Arguably no Franciscan theologian has bridged science and religion quite like Sister Ilia Delio, OSF.
”If you want to know how science and religion are related, first come to know the deepest truth of yourself,” writes Sister Ilia Delio, OSF, in Birth of a Dancing Star. “This is what I realized when I looked into the nighttime sky: I saw myself in the stars and the stars within me.” 4:00 in the afternoon of April 8, 2024: That was when I interviewed Sister Ilia for St. Anthony Messenger. It’s a fitting thing to talk to someone like Sister Ilia in the middle of a solar eclipse. Theologians like her don’t come along often. Their orbits and alignment change the colors of our skies. They invite us into mystery, to contemplate the nature of the universe. They are phenomena. We experience beauty and emerge changed.
“Well, we have to admit: We live in a wondrous universe,” she beams, her common expression when talking about anything related to science or theology. “Francis of Assisi was awed by the beauty of nature and its natural and miraculous ability to grow, to be wild, to have this kind of spontaneous beauty to it. The fact that we’re in a solar eclipse, moving around the sun as the moon moves around us—in this orbital phase of life—I’m reminded of how often we get stuck on ideas, like we are never going to change, when in fact we are in movement already.”
Sister Ilia describes how her mentor, the late Bonaventure scholar Ewert Cousins, was an “intellectual Etch A Sketch,” nonlinearly making connections among the fields of Franciscan theology, Church history, philosophy, and science, in a way that, eventually, if his students were patient, forms an image. Sister Ilia is no different. The eclipse had led her to think about nature, then Francis, then orbiting, then how movement is fundamental to an evolutionary universe. Now, she is circling back to Francis, the movement of his own spirit, the movement of energy in our reality and, brilliantly, back to our tendency to get stuck and fight our own orbits.
“Francis, you know, was very charismatic,” she continues. “He probably would have been among the evangelicals today. He may have found the Catholic Church a bit too, you know, stuffy. He was a free spirit who was sort of uncontainable at times, maybe a little uncontrollable. But there’s something about the spirit he had.
“The whole world, really, is spirit. Energy is the name of the game, quite honestly. We’re surrounded today by these fields of energy, and that same spirit is alive even in the solar eclipse. Energy and aliveness, that’s what it’s all about. But we get stuck on concepts and categories. We get kind of locked into intellectualism.”
See the image on the Etch A Sketch?
Arguably no Franciscan theologian has bridged science and religion quite like Sister Ilia. When reading her work, one might be tempted to categorize her in the impersonal world of academia. Though she admits her tendency is to sometimes remain in her head—comfortable playing in the realm of research and ideas—the joyful spontaneity of Francis continually invites her back to the earth. She loves watching (and talking) basketball, preferably while drinking some kind of German beer. She loves playing guitar and piano and still dreams of touring in a rock band. She sometimes wonders about taking a stab at a stand-up comedy routine.
In talking to Sister Ilia, one will find that the faith she has formed through her study of science and religion—through the bridging of evolution and theology—is also deeply practical. Phenomena, after all, can be evaluated from afar. On the other hand, these mysteries can change us from within.
An Unlikely Journey
Sister Ilia never thought she’d be a theologian. She assumed her life would unfold in the sciences. Her mother was a nurse; her sister was a nurse. Her two brothers married into doctors’ families. Sister Ilia was on the same career path, hence her study of neuroscience and neurotoxicology in college and grad school. She earned a PhD in pharmacology at Rutgers University-Biomedical and Healthcare Sciences (formerly New Jersey Medical School), where her research focused on ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. But religious life called to Sister Ilia.
Ever since a traumatic episode as a teenager that involved a fire at the all-girls boarding school she attended, she had felt that she “belonged entirely to God,” as she writes in her autobiography. So, naturally, she abandoned her postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, where she was about to join a top-ranked Alzheimer’s disease group, and decided to fully enter into religious life at a Carmelite monastery.
Talk about nonlinear. She wouldn’t abandon the sciences, though. Not yet. She eventually joined a Franciscan community and continued a postdoctoral fellowship in neurotoxicology at Rutgers University. But the Franciscan tradition spoke directly to Sister Ilia’s heart and led her to contemplate the strangest of vocational pivots: from pharmacology to theology.
