science – Intelligent Christian Spirituality

Stages of spiritual development: a comprehensive guide

Most of us are familiar with intelligence quotient (IQ) tests. In 1995 Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence a groundbreaking book based on the idea that how well you did in life depended not on IQ but on EQ, your emotional quotient, that is, how well you got along with others. Perhaps there is also a SQ, a spiritual quotient. Your SQ would be how far along you are on the spiritual journey as mapped out over the centuries by various spiritual thinkers.

In the sixteenth century, Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross outlined the stages of the spiritual life, from complete union with evil to complete union with God.

In the first stage, that of pagan life, one gives into temptation and doubt about God and lives in desolation. Eventually, through the grace of God, one may be converted to belief in God. This can occur rapidly (the “born again” experience) or gradually over time.

During the conversion stage, doubt about God disappears but temptation remains strong, so to survive spiritually one must move to the next stage, which is purgation, or “the dark night of the senses.” One must separate from evil by purifying one’s senses and learning virtue, and the best way to do this is through active contemplation, particularly prayer and scripture study.

Eventually, one gets to the stage of illumination, or spiritual betrothal, where the spiritual life is going well and there is lots of sweet consolation. It’s like being engaged to be married to God.

The next stage is shocking because it seems as if God has abandoned you. In this stage, temptation is gone, but so is consolation. The thinking here is that God has not actually deserted you; instead, God is trying to move you from a faith based on feelings to a faith based on conscious decision, a much more unshakable faith. In this spiritual desert, which people like Mother Teresa went through, doubt is strong. The only solution is to keep choosing to believe.

The final stage is divinization, not that you become God, but you are in total union with God. All temptation and doubt are gone. You are fully your beloved’s, in spiritual marriage.

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) had a more generalized map. In the aesthetic stage, the sole focus is on self-centered pleasure. Eventually, you realize this is causing yourself and others great pain, and so at this point, you can choose to enter the ethical stage. In this stage, becoming “holier than thou” is easy until you realize you also fall short of your ideals and need God’s help to be truly holy. When you surrender to God’s grace, you enter the religious stage.

Empirical research on stages of faith has been conducted in the past twenty years. By conducting thousands of interviews, James Fowler of Emory University mapped out six stages.

Briefly, in magical faith, one thinks of God as a cosmic Santa Claus. In mythical faith, one takes every scriptural story as historical, scientific fact. In group faith, one believes whatever one’s group believes. In personal faith, one starts asking questions like “what do I really believe?” Here, people often feel they are losing their faith, but they are actually going deeper. In paradoxical faith, one accepts paradox, for example: Jesus is the only way to God, and yet there are other ways. In sacrificial faith, one becomes willing to lay down one’s life for principles like justice or freedom for all people, not just those of one’s own religious tradition.

SQ, like all spiritual things, cannot be exactly quantified. You cannot say your SQ is 100 or 160. However, if over the years, you have a deeper, more contemplative, loving, ethical, grace-filled and service-oriented spirituality, if you can embrace paradox and all people, and think freely for yourself, you can be assured, given the spiritual maps above, that your spiritual IQ is growing.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

The rationality of religion and the faith of science

Many today have concluded that religion is fundamentally irrational, and science is the only model of rationality. However, science and religion are more similar than most people think. They both start off beyond reason and become rational later.

Anselm in the 11^th century defined theology as “faith seeking understanding,” thus balancing those who said all we need is faith with those who claimed all we need is science. In the 13^th century, Aquinas carried on Anselm’s agenda of putting divine revelation and human knowledge together. At a time when universities were first forming, these doctors of the church defined the criteria for western scholarship from then on. Since then, most mainline churches have had a healthy respect for the role of reason in religion. In fact, in the Anglican church, they believe the three basic pillars of the church to be tradition, scripture, and reason. Blind faith is immature faith.

The great pioneers of science – Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin were religious and hoped their findings would confirm their faith. They believed all truth comes from the one God; therefore, there can be no ultimate contradiction between religion and science.

It is true that people become religious from promptings of the heart. The heart is beyond reason, but has reasons of its own, as Pascal said. God is most readily experienced through faith, prayer, ritual, and acts of compassion. However, whereas religion is more intuitive and right-brained, theology is the rational attempt to understand religion and is more left-brained and logical.

