Uncertainty, like tragedy, is part of the human experience. It is easy to try and ignore what we don’t understand, but we can also choose to engage more deeply, allowing our spirits to be captivated by the mystery of this uncertainty.

“The true nature of reality is far more complex, subtle, and illusive than we care to admit. Beyond our capacity for human observation and the rigorous research of science lies a more mysterious but real world. Religion has known this for several millennia, but religion itself has failed to honor the mysterious depths.”

We are called to focus on and engage in this mystery. To do so may help us see our role in the act of creation that is always unfolding, emerging, and becoming.

In the Beginning was the Spirit: Science, Religion, and Indigenous Spirituality (2012) by Diarmuid O’Murchu takes a broad look at what many know as the third member of the Christian Trinity. O’Murchu’s ambitious work broadens the analysis to include science (specifically Quantum Physics) and Indigenous spirituality. For many readers it will be both eye-opening and difficult to fully comprehend. To some it may seem heretical.

In place of anthropocentric traditional approaches to Christianity which tend to place the spirit in a type of little brother relationship to the creator (God) and savior (Jesus), O’Murchu wants us to look at the creative act described in Genesis, as well as the insight of indigenous people who see the Great Spirit inhabiting the whole of creation from time immemorial, and recognize the Spirit as that which breathed over the formless void. The Spirit, in O’Murchu’s telling, “is the force behind the recurring words ‘Let there be . . .'”

O’Murchu notes that the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible goes back to the Hebrew to suggest that “God did not create the world from nothing” but worked on the chaos. The divine is calling forth order, or potential. This foundational creativity may be what some theologians conceive of as divine eros, which “lures life into greater being.” This “originating work” of the Spirit, O’Murchu asserts, is “always based on a lure from the future.”

Many commentators, from J.B. Phillips to Stephen Hawking, have declared that “your God is too small.” O’Murchu adds that the God of formal religion is “too anthropocentric and ‘ecclesiastical’ to be relevant for new scientific vision.”

“(S)cience rather than religion is recovering the mystical and spiritual depths of the creation that surrounds us. Religion for the greater part still seems wedded to the idea that the human comes first, and everything else in creation is there for human use and benefit.”

In another of his books, O’Murchu calls on the reader “to embrace the grandeur, complexity, and paradox that characterize evolution at every stage.” The strategies of this divine spirit “always have, and always will, outwit our human and religious desire for neat, predictable outcomes.”

“Deep down is an intelligence, a source of meaning and possibility that defies all our rational theories, and indeed all our theological dogmas as well. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is the Great Spirit so long cherished by the world’s indigenous peoples, ancient and modern alike.”

Rather than embrace and engage with this mystery, O’Murchu notes that it is so much easier to divide the world into a battle between good and evil, and to place ourselves on the side of the good. “Needing a ladder to climb only appeals to our egotistical consciousness and our need to win or be right,” asserts the priest Richard Rohr, “which is not really holiness at all—although it has been a common counterfeit for holiness in much of Christian history.”

Mystery is hard. But O’Murchu helps the reader see that the energy of creation, of the spirit, “is not random, but unfolds in patterns and relationships, indicating a guiding wisdom that indigenous peoples call the Great Spirit.” How do we approach and begin to understand the “rational and compelling logic” to this process of unfolding? It requires the “contemplative gaze to access its greater depths.” Yet we can all see this spirit of creation at work when we see affirmations of “life over against death, liberation over against oppression, justice over against injustice . . . To live by the Spirit is to affirm life unambiguously.”

As the publisher describes it, “Poets knew it. Mystics knew it. Indigenous people knew it.” I, however, did not begin to understand all of In the Beginning Was the Spirit. What O’Murchu is doing—sometimes in prose that goes down too many rabbit holes and challenged my ability to comprehend—is to explore what religion has often forgotten or ignored: the power and presence of this sacred spirit “in our lives and in the breath of all things.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash