The evolutionary process of natural selection is fueled by both cooperation and competition. Cooperation often involves a symbiosis where two different organisms survive best when they rely on one another. Examples are lichens (composed of fungi and algae), sea anemones and lion fish, and the beneficial microbes that live within the human gastrointestinal system.
However, evolution also proceeds by competition, with the "survival of the fittest" reigning as the law of the land. All worthwhile human endeavors involve attempting to overcome an obstacle, whether it be a disease, a mountain that is difficult to climb, or one's own frustratingly ingrained personality traits.
Because the Divine often acts like a competitive foe, we have the opportunity to develop our own gifts in response. It is instructive to remember that the nation of Israel was named after Jacob, the patriarch who wrestled with God in the form of an angel when he wanted to obtain a blessing. After the fight, God renamed him "Yisrael," which means "God-wrestler."
John Ruusbroec, a 14th century Christian mystic, talked about God as having both a "craving" and a "generous" nature. He experienced God's CRAVING nature as it seeks to swallow us up in union, a move that resists our individuality and ends ultimately in death. However, the other aspect of God - God's GENEROUS nature - arms us with spiritual weapons like faith, hope and love to help in the fight against God's craving nature, better enabling us to survive in the process and share our own unique and particular embodiment of these traits with the Divine Life who contains us all.
Similarly, when matter resists us - as when we contract a disease - we have the opportunity to compete in the game of life and reveal exactly what we are made of. Teilhard de Chardin puts it this way:
" Blessed be you, mortal matter . . . : Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless. I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing preachers depict you, debased, disfigured – a mass of brute forces and base appetites – but as you reveal yourself to me today, in your totality and your true nature.”
Of course, we will all eventually lose the competition with the all-engulfing aspect of matter - in this life, at least. Lethal microbes, for example, may kill us as they fulfil their role of keeping the human population in check. Obviously, none of us wants to be one of the ones who is sacrificed for the overall health of the species. But perhaps if we learn to identify ourselves with the larger Whole - a task that meditation is designed to address - it will not be so traumatic when our individuality eventually loses the competition, dies into union with the divine Beloved, and makes room for new and better-fitted individuals to thrive.
Photo: Two bull elk fighting; Rocky Mountain National Park, CO; January 7, 2014
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