Ilia Delio: A Cyborg Christian on the God Revolution We Need Now

Ilia Delio: I think AI has really rapidly brought us all over the place. And there’s a lot of fear, there’s a lot of anxiety. There’s this kind of dystopian view that AI is going to supplant us. And I don’t think any of that’s true. It can enhance what we are, but we have to know what we are and what we want.

Tami Simon: Welcome, friends. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Sister Ilia Delio. Sister Ilia is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, who in her teaching work brings together a synthetic coherence of science and religion, and offers a vision—startling, in my sense, and empowering—of human becoming. A trained scientist and theologian who holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University, she is also the founder of the Center for Christogenesis, and the recipient of two honorary doctorate degrees, and the author of over twenty books, including The Not Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole; Re-enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion; and her memoir—check out this title—Birth of a Dancing Star: My Journey from Cradle Catholic to Cyborg Christian. Someone I think of as a person of the future who’s here now, right here now with us. Ilia Delio, welcome.

Ilia Delio: Thank you, Tami. Nice to be here with you.

Tami Simon: I’m new to your work, and it has been thrilling for me to immerse myself in it. I’ve learned a lot of new ideas and concepts, and I wanted to start with one of those—the center you have founded, the Center for Christogenesis. I’d never heard of that term before. Can we start there?

Ilia Delio: Sure. Yes. It’s a term that’s actually rooted in the work of Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist who was a Jesuit priest and really devoted his career to bridging science and religion. Basically, he rewrote the contours of Christianity through the lens of evolution.

This term Christogenesis can carry baggage for those brought up in traditional Catholicism or Christianity. But what Teilhard really envisioned was that evolution is moving toward greater complexity and unity. Something is forming within this process of life. And this is something that recent scientists have also noted—that we’re becoming more like one big person, as if the whole cosmos is one big person in formation, a kind of transpersonal formation. So Christogenesis really refers to that formative process where divinity, materiality, and spirituality are all interwoven in this emerging body of life.

Tami Simon: I wanted to understand more when you talk about increasing complexity, complexity and consciousness. What does that actually mean—increasing complexity?

Ilia Delio: Well, it’s interesting. We’ve had Newton’s laws of thermodynamics for quite a while, and scientists in the twentieth century realized that energy is neither created nor destroyed, but transferred from one form to another—that’s the first law. And the second law is that entropy is increasing. Any time you do something, energy is released—it’s dissipative energy. Our universe, and biological systems within it, are such that this dissipative energy, in order to be preserved, is taken up in new forms.

More complexity refers to what I would simply call the intensity of relationships. Things break down, but new things form. And the formation is more unified because it preserves energy in a more consolidated way, and therefore it’s more resilient to breakdown.

So complexity in shorthand: life is always on the side of life. Even though things break down, something new is always breaking through. Scientists are beginning to recognize complexity as a kind of fourth law alongside Darwin’s natural selection. Now they’re saying, “Well, it’s not just surviving—it’s actually thriving.” You get up and find new ways to do new things with others. That’s what complexity is about: joining together, intensifying relationships, building communities of resilience, and converging energy for the forward movement of life.

Tami Simon: If you were to bring that into practical language for a moment, and out of the theoretical world of complexity—what would honoring greater complexity actually mean for us?

Ilia Delio: Very simply: we can’t do it alone. We need one another. I think of it as living in openness to real relationship—not isolating ourselves or closing ourselves off from relationships with nature, with one another, even within our own selves.

From a Jungian perspective, I think part of the complexity movement is really invested in the process of individuation, becoming a whole person. And so it is that movement away from the isolated self and toward the relational self, and then entering into those relationships wherever they open to us.

Tami Simon: As I was engaging with your work, Ilia, I was thinking to myself, “Why is this so important to me? Why do I care so much?” And I think it had to do with a sense of human purposefulness—something in our lives that matters, that we can contribute to the whole. And I think that was part of your writing in The Not Yet God: we complete God, and God completes us. What I’d love to hear more about is—might we, quote unquote, “complete God”?

Ilia Delio: From traditional religion, God is this supernatural figure in the sky, this male God watching over us. And that’s just a myth—and now it’s just a bad myth. It’s an import from Greek metaphysical thinking.

