Spiritual
Evolution
“Spirituality
is about personal experience—the deep realization that dirt is
good, water is holy, and the sky holds wonder; that we are part of a
great web of life, our home is in God, and our moral life is entwined
with our neighbor.”
Diana
Butler Bass (Grounded: Finding God in the World—A Spiritual
Revolution)
Diana Butler Bass, in her
book, Grounded: Finding God in the World, writes that
experiencing the divine in immediate, personal ways has heretofore
been the province of mystics in all the world's religions. Once, she
says, mysticism was the “minor chord” of faith. Now,
however, it is becoming the dominant means of accessing the sacred.
This is why our places of worship are declining. It is not that we
have strayed away from God; it is that we are finding other, more
intimate ways of experiencing God.
Naturally, people are
concerned about this, thinking that churches, temples, and mosques
losing members means that people no longer believe in God. Not so.
People have lost faith in the hierarchy of authority that organized
religion has become—there was a time for a pyramid, top-down
approach to faith, but that time has passed. Diana Butler Bass
writes, “The spiritual revolution is a protest movement against
forms of religion that have lost the binding vision of peace, wisdom,
and equanimity here on earth.” This spiritual revolution has
been growing in momentum for decades, but the rise of fundamentalism
has caused it to speed up exponentially. Whether we are talking about
hard-right Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists, the proponents
have become war-like and hateful. They feel entitled to kill and maim
those who do not believe as they do. That is unacceptable to the vast
majority of human beings whose faith leads them toward peace and
freedom.
Ironically, the spiritual
revolution is leading us, in many ways, back toward the religions of
our original people—those who understood that we are part of the
earth, related to the plants and animals with whom we share it, and
dependent upon the sun, moon, rain and snow for our very lives. As we
see the dramatic effects of degradation of the planet, we are
expanding our awareness of the interdependence of all life. I don't
see this change—away from hierarchical thinking about God, toward
the inclusive, cohesive, and sacred union of all things—as walking
away from belief in God. It is actually walking more deeply into it.
We are taking our place in the communion of life, which is to say, we
are moving closer to that which we call God. Spiritual evolution is
happening before our very eyes.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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