Paschal Paradox: Reflections on a Life of Spiritual Evolution By Diarmuid O’Murchu

From the Precis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM

The Evolutionary Imperative

The evolutionary imperative of this time is calling for more informed adaptations and adjustments in how we relate with other life-forms and with the vitality of creation itself. There is a shift that is becoming increasingly clear, namely, that humans cannot evolve in a truly creative way without bringing with us in a more conviv-ial way a range of other creatures we have long regarded as mere fodder to serve our personal needs. How to reclaim the animal within and without is one such invitation to new integration, one that has been of major concern to theologians throughout the opening years of the 21st  century.

In my own early spiritual development, the need to subdue and get rid of the animal within was deemed to be foundational to all spiritual growth. The animal denoted the instinctual drives, deemed to be alien to God’s grace and holiness. Today, it is the integration of the animal—along with the plant and other organic organisms—that is coming to the fore in our more integrated understanding of both theology and spirituality.

The fascination with our cosmological significance, despite our tiny place within it, quickly moved into our need to wrestle with our dysfunctional relationship with the home planet, our Earth. Gradually, we came to recognize that we are Earthlings, creatures that belong to the Earth; we are totally dependent on it, not merely for survival, but for all the resources made available to us for growth and flourishing.

It is at this juncture that a disconnect with formal religion first came to the surface. Instead of waiting for the promised liberation of a life hereafter, where our hopes and dreams would be fulfilled, a substantial shift in consciousness took place—and its fuller impact continues to happen. It is in our identity and status as Earthlings that God works primarily in and through us. Our earthiness, rather than our promised heavenly escape, is the basis of all that is sacred within and around us.

None of the major religions have yet come to terms with this evolutionary shift. Along with our politicians, economists, and social policy makers, our ecclesiastical leaders are in deep denial of this new focus. It is indeed scary to confront the fact that many of our long-held cultural assumptions are outliving their usefulness and need to be consigned to the archives of history. The lure of the future (outlined in Folder #1) is inviting us all to a new evolutionary threshold wherein it will be open-ended possibilities, rather than past securities, that provide more solid foundations for hope and meaning.

Engaging Evolution’s Paschal Journey

All of this brings us to the central theme of this book. On the one hand, I am offering reflections on personal experiences of the paschal journey at work in my own life over many years. It has become increasingly clear, however, that many, if not all, of those personal encounters with decline and death leading to new life were entwined with the wider evolutionary shifts. The personal and transpersonal seem to be inescapably interconnected, particularly within the co-evolutionary imperative of our time.

Sr. Ilia Delio synthesizes the challenge in this statement: “Evolution is the rise of transpersonal life, one cosmic person in formation whom Christians call the Christ.” The Christian context alluded to here is wonderfully elaborated in Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ.

Each chapter of this book follows a double dynamic of personal and transpersonal. I begin with personal narrative, indicating evolutionary growth in my life, usually a narrative of success but often inter-mingled with challenge and struggle. Then follows the transpersonal dimension in which the evolutionary process of the personal narrative is interwoven with a corresponding process on the larger scale of life, whether in the cosmic or planetary domains. I am adopting this strategy to highlight the deep interconnection between person and planet (universe).

Everything in the human body has been given to us from the body of creation. The energy that begets and sustains life on the grand universal scale is that same creative energy that empowers each person and every organic creature.

As we move deeper into the 21st century, all the sciences—and religions—will need to wrestle with this evolving earth-centered anthropology.  Central to this enterprise is my desire to integrate more consciously the paradox of birth-death-rebirth that recurs at every level of life, human and cosmic alike.  

Throughout the book, I describe it in the traditional Christian language of the paschal journey. Although the language is Christian in origin, the phenomenon I am describing is universal and has been at work since the dawn of creation.

This paradoxical dynamic of creation-cum (with)-destruction did not begin with Jesus of Nazareth; it long predated him. In undergoing the process of Calvary-cum-resurrection, Jesus was undertaking his own evolution, a process already operative throughout the entire creation.

From the Personal to the Transpersonal

In the interweaving of the personal and the transpersonal, I am seeking out a more organic way to reconstruct human meaning. Many of our problems at this time arise from a dysfunctional anthro-pology. The human project has lost its authentic sense of direction, painfully illustrated in the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. We have become an imperial violent species, setting ourselves above and beyond everything else in creation. Instead of being grounded in the cosmic-planetary web of life, we have set our-selves over against it, treating every other life form as a mere commodity existing for our use and benefit.

Such a dysfunctional relationship is unsustainable and currently plunging humanity into one crisis after another. In our deluded anthropocentricism, we invented religion to resolve the perversity that we ourselves created. That delusional travesty is cryptically captivated by the Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong in his book Biblical Literalism: Atonement Theology assumes that we were created in some kind of original perfection.

We now know that life has emerged from a single cell that evolved into self-conscious complexity over billions of years. There was no original perfection, so there could never have been a fall from perfection.

This important shift of perspective belongs to an evolutionary understanding of life and faith. In the latter half of the 20th century, we experienced a seismic shift in our evolutionary understanding of life. Quantum physics, the new cosmology, Gaia theory, and the new biology all opened up vast new arenas of under-standing. Our narrow mechanistic para-digms, and sin-laden religious ideologies, which are only a few thousand years old, were expanded into timescales of millions and even billions of years. The evolutionary imperative is central to the vastly expanded horizons engaging the contemporary imagination.

We Are Being Evolved

Tragically the very word evolution still evokes a negative response among evangelical Christians (and others) around our world. The fear seems to be that we are undermining the creative primacy of God. The real reason, however, is the threat to that brand of human imperialism that likes to play God. In so many cases, we have invented a God image, modeled on our patriarchal projections, seeking absolute control for ourselves.  

We need to let that ideology die out. In fact, it is already dying, and that fuels even more irrational fear in those who invest so much in it. Sadly, all the major religions, and particularly the three monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), cling to it tenaciously. Meanwhile, millions of people all over our world are riding the wave of this new emergence of the God-given reality of evolutionary creativity. Some remain consciously religious, in a variety of different ways, but many have either abandoned or outgrown the faith that one time felt important.

I have had the privilege of walking alongside many of these new explorers. Although viewed by many churches and religions as drifters or postmodern lost souls, I believe they are evolutionary catalysts, touching depths of the paschal journey that elude several of our ardent religionists. They are the companions I cherish as I explore my own engagement with the paschal journey in our world today.

Much of this personal narrative feels like the birthing of new vision and new paradigms for our contemporary under-standing of life and its meaning. And yet, such birthing is intimately connected with death and dying. How the two strands, the creative dynamic evolution of birth and death, are inseparably interwoven is the central theme of this narrative. In fact, I suspect they feature with equal complexity in every person’s life.

My hope is that what I share here will help others to embrace what might well be the greatest paradox of all life-forms: dying as a precondition for rising into new life.