#4 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
God: Dying and Rising
Adult people of faith go for depth and seek to honor the wisdom of deep time, whether understood in cosmic, planetary, or anthropological terms. For them God is an open question and not a reality that can be determined by the prevailing philosophical and cultural assumptions of the past few thousand years. All the formal religions we know today, including Christianity, evolved under the shadow of the post-agricultural era, with its heavy emphasis of domination, control, manipulation, and commodification of the land.
This was the era of the Sky God; a human projection empowering the mighty imperial ruler to sanction and validate all that the earthly imperial forces themselves declared to be normative. It is a tragic cultural reductionism that has wreaked havoc on deeper and more ancient spiritual meaning.
Contemporary spirituality is seeking to retrieve a more ancient grounding in the mystery of God, described by several contemporary indigenous peoples as the Great Spirit. In all probability, this is the oldest and deepest intuition into the meaning of God that we humans possess. In this intuitive understanding, the Spirit is the primary energizer of everything in creation (as intimated in the opening chapter of the book of Genesis) and impacts on human experience through the living vitality of the earth itself.
This reappropriation of the Holy One, re-visioned as the Great Spirit, raises a range of urgent theological questions.
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The implications are best accessed by reviewing the major theological paradigm shifts happening in our time. Today, we evidence three theological paradigms at work in our world. The reader will recognize the first two; I hope by the end of this book, the relevance and meaning of the third paradigm will become much clearer.
First, I outline the first landscape ~ what I name as the codependent paradigm, described simply as Creation—Fall—Redemption. The central emphasis here is on the flawed nature of everything in creation. Although it is God’s creation, God cannot rectify the fall, attributed to human recklessness (an irrational craving for power), so Jesus is missioned to rescue the flawed reality, a task that continues in the life of the Church, often ensuing in humans entangled in several codependent relationships—hence, a primary reason why humans maturing into a more adult consciousness tend to walk away from such an unhealthy faith system.
The second landscape I name as the imperial Judeo-Christian paradigm, which runs like this: Creation-Israel-Jesus-Church-Eschaton. More central to this paradigm is the rescuing imperial God of the Hebrew Scriptures, modeled primarily on the great King David, who in turn becomes the messianic model for Jesus. That same kingly royal imperative permeates Christianity up to our own time.
Although vehemently denounced and opposed by Jesus, the Roman emperor Constantine reestablished the imperial prerogative that then morphed into popes, bishops, and exclusive male clergy, with accompanying institutions to uphold patriarchal power. Of course, it will never truly satisfy authentic spiritual desire, in which case we need the eschatological clause assuring us that God will eventually bring the whole thing to an end in a final act of divine deliverance.
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The third landscape is often described as the post-confessional paradigm and has a radically different feel to it; even the language will initially seem strange. I name it as the evolutionary paradigm. It goes like this:
Spirit—Energy—Creation—Evolution—Incarnation—Spirituality.
Looks like we have dropped the very word God! No explicit reference to Father, Jesus, or Holy Spirit, but fret not, they are included. No allusion to fall, redemption, church, or eschaton. And the reader may already be wondering what has happened to revelation and the inspiration of sacred scripture. On top of all that, it looks rather impersonal!
The Myth of Origin
The myth of origin is crucial here, as indeed it is for every faith system. The Great Spirit is how indigenous peoples around our world name the divine reality (God). An ancient creative energy, insinuating the dark deep, out of which the Great Spirit energizes all life. Energized by the Great Spirit, the birthing Holy One begets the vast panorama we call creation, setting in motion the irreversible complex trajectory that today we call evolution. The evolving creative enterprise eventually gives birth to (incarnates) consciously embodied creatures called humans, for whom the historical Jesus serves as an archetypal model.
Finally, I am suggesting that our primary theological responsibility at this time is to name and celebrate that magnificent mythopoetic drama within an empowering spirituality for our age. Committed Christians are likely to panic when faced with this outline. Jesus falls into third place and loses much of the traditional emphasis on salvation and redemption. In fact, Jesus is being reinscribed within the Gospel vision of the kin-dom of God.