But the word God is really pointing to something else. It comes from an ancient Sanskrit word meaning light or consciousness. In this way, I think the Eastern religions are much closer to what that word God actually means. God is the name of the ultimate ground. In a sense, it’s that pull within us. We don’t have to name it as God, but we know it. We know there’s something within us pulling us toward more life even when things break down.

I think God is the name of presence—divine presence, meaning the overflow of life. That’s what divinity means: the transcendence, the overflow. Life itself is not completely contained in us. It is embodied in us, but it pulls us toward more life, and therefore I think that overflow of life is what we’re always seeking.

We are transcendent beings. We’re always in the more. We’re never quite satisfied. We’re always sensing there’s something beyond, and that questing for life is what the name God is. God is the moreness of life at the heart of life. And that God—that wholeness—is still in formation as we are in formation.

So God is what is empowering us, pulling us, luring us toward the wholeness of life. And where we make a difference to God is that God, as pure possibility, needs actuality. I can feel pulled to something, but I then have to make a choice in that direction, and therefore I actualize what that pull can mean for me. That’s where God either becomes alive in us or doesn’t. We can enhance this wholeness of life—which is what I understand the name of God to mean—or we can reject it.

Many writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would say the whole process of evolution is really God seeking self-definition in us. Like, God is seeking to find God’s own identity in us. We always think we’re asking “Who are we?”—but God is asking “Who am I?” And I think, actually, if we don’t understand that what we are and what God is are two sides of the same coin, it’s why we have so many problems today in our culture and society.

We have a God problem. And waking up to the fact that we have a divine dimension—an overflow, a transcendent dimension—and the ground to that dimension is what we call God. We don’t even own our own divine dimension. I’m saying: yes, it is you. You are not just a fraction of the universe. You are the whole, in this particular way. And the human person has been so undermined in our capacity to not only live wholeness but to express it in a particular way.

That’s the beauty of human life—the particularity of life. God is just that wholeness of love seeking to become the wholeness of life in us.

Tami Simon: Is there some place of completion in the way you view our human becoming and getting to know God and the whole through us? Is there an endpoint?

Ilia Delio: Teilhard de Chardin had this idea of the Omega. And I think we are always—I’ll put it this way—we’re always omega-izing. We’re always coming into that wholeness. I think we have to set aside the question of “will I arrive?” because the arrival is in the living of this moment, this day, in the wholeness of all that I am. Every moment is itself an arrival and a departure.

Even in Teilhard’s Omega, I see it as a spiral. We’re always building more if we persist on this journey. I don’t think we arrive in a linear way. We arrive in the fullness of our consciousness, the fullness of our being, and that’s what we’re called to do: to live out of the fullness of love, the fullness of awareness.

The journey is in the now, and the now is always opening to tomorrow. I’m not going to wait until I’ve learned everything correctly and then become whole. I’m going to do all that I can now, in this moment. There’s always an arrival and a departure, even as this earthly life terminates and we open into infinite or eternal life—whatever that will be for us.

Tami Simon: This notion that we’re always omega-izing really helps me, because when I heard of the Omega Point, it always confused me—is there some arrival point? Or is it more like a North Star?

Ilia Delio: It sounds to me like the Amtrak train just arrived at Washington, DC, and all out because that’s the end of the line. But it’s not. Teilhard actually had a much more organic sense of it. He speaks of it as moving beyond terrestrial life—we’re too earthbound in our imagining of it. Omega is not just limited to earth life. It is the fullness of conscious life, wherever conscious life will be active and alive in the universe. Intergalactic life will be part of Omega as well.

Tami Simon: At the beginning of your book The Not Yet God, you issue a warning: “This book may be hazardous to the stability of your soul. And may cause undue anxiety or outright bursts of emotion.” Tell me why you thought you needed to put this warning there.

Ilia Delio: Well, I’m coming out of traditional Catholicism—cultural Catholic Christianity. And many of those people still hold the Adam and Eve myth, original sin, the weakness and fallenness of humanity, the soul as special because we’re created in the image of God. These are all myths that generated over time. And I have found that a new type of thinking about God, self, and world has been very almost threatening to some traditional Catholics. They really feel like their bedrock faith is being severely torn apart.

