#11 Awakening Consciousness
Paschal Paradox:
Reflections on a Life of Spiritual Evolution by Diarmuid O’Murchu
From the Precis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
Chapter 6 ~ Entangled with the Earth
The Tree of Life
I love trees. They fascinate and intrigue me. Trees draw me to an ancient spiritual wisdom long known to the human species. The tree was a primary symbol of the Great Earth Mother Goddess worshiped by our ancestors some forty thousand years ago. The book of Genesis knows that ancient wisdom, though some of the people who wrote or edited the book may not have shared that knowledge. Because of their misogynist fear of the feminine they screwed up the ancient relationship between the woman and the tree (in the garden of Eden). As a result, both end up deeply wounded.
When the tree calls, I can hear primal echoes, which is what happened in the spring of 1975 when I ended up at a Lenten talk in Coventry Cathedral in the United Kingdom. The speaker was a botanist who spoke of the spirituality of trees. In fact, it was the botany, and not merely the spirituality, that fascinated me.
Beginning with the colloquial wisdom, whereby trees draw their nourishment primarily, if not exclusively, from their roots, he informed us that this was a popular understanding that no longer made any scientific sense. It described the tree as a closed system, containing within itself all it needed to grow and flourish, when in truth a tree is an open system. As an open system the tree flourishes through an intricate interrelationship with several organic forces within a scientific process known as photosynthesis (how the energy of sunlight becomes a nourishing source for all organic life).
While trees come in several shapes, the botanist informed us that evolution had selected two configurations most commonly seen throughout the arboreal world. One is the cone shape and the other the canopy (like an open umbrella). These seem to be the shapes best suited for the tree to absorb the energy of sunlight.
= 2 =
Sunlight contributes at least 50% of the growth energy for the tree. Rainwater and moisture contribute at least another 20%, air a further 10%, and various other ingredients involved in photosynthesis add another 10%. All of which brings us to 90 percent—and all coming from outside the tree, not from within it. It is important to note that the inner and outer cannot be kept apart. The inner and the outer are one.
Roots are essential to the existence of a tree and always will be. Moreover, human tampering with the roots can easily destroy and kill a tree. When it comes to the growth of a tree, however, the roots contribute very little. Since a tree is an open system, its flourishing arises from its interdependence, not from its rootedness.
Nothing in creation flourishes primarily via rootedness; nothing makes sense on its own. All is interconnected; everything flourishes through interdependence. The tree is indeed a potent, ageless symbol of how creation thrives, of how the divine life force co-creates with our unfold-ing creation. Humans need to adjust to this divine, cosmic imperative.
From the Personal to the Transpersonal
Informed by this deeper wisdom symbolized in the tree, the transformative process (resurrection) becomes significantly clearer. Instead of clinging to my roots, I am invited to embrace the transnational identity of becoming more expansively planetary, and more deeply cosmic. Paradoxically, it is in transcending my exclusive Irish identity that I grow more deeply into it. And similarly with my Catholic faith, the invitation is to become more of an ecumenical Christian, open to multifaith dialogue and engagement and, embracing the universal spiritual empowerment of the God who works throughout the entire creation. This is a more authentic espousal of catholicity in its deeper meaning.
Entanglement is how quantum physics names this pervasive interdependence. Nothing makes sense in isolation, nor must the interdependent context be confined merely to human beings. Our convivial relationship with creation—at both cosmic and planetary levels—is foundational to all we are and all we are invited to become. It transcends all the roots that ground us, inviting us to enlarged horizons that forever engage our spirit and imagination.
= 3 =
Quantum Entanglement
The tree is an icon of God at work in creation. In Christian theology we describe it as the Trinitarian God, the subject of much theological controversy throughout the ages. Beyond the metaphysical rhetoric lies a deeper layer like that of the root system in the redwood forests. All is interconnected. Entanglement is how it is named in quantum physics, a concept that will need to be integrated into a transpersonal theology for our future.
None of our systems—educational, political, economic or religious—has been telling us the truth, and in our inherited gullibility, we have been colluding with their very narrow view of reality. Our true human story of seven million years has been neither recognized nor affirmed. For much of that time we lived in a more entangled way, congruent with our place in a quantum universe. We lived very close to nature, engaging in a convivial manner with its organic nurturance, enhancing its growth and development, with the earth in turn supporting our human endeavor. It would seem we got it right most of the time, till about ten thousand years ago when the so-called agricultural revolution disrupted and undermined the creative balance.
A whole range of new diseases appeared for the first time. We began treating the earth as a commodity to be usurped and subdued. We lost sense of our entanglement, our interdependence with the cosmic and planetary web of life. It is that dislocation that is at the root of many of the major problems facing humanity today.
We are a species who have lost our way. Many of the major crises of this time, particularly those of an ecological nature, are alerting us and calling us to new ways of being in our world. We need to become entangled once more and reclaim a more benign and convivial relationship with the wider web of creation. It is in and through bodies that the creative energy of the Spirit flows. Without body Spirit can achieve nothing. God’s primary body manifesting to us, and bestowing on us, God’s own life is that of the evolving universe itself, the operational sphere in which the creativity of the Holy One has been at work for billions of years before humans, religions, churches ever came to be.
