#1 Awakening Consciousness - Diarmuid O'Murchu
Paschal Paradox:
Reflections on a Life of Spiritual Evolution
By Diarmuid O’Murchu
From the Precis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
My Evolutionary Horizon
There is a rhythm to my life for which the notion of evolution seems like a useful fit. Deep within my being, it is a construct that has nourished and sustained me across many challenging transitions. I first came across the notion of evolution in my early twenties. A deeper wisdom led me into reading spiritual books that began to set my spirit on fire. Of particular significance were the writings of the paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin.
The Evolutionary Imperative
Teilhard had a lot to say about evolution, the depths of which only made sense to me over several years. For the first time I began to understand the intuitive wisdom that nourished and sustained me during those years when, several years later, I read Stephen Hawking’s popular work, A Brief History of Time.
For well over 70 percent of the book, I could not comprehend all the scientific information, yet I could scarcely lay the book aside. The subject matter enthralled me. It left me with a sense of cosmic wonder that insinuated meaning into the depth of my being.
It is one of the most compelling books I have ever read. Perhaps it was the vision rather than the message—or the vision mediated through the message—that intrigued me. That sense of elegant movement of God’s Spirit in the unceasing unfolding of life.
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I began to get the evolutionary significance as I started to research the story of human origins. Now I could see evolution at work with a scope and depth that vastly expanded every fiber of my wisdom and curiosity. I had heard of Charles Darwin and the neo-Darwinians, but their take on evolution and its impact on universal life seemed cold and mechanistic. It lacked the dynamism and spiritual value of the Teilhardian approach.
When I first began exploring human evolution, Louis and Mary Leaky were the big names, and their discovery of Homo Habilis (the handy person) in 1959 was the primary evidence pointing to a date of origins, some two million years ago. That realization utterly fascinated me. Nor did I experience any conflict with my inherited religious wisdom, dogmatically asserting a sin-infested humanity of a mere few thousand years, whose human and evolutionary meaning all depended on the divine rescue of Jesus a mere two thousand years ago.
I grew up with a Christian view suggesting that it was what evolved after the time of Jesus that was really important, indeed that was the only evolutionary time-scale of any divine or human significance. As for the Hebrew Scriptures, their main significance related to the story of creation outlined in the opening chapters of the book of Genesis. Up until the mid-20th century, most Christians around the world took the creation sequence in Genesis as literal fact, with a date for the entire creation at around 5000 BCE. The study of human origins officially known as paleo-anthropology began in the 19th century but only attained its full scientific rigor in the latter half of the 20th century.
We now know that our species has been on the earth for an estimated seven million years, blossoming into the more distinctive hominoid status at least 3.3 million years ago. Despite the scientific verification and validation of this knowledge, the religions of the world—as well as Christian theology—have scarcely begun to engage with this enlarged human horizon.
Teilhard de Chardin has been a major influence in my life, particularly in my spiritual and theological coming of age. His expanded horizon of spiritual possibility, deeply earthly, on the one hand, while stretching the human spirit toward cosmic consciousness, on the other. For me, and for many others, Teilhard opened the creative horizons of our evolving universe.
Central Features of Evolution
I want to focus attention here on three central dynamics of evolution: growth, change, and complexity. In my psychology studies, in the late 1970s, a significant shift was taking place in our under-standing of human growth. The earlier emphasis on the childhood behavioral foundations was giving way to behavior across all the various stages of life.
Around that same time, the developmental psychologist James Fowler was integrat-ing the new developmental understand-ings into the growth of faith in the human life cycle. Observing the natural world we inhabit ~ the plants, the trees, and animals never remain the same. Everything grows, unfolds into ever new ways of being. We cannot control such change; indeed, the only authentic response we can make is to learn to flow with it.
In the change we experience around and within us, there is another inescapable dimension: decay, decline, and death. Such disintegration is not an evil, nor is it the consequence of sin stated in Romans 6:23, but it is a God-given dimension of all creation. Without the disintegration and death of the old there can be no true novelty. The ability to let go of that which previously sustained us is a perquisite for embracing the new that morphs into further growth and development.
Not Death but Transformation
The piece of coal thrown into the fire can never be restored to its original form. An important transformation takes place, however, as the burning of that coal generates heat energy that propels tech-nology to create a range of new entities.
The piece of coal has not come to naught. Its true identity as an energy-bearing structure continues in a range of new forms, which cannot be perceived, understood, or accessed in the original form of the piece of coal.
Viewing the natural world around us, we see things growing, a vast range of life-forms becoming and developing through greater complexity. It is often an untidy, even messy process (hence, the notion of chaos) and certainly does not follow a neat, logical progression.
Any process of development involving increasing levels of complexity, elegance, and beauty will be accompanied by a considerable amount of destruction and waste. At every level of life, creation and destruction are interwoven in evolution’s trajectory.
The Lure of the Future
As if all the above elements of growth, change, and complexity were not enough to come to terms with, there is the additional factor of directionality. The inherited neo-Darwinian claim is that evolution happens by repeating the successful patterns of the past; in other words, everything is driven from behind. Formal religions also adopt this view.
Truth is seen to reside primarily in that which has stood the test of time. The new notion that evolutionary unfolding responds to a future lure, not on past influence, helps to explain the rapidity and complexity of evolution today. Just as human beings are motivated, not merely by former successes, but by the attraction of as-yet-unrealized possibilities, so in the wider realm of life we detect break-throughs that cannot simply be explained by referencing the past.
The scientific notion of the strange attractor comes into play here. According to chaos theory, alongside the turbulence and randomness that characterize many organic systems, the often-unexpected emergence of orderliness occurs. The new sense of order seems to emerge from within the system itself, strangely drawn into the structure that has come to be known as a strange attractor. When a new behavior reaches a critical threshold, unexpectedly it spills over to the benefit of the entire species.
The human hunger for transcendence toward ultimate meaning can also be understood as another feature of the lure of the future. In the words of Ilia Delio, “If God makes things to make themselves (as Thomas Aquinas suggested) then self-making is written into the heart of nature.
“Reality is a process constituted by the drive for transcendence. The nature of reality is to explore possibilities that are not yet actual. Nature, in a sense, is never satisfied; it is always ready for novelty and to be something more….Every human life is the cosmos winding its way into the future.”
Theologically, I understand that the central attraction of the lure of the future is a fruit and wisdom of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit can be understood as a kind of cosmic strange attractor. Throughout this book, I explore the meaning of the Holy Spirit in terms of what indigenous peoples all over our world call the Great Spirit. This is probably the oldest insight into the meaning of God known to humans.
For indigenous peoples, the Great Spirit is not a transcendent being above and outside creation but rather the energizing creativity that lures all beings into creative engagement with life. And for our First Nations peoples that happens primarily in and through the land (soil). The land itself is imbued with vital empowering energy, making it a “strange attractor” for the awakening and evolution of our spiritual selves.
For Private Circulation Only-March 2023
The above is taken from the beginning of the Precis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM, of Diarmuid O’Murchu’s book, Paschal Paradox, Reflections on a Life of Spiritual Evolution, Published in 2022 by Franciscan Media, 28 West Liberty Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.