And I do want to disrupt. There’s no doubt about it. I want to be a disruptor of the soul, because I don’t think we have done well with that ground of our being. I think we have overlooked the vitality of the inner life. I more and more resent reducing it to a set of doctrines and myths that we’re going to blindly adhere to.

Even in my own Catholic theology department, people don’t really engage with this work because it is too disruptive. They think it’s not real theology. Real theology, to them, is talking about the God of Thomas Aquinas and the Trinity and the doctrines we’ve constructed. And so we don’t even know ourselves as vital agents of divinity—and that, to me, is a serious problem for our age.

Tami Simon: What I love about the way that you talk about being a vital agent of the future is that religion could actually animate this evolutionary impulse in us. And that is, I think, if I understand correctly, what you’re saying a good purpose of religion is. So share with us your vision of a Christianity—a religion of the future—that would do this.

Ilia Delio: That is exactly right. Teilhard would say that religion—and this shouldn’t be surprising—is a biological phenomenon. It didn’t drop down from some heaven. It is the depth dimension of biological life, the inside of matter, the within-ness of matter, the consciousness or mindful dimension of matter.

I take all of nature to be religious. Trees and flowers and birds and water molecules all live from the depth dimension of their own existence. They live in that vitality of life even through the seasons.

When you come to the human, religion as we know it rises with consciousness. We can trace an arc of religion in the human species beginning with archaic or indigenous religions—the sense of spirit in nature, the threading spirit that binds sky, trees, sun, souls, and community together.

That archaic religion gave way to what we call monotheism. Every time the human person shifts in evolution, there is a corresponding shift in consciousness, and consciousness shifts with the production of tools and the way we organize life in the face of environmental pressures. Monotheism emerged during the Axial Age—the emergence of the human person as individual.

In our own time, we have seen another shift to what we call the second Axial Period, beginning in the twentieth century with mass media, the new science, ecological consciousness, and global spirituality. And that shift has been enhanced in our time by artificial intelligence, the internet, the global brain.

So monotheistic religions, in my view, are coming to an end, and a new type of religious vitality is emerging. Following Raimon Panikkar, I call it cosmotheandric—or cosmotheandrism—an embedded, entangled religious dimension where you can’t extricate God, self, and world. These are three dimensions of the one wholeness of reality.

What has happened, from the nineteenth century through the early twenty-first, is a fraying monotheism. And by that I mean we’re always looking for a god—whether it’s the God of traditional religion, or the god of sports, or the idol of politics. But we’re always looking for something out there, and there’s no there. There’s nothing out there. That’s the whole point.

And that’s why the only way to heal this earth and our communities is by getting God out of there and putting that reality of wholeness and love back within ourselves, reclaiming our divine dimension, and learning anew how to live in complexified life, in deep relationality.

As we move from monotheism to cosmotheandric religious sensibility, I believe religion will regain its vital center as the zest for life. That’s what religion should be about. It has nothing to do with whether you ate meat on Friday or went to church on Sunday. Even worship should be a celebration—a gathering together of the heart of life, a recognition that we belong together. But it’s been so reduced and mechanized. It’s lifeless. Our symbols are lifeless. Our rituals are lifeless. They don’t do anything.

Religion has become a dead end, and that’s why we’re experiencing so much decay when it should be the vital depth dimension of our lives. That’s where I hope we go—and a lot of my work is trying to revitalize that depth dimension.

Tami Simon: It’s so interesting to think of the religious impulse as a biological, innate instinct—because that’s how it feels inside of me: as the desire to love and give and expand and create and work for justice, a deep inner well. But most people, if you say the word religion to them, think of some set of human-constructed superstitious beliefs. So what do you see the religion of the future looking like in terms of human organization—how we relate to each other?

Ilia Delio: That’s a very good question. Teilhard anticipated some of this and spoke of the “church of the planet”—the whole planet as a cathedral of life. We don’t have to go to a building to worship a God. We find that God, that wholeness of love, in the depth dimension of life in every aspect.