Whether you think science is rational and religion is not depends on your definition of reason. In medieval times, thinkers such as Anselm and Aquinas defined reason as the faculty which knows our place in the universe and that there are divine mysteries beyond human understanding.

However, science eventually predominated to the point where some scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, subscribe to positivism, the belief that only what can be proved by science is rational.

The truth is that science, like religion, starts beyond reason and then becomes rational. Science is based on the faith that the universe is logical. No scientist would begin to do science if they did not have this faith, if they presupposed the universe is beyond understanding. The scientific search for the simplest theory is motivated by the belief that such a theory exists. Charles Townes, a Nobel Prize winner for physics, said: “Science is so successful, we are enthralled. Many people don’t realize that science involves assumptions and faith…nothing is absolutely proved.”

Beyond that, science is increasingly coming face-to-face with mystery. The strange, logic-defying things quantum mechanics tells us happen at the subatomic level of the universe make Christian theology seem more and more reasonable by comparison. If you don’t reject science because it is full of mystery, incomplete knowledge, and paradox, why would you reject religion because it is also full of mystery, incomplete knowledge, and paradox?

When you plunge into the depths of religion, science, and the universe, you must first let go of rationality and be guided by intuition, imagination, wonder, and awe. However, religion, science, and the universe are all secondarily rational. Religion has theology, science has theories, and the universe has material and spiritual laws.

Dawkins believes that science and religion are opposites, with science totally rational and religion totally irrational. However, they are on parallel paths of trying to understand the universe, and at a deep level, the differences are superficial.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

Exploring Atheism in the Context of Progressive Christianity

Gretta Vosper, director of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity, a United Church of Canada minister, and author of the bestselling With Or Without God: Why the Way We Live Is More Important Than What We Believe, declared she was an atheist in 2001. A minister who is an atheist?

She said in most mainline churches there is a vast gap between what the clergy know and what the laity believe. What she believes most clergy know is that there is no supernatural being called God and even if there was, God does not intervene in human affairs or respond to prayer. God is merely our own human efforts in the world for justice and peace. She also believes the Bible was just written by humans, there is no heaven, and the Christian creeds are irrelevant. I’m sure most clergy were surprised the United Church let her continue in spite of her atheism.

Like most atheists, she has no authentically satisfactory explanation of where everything came from. You have to stop the infinite regress of asking “Where did that come from?” at some point. Asking, as atheists do, “Where did God come from?” makes no sense because the concept of God implies eternality. God has always existed. Atheists could say the same about the universe, but at some point, you are forced to give something God-like qualities like eternal existence. You have to make something into God, either God or the universe.

Vosper sees religion as an attempt to deal with chaos in the world. However, how does she explain order in the world? The late Bernard Lonergan, a Jesuit theologian, explained through his concept of “emergent probability” how there can be both order and chaos in the universe because God works through “secondary causes,” such as nature, without violating those causes. God is mystery, and just because we don’t understand exactly how God works does not mean God does not exist.

I like the approach of biblical scholars who say humans wrote the Bible and therefore it has scientific and historical errors in it, because God works through secondary causes like flawed and limited human beings, but underlying it all, the Bible is inspired by God.

Also, in my experience, prayer does work, and I regularly hear from my clients how prayer works in their lives. Some things have to be believed to be seen. If you don’t believe in God’s intervention, you won’t see it, but if you do believe in it, you see it everywhere. Coincidences happen that are too coincidental to be mere coincidences. They are “God-incidences.”

Progressive Christianity can be helpful, but Vosper’s attempt to leave God out does not address our existential angst. Who do you turn to when human effort fails, you fail yourself, people betray you, or you suddenly find you have cancer and are going to die?

To be fair to Vosper, I think she has a point: we need to look for the positive common values found in all religions, and this is more important than our various creeds. She is right that our beliefs are meaningless if we do not live our faith. Believing the faith is easy, living it is hard. As G. K. Chesterton said, “Christianity has not failed, it has just never been tried.”

In fact, it has been tried by individuals who Christians call “saints,” who always put more emphasis on living the faith than on doctrine. As one of the most famous, Francis of Assisi, said, “Preach the gospel wherever you go, using words if necessary.”

