Awakening Consciousness # 12

Paschal Paradox:

Reflections on a Life of Spiritual Evolution by Diarmuid O’Murchu

From the Precis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM

Chapter 7 ~ The Death and Resurrection       of Liberation

 The Devotion of Consolation

It happened in 2002, in Lusaka, capital of Zambia in East Africa. Martha’s husband had died in a road accident many years ago, leaving her with eight children, all of whom married and among them parented 32 children of which Martha was the proud grandmother. Tragedy began to strike in the early 1990s as AIDS/HIV consumed groups across the African continent. Between 1991 and 2002, in a space of eleven years, Martha buried all her eight children, all their spouses and two of her grandchildren. When I was introduced to Martha by a religious sister, one of her support team, told me that Martha had a wonderful devotion to the crucified Jesus.   

 She begins and ends each day kissing her crucifix. It gives her comfort, consolation and strength. And despite her great struggle to support and care for the remaining 30 grandchildren, Martha prays every day, specifically 18 decades of the Rosary, one decade for each of her deceased children, a decade for each of their spouses, and two decades for the deceased grandchildren. And she makes many novenas, the one to the Sacred Heart being her favorite.

 As we entered the 1990s, the miracle retro-viral drug known as AZT came, and within a few months we began to notice improve-ments, encouraged by the news coming out of the United States of people now living fairly normal lives, despite the fact that they had full-blown AIDS.

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However, African countries could not get these drugs because pharmaceutical companies were not prepared to share the resources with those who could not pay the money. Financial profit rather than saving human lives was the blunt and harsh truth.

 The Spirituality of Liberation

A breakthrough happened in 2003. The details are sketchy and are unlikely ever to come to public knowledge. It seems that a small group of activists ~ presumably with some scientific and medical expertise ~ managed to reproduce the copyright for some of the prevailing retro-viral drugs and began to manufacture them secretly initially in India it seems, and transporting them readily and cheaply to Africa. Shortly thereafter the manufacturing itself moved to Africa. The decline in the death rate was noted in months.

 Fortunately for Martha, she and her family were among the first to receive the drugs. She was now the beneficiary of empowering hope, something the devotions and multiple prayers could never have achieved. Since we know nothing of those brave risk-takers, we can only guess what motivated them to do what they did. I have no hesitation in calling them prophetic with the full spiritual and theological weight of that word. For me they are pioneers of what I now describe as the spirituality of liberation. What they delivered is among the most credible and compelling evidence I have ever known of what the Gospels call the kin-dom of God.

 From the personal to the Transpersonal

Personal devotion features in every major world religion. It creates and maintains a sense of intimacy between the devotee and God (variously understood). It helps to bring God near and reassures the devotee that God does care and love.

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Devotion is a major feature of what is often described as a personal relationship with God (or with Jesus). I name it the devotion of consolation. There is a shadow side to devotional faith. Devotions thrive on a codependent relationship in which a child-like, unworthy (and often fearful) devotee beseeches an all-powerful deity for help. The posture is sometimes described as throwing oneself at the mercy of God.

 The spirituality of liberation is of a very different persuasion. Its foundational premise is that we are all loved uncondi-tionally by God, so we do not need to beseech or persuade God for anything. What we need to be about is making real for others the empowering love with which we ourselves are unconditionally loved. Here everybody is seen as an adult and not as a passive child. The mediation of love, therefore, can never be patronizing toward, or merely appeasing for, the vulnerable other. Instead, it must empower and liberate others to become agents for their own growth and development.

 The Desired Integration

Despite the negative appraisal of religion in the modern world, millions still rely on a devotional faith to help them through lives of struggle, pain, and suffering. We can easily dismiss such devotionalism by citing Karl Marx’s claim that religion is the opium of the people, but often such practices are subtly woven into survival strategies without which despair would engulf many lives, condemned to oppression, poverty, and the appalling conditions no human should have to endure. The challenge facing us is one of integration. How do we reclaim devotional elements so that they empower us to embrace the daring, liberating, and empowering capacities that authenticate genuine religion?