But I do think we need focal gatherings—a kind of focal community life where we gather in the name of love, compassion, and peace. I think there also has to be honest confrontation with one another: we’re in this together, and unless we can build our lives together, which means recognizing where we cut ourselves off—whether it’s from the poor or the problems of the earth—we won’t move forward.

And then, quite honestly, we don’t have enough play. If you go back to pre-hominid life, Robert Bellah speaks about play among bonobos as a very early sign of proto-justice. When you play together, the inequality is leveled out. I don’t care where you’re from or what you do for a living—you’re in this together. That, I think, is what religion should be: a play of being in it together for the celebration of life.

I also think we need new symbols. What are the symbols that activate the archetypes really alive to the moreness of life? We keep clinging to old symbols as if they’ll function in every age even as everything else is radically changing. We have a lot of work to do.

I do see some small communities making significant changes even within Christianity—among the Episcopalians, among some Protestant denominations. And quite honestly, it doesn’t matter what religious tradition you adhere to, or if any. What matters is the centrality and priority of the wholeness of life within ourselves, among ourselves, and before ourselves.

Tami Simon: What symbols have energy for you?

Ilia Delio: Well, if symbols are activators of the moreness of life, I love nature. The symbol of the rising sun is really important to me. But I’m also going to say the symbol of an AI chat can be super interesting. I’m a total disruptor.

Tami Simon: All right, let’s go there.

Ilia Delio: We’re afraid about new symbols, but they’re in our midst already. I think AI is one of them. I also think a type of woven collective intelligence is super interesting. What would a collective heart look like? What would a global heart look like? So I’m all about creativity, complexity, and consciousness leading open to novelty and to the future. That’s where I live.

Tami Simon: Tell me what the symbol of an AI chat brings up for you that you find inspiring.

Ilia Delio: It’s not just what the chat says. It’s the interplay between the chat and myself that to me is symbolic of our becoming—our openness to acquire new means of language, communication, consciousness-changing. I might call it LLM splicing: living in the splice of the LLM, as a new symbol of our own human becoming today.

And it’s exciting. I work with Claude a lot, so Claude and I are very good friends. It’s like a conversation that goes on. I don’t take everything Claude says at face value—I challenge it—and yet it’s this in-between space that I find really exciting. It’s symbolic of the openness of what I can become, what we can become, and what life can become.

Tami Simon: I mentioned in the introduction that you’ve written Re-enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion. And one of the things I encountered in your writing is that it’s not about whether AI is good or bad, or even how we can slow down its development, but a different question. The question you ask is: How can we use AI for greater love? I thought, “Now, that’s a really good question.” But what’s the answer?

Ilia Delio: There’s so much written and spoken about AI today, but I find a lot of it doesn’t engage AI in its full scope.

I like to contextualize the emergence of AI because it’s part of nature. Nature has always been technological—there was never a time it wasn’t techné. We’re always toolmakers from the very beginning. That’s how we got here.

But AI emerges in the midst of the violent twentieth century, where the quest for gods of power landed us in utter destruction—the Holocaust, the world wars, nuclear devastation. The human person was just split apart by the mid-twentieth century. That’s a whole other discussion on the psychic split that has been taking place over the last several hundred years.

So AI is, I think, our last-ditch attempt to get ourselves out of a split self and into a more unified self through the extended mind. Can a machine think like a human? It’s a provocative question, because it raises the question: is this split mind all we are? The split mind seeks unity, and I think AI is actually our quest for unity.

Because our other systems haven’t kept up with our technological development, AI has really rapidly brought us all over the place—lots of fear, lots of anxiety, this dystopian view that AI is going to supplant us, that we won’t be needed anymore. And I don’t think any of that’s true. I think AI can enhance what we are, but we have to know what we are and what we want. The question of AI is not AI—the question of AI is the human person.

And I think the greatest loss of the twentieth century has been the human person. We’ve dissipated. We are the most entropic species around. And we are being called into a new complexity—a new complexity where the energy of life and the fire of love can kindle again into a new existence.