She started all over and went back to school, earning a master of theology at Fordham University, followed by a doctorate in historical theology. “At one point I said to myself, ‘Why did I spend 13 years studying science?’” Sister Ilia reflects. “I gave it all up and, at the time, couldn’t help but feel that that this was really wacky.” It was, without a doubt, wacky. But she was in good company with the Franciscans. Little did she know that she wasn’t leaving science behind either.
Soon, as she ventured deeper into the world of theology at Fordham, she would meet Cousins. He would mention to her an unfamiliar name, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist and priest. Cousins had written articles exploring the Christocentrism prevalent in the metaphysics of both Bonaventure and Teilhard. Sister Ilia found that her mentor’s unique ability to “Etch A Sketch” made her wonder if science still, somehow, would be in her future. “I could tell that Cousins was an integrated thinker,” she reflects. “It’s a different way of thinking, quite honestly. But it helped me realize that I could keep a big toe in science, even as I studied religion.”
Teilhard’s work almost had to age in the cellar of Sister Ilia’s mind. Ten years, to be exact, when she accepted a post as a senior research fellow at Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center and learned that Georgetown housed a large section of Teilhard’s archives. She began to obsessively spiral into his work.
“After that, it just started taking off: to see these parallels, if not confluence, between Teilhard and Francis in theology,” Sister Ilia reflects. “I tell people all the time that Teilhard de Chardin was a closet Franciscan, and, had he become a Franciscan, we probably would have published all his stuff,” she adds with a laugh.
Sister Ilia’s long academic journey was finally bringing forth her voice. She reflects, “I felt like a fish who had found water.”
(R)Evolutionary Thinking
Sister Ilia’s entire journey could be summarized as a continual letting go of the direction she thought she was going. All those years she had spent studying science: She let them go and started all over with theology. All those years finding her way in the world: She let them go and entered the monastery. All those years she had spent in an organized cloister: She let those go and, alongside her best friend, Sister Lisa Drover, OSF, began to imagine a new way of religious life. The Franciscan Sisters of Washington DC were born, as was the Center for Christogenesis (Christogenesis.org), a ministry focused on religious convergence while also integrating Western scientific thought.
Sister Ilia says that holding onto things makes no sense in an evolutionary universe.
“To live in an evolutionary world is to let go when the right time comes,” she says. “I think that’s exactly what Francis did. He could let go when the right time came and engage in new ways of thinking and structures of relationship. I think Francis’ notion of poverty, as much as it was material, was more of an emphasis on living without possessing. People possess. We possess our ideas, our judgments, our opinions. We grip them and hold onto them with a tight grasp, not letting them go for anything.
“So, one thing for me is to become conscious of where I grasp and to make every effort to let go, to live sine proprio, without possessing. We are a consumer culture of graspers, and we simply don’t know what it means to live in the flow of letting go.”
Sister Ilia’s affinity for the sciences might lead to her common description as a “cyborg Christian,” but she is also unashamedly human. “Part of the letting go is knowing yourself, knowing your strengths and weaknesses,” she reflects. “Francis of Assisi really knew himself. Anyone who spends a long time in prayer and deep meditation comes to the darkness of your own self. That can be where God is at work, trying to break through that darkness and bring light. Bonaventure once said that the lack of self-knowledge makes for faulty knowledge in everything else.”
Her work also receives its fair share of criticism, but she accepts that she is not in the mainstream of Catholic theology. She likes Franciscan Father Richard Rohr’s notion of making her home on the edge of the inside. “Someone has to be on the margins for things to expand,” she reflects. She’s in good company. Her two intellectual heroes, Teilhard and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, both faced unpopularity in their day. Teilhard was once labeled dangerous by the Holy Office because of his integration of religion and evolution. Merton’s interreligious writings, quite provocative for his time, raised eyebrows; his antiwar essays and gravitation toward Eastern ways of thinking may have landed him on a CIA list of potentially dangerous people. Sister Ilia has learned over time to let go of other people’s opinions, particularly in academia, where it is sometimes easy to rub people the wrong way.
“I have to simply pull back and let it go,” she says. “I wish them well, I pray for them, and then I throw them into the stream of life and say, ‘May you swim.’ When we can’t throw things into the river, or when we have to run alongside the river to see where what we’ve surrendered is going, I wonder if, from a Jungian perspective, that is something within ourselves that is not fully reconciled. We have to come home within ourselves and be at peace there, knowing that the way the river flows will never be within our grasp. We will find the greater fullness of life by simply coming home to ourselves.
