Monday, August 26, 2024: he Spirit is urging us to remember that we are to do to others, including Earth and every species, what we would most want done to us.
The Great Search (Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home) by John Philip Newell. Excerpt from “The Conclusion.”
Religion, as we have known it in the Western world, is dying. We are in a time of transition, not only religiously but politically and ecologically.
What is the spiritual vision at the heart of our religious inheritance that we have forgotten or neglected? The Spirit is urging us to remember that we are to do to others, including Earth and every species, what we would most want done to us. This is the teaching of Jesus at the heart of our Christian inheritance, with its equivalent in the ‘Golden Rule’ of nearly every great spiritual tradition in the world. It is the teaching that can lead us into new beginnings.
In our Great Search of today, we are searching for what will bring healing, not only for ourselves, whether as individuals or nations or races, but for all people and for every species. And it is for all things that we are seeking a new sense of home address, not only physically but spiritually. We are longing for a deeper sense of shared origin and spiritual kinship, including a sense of family responsibility for everything that has being.
Our search will be served by the vision of love at the heart of our religious inheritance, but our search must never be confined by the boundaries of religion.
During this time of transition, many of us, as we have been emphasising, are in religious exile, whether that be literally as fugitives from our religious tradition or simply as dissatisfied members of it, longing for more depth and vision.
The modern Scottish poet, Kenneth White, says that “exile is the mark of any deep and far-going creativity.” By this he means that leaving home, whether that be the home territory of our nation or race or religion, either willingly or by force, presents us with the possibility of expanding our vision beyond what it has been.
His emphasis is not on what we are losing in exile, which may be painful and unsettling, but on what we are being invited to open to in exile in new and creative ways. And those who are in exile, he adds, will often take with them more of the essential vision of home than what is prevalent in the places they have left. Exile, therefore, whether individually or collectively, can be a time of great openness to new vision and creativity.
This time of spiritual exile in the Western world is a moment in which we are being invited to find relationship with Earth and one another in ways that surpass anything we have known. It is a time of opening to the Spirit in our own depths and the depths of every human being and lifeform. And it can be a time of liberation from the closed boundaries of nationhood or race or religion that have confined us in the past.
We are being invited to remember what our souls, at some level, have always known which is that our true spiritual centre is not Rome, for instance, or Jerusalem or Mecca or any of the other places that religion has claimed to hold special authority over us.
Our true spiritual centre is Earth and the human soul. Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, and so on, have occupied a significant place in our faith traditions over the centuries but, essentially, they exist to serve Earth and the human soul, not the other way round.
The source of truth is deep within each one of us and deep within everything that has being. Just as new science enables us to know that physically we live in an omni-centric Universe, so it is spiritually.
The center is everywhere.
Our cherished places of religious authority from the past, including our local churches or temples or mosques, can serve us at this moment in time but only if they remember that the center of the divine is everywhere. It is deep in my soul and your soul, and it is deep in Earth’s soul and every soul….
We are longing for an expanded vision of the Universe, a reawakened love affair with Earth, and a deepened sense of spiritual presence in every moment and encounter of life. We are yearning to grow in awareness, to find wellness, and to delight in love. And we are longing for the recovery of wisdom, for meaning in the both the joy and pain of life, and for a reimagined faith in the immortal light that shines in all things.
These are the yearnings of the Great Search today.
If we are true to them, we will be blessed with graces of healing, both individually and collectively, and together we will be graced with a new sense of home address deep in Earth and the human soul. It is this that will bless us and Earth in our shared journey. And it is this that will bless those still to be born, for our children and our children’s children.
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