Monday, October 16, 2017

Join the Revolution!

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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