So yes, let’s be progressive and update our faith in the light of contemporary scholarship, but let’s not throw out God with the childhood religion, as atheists do. Let’s have an adult faith. In God, not Gretta Vosper.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. www.brucetallman.com

Exploring Dimensions: Angels, Spirits, and Our Quantum Universe

There is more to the universe than meets the eye: scientists know that 23% of the universe is composed of dark (invisible) matter, and 73% is dark energy. That means only 4% of the universe is visible. Some astrophysicists also believe that our quantum universe is made up of 11 dimensions, not just the three we are used to, or four if you include space-time.

Perhaps angels, spirits, ancestors, and ghosts inhabit these other dimensions and have the ability to interact with our dimension. These beings are real, not just the figment of someone’s imagination, and have a real impact. John Geiger in his new book The Third Man Factor, writes about how people in desperate straits are often helped by a mysterious someone who shows them the mountain pass they must go through or steers their boat in a storm when they are too sick to move.

Many people believe in guardian angels, and the scriptures of the major religions are full of them. The Jewish and Christian scriptures describe angels guiding people in dreams, protecting them when they are thrown into a furnace or lion’s den, or liberating them from jail.

It is not always clear what the difference is between angels, spirits, ghosts, and ancestors.

Directees (people in spiritual direction) often tell me about spirits appearing at the end of their bed when they wake in the middle of the night. Perhaps our unconscious mind is still open to the seven or eight other dimensions when we are in that hazy state between sleep and waking.

Some of my Christian directees can see spirits or ghosts when they are fully awake, an ability they usually wish they didn’t have. One woman reported walking into the back kitchen in her old farmhouse and seeing four spirits sitting around a table. Another said she was at a funeral when she saw the spirit of the dead man being led through the chapel by another spirit who apparently wanted the deceased to know the grief he caused his family by committing suicide.

Others have told me about an invisible someone preventing them from stepping in front of a car or hugging them when they were crying over a deceased spouse.

Some friends who immersed themselves in native spirituality were building a sweat lodge when they looked up and found themselves surrounded by spirits. Aboriginals throughout the world believe we are constantly accompanied by our ancestors. This is similar to the “cloud of witnesses” Paul wrote about in the New Testament, which later became the doctrine of “the communion of saints.”

One of my directees read about a doctor who was driving in the middle of nowhere when a young boy appeared, who then led him to an overturned bus. The doctor was able to save several lives, but one of the deceased was the boy he picked up. When he got back in his car the boy’s baseball cap was still on the passenger’s seat.

A long time ago I was lost on the prairies when my car broke down. It was January, and I was slowly freezing to death. Even though I was an atheist then, I shouted at the sky “God, please help me!” Out of the blue a car appeared, and a man poured antifreeze into my gas tank. When I asked who he was he said “I’m an angel of the highway.” I followed right behind him until we finally came to a town. He turned to the right and when I looked down the street there wasn’t a car in sight. I don’t know if he was indeed an angel, but in our strange universe I don’t discount any possibility.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

The Absurdity of Atheism in Maher’s ‘Religulous’

“Religulous,” a mockumentary, is a two-hour assault on religion. The not-very-subtle message is that to be “religious “is “ridiculous.” The title combines the words.

Bill Maher, the host, delights in skewering the seeming absurdities in religion: babbling in tongues, silly hats, the manipulation by televangelists. I think Jesus himself would likely laugh or weep over our folly. Religions need people like Maher. He is like the court jester employed by wise medieval kings to point out when people were getting too pompous.

Maher also attacks the dangerous side of religion: the holy wars, suicide bombings, anti-science, and potentially self-fulfilling prophecies of nuclear end-times. Maher does religion a service by courageously showing us when it is absurd, mindless, and destructive. He mainly attacks Christianity and Judaism, but also dares to criticize Islam.

However, he does religion a disservice by presenting the extremes as the norm. There is a danger the uninformed might think this is all religion is.

He conveniently leaves out when religious people live according to their true values, have a deep spirituality, found service agencies and hospitals, educate and feed the poor, protest war and injustice, promote the sacredness of life and marriage, and constantly remind us life is more than the unbridled pursuit of money and self-centered pleasure.

He conveniently leaves out the many profound and very rational Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers: Abraham Heschel, Martin Buber, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Thomas Aquinas, Avicenna, and Averroes, to name a few.

He conveniently leaves out the constant progression in religious thinking and that atheists are stuck in a time warp in their criticism. Sure, there were absurd things written in the scriptures 2500 years ago, and God was often portrayed as an angry despot. Sure, there were crusades, and the church condemned Galileo hundreds of years ago. However, most believers today have repented of those ways of thinking and left them far behind.

