#3 Awakening Consciousness - Paschal Paradox - Diarmuid O'Murchu

Paschal Paradox:

Reflections on a Life of Spiritual Evolution

By Diarmuid O’Murchu

From the Precis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM

In the Shadow of Religious Fear

At age twelve, I went to boarding school, run by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, the religious congregation  I subsequently joined. For my second year of scholastic philosophy, my religious congregation decided to open a formation house (seminary) in the capital city of Dublin, so that we could avail of an inter-congregational formation program initiated by the Jesuits in Milltown Park, Dublin. 

 Ahead of me was one of the richest years of my life in terms of contentment, growth, and integration. The Milltown Park Institute provided me with an array of books that opened up new vistas of resurrection break-through. The writings of the then-Jesuit theologian Ladislaus Boros changed my understanding of both humanity and God. Boros was describing a Christian anthropol-ogy, prioritizing the sacredness and whole-ness of the human condition above and beyond the flawed nature I had internalized in my earlier years. This not only was refreshing and reassuring but also launched me into an incarnational sense of meaning that engages my mind and spirit to the present day. It was indeed a stone rolled away from the tomb.

 And it began to change my imaging of God. The God of our deep humanity—wounded indeed, but more magnificently healed—could not have been that distant harsh judge I had taken so literally in my earlier years. It felt like my image of God had also been released from the tomb. It would be several years later before I would name the spiritual encounter awakening in my soul. It was—and fortunately, continues to be—the God of unconditional love, manifested uniquely in the human face of Jesus.

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The second author whose writings transposed me onto mystical heights was the Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin. It was the evolutionary threshold of Teilhard’s vision that captivated my imagination, leading me into the deep recesses of our ancient human becoming amid the wilds of Africa. Unknown to myself I was on the way to becoming a planetary citizen and a cosmic mystic. Theology continued to be a thrilling experience, as the mystery of life and the reality of God were ever more deeply insinuated into my soul. Life also had its moments of struggle and difficulty, but now I felt there was a solid foundation with the aid of which I could weather many a storm. I had come to a place in my life journey where I knew I was being held within the power of a mystery that is ultimately benign.

 After ordination I began to plunge deeper into my understanding of religious life. A visit to the international, ecumenical community in Taizé (France) proved to be another graced breakthrough. My 3 weeks at Taizé, involving conversations with monks and others, raised questions around the meaning of my vocation that would engage me for the rest of my life. I came home from Taizé with a clear unambig-uous conviction that I was first and foremost a religious and only secondarily a priest. My vocation to religious life took on enormous significance.

 From the Personal to the Transpersonal

Evolving an Adult Faith

Growing into a more adult way of under-standing and living my faith happened in what seems to have been a gradual, organic process. The evolutionary vision of Teilhard was certainly a major influence. It reinforced the integration of the human and the holy that I first encountered in the writings of Ladislaus Boros. More important, Teilhard’s vision enabled me to build bridges across the dualistic split between the sacred and the secular.

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In a few years that led me into the exploration of quantum physics and the expanded vision of the new cosmology.    At this juncture, the distinction between religion and spirituality became all important. It was all too clear that my ancient ancestors, going back some one hundred thousand years were already operating out of an informed spiritual sense of life. Long before formal religions evolved (about 5,000 years ago), members of the human species were exploring spiritual mean-ing in several contexts of their daily lives. And they were doing so without rabbis, bishops, or imams, and without any of the patriarchal structures adopted by major religions.

 When I began exploring our long human story in the 1970s, the science of human origins (paleontology) had not yet evolved into the rigorous science it is today. It is when the scholars moved into Ethiopia in the 1980s, and research became more expansive in Kenya, Tanzania, and later Chad, that the momentum gathered to the point of establish-ing the current date for our human origins, namely, that of seven million years ago.

 This is now our sacred story, the expanded horizon of our faith as adult people of God. Africa, and not the land of Israel, is where God first incarnated in our embodied spirits. This is our graced narrative as God’s creatures, and our God has been with us on this long journey every step of the way. This is the adult coming of age, outgrowing the former codependent relationship of the docile child obeying the patriarchal God-father.  We are called to co-create with our God and not merely for “Him.”