= 4 =
It is in the universe at large that we discern the empowering creativity of God, elegant while being simultaneously highly paradoxical. The universe is God’s primary revelation for us and to us. Therein the face of the Holy One is first made real for humans.
Embodiment
Accordingly, nothing in creation can be adequately explained in material, physical, or biological terms. The divine radiance is in the interconnectedness of all the apparently separate elements. The embodiment in question is not about product but about process. It is in the co-evolutionary unfolding of reality that we encounter the elegance and magnificence of the divine creativity.
Our human experience of this cosmic sense of embodiment is mediated for us in and through our earthiness, which in turn is facilitated through all the earth-creatures with which we share our convivial existence. Here we encounter a marked departure from all the major religions, which postulate, in one form or another, that our eventual salvation with God is obtained by escaping the curse of this vale of tears. Instead, we are meant to transcend our human predicament so that in death we can escape from our embodiment in creation and be reunited with God in the noncorporeal realm of the afterlife.
In the evolutionary expansive horizons of the twenty-first century, a very different theology calls us forth. It is in the earthly dimensions of our embodiment that we most directly encounter the divine energy that creates and sustains everything in creation. Our earthiness is the umbilical cord that connects us with the birthing and sustaining nature of God. It is at this juncture that we reconnect with indigenous peoples around the world for whom the notion of the Great Spirit provides the primordial identity of the God who energizes everything in our cosmic-planetary being and becoming. We are in this thing together, we and God, and we cannot let each other down. What thing is that? The thing of it is “the world.” That reclaiming of holy mystery at the heart of creation is where the Spirit pulsates today. Spirituality is the name of this rediscovery.
= 5 =
Reclaiming the Great Spirit
Spirituality evolves and unfolds around one central idea: Spirit connecting with spirit. Everything in creation (not merely humans) is energized from a primordial “entangled” source we call Spirit (with a capital S). The inherited energy in each living organism, and even in the minute subatomic elements that constitute everything in creation, is a manifestation of the same spirit (with a small s). This manifestation of spirit in the human person is what the famous Catholic theologian Karl Rahner had in mind when he described humans as being essentially open to transcendence. Spirit (with a small s) is forever being lured into the dynamic creative energizing of the Great Spirit.
I first encountered the notion of God as Great Spirit in a brief engagement with the Australian aborigines, in 2000 CE, and have had several exposures since then in different parts of the world. This is how indigenous/First Nations people name and understand that divine reality we call God. There is a marked difference, however. For our indigenous peoples, the Great Spirit is not a transcendent reality but an empowering, energizing life force, intimately interwoven with the alive Earth itself.
It is in and through our identity and status as Earthlings that we encounter and engage with the Great Spirit. First Nations peoples do not worship the Great Spirit. Their several elaborate rituals are used to sensitize people to the energizing dynamism of the Spirit and to empower them to work collaboratively with the Spirit. And Spirit is not merely in the constructive experiences of life; it also operates in the storms, the sufferings, the setbacks, all that constitutes the great paradox described earlier in this book. Faith in the Great Spirit knows no dualisms. The wisdom arising from both quantum physics and the new cosmology provides an aperture into this foundational, transpersonal faith. Conventional theology is too narrowly anthropocentric.
In the contemporary transpersonal realm, spirituality is outpacing theology. By honoring the primary role of the energizing Spirit, spirituality begins to highlight the complex and creative web of life in which everything is deeply interconnected.
= 6 =
Reframing the Story of Pentecost
The biggest problem with our conventional death-resurrection narrative is the substantial displacement of the earthly life of Jesus. It feels as if the life of Jesus, and its hugely transformative significance as a Spirit-filled inheritance, is merely a preparation for the real stuff that came in the last few days of his earthly existence. Salvation and redemption do not belong to the exemplary life of Jesus but to his death and resurrection. By the end of the Gospel narratives, the Great Spirit has been reduced to the Holy Spirit whose energizing can be done only after Father and Son have accomplished the anthropocentric deliverance.
An Entangled Paschal Journey
Hopefully, the insights of science and cosmology, the urgent ecological forces of our age, the deepening insights into scripture and theology, and the wisdom garnered by the growing body of adult faith seekers, all contribute to a more inclusive and empowering spiritual culture for now and for the decades ahead. In that “entangled” journey there is a great deal of death and rising in abundance. The tree of life has flourished and borne much fruit. On that grand scale, resurrection has outwitted Calvary many times over. Hope prevails!
As we move deeper into the 21st century, the paradigm will either progressively fall apart or may quite suddenly implode on itself (likely to happen to Islam before other major religions). This old paradigm is just too alien to the evolutionary thrust of cosmic and earthly life today for it to survive. Its demise will engage us in a major paschal journey, but that energizing Spirit will blow where she wills and as she wills. She will bring about a resurrection break-through, every bit as earth-shattering and empowering as any of the Christian renderings we have known over the past two thousand years. Except, this time round, the Earth itself will play a more central role.
#11 ~ For Private Circulation Only - January 2024
The above input is in Chapter Six of the Precis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM, of Diarmuid O’Murchu’s book, Paschal Paradox, Published by Franciscan Media, 28 West Liberty Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
Maryknoll Contemplative Community