This is where Maher totally misses the mark. The inconvenient truth for him and other atheists is that most people in the mainline synagogues, churches, and mosques are not extremists but moderates who believe in a loving God, are in favour of rationality and science, and are themselves critical when their traditions become absurd and dangerous.

Maher also conveniently leaves out that atheism itself may be dangerous and absurd. Without religion, people make up false gods, for example, absolute ideologies like capitalism and communism. Maher conveniently leaves out that atheists like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao killed 80 million people in the twentieth century, more than all the religious wars in all of history.

He conveniently leaves out that it might be more rational to believe there is a Supreme Intelligence behind all the order of the universe than to believe it all just happened by chance. He conveniently leaves out that without God, life might seem ultimately absurd when you are suddenly downsized, become sick, or lose a loved one. He conveniently leaves out that God and religious faith may, in fact, be the only real answers to life’s absurdities and dangers.

Thank you, atheists, for keeping religion honest and accountable, but please don’t try to convince people that religion is all absurdity and destruction, and please be as self-critical as you ask religious people to be.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

Atheists not scientific about religion

For the past few decades, atheists have been speaking freely about their lack of faith. In part they have been emboldened by two vociferous atheists. In both Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, they take the worst examples of religious folly and advocate getting rid of religion because it is an irrational curse on the human race.

There is no denying that they are both partially right: religion has been the cause of a lot of irrationalism and evil, witch-hunts and terrorism. However, there is also no denying that they are largely wrong: religion has been responsible for untold good. There is not only unhealthy religion, but also healthy religion.

As my friend Dr. Larry Cooley, a philosopher of science and religion, put it: “From a scientific viewpoint, Dawkins and Hitchens are unscientific when it comes to religion. In formulating a theory, a competent scientist tries to account for all the data.” It’s surprising that Dawkins, a respected scientist in the field of genetics, would throw out the scientific method when it comes to religion. In arguing that we should get rid of religion, both he and Hitchens have not taken into account all the data about bad science and good religion.

It would be easy to attack science based on all the evil it has brought upon the human race. Science and the technology that derives from it have brought us all manner of weapons of war: bombs, machine guns, tanks, and biological and chemical warfare. Science has been responsible for the maiming and deaths of hundreds of millions of people.

Science has also robbed people of hope for the future. I remember thinking in the 1980s that my family and I probably had no future because of the constant threat of nuclear war. Now, people in their twenties tell me they have no future because of the destruction of rain forests, pollution, and global warming brought upon the human race by science and technology: bulldozers, chain saws, cars, planes, and factories. Science is once again threatening our planet with destruction. Science has totally failed to bring us the utopia promised by the Enlightenment. One could argue that science is evil and should be done away with.

On the other hand, Dawkins and Hitchens have not taken into account all the data about good religion. The World Council of Churches and the Vatican have issued and implemented numerous statements and strategies about war, social justice, poverty, hunger, welfare, and the environment. Most universities and hospitals in the western world began under the sponsorship of Christian churches. Here in London, Ontario, for example, St. Joseph’s Hospital began as a mission of the Sisters of St. Joseph, and Parkwood Hospital began with the Women’s Christian Association. The University of Western Ontario began with Huron College, an Anglican seminary.

The whole Canadian system of universal health care happened because of the efforts of a Baptist minister, Tommy Douglas. Our legal system and moral code are based on Judeo-Christian precepts. As Michael Coren once said, “Quite simply, without Christian groups and Christian people, the social network of Canada would collapse. This is not hyperbole. Walk along almost any main street and look at the names of the houses, associations, and institutes that work for the poor.” In London, we have the Salvation Army and numerous soup kitchens sponsored by churches, and most churches educate their congregations about social justice issues and engage in charitable activities here and abroad.

Countless missionaries have brought not only religion but also education and medicine to developing countries. I think of my friend Dr. Harold Fast, a Mennonite who lived and died selflessly helping thousands of Muslims as a medical missionary in Pakistan. Save a Family Plan, operating out of St. Peter’s Seminary here in London, has helped tens of thousands of the poorest of the poor in India become self-sufficient.

On an individual level, religion has given billions of people a sense of significance, that their lives have transcendent value and meaning, that they are more than a cog in the drudgery of daily existence. Religion has brought people a sense of personal ethics, community, comfort, and hope for the future.

