The word “emerging” could best describe the journey into our understanding of the story of life – because our understanding is always emerging. Different wisdom traditions down through time have played a significant role in the breaking open of this understanding – classical wisdom, feminine wisdom, indigenous wisdom and science wisdom. In this new age of scientific knowledge we are now being invited into a renewed understanding and appreciation of our wondrous origin, of that stupendous explosion of energy that flared forth into being 13.7 billion years ago. We are invited to allow the sacred story of the Universe to captivate our imagination, to follow its call into fullness of life as it weaves its way into our heart, mind, body and spirit so that nothing, nothing again separates us from the love for which each and every aspect of life is made.
Under the Emperor Constantine in 313CE, Christian talk about God began its journey into being bound into institutional expressions that made words about God into absolutes. The diversity of forms reality takes, the mysterious reality of the sacred body of God became reduced to a limited point of view, to a certain interpretation of Scripture and to specific formulations that, although they contain undeniable truths, do not exhaust the whole process through which truth unfolds. Our images of God became enmeshed in a patriarchal structure, a structure that was dualistic in thinking and hierarchical in action. It orientated us towards certitudes, separated body from spirit, just from unjust, masculine from feminine, heaven from earth. It taught us to wish for heaven and to see our earth home as a “valley of tears,” a place that we are merely passing through rather than a source of Divine revelation. It cut us off from our bodies and from our intimate belonging to the body of earth. We learned to dream of heaven, while disassociating ourselves from the dream of earth. But heaven is not our mother and our earliest relationship is not with an ideal heaven but with our mother’s body, earth’s body. Christology became entrapped in a disembodied theology. In disembodying ourselves we disembodied Jesus and so conditioned God’s love.
But today a new consciousness is dawning. There is a re-awakening to our real power as it emerges out of the shadows of patriarchy, a naming and letting go of images of God that are no longer life-giving. In every social and religious system we see an unravelling of the human delusion of control. This dawning realisation is deeper than thought, emotion or reason. It is luring us into a renewed surrender to mystery and to the expanding vision of our sacred origin. We stand on a threshold moment.
What our world now needs are dreamers of this vision, dreamers who refuse to tame the wildness of the mystery. Dreamers who dare the surrender to the dream of earth, for it is here that we must go, as Jesus went for the guidance needed for the “great work” that lies ahead? Will we dare to go out beyond the boundaries of what we once knew and bring forward from the depths of our belonging to the community of life, the living story of our intimate connectedness to all life, refusing to be co-opted or domesticated by any political, economic, educational or religious system that threatens any aspect of the fabric of our planetary life and of the fullness of life that is the Divine inheritance of all?
©Mary Teresa McCormack
