Back to School
Sep. 23rd, 2004 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qosI just finished my near-final draft of my 3-page paper on Evolutionary Faith.
As often happens when I write a paper, I found my most important insight as I wrote. In this case, it was that O'Murchu concentrates so much on "the big picture," the cosmic element of God, that even though he makes a big point of the central importance of connectedness, he lost all track of how God connects with us in anything but impersonal, fabric-of-the-universe way.
Throughout the book, he keeps reminding us that paradox is inevitable when trying to conceptualize God. But then he himself runs from paradox when he should have gloried in it.
The paper was too short to bring in my observations about how pagan some of his thought is. I had to settle for chiding him for ignorning certain elements of indigenous, Neo-Pagan, and Hindu theology on the subject of the place of destruction in the cycles of life.
More than anything else, Diarmuid O’Murchu wants to break people out of their boxes of conventional thinking about God. God, he insists, is neither absent from creation, nor over and above it, but part of the fabric of the cosmos itself. We learn about this God not from scriptures, but from the testimony of the nature of the universe, especially the patterns of evolution. O’Murchu lays out a vision of a universe that is more alive and more complex than most of us had realized: an awe-inspiring place of vacuums that give birth to matter and a creation made of star-stuff, all evolving in a sometimes chaotic but ultimately wise way toward greater complexity and relatedness. His vision of a God which is part of the warp and woof of this magical cosmos is both bigger and smaller than conventional visions.
Connection is a key concept for O’Murchu. God is intimately connected to all things, and all things are inescapably in relationship with each other. “Communion,” he writes, “is the goal of all movement, personal and planetary alike. Communion is the power within the evolutionary story that forever draws things into mutual interdependence” (p. 66). His fundamental ethic is relational. A right relationship is one in which the participants exist in mutually-nurturing harmony. Relationships which are out of balance (especially those involving greed) are the primary cause of suffering, which is evil. He makes a careful distinction between Acts of Nature, which express the ongoing evolution of our world, and the consequences of the choices of humanity. There are no "Acts of God" (in the negative sense) in his cosmology. God does not cause earthquakes, hurricanes, or other natural disasters which cause human suffering. According to him, most of human suffering “arises from wrong ways of relating” (p. 103).
According to O’Murchu, when we pay attention to the revelations of evolution, we discover our right relationship with the rest of creation and can relax into harmony instead of striving for a mastery we can never achieve. “When we learn to flow with the evolutionary process and to trust in its creative movement, then, I suspect, the eyes of our hearts will be opened as never before. We will have moved beyond the need for control. Intuitively, we will sense and know that a wisdom greater than ours propels the onward movement” (p. 63).
It feels petty and mean-spirited to take issue with O’Murchu. His goal of liberating our perceptions of God from the narrow confines of tradition is one in which I am in complete agreement. His vision of a vast and awesome cosmos is precious to me, for my own sense of the Divine Mystery derives significantly from my growing awareness of the vastness and glory of the cosmos. His focus on human responsibility for suffering, especially when it arises from selfishness and a lack of concern for the “other” is something our culture needs to hear.
But I come away from this book with a sense of loss, for O’Murchu is so focused on the glories of the evolving universe and the fascinating things they suggest about the nature of the Divine that he loses all sense of a personal God. Even Jesus, that most personal of theophanies, is reduced to a cosmic type, all but the most primitive meaning removed from his death and resurrection.
O’Murchu wants to retain some of traditional attributes of a personal God for the cosmic Mystery. “The creative power of the Spirit-filled vacuum has inexhaustible reserves of grace and goodness,” he declares (p. 48). “Grace” and “goodness” imply – to me, at least – person, relationship, ethical awareness, love. Then he finishes the thought: “Despite all the paradoxes and contradictions, creativity wins out.” Creativity is indeed a powerful and positive force, but I think that in this context O’Murchu is asking it to bear too much in making it synonymous with such theologically-weighted concepts.
The problem of trying to conceptualize a Divine which is simultaneously cosmic and personal is a familiar one, and worthy of attention, but O’Murchu tries to sidestep it.
"Whether the life-force is personal or impersonal is a debate I tend to avoid. My sense is that it is neither, and yet it somehow transcends both. But to consider the divine to be a person, in the sense that we typically understand personhood, feels to me like a form of reductionism that could easily undermine the wonder of God throughout the length and breadth of creation (including the human)." (p. 53)
Unfortunately, his choice of language throughout the book puts him squarely in the “impersonal” camp. I say “unfortunately” not only because I consider the personal, relational aspect of God to be the powerful center of my own spirituality, but because in taking sides O’Murchu undercuts two of his own points: the necessity of allowing ourselves to experience the paradoxical nature of the Divine, and his emphasis on “communion” that is part of evolution. His God is intimately part of the universe, but does not “relate” to us in a way that most of us would find meaningful.