The problem in the world today is not science or religion. The problem, and the glory, is human nature. As human beings, we have the capacity to take these two great endeavors of the human spirit, science and religion, and make them into something very compassionate or very destructive. Dawkins and Hitchens seem to miss altogether the fact that, whether as scientists or religionists, we are capable of unlimited good and evil. Religion, at least, predicts this.

The most serious criticism of fundamentalist atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens is their inadequate scientific method: not taking into account all the data about healthy religion and unhealthy science makes them incompetent thinkers from their own scientific viewpoint.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion: brucetallman.com.

EVOLUTION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Dear Friends,

On September 7 the London Free Press published my article below under the title “Evolution leads to cosmic consciousness”

It is 689 words, so when you have 2 minutes, why not give it a quick read?

Blessings and peace,

Bruce Tallman

Spiritual Director

www.brucetallman.com

Mystics give us a bigger vision of where we are evolving

Sri Aurobindo was a Hindu mystic. Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian mystic. They never knew of the other’s work. Despite this, they both came to the same momentous conclusion. The direction of evolution is toward divinization. This means God is fully alive in every human being.

In books like The Future Evolution of Man (Aurobindo) and The Phenomenon of Man (Teilhard), they both outlined the earthly process. It moves from rocks and water (matter) to plants (sensitivity). Then it progresses to animals (feelings), leading to humans (thought). Finally, it reaches the spread of the great religions (spirit). The goal of evolution is greater and greater consciousness, from matter to spirit. We are heading towards God (Cosmic Consciousness) being all in all.

Of course, since we have free will, if we choose hate and war over love and peace, we could destroy ourselves. The planet might be destroyed with us. Divinization is not a guaranteed process.

In the past one hundred or so years new technologies such as radio, television, Internet, smartphones, and now artificial intelligence have been growing our consciousness at light-speed. These are all new stages of the world-wide evolution of humanity.

Mystics and scientists have come to the same conclusion: everything is interconnected and one. The pandemic also forced unitive thinking on us: we are all in this together. As well the climate crisis forces us to see our interconnectivity: our energy use affects everything else.

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, has written about order, disorder, and re-order. For hundreds of years white males have dominated the planet, making decisions affecting everyone. The modern means of communication, particularly the Internet, have gradually dissolved this domination, allowing suppressed voices to speak: women, blacks, indigenous, and LGBTQ2SA+ people. All these new voices have also expanded our consciousness. Domination by white males is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

Our consciousness is expanding. We are now aware of stages of faith. The group stage loves order and simply believes what others say. The personal stage loves asking questions and deconstructing everything, particularly religion. At this stage people often feel they are losing their religion and leave their church, synagogue, mosque, or temple. This stage however is in danger of getting stuck in disorder. And disorder is the case for many young people today – they have never experienced even the group stage of faith and so have no spiritual foundation to build their lives on.

The final stage of faith is mysticism where you accept that those previous stages had their role to play. As Rohr says, you need somewhere to discover that some things are holy, and church is a good place to start. But the mature person grows their consciousness beyond that and eventually realizes that everything is holy: every creature is a face of God. The local church still has a role to play however: starting people on the road to oneness, holiness, justice, and mysticism.

White male domination now senses that all these new voices are creating disorder and is trying to re-establish their authority and order, for example, “Make America Great Again,” or by arch-conservative bishops in the Catholic church trying to take the church back to the 1950s, before Vatican II (1962-65), which they perceive as disorder. But history always works as a spiral: two steps forward, one back, but ever onward (unless we destroy it).

The Spirit of God is moving us inexorably towards re-order – towards unity, mysticism, and justice for all voices. This is what people like Aurobindo, Teilhard, Thomas Merton (a Catholic monk), Rohr, Matthew Fox (an Anglican priest), Brian McLaren (a Protestant minister), and Ilia Delio (a Franciscan sister and expert on Teilhard), advocate in their many books.

Pope Francis also advocates this in his attempt to make the church “synodal,” that is, one where lay Catholics have a voice in church governance, not just priests and bishops. Despite this being opposed as disorder by some bishops, the church will likely continue on its road to inclusion, unity, and mysticism as this seems to be where God is leading it, and all of evolution.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and religious educator of adults. http://www.brucetallman.com

SCIENCE/STOICS/FEAR/LOVE

What the ancients called the ‘soul’

or the essence of personhood

emerged thru billions of years

of converging and complex evolution

giving rise to ever greater consciousness:

matter/plants/animals/humans/

religions/sciences/Internet/smart phones/AI

but some religious people ignore common sense/

empirical science and develop utopian visions

and some scientists ignore the direction of evolution/

personal experience/religious wisdom

reducing humans to objects or machines

and some humanists in their quest

for self-fulfillment ignore the communal dimension/

traditional teachings about human nature –

dialogue between religion/science/humanism

is necessary for all of us to avoid our delusions

for everyone new knowledge can seem like an assault

on our cherished idolatrous concepts –

even Einstein resisted the new knowledge

his own theories pointed to

however, he later admitted his resistance

to God playing dice with the universe

was his biggest mistake

Einstein claimed time and space are mental constructs –

its all going on in our minds, therefore

the only thing that makes things fearful is the fear itself –

the fearfulness of things is in us not in them

as Seneca the Roman Stoic philosopher claimed

“Nothing is terrible in things except fear itself”

and Epictetus the Greek Stoic philosopher claimed

“It is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing

but the fear of death and hardship”

and Henri Nouwen the Roman Catholic mystic claimed

“Our greatest fear is intimacy with ourselves

and the greatest paradox is:

the heart is where we are most ourselves

and most alienated from ourselves

and since God is beyond even paradox

and cannot be thought but only loved

we can approach God only in a cloud of unknowing.”

REVOLUTIONARY WORLDVIEWS

Copernicus (1473-1543) upset two worldviews:

the Earth was not fixed in place but rotated

and the Sun was the center of the cosmos not Earth

Duns Scotus, Franciscan theologian, upset another two:

“Our predestination to glory precedes by nature

our tendency to sin” – we are original blessings

not original sinners – and “The goal of perfect love

is the perfection of love, therefore Christ

would have come to Earth even if there was no sin

and therefore no need of redemption”

Meister Eckhart upset a fifth worldview:

God is not “out there,” but rather

“The soul is the deepest/truest part of being human

and the place where we are united with God

who creates us in every moment”

the spiritual and physical are united –

the Father/Son/Holy Spirit are in our heads/hearts/guts

Jacques Ellul’s theology upset both the capitalist and Marxist

world-views: “Christian social action must put the emphasis

on individual humans not the collective masses

nor on the technological means of production –

a human being is not a cog in mass machinery

nor a tool to be used by the professional politician”

another upset of the modern worldview: sex is healthy not “dirty”

“Evolution continues through humans only to the extent

that we are conscious of the integral wholeness of love

which includes healthy sexuality. In other words

healthy sexuality is a key to evolution’s progress”

– Teilhard de Chardin

but there is a major problem with males and females:

we can see our shadow and the shadow of others

much more easily in our own sex than in the opposite sex

we overlook the shadow of the opposite sex

which means that men see their own shadow

in other men, fight them, and create wars

and women are jealous of other women

overlook the flaws of men

and make seriously bad choices

in whom they fall in love with and marry.

The Fifth Awakening

Awakenings occur when society’s old institutions break down:

the First Awakening (1730-1760) in North America

ended European forms of religion

and ushered in Protestant Evangelicalism

the Second Awakening (1800-1830)

ended Calvinist dominance of theology

the Third Awakening (1890 – 1920) had two parts:

the social gospel and Pentecostalism

the Fourth Awakening (1962-1965)

was the Second Vatican Council

the Fifth Great Awakening has been happening

since the 1970s thru the new science

which does not prove or disprove the existence of God

nor does it contradict the basic beliefs of our faith

what the believer looks for in science is not proof

but a more accurate understanding of reality

The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra showed how

outstanding scientists shocked by

relativity and quantum theory

turned to Eastern mysticism to understand reality

and Carl Jung’s belief that all humans

are communally connected and interdependent

led to his theory of the Collective Unconscious

which fit well with the quantum universe

and Jesus, like mystics everywhere, was a unitive thinker

who talked about his unity with the poor:

“To the extent you took care of one of these

sisters and brothers of mine, even the least of them,

you did it to me”

– Matthew 25: 31-46

to love Christ is to take care of the most needy –

that is why ministers of the gospel, as Henri Nouwen put it

must be “wounded healers”

or they cannot enter authentically into the suffering

of a dislocated world/

a rootless generation/

a dying person

unless they have experienced the awakening of suffering

in their own heart.