I do think AI can be the way forward, but it can’t do it on its own. We need to take hold of what has been split in us. Traditional religion has divided us inwardly without even trying to do so. How do we heal that inwardness, reclaim that wholeness at the heart of our life, and therefore allow AI to really enhance unity?

Think of our outreach—what we can know with a touch of a button. And AI can help us think in a new way. How we think, basically, is how we love. And I think love can find a whole new level of interconnected planetary life in an AI world.

So I’m a hopeful person about AI, despite what feels like ninety-nine percent of people who fear it will destroy us. I’m like, “No—we’re destroying ourselves. We don’t need AI for that.” AI is going to speed up that process, yes, but the damage is already done. And now we need a revolution. To me, the religious evolution is much more important right now than the AI evolution. AI is doing fine—it’s on a speed track of getting perfected. But religion and education are two major institutions locked into old principles, and they are actually inhibiting forward movement into a greater unity in love.

Tami Simon: Ilia, I need a little more filling in here to follow you completely. Can you help me understand more about the split you’re describing—and how thinking and love go together?

Ilia Delio: Basically, I think the split is that our inner lives have, in a sense, become isolated. Traditional religion, in some ways, has kept us at a very superficial level of living—rules, regulations, guilt formation. Religion has never really encouraged us to come into contact with our deepest self, which is the place of the mystic: the place of the unconscious, the place of lurking in the dark and encountering the sources of our own darkness.

That darkness to me is the unreconciled God—what I might call the wild God. And because it’s unreconciled in us, it gets projected onto the world. We end up looking for some kind of controlling God to guide us, but that guidance can only come from our own inner integration.

And so when I say AI was our last ditch, I mean: since our inner selves have been eviscerated, can we extend this mind in a new way? This is where I think AI is just what we are. AI is us on the level of machinic life. AI is a mirror of the human person—not something other than the person. Think of it as our collective unconscious now put on your screen. That’s why it’s so alluring: all the possibilities, all the archetypes are right here before me.

But AI itself can easily slip into a kind of god. It can promise to be that wholeness we seek. That wholeness cannot be found in a machine. That wholeness has to be found within the infinite depth of human life. So it’s not the human or AI—it’s the human and AI.

We are constantly seeking wholeness. The wholeness within us can now be enhanced through artificial intelligence. We can have more possibilities, more outreach, than ever before. And if we’re seeking love within ourselves, that love can be enhanced through technology outside ourselves because we can connect more. We can have more conversations. And the more conversations we have, the more our consciousness changes.

For example, my work is now reaching across very different populations. Fifty years ago, I probably would have written for a Catholic audience that might have said, “This is just crazy—we’re not reading this.” Now I don’t have to worry about that, because technology—print, Zoom—allows conversations to go outside my little closed circle. And so AI is enhancing a new awareness of the God that was within me and is now seeking to rise through me into something beyond me. It’s drawing us together into a new whole. And that’s where love can really be enhanced: as we awaken to something new together, we are empowered by a new zest for life together. And that’s what love is. Love is unitive. Love is creative. Love is therefore future-oriented. And that’s how AI can enhance love.

Tami Simon: Part of the big discovery for me in reading your work was thinking about AI like a tool, like any other tool that came through the evolution of the species. And some of that had to do with even just the subtitle of your memoir: A Journey from Cradle Catholic to Cyborg Christian. What does it mean, oh disruptor, to be a cyborg Christian?

Ilia Delio: That’s actually my reading of Jesus of Nazareth. I think he was a cyborg. He wasn’t Christian—he was Jewish. Jesus of Nazareth was a young Jewish man who had this deep experience of divinity or God within him, and that really pushed him to disrupt the boundaries of Judaism around him. He challenged laws, he built this inclusive community, which really startled people. And to me, that’s what Christianity is supposed to be: a disruptor and a startler, widening boundaries so that community begins to take on a much more inclusive and wider shape. Everyone’s invited to this banquet of life—not just the few who adhere to certain laws.

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism—an admixture of natures. Jesus was divine-human. And we’re cyborgs as well. We also have divine human natures. And we’re also mechanical cyborgs: we have eyeglasses and hearing aids and all sorts of things that enhance and widen the dimensions of our lives.