When wrestling with the problem of suffering, O'Murchu takes a strongly modern, Western perspective in feeling the need to point out that the cycles of creation and destruction are part of the natural order of things. Eastern religion, particularly Hinduism, in the figure of Kali, acknowledges and pays reverence to this fundamental aspect of existence, and earth-based religions (both indigenous and Neo-Pagan) pay similar homage to the place of decay and death in evolutionary cycles. In fact, where O'Murchu appeals to modern science to express the possibility that our universe itself may go through cycles of creation and destruction, he neglects to mention that this is part of Hindu cosmology.
These omissions aside, O’Murchu does make valid points about the place of destruction in the evolutionary process – but I take issue with him again when he reduces the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection to an expression of the evolutionary rule. “Because Jesus was endowed with a cosmic status, he was living out his embodied presence in the processes of cosmic evolution itself” (p. 105). O’Murchu wants us to become aware of “the wisdom of the big picture” in contrast with our desire to know and understand “the minute details” (p. 105) of Jesus’ story, but in reducing Jesus to someone acting out a cosmic process, he goes so far into “the big picture” that any sense of redemptive meaning is gone.
Again, O’Murchu misses the opportunity to dance with paradox and acknowledge both the personal and the cosmic aspects of the story. In making Christ’s death wholly evolutionary, he misses the chance to discuss what part right-relationship and wrong-relationship played in the life story of Jesus, or how Jesus, as someone deeply connected with evolution, can provide a model for our own lives.
O’Murchu states again and again that it is important for us to look at “the big picture” and begin to understand it better. By doing so, we can awaken to a deeper understanding of the God which is present and alive in all things, the ever-living Spirit that drives creative evolution. Perhaps it is inevitable that in focusing on so vast a scale some details get lost. It is disappointing, however, that he did not take the time to dwell for a while in the places of paradox and mystery where cosmos intersects with communion on the personal scale.
As often happens when I write a paper, I found my most important insight as I wrote. In this case, it was that O'Murchu concentrates so much on "the big picture," the cosmic element of God, that even though he makes a big point of the central importance of connectedness, he lost all track of how God connects with us in anything but impersonal, fabric-of-the-universe way.
Throughout the book, he keeps reminding us that paradox is inevitable when trying to conceptualize God. But then he himself runs from paradox when he should have gloried in it.
The paper was too short to bring in my observations about how pagan some of his thought is. I had to settle for chiding him for ignorning certain elements of indigenous, Neo-Pagan, and Hindu theology on the subject of the place of destruction in the cycles of life.
More than anything else, Diarmuid O’Murchu wants to break people out of their boxes of conventional thinking about God. God, he insists, is neither absent from creation, nor over and above it, but part of the fabric of the cosmos itself. We learn about this God not from scriptures, but from the testimony of the nature of the universe, especially the patterns of evolution. O’Murchu lays out a vision of a universe that is more alive and more complex than most of us had realized: an awe-inspiring place of vacuums that give birth to matter and a creation made of star-stuff, all evolving in a sometimes chaotic but ultimately wise way toward greater complexity and relatedness. His vision of a God which is part of the warp and woof of this magical cosmos is both bigger and smaller than conventional visions.
Connection is a key concept for O’Murchu. God is intimately connected to all things, and all things are inescapably in relationship with each other. “Communion,” he writes, “is the goal of all movement, personal and planetary alike. Communion is the power within the evolutionary story that forever draws things into mutual interdependence” (p. 66). His fundamental ethic is relational. A right relationship is one in which the participants exist in mutually-nurturing harmony. Relationships which are out of balance (especially those involving greed) are the primary cause of suffering, which is evil. He makes a careful distinction between Acts of Nature, which express the ongoing evolution of our world, and the consequences of the choices of humanity. There are no "Acts of God" (in the negative sense) in his cosmology. God does not cause earthquakes, hurricanes, or other natural disasters which cause human suffering. According to him, most of human suffering “arises from wrong ways of relating” (p. 103).
According to O’Murchu, when we pay attention to the revelations of evolution, we discover our right relationship with the rest of creation and can relax into harmony instead of striving for a mastery we can never achieve. “When we learn to flow with the evolutionary process and to trust in its creative movement, then, I suspect, the eyes of our hearts will be opened as never before. We will have moved beyond the need for control. Intuitively, we will sense and know that a wisdom greater than ours propels the onward movement” (p. 63).