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For Christianity as for all authentic religion, transformation is the primary goal, empowering us to create on earth a set of values that draw forth all that is good and wholesome in humans and in all aspects of the web of life. Authentic spirituality seeks to empower our human endeavor to create a better world for all beings. The spirituality of liberation is our primary task, not merely a freedom from, but, more important, a freedom for. The millions trapped in poverty, violence, and oppression certainly deserve to be freed from all that immobilizes and weighs them down, while those living in the lap of luxury, or ruthlessly exploiting the earth for mere human gain, also need to be set free ~ to live in a more convivial and responsible way within the web of universal life.

 The Crucifixion and the Resurrection

In their 2008 book Saving Paradise, scholars Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker write a history of the cross in the ancient Christian world. Many churches today are adorned with a crucifix, highlighting the torturous suffering that Jesus underwent in his passion and death. Emblematic of what Jesus suffered for us, to redeem us from our sinful condition, this commonly used depiction of the death of Jesus is meant to remind us of our sin and call us to repentance to make up to Jesus for the cruel sufferings we caused him to endure.

 But Jesus hanging on the cross is very much an invention of the second Christian millennium and largely unknown for the first thousand years of Christendom. Through-out the first 1000 years, the cross adopted by Christians was typically that of an exalted risen Jesus, a glorified Christ, reigning over the world. No emphasis on torture and suffering.

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In the 2nd millennium onward, suffering for the sake of suffering becomes central to the notion of Christian salvation and redemption, with the historical Jesus upheld as the paradigmatic victim, whose violent death and suffering arrested the power of sin and opened the gates of heaven for sinful creatures. And those who suffered most were the ones who stood the best chance of inheriting eternal life in Heaven. In the second millennium of Christianity while the Church of Rome in the West chose to portray the tortured, victimized Christ on the crucifix, the Eastern Orthodox Church continued to portray the cross with the victorious, Risen Christ in whom all of creation rises. 

The Long Road to Freedom

Jesus did not die for our sins (the atonement theory). Jesus was killed because he was such an empowering prophet of the kin-dom of God’s vision. He was crucified, which was a death meted out to subversives who posed a threat to the prevailing powers. Jesus died because he gave his life so fully and unstintingly to this liberating and empowering transformation that he was eventually captured and crucified. The system could not tolerate him any longer. The empowerment he was instigating became too much of a threat to the imperial and religious powers of the day.

 The transpersonal invitation, therefore, is to embrace life, darkness, suffering, struggle, breakthrough, and flourishing ~ the whole lot ~ with the fullness of our lives. And it is not merely life at the human level but pertains to the energizing and empowering web of life to which we all belong at both the cosmic and planetary levels. To the best of my knowledge, Elizabeth Johnson’s book, Creation and the Cross (2018) is one of the first theological attempts to situate our theology of the cross and Good Friday in a more transpersonal context.

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Crucifixion in our world today is first and foremost a cosmic and planetary reality. A great deal of human anguish, pain, and trauma results directly from the meaning-less suffering the earth itself has to endure ~ largely because of reckless human interference. We have become so dis-connected from the sacredness of creation that we live our lives with a kind of inorganic alienation that is central to most of our pain and suffering.

 The crucial point, of course, is that we do not merely inhabit the universe. We are co-creators, participants in a complex creative process and for the greater part, we learn as we go along. Martha in Zambia reached a cruel, painful juncture where the future looked very grim. All she could afford to learn was how to muster the basic courage to arise to the dark and frightening dawn of each day.

 Until, that is, empowering grace came to her rescue, through the activists who risked so much that Martha ~ and millions like her ~ could also regain some sense of being co-creators in a future worth living for. She may still be doing her rosaries, novenas, and devotions, but no longer pleading in desperation to a distant God, but now in gratitude to the God who liberates and empowers in the courageous endeavors of those who go the extra mile, the prophets that deliver enduring hope.

 The above input is in Chapter Seven 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.