Spirituality and Ecological Hope

I have been reading Diarmuid O’Murchu for several years now.  His books open up our worldview, our spiritualities and religiosities, to the enormity of the evolutionary process of which we are a part.  He allows the full impact of science — what we know now of the vast expanses of time and space — to challenge our old paradigms and invites us into the adventure of participating in the unfolding of a new state of consciousness within the human experience, something clearly underway in our time.

In his latest book, Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human History, he takes us on a journey through the evolution story of Homo sapiens sapiens and shows us why our lack of consideration for the entire story, the wholeness of the unfolding, has left us with an incredibly narrow and damaging worldview.  Challenging the religious orthodoxy that claims that God only came into the world in the person of Jesus, an extremely narrow vision of the divine in creation, O’Murchu sees ‘incarnation’ within the whole of human history, within the whole of Creation itself.

O’Murchu de-centers the human within the story of creation, based on what we know now about our place within it.  The human species evolved over some several million years within a universe that is 13.7 billion years old.  Many billion years will unfold once humans, and even the Earth, are gone.  Narrow indeed would be a view of God as only incarnate within this very minute moment in the entirety of creation, and within that moment, only within the 2,000 years since Jesus Christ.

While this insight can fill us with dread, we agree with O’Murchu that it is key to whether or not this era of life within the evolution story of Earth will continue.  Our Hebrew/Christian-based traditions, along with ancient Greek philosophical thought, placed God outside, over and above the process, while placing the human at the center of the creation story, with human redemption as its centerpiece and culmination, the focus of the drama.  Alongside this belief framework came belief in some sort of immortality for our individual souls, a state above the corruption of the body, in which we achieve perfection, a belief that puts the human outside the evolution story and its ultimate fate, whatever that may be.

O’Murchu invites us to embrace our mortality, death, as a crucial step towards understanding our place within the dynamics of creation.  The real key to rich and abundant life for the generations to come after us rests in our coming to terms with the dynamics of birth, death, and rebirth in order for life to exist at all, much less life lurching forward towards greater levels of consciousness.

Unless we die, the whole process comes to an end very quickly.  And it is so often our fear of death and projections of our individual mortality, with a god as judge over us, that leads us to the destructive tendencies that mark so much of the history of the human on the planet.

We need to reclaim our deep ancient wisdom whereby we comprehend and appropriate afresh the interdependence of all life forces, including death.  We belong to the web of life; we don’t own it, less so control it.  It is not a commodity for our usufruct and domination; it is a dynamic process upon which we depend for existence, meaning, flourishing, achievement, and dying.  And it is absolutely imperative that we do die when we have made our contribution to the evolving process of creation. – O’Murchu

Indeed, and I would say further that this includes not only our individual egos, but also our ‘ways of life’ when they no longer serve the larger project of evolving life.  We are coming to many ‘ends of life’ right now, because the Earth and the beings on it can no longer bear the destruction we humans have wrought.  When we can begin the process of a humble letting go not only of individual ego, but also of nationalist, religious, economic, and other forms of ego, we can allow the regenerative and healing dynamics of the Earth to carry the mystery of the evolution story to a rich, new unfolding.

Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story, Diarmuid O’Murchu, Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY, 2008