"The unexamined life is not worth living" Socrates

- - scatterings of ideas sent to my younger self, a sensitive girl who was fooled into believing she was a boy because of anatomy - -

Sunday 20 September 2015

What Could Be More Important?

I feel the need to engage and be part of something more.

Today's post is not trans related, but it is about something rather important. It is about an invitation to those who, like me, have wondered if it is possible for my spirituality, which somehow survived religion rather than being fed by it, to find a relevant community.

We are living in very dangerous times. Extremist religions threaten to arm themselves with the most destructive weapons humans have invented. The power to end this seems to be under the control of those who are convinced that this life is nothing and the afterlife is all.

At the same time, through greed and neglect, our planet is convulsing with climate change effects. Too many leaders argue that this is not caused by humans, and we needn't concern ourselves. If there is a uniting spirit behind all life, I believe it is calling out to all of us to take heed of the violence of the storms.

I have begun to read a book, With or Without God by Gretta Vosper. The subtitle is "Why the way we live is more important than what we believe".

Gretta admits that as a woman, ordained in a mainstream church, something that has been possible only recently in the close to two millennia of Christianity, her perspective is different:

Once ordained, women gained access to a power structure they had recognized from the outside as displaying many of the features of archaic institutions; they saw where it was hierarchical, self-preserving, bigoted, chauvinist, and dulled by successive generations of leaders whose circumcised intellect prevented them from exploring beyond their own reiterated dogma and canonical laws. 

Vosper asks the important questions right away:

Can the church slough off the encrustations of two millennia of ecclesial doctrine and theology in order to address the world's most urgent needs? Can it let itself dissolve into the pool of ideals, and hope-filled primordial elements out of which it once grew and find in a new mix, in new combinations of those elements, something of value to offer the world?

She seems to be intent on answering yes to these questions, convinced that church and religion can work and be relevant. It seems tantalizing to me. I will read this book and if there is something further to say, perhaps will post again.

I am willing to be convinced that it is possible to somehow use this opportunity to be part of a paradigm shift. If it is possible to save the planet and humanity with it by rediscovering a spirituality that is the root of all of our current religions, I am very interested. I will finish Gretta's book at the very least.

9 comments:

  1. Ah! That sounds intriguing ... I'll look it up and be back!

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    1. I will be interested to compare notes dear R!

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  2. Hi Halle
    What may also be of interest to you also was an article in the June 2014 edition of “The Tablet” interviewing sister Ilia Delio who is a very well qualified scientist/academic - a Franciscan sister talking about the theology of the Jesuit palaeontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. - positing “human beings are evolving to a new “consciousness” along with nature.

    Sister Ilia Delio contends “We can say there is an intelligence to nature, and by that we mean the flow of nature towards more complexity, towards more unified life, and therefore we humans don’t emerge as some form extra-terrestrial phenomenon, we emerge out of this nature and are consonant with it.”
    http://francis.edu/ilia-delio/
    Not to ne confused however with pantheism.

    Best wishes

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    1. Lindsay, I have always wondered if the fictional character Fr. Télémond in Morris West's 1963 book The Shoes of the Fisherman was based in an actual character. Thank you for helping me find him in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. A very interesting thread to follow!
      Panentheism, not pantheism...

      All the Best

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  3. Hi Halle
    A better word is “panentheism” but I was deliberately using “Pantheism” since it is a doctrine that regards the universe as a manifestation of God. Hence Pantheism views the Universe in the totality of all existence- think of it as the idea that God and the universe are identical which denies the idea of the transcendence of God.
    A counter view then is the universe is not GOD and cannot exist without GOD, but I like the way it is described by the Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory. "God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity. He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves."
    Best wishes

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    1. For some reason, call it stubbornness, the idea of some creature called God, participating in any fashion in the world offends me. It leads to situations where those who have good fortune in some area thank 'Him', implying that those whose fortunes have not been so great, or are suffering in some way have offended that same great and loving power.
      Why that is different from an all-encompassing spirit which does not offend me is likely the heart of my current search.

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  4. Hi Halle
    I don’t think you are stubborn as such, but I do think this all comes down to philosophy or more particularly to the philosophy of religion. That is what you adopt personally as your philosophy. In that respect I am sure you will agree ‘’communities” spring up from age to age and evolve of like-minded individuals bonded under a common thread. But such questions concerning the nature of GOD or what images we adopt from differing spiritual, moralistic or naturistic perspectives is an ongoing feast. Nor forgetting of course advances in science, so that most things like this as in metaphysics (outside of science) can never be answered definitively. Hence I think it more to do with the journey than in coming up with the answers – so I wish you well on yours.
    Best wishes

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  5. White settlers saw axes as a means to cut down ten times as many trees while Native Americans saw them as a way to harvest a tree in one tenth the time. We know which attitude won and the uninspiring landscape left for us to contemplate. I'd like to think many of us are ready to journey on the road untraveled but I'm not hopeful.

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    1. That one illustration says so much Susan. Given the world as it is, living that simpler life seems almost impossible.

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