“When things happen in my own life, I can’t blame other people,” she continues. “I have to ask myself the question: Who am I in this God-drenched world? And what am I called to do in this moment? So it’s about pulling back, reassessing, and then letting go. That’s the journey.”
Wholeness and Integration
There was a time not long ago when everything that Sister Ilia believed—about wholeness and integration, about poverty and letting go, about science and faith—came to a head. Quite literally, her head.
She thought she’d bounce right back. She thought her willpower would be enough to push through the discomfort. Yes, she had wound up in the emergency room that day—when she left her post at Villanova University and the front tire of her bicycle caught the rut between the grass and sidewalk, stopped her full speed, and flung her headfirst into the pavement. Yes, she had been told by doctors that the accident had resulted in “head trauma.” Yes, she was in her 60s. But soon enough, she was cleared by doctors. She was rattled and sore but ready to get back to work. This wasn’t the first time she had crashed on her bicycle.
Then began the constant buzzing in her head. Her greatest gift to the world—her mind—was now housing something of a hornet’s nest.
She found this hum would escalate when she was staring at her computer screen. To work without her computer was not an option for someone like Sister Ilia, who not only needed her computer for the classes she taught at Villanova—where she holds the esteemed Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology—but also for her writing and research.
The humming intensified to the point of debilitation, making the work she loved unbearable. Despite many head scans, ECGs, and new medications, no doctor could tell her what was wrong. Meanwhile, her brain and body screamed for healing.
“I love what I do, I honestly do,” Sister Ilia says. “Even if I wasn’t employed at a university, I’d be doing this. Even if I was working at a supermarket, I’d be doing this. I’d still be doing theology. It’s where my heart is.”
But for the first time in decades, her study of theology remained dormant. Or did it?
“She was tenacious,” says Sister Lisa, her best friend and fellow Franciscan sister who walked with Sister Ilia as a caregiver during that dark time in her life. “She wanted to get to the bottom of it and make sure she did the right thing. She was worried at one point that she had a subdural hematoma, which we know can have a really bad outcome. She said that the constant buzz and ringing would not let up.”
Sister Ilia eventually got connected with Randy Calabray, an expert in cranial psychotherapy. “The cranial system is designed to allow the spinal fluid to keep moving around the brain, down the spinal cord,” Calabray explains. “And if you ever look at a skull, you’ll see that there’s lots of sutures, lots of bones. Most people think their head is just a helmet, which is not the case. But that’s what can happen sometimes in head trauma—it causes the cranial system to lock down, as if it is a helmet.”
Calabray worked with Sister Ilia for a year, essentially putting pressure on different areas of her skull, like a massage, loosening areas that had locked down. They used the ringing in her head as a gauge for progress. “She realized her body was giving her all these subtle signs and that she needed to pay attention to them,” Calabray reflects.
They became friends. “I’d be talking to her about the body, and she would come back with theology and concepts about wholeness and oneness,” Calabray shares. “She was realizing that her body was a reflection of what she was talking about in the world.” The ringing slowly began to subside. The dividedness within herself had become its own pathway toward oneness.
Free God
Sister Ilia says that if she were to ever be seen at a political rally or protest, she’d likely simply be holding a plain cardboard sign that reads: FREE GOD.
“Teilhard helps us redefine a world that is not only not finished but is also becoming—with change, with complexity,” she says. “And that is one of the hardest things to get our heads around: We don’t realize that we are actually becoming. The world itself is becoming. So, we hold on to stuff, but there’s nothing to hold on to.
“We’ve already changed a hundred times over since what happened yesterday, and I think that the Christian God is a God who is becoming—that’s the whole point of death and resurrection, which is taking place here in the midst of a world of matter and spirit, on this ball that revolves around the sun, where we can see different phases of the moon and all this kind of stuff.”
Sister Ilia is rolling. She’s Etch A Sketching again. “The Trinity, you know, is not three men at a tea party,” she laughs. “It’s time to let God out, to let God loose. This brings us back to Meister Eckhart and his notion of ‘God, rid me of God.’ If you want to know who God is, then let go of God, you know?”
Again, she seems to be in good company, for maybe that is what the universe and eclipses and bodies and minds and hearts and science and religion are saying to us as well. Free God.
It’s light again outside now, like nothing ever happened. The moon has passed between the earth and the sun. Now the dancing star and cyborg Christian is talking about basketball.