 In this co-creative process, our engagement is deeply rooted in the soil of planet Earth. As Earthlings, our true God-given home is the living creation itself, in its cosmic and planetary dimensions. In this adult under-standing there is no room for the vale of tears from which religion has long told us to escape.

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We are birthed into life in the empowering grace of our creative God, and our collaborative responsibility with that God is to birth anew the nature that has birthed us. In this co-creative process, there is no room for patriarchal power or manipulation. It is our sense of belonging that defines our true nature and our God-given identity. That to which we belong defines the very essence of our adult selves.

 Therefore, God’s will for humans—and for all creation—is to exercise an agency of co-creation: to bring about on earth a greater fullness, the evolutionary complexity I described earlier. We are meant to be an engaged and involved species, adult people serving an adult God, in the ever-evolving enterprise of our magnificent universe. Seeking to escape to a life hereafter makes no evolutionary sense anymore; in fact, it never did for our ancient ancestors.

 Adult Challenges for Contemporary Faith

Religious faith today is in deep crisis and rapidly losing credibility all over our world. We are witnessing a classical evolutionary shift, featuring a paschal journey of dying, with seeds of new life beginning to appear. Today, rapidly increasing numbers of people drift away from religious belief and from allegiance to a denomination. We are witnessing the growing amorphous body of those who claim to be spiritual but not religious, an evolu-tionary movement of the 21st  century deserv-ing a far deeper assessment.

 Regarding those who drift away, a key issue here is that of relevance. Religion seems neither relevant nor useful anymore. People feel they can get on fine without it. A significant influence here is that of our information-saturated world, in which the desire to know is growing exponentially. In such a culture we witness an ever-deepening curiosity, a tendency to question just about everything, and an adult expectation of honest, truthful answers to questions asked.

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Additionally, our growing scientific and technological culture tends to provide rational explanations replacing mythological or religious beliefs of former times.

  Most of the adults who have graced my life, those that have embraced the search for a more adult way of living out the faith, are better described as trans-religious rather than post-religious. Some may abandon entirely the religion they have inherited, and some may maintain a minimal rate of practice, going to church at Christmas and Easter and availing of church services for funerals and weddings. But the majority maintain strong links, while all the time desiring, and striving for, an experience of church that will honor and nourish their hunger for adult faith.

 This yearning emerges out of a twofold adult maturation:

First, there is the growing sense of unease and suspicion around the inadequacies of long-held convictions and beliefs and a dissatisfaction with what is preached and delivered at regular church services.

 Second, is the intellectual awakening and curiosity of our culture of mass information in which people question several aspects of inherited truth (for example, the literal truth of scripture) and seek out forums where they can air their doubts, have their questions heard, and receive responses that invite deeper exploration.

 The Importance of Spirituality Today

For many such people, the distinction between religion and spirituality is all important. The institutional nature of religion and the perceived rigidity of its doctrines fail to deliver the deeper truth emerging from their life experience. Their hunger for God, and for spiritual meaning, opens up a wider and deeper arena, often described today as spirituality.  

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Although it has been around since the 1960s, the post-religious culture often described as spirituality is still poorly understood and often superficially dismissed by those committed to formal religion. Frequently denounced as a by-product of our selfie culture, the movement is perceived as a classical postmodern mixture of “anything goes.”

 Spirituality can simply be defined as Spirit connecting with spirit. From the human perspective it views humans as founda-tionally open to transcendence, to an intuitive sense of the sacred within oneself and in the surrounding creation. In ancient times it was identified as animism, viewed by religionists as paganism and therefore contrary to God’s desire for humanity as understood by the religions.

 The depth and richness of this ancient sense of the sacred can be authentically understood only when we come to terms with our long evolutionary story as a human species, dating back some seven million years. Assuming that God has been fully at work in us during all that time and bearing in mind that formal religions (as we know them today) are little more than five thousand years old, then we discern more clearly what we mean by spirituality and its substantial significance in the human story long before formal religions ever evolved.