Dawning a new day

Catholic New Times, May 18, 2003 by Elaine Wainwright

"God's spirit blows fresh breezes across the barren deserts of sacred traditions and time-honoured institutions. A new day is dawning over the spiritual landscape and new possibilities for spiritual pilgrimage open up on all Sides."

--Diarmuid O'Murchu

The closing decades of the 20th century were characterized by emerging processes of spirit movements that changed the face of the spiritual landscape of the Earth community. As it faces into not only a new century, but a new millennium, such a turning toward the new carries both symbolic and actual potential for the dawning of a new day. But initially, let's recapitulate. Movements for justice, for liberation and for peace drew together peoples from a wide range of both human and religious traditions in a work that challenges both the institutions and the narratives of those traditions to their core.

The feminist/women's movement raised human consciousness to the inordinate gender disparity in almost all cultures and social systems in today's world, and to the language, narratives and symbol systems that render women all but invisible. And most recently a growing recognition of the profound significance of the ecological movement called for both a new consciousness and a new way of being in the Earth community.

New breezes: liberation, ecology and feminism

Each of these movements, as O'Murchu suggests, blew "fresh breezes across the barren deserts of sacred traditions and time-honoured institutions." It was as if nothing within the political, social and cultural/religious worlds was left untouched. As a result, such movements were approached fearfully by some as a time of extraordinary "disintegration," a breaking down of the "time honoured" and "the true." They called forth fundamentalist responses that clung, at times fanatically, to a particular institution, belief, or articulation of that belief regardless of other human and religious values or practices.

For many others, however these movements were and are seen as movements of the life-spirit, the life-force that permeates the Earth community and its unfolding. They invited participants into processes of deep reflection and grounded praxis toward human, social, cultural and cosmic transformation. These movements have only just begun; their inherent processes are in an embryonic stage of evolution. The invitation, the challenge into the 21st century and the third millennium, is toward their interrelationship, the spiralling interconnectedness of these processes beyond hierarchical dualisms and binary oppositions: of love and justice, of the material and spiritual, of the ethical and the ritual, of the processes for life and transformation that are emerging in this day. These are the processes that will engage the spiritual quest of those entering a new age of human, of cosmic, unfolding. It is these processes I will now address.

Attentiveness to the spirit, to what is life enhancing and what is death-dealing in human experience, has been a hallmark of both liberation movements and the emerging theologies closely connected to these movements.

This attentiveness has led to a deeper human consciousness and narration of

stories of oppression and destruction, not only of the human but also of the earth or planetary community. Awareness of and response to the systemic nature of this oppression has, however. sometimes blinded the human community to the interconnectedness of the personal, the interpersonal, the structural, and the ecological, and to the profound relationship between the life-enhancing and the death-dealing, which the natural world demonstrates daily. Attentiveness to the spirit is, therefore a process which calls forth a new listening within one's own being to the irrevocable interlinking of life and death to this movement within one's relationship with others and within the universe. Such attentiveness will discern those death-dealing elements which are destructive of life and the life-giving ones which are enhancing of life. From this, new stories of the spirit or life-force at the heart of each relational encounter will emerge, while the shadow of death dealing will likewise be named with courage and fidelity.

Analysis of these human experiences draws on the human wisdom developed during the 20th century in the human and social sciences--psychology, sociology and anthropology. This process discerns and affirms what is indeed the wisdom of the spirit in these disciplines. It then engages this wisdom in a way that enables an uncovering of ideologies, a naming of pathologies, an understanding of human, social and cultural systems and a further uncovering of the life-enhancing and death-dealing. Such analysis brings the processes of the mind or intellect into dialogue with those of the body or the experiential in a way that seeks to be integrative--moving backward and forward and in all manner of directions between and among these processes. It calls for a new wisdom that, like that of the ancient wisdom of traditions, draws on life and the knowledge or sciences of life experience as a profound source of the spirit. Thus, the dialogic of human and religious traditions, which has often been isolated into an oppositional dualism, will be reestablished to the enrichment of these traditions and of the life of the Earth community.