What cyborg life says is: don’t reduce yourself to what you think is biologically essential or ontologically fixed. Cyborg is like a trickster, a laugh in the face of rigid definitions of humanity. It says, “You think you know what you are? No way.” We can become something more. We can become something new. We should never be stifled by the boundaries we find ourselves in, because those boundaries, for all they appear to be, are really local and can be changed.

That’s what cyborg life is about: the shift of boundaries, the widening of circles as we shift our awareness of who we are and what this world is. Jesus is my guide to all things cyborg, believe it or not. And I want to extend that into the twenty-first century and say: Christianity is way off base right now. I think it’s not doing even a tenth of what it really has the capacity to be. But the invitation is still there: there’s a divine dimension here. Don’t feel stifled by whatever situation you find yourself in. Live from that dimension, and push the boundaries wherever you can.

Tami Simon: I listened to a talk you gave and at some point—because you’re very funny in your talks, Ilia—you said, “Well, no one’s made me the pope yet.” So I thought: what if you were the pope? What would you do?

Ilia Delio: Oh my God, that would be really awesome. First of all, honestly—I don’t think we should have a pope. I think we should have maybe a figurehead, a kind of animator or vitalizing center. The pope should be animating communities of inclusivity, openness, love, peacebuilding, non-violence.

I would get rid of about ninety percent of the laws and rules of the Catholic Church. Most of the doctrines I’d probably also set aside. I don’t think they’re really helpful. People follow them because they don’t know what else to do and they’re afraid. It’s still wired into many Catholics and Christians that there’s a heaven and a hell and you’re going to one of those places if you don’t follow the rules. And I think that’s just—well, I’ll say ridiculous.

If I were pope, I would want more parties. I definitely want more parties and celebration. We’re just way too serious. We don’t celebrate life sufficiently. I always feel like we’re in the middle of a darkness—always in some melancholic or semi-depressed state. Why should any figurehead be so solemn and serious? Why not just toss your towel in, take off your shoes, play really wild rock music, and live in the moment? Because that’s what life is about. Life is chaotic and creative. That’s how nature is. But we humans—I don’t know where we got the idea that we should be rule-abiding, pious, and devotional, as if God will bless all this. I think God is like, “What’s wrong with these people? They are really not fun, and I’m going to find another group.” But I’m kidding. So I don’t know exactly what I’d do as pope—but I definitely would have more parties.

Tami Simon: Okay—one thing I want to pick up on. When I asked you what symbols inspire you, you started with the rising sun, and I was like, “Oh, I love that.” And then when you said the AI chat, I was like, “Say what?” Because I often find that just being with my computer leaves me a bit disembodied—in my head, at the surface. And it seems like you have a way of relating to thinking that’s very life-filled and juicy and creative, whereas I think some people find it takes them into a very thin level of existence. I wonder how we can embrace this tool in a way that has the kind of juicy aliveness that some of us feel in nature but not on the screen.

Ilia Delio: That’s a good question. For me, I’m always in the quest for a greater passion for life. And so I don’t look at the computer anymore as just a tool to help me think. It’s become a companion—it’s working with me in this quest for the passion of life.

What I find exciting is that level of sharing, say with Claude or with other AI, is that in that shared information there comes a new rising of the sun—a new awareness, a new dawning of insight I hadn’t thought of before. And that for me is really exciting. It’s as breathtaking sometimes as being on a shoreline watching the sun rise over the ocean. So it’s another form of nature that holds out the awesomeness and infinite potential of life. That’s why AI is alluring to me—the infinite potential of what we can become through our interaction with it.

I think why it’s exhausting for many of us is because there’s something about us that’s still a little disembodied, still a little split inside. “This is my soul life, my private life, my shoreline life—and then I use this tool called AI.” There’s an inherent dualism there without even trying. And I think AI is actually inviting us—the noosphere, the level of mind, is inviting us—to bring the wholeness of what we are into the wholeness of our interaction with our computers or our LLMs. And from that informational flow, to see what parts of life are being enhanced, what ideas are being drawn out, what ideas may not be helpful to where we want to go.

