The Omega Point

I’ve been an avid reader of the MML since it launched 10+ years ago and a friend of Sean’s since he challenged me to a race to the Hackley cafeteria back in September 2000. As impactful as the content always is, I think the most powerful part about the MML is the way that it encourages the reader to be an active participant. By incorporating quotes sent in by the readership, it asks the reader to not only take the time to digest the content curated each week by Sean, but to also become more active in our search for small wisdoms on a daily basis. There’s one lesson that I’d like to share that I’ve come back to throughout my life, but has been particularly top of mind given recent events.

During my freshman spring at Georgetown (13! years ago), in order to meet my Theology requirement, I decided to take “Theology of Evolution” with Father King. I chose the class simply because it seemed counterintuitive – evolution has always been a major point of conflict between the Christian narrative of creation and Charles Darwin’s breakthrough regarding natural selection.

The course focused upon the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and geologist. He participated in the discovery of ‘Peking Man,’ fossilized remnants of the skull of homo erectus from 750,000 years ago. Particularly during the early 20th century, most people thought that they had to choose which side to believe – science or religion. Teilhard instead followed his two passions to see the scientific world through a theological lens, and the spiritual world through a paleontologist’s lens. His seminal work The Phenomenon of Man was so controversial that at the time of his death, the Church had condemned most of his writing as dangerous and untrue. Yet there we were fifty years later, at one of the leading Catholic universities in the world, reading his books.

During his career as a paleontologist, Teilhard observed that evolution followed an arc of increasing diversity. Life on Earth began with a single microorganism, which over millions of years developed into plants and animals, then ultimately humans. Life adapted to become increasingly diverse with each passing generation.

Without getting too into the weeds, Teilhard’s vision of Catholic theology centered upon the “Omega Point,” a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe was evolving. One might think that life was most “whole” when everything was the same – but each step of evolution brought us from “drab uniformity” toward a “rich and potent pattern of variety-in-unity.” As life became more differentiated, it became more complete.

Differentiation unifies.

As our 80-year-old professor whispered those words, the rest of my hungover classmates practically napping at their desks, I was sitting on the edge of my seat (also likely hungover), mind-blown. Throughout Georgetown I used that concept in nearly every essay that I wrote, and I’ve found that it applies to nearly every situation.

Differentiated unity applies to friendships, marriages, business partnerships and academic communities. Anywhere that people gather, groups are more complete when they’re composed of people that provide differentiated perspectives and skillsets. It takes courage and self-awareness to search for those that are different, whose strengths align with our weaknesses, to make us whole.

We see it often in sports. Back during the 2016 Olympics, ESPN created a tool to build your own “Dream Team” and their plus-minus model let you know when you picked the perfect combination. If you picked the 5 best players, your team came out toward the middle of the pack. Only by picking 5 players with complementary skills, several of them toward the bottom of the stack, could you reach a perfect score. Lebron James has been the best player in the NBA for the last two decades, yet has lost twice as many Finals as he’s won.

The United States is the greatest collective experiment in variety-in-unity. The founding fathers’ vision for government is nothing short of genius – by layering representation from the local level, to the state level, and then at the federal level, our system is designed to acknowledge and even accentuate our differences, rather than ignore them. E Pluribus Unum: out of many, one.

Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on Teilhard’s vision. Following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, a spotlight has been shined on the reality that Black Americans aren’t treated fairly or given access to the opportunities that they deserve. I don’t know why we’re here, how long it will take, or how we’ll fix the shortcomings of our current system. I do know that any community that doesn’t celebrate those who are different from themselves is worse off for it. Over time, differentiated unity wins.

Father King passed away almost exactly one year after I took his Theology of Evolution class. When Fr. King was my age, Teilhard was exiled from the Catholic Church, yet here Fr. King was fifty years later, in his final years, spreading Teilhard’s message to a classroom full of students. I’m so grateful for that unique experience.

Seek others that are different from you. Travel to far-away places. Listen to music that you can’t understand. Read as many books as possible. Eat dishes that you’ve never seen before. Reject “drab uniformity” and celebrate our “rich variety-in-unity.” Father King will be looking down smiling as we continue onward to the Omega Point.