It feels petty and mean-spirited to take issue with O’Murchu. His goal of liberating our perceptions of God from the narrow confines of tradition is one in which I am in complete agreement. His vision of a vast and awesome cosmos is precious to me, for my own sense of the Divine Mystery derives significantly from my growing awareness of the vastness and glory of the cosmos. His focus on human responsibility for suffering, especially when it arises from selfishness and a lack of concern for the “other” is something our culture needs to hear.
But I come away from this book with a sense of loss, for O’Murchu is so focused on the glories of the evolving universe and the fascinating things they suggest about the nature of the Divine that he loses all sense of a personal God. Even Jesus, that most personal of theophanies, is reduced to a cosmic type, all but the most primitive meaning removed from his death and resurrection.
O’Murchu wants to retain some of traditional attributes of a personal God for the cosmic Mystery. “The creative power of the Spirit-filled vacuum has inexhaustible reserves of grace and goodness,” he declares (p. 48). “Grace” and “goodness” imply – to me, at least – person, relationship, ethical awareness, love. Then he finishes the thought: “Despite all the paradoxes and contradictions, creativity wins out.” Creativity is indeed a powerful and positive force, but I think that in this context O’Murchu is asking it to bear too much in making it synonymous with such theologically-weighted concepts.
The problem of trying to conceptualize a Divine which is simultaneously cosmic and personal is a familiar one, and worthy of attention, but O’Murchu tries to sidestep it.
"Whether the life-force is personal or impersonal is a debate I tend to avoid. My sense is that it is neither, and yet it somehow transcends both. But to consider the divine to be a person, in the sense that we typically understand personhood, feels to me like a form of reductionism that could easily undermine the wonder of God throughout the length and breadth of creation (including the human)." (p. 53)
Unfortunately, his choice of language throughout the book puts him squarely in the “impersonal” camp. I say “unfortunately” not only because I consider the personal, relational aspect of God to be the powerful center of my own spirituality, but because in taking sides O’Murchu undercuts two of his own points: the necessity of allowing ourselves to experience the paradoxical nature of the Divine, and his emphasis on “communion” that is part of evolution. His God is intimately part of the universe, but does not “relate” to us in a way that most of us would find meaningful.
When wrestling with the problem of suffering, O'Murchu takes a strongly modern, Western perspective in feeling the need to point out that the cycles of creation and destruction are part of the natural order of things. Eastern religion, particularly Hinduism, in the figure of Kali, acknowledges and pays reverence to this fundamental aspect of existence, and earth-based religions (both indigenous and Neo-Pagan) pay similar homage to the place of decay and death in evolutionary cycles. In fact, where O'Murchu appeals to modern science to express the possibility that our universe itself may go through cycles of creation and destruction, he neglects to mention that this is part of Hindu cosmology.
These omissions aside, O’Murchu does make valid points about the place of destruction in the evolutionary process – but I take issue with him again when he reduces the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection to an expression of the evolutionary rule. “Because Jesus was endowed with a cosmic status, he was living out his embodied presence in the processes of cosmic evolution itself” (p. 105). O’Murchu wants us to become aware of “the wisdom of the big picture” in contrast with our desire to know and understand “the minute details” (p. 105) of Jesus’ story, but in reducing Jesus to someone acting out a cosmic process, he goes so far into “the big picture” that any sense of redemptive meaning is gone.
Again, O’Murchu misses the opportunity to dance with paradox and acknowledge both the personal and the cosmic aspects of the story. In making Christ’s death wholly evolutionary, he misses the chance to discuss what part right-relationship and wrong-relationship played in the life story of Jesus, or how Jesus, as someone deeply connected with evolution, can provide a model for our own lives.
O’Murchu states again and again that it is important for us to look at “the big picture” and begin to understand it better. By doing so, we can awaken to a deeper understanding of the God which is present and alive in all things, the ever-living Spirit that drives creative evolution. Perhaps it is inevitable that in focusing on so vast a scale some details get lost. It is disappointing, however, that he did not take the time to dwell for a while in the places of paradox and mystery where cosmos intersects with communion on the personal scale.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-24 08:41 pm (UTC)Your comment reminds me of something else: as I indicated the other day, O'Murchu likes to idealize our primitive, spirit-connected ancestors -- and it seems likely that they did not have a concept of a personal God, not in the "personal relationship" sense that I grew up with in the Protestant tradition. O'Murchu is a priest, but it seems like the personal aspect is far less important than the cosmic.