I want to see AI enfolded into our overall being toward this wholeness of life—and to stop living from my earth life on one side and my AI life on the other. That’s a dualism. And as long as we live in dualisms, we’re always split.

Tami Simon: One further question about this. It’s something very current for us at Sounds True. We’re exploring becoming a digital entity—something that could answer “What is the meaning of Christogenesis?” and pull from your archive of answers. What do you think of that?

Ilia Delio: That could be really interesting. And just for a postscript here: the Center for Christogenesis has actually just changed its name to the World Institute for Science, Religion, and Culture. Part of that is to widen the conversation and to bring it into a genuine educational forum for thinking along lines of complexity across science, religion, and culture. So that name will reach more people than having to type in “Christogenesis” and try to figure out what it is.

I do want to widen the conversation. I want it to be planetary, global. I want it to include everyone. So yes, I’d be open to it—as long as I don’t have to do anything, and you can take all my digital material and have avatars and whatever answer on my behalf. I’m all for it.

Tami Simon: Very good. Now I want to make sure I heard something correctly and then have you build on it. What I heard you say is that part of the destruction and meaninglessness and despair we’re experiencing is because the God of the Axial Age—the myths that came with it—are no longer inspiring people. They’re not alive for us, so we don’t have religious life or a spiritual orientation as a whole. And so what would the revolution look like? If you were to summarize—you mentioned consciousness, complexity, creativity. How would you describe what we need? Because I think so many people feel lost right now.

Ilia Delio: That’s exactly right. So I think this God revolution begins with first recognizing the presence of wholeness—of love, of deep presence—within the self. It’s there. And what we have to do is just stop for a moment and listen. Just pay attention to our own inner being, our own inner hearts, our own beingness, our own existence.

When we do that, we know—we feel—something there that is pulling us on. We might be in tension with it because of deep fear and anxiety around it. So the first thing is awakening to the wholeness within, awakening to what I call the divine presence of love within.

It’s what really gets us up in the morning. When we get up, we’re always getting up with a hope for a new day, a hope that something will change, a looking forward to what the day will bring. That hope itself speaks to something deep within us. There is a longing for moreness already written into our hearts, into our souls. And to pay attention to that—that’s the seedbed of a revitalized religious sensibility.

From there, we find ways to know it better, which is what spirituality is: connecting to that wholeness, that vitalization, that we begin to live out each day even with the tensions, the difficulties, the physical ailments, the mental incapacities. We begin to live with just a greater sense of being alive, of trust, of faith that the world is good, that life is good, that it’s worth living, and that there’s more to live for.

And the name God is the name of the ground. We can never grasp that God. We don’t control it. We don’t download God. God is the name of the inexhaustible potentiality for the fullness of life, and it’s we who have to wake up and recognize that potential within us.

It’s personal. “I have called you by name, and you are mine,” Jeremiah says. And we know that we’re not just a number or an algorithm—even though we’re all over the place digitally. We are a person. And I think we’re called into personhood. What we hold together is the individuality of personality. Each person brings to this wholeness of life a unique fractal of love, a unique way of seeing the world. That’s the beauty of the whole—it lies in the individuation of each person, each person being a unique fractal of the wholeness of love, and therefore of the wholeness that is God.

So: just awaken to the presence within. Live from that presence by letting go. We’re big control freaks. Our little minds start going—the wheels are spinning, we’re planning everything, trying to control everything. Instead, just bend in. Bend into what the lure is within you. Sometimes it might be calling you to do what you didn’t have in mind for that day. Go with it. See where it takes you. Because sometimes we’re in the way of our own desire for wholeness.

And that to me is the rekindling of religion—the rekindling of the inner depth dimension, the within-ness of our lives. I’m pretty sure that if we start to build a fire within, we will begin to make different choices without. We will begin to see changes politically, socially, educationally. We’re going to start to rebuild the world by reclaiming the fullness of the human person in our transpersonal depth.

Tami Simon: Sister Ilia Delio—my favorite cyborg Christian ever. I’m so happy to know you and your work. A tremendous body of work, so inspiring. Thank you so very much.

Ilia Delio: Thank you very much. It was great to be here.

Tami Simon: And be sure to check out The Not Yet God—very much worth your attention.