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Signs of Our Time
To conclude this overview of adult faith in the 21st century, I outline briefly those evolutionary developments that have contributed to this cultural awakening, factors that will impact even more significantly over the next few decades.
1. The Information Explosion: We are living through a time in which new information and insight bombards us unceasingly. Faced with this challenge, some people panic and seek new contexts to give stability, structure, and reassurance in the face of the postmodern onslaught; these are predominantly the people who seek refuge in fundamentalist religion and tend to support right-wing politics. For those who begin to flow with the information explosion, curiosity is scaled to new heights, and they begin to question everything. Fobbing them off with conven-tional answers, no matter how dogmatic or scientific, is a waste of time. Unknowingly, they are after breadth and depth, and the evolutionary impetus in their lives will take them in that direction.
2. The Demise of Imperialism: Today there prevails an extensive cynicism toward all imperial systems. Power from the top down is no longer trusted to deliver any sense of meaningful empowerment. Nor do people believe in confronting the corruption of power; instead they tend to veer in the direction of exploring alternative possibilities. Sometimes the option for alternatives will fluctuate within the power structure itself, as in the option for Donald Trump, as a businessman, for American president, or the deluded hope that a military general—in the person of Jair Bolsonaro—might clear up the corruption in Brazil’s political system.
3. The Fragmentation of Patriarchy. With the demise of imperialism arises growing distrust in all wisdom coming from on high. The alternative desire is for consensual process.
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This implies employing dialogue, consultative dynamics, and mutual agreement. Truth is perceived to unfold from the collective wisdom, rather than what is delivered from any supreme authority. In religious terms, the retired biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann expresses it thus: “But the Church, with its excessive penchant for dogmatic certitude, and the academy, with its fascination with objective rationality, characteristically stop short of the evidence of communal obedience.”
4. Transcending Codependency. As people learn the art of communal deep listening, and begin to discover the deeper truth that ensues, they also begin to trust more deeply their inner intuitive wisdom. Some begin to realize the terrible price of earlier life conditioning in which they were effectively treated like passive children and enculturated into a codependency that they now realize is no longer congruent with their adult status. It is in an attempt to reclaim this sense of adulthood that many people choose to outgrow or abandon their inherited religion.
5. Reawakening the Suppressed Imagination. The patriarchal consciousness described above first evolved as a response to the extreme climatic conditions associated with the agricultural revolution some ten thousand years ago. In due course, it evolved into the imperial structures of kings and warriors about six thousand years ago. Finally, it gave birth to the rational mind about three thousand years ago, with Greek philosophy as a dominant catalyst for how this way of thinking was internalized in the Western consciousness. One of the catastrophic effects was the suppression of imagination, intuition, and the power of the symbolic. Today, these qualities are back with a vengeance, creating seismic shifts in the arts, in human sexuality, and in psychic exploration.
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6. The Relational Revolution of Quantum Physics. Classical science with its focus on rationality, objectivity, and quantification has certainly brought enormous benefits to our world, particularly in the industrial and technological spheres. It has, however, left millions of people with a raw psychic hunger and a cultural isolation from pitting the human over against the natural world. Quantum physics illuminates a very different sense of reality, with creative energy underpinning every life process and the capacity for interconnection foundational to all growth and progress.
Our evolving scientific paradigms inform a new way of being spiritual that is essentially multidisciplinary, nondualist, and grounded in a much more expansive sense of the sacred. And they incarnate for us a different way of grounding our understanding of God. As we move from the personal to the transpersonal, we outgrow what fitted well at earlier life stages. But growth requires change and change embraces diversity.
And for those among us seeking to honor the evolutionary thrust—as for many adults today—there is no going back. The lure is for the future and not for the past. In Christian terms we call it resurrection, that expansive horizon beckoning at us from every Calvary, as we learn to negotiate the mystical paradox on which all life flourishes.