A Spirituality of Life as Gift
The Rev'd Dr Gregory
James Moses, Nowra, NSW.
This is a
follow on from my article in the Autumn 2019 edition of The
Swag. There
I had a go, to the best of my abilities, to try to make sense
of the kind of
society and culture we seem to be in right now. In the last
section of that article I
mentioned some possibilities in the way of where
we might go from here. This follow up, over two editions of The
Swag, is
an attempt to make good on some of the promises in the last
few paragraphs of
that section. For this edition, I will try to do something
about the mention of
the possible continuing value for me anyway of something
called Process
Theology. Hopefully for next edition, taking this paper for
granted and making
some use of it, I will try to follow through on the notion of
us Australians
doing our best to receive what Eugene Stockton called the
Aboriginal Gift, for
our sake as church and for our sake as human beings living in
this country.
These two
articles taken together are a re-writing of a paper I gave in
Sydney in early
July at the 2019 conference of the Australian Catholic
Theological Association.
With thanks to the good people who enabled this to happen, as
well as to those
who gave feedback.
The object
of this article is to help develop a
spirituality, a
total way of doing business with respect to the past, the
environment and
community and the transcendent. Right now, in consequence of
my previous
article and research before that, I think we need a total way
of doing business
which is neither organic everything determined for us in
advance as supposedly
in traditional societies and cultures; nor individualistic
consumerist, with
the main goal being supposed individual happiness (effectively
for those who
can afford it!) as increasingly in our culture starting to
gobble up
everything; but something more like artistic, a creative
non-organic
post-modern way of recouping a kind of identity which truly
re-integrates
community and nature and the transcendent. Inspired by a
certain kind of
thinking I have been in for a while (see next paragraph), for
this purpose I
will have a go at developing something along the lines of a
way which
experiences the total way we have been given in creation and
community and
human life as gift to be more or less creatively
received in a way which
is best for all of these in our activity in the present
moment. This reality in
its turn then becomes a gift passed on for the sake of
a certain total
future for ourselves, our
communities and creation.
To do this I
will be using something called Process, or Process-Relational
Philosophy and
Theology, something I picked up in Leuven in 1978 and have
been part of in some
way ever since. As well as being inspired by it, this is the
only kind of
theology I know really thoroughly,
as well as anyone
in the country probably. So, if I am going to make even a
small contribution to
the kind of spirituality we might need in our society and
culture, it has to be out of this!
[In the
paragraph before last, I say 'supposedly' on purpose. There is
evidence that
the cultures of our First Nations people had inbuilt resources
for adaptation
to changing circumstances, new stories, new ceremonies etc. it
is just that the
intensity and speed of the threefold invasion of European
diseases, European
addictions and European settlers was such as largely, in some
places almost
totally, to overwhelm those resources. Whether our resources
are any better for
adapting to our circumstances and our many problems, well, we
will find that
out, or our grandchildren or great grandchildren will.]
1.
The Process Relational Metaphysical Vision: the background
theory
The notion of
Process Relational Trinitarian Theology as what I call an
Artistic Spirituality
of Life and Creation as Gift starts with the background
theory, the Process
Relational metaphysical vision. Don't be
scared of the
word, "metaphysics". It is just a way of talking about people
having
a go at describing what the world might really be like. This
kind of vision
about what the world might really be like had its origins
after Relativity and
in the early days of Quantum Physics, and it strives to be
compatible with and inspired by contemporary sciences, though
without being
restricted to that. It attempts to overcome all the modern
dualisms, towards
"a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in
terms of which
every element of our experience might be interpreted." (Alfred
North
Whitehead, Introduction to Process and Reality from
1929). It does this
in the name of adequacy to all of
our experience,
including scientific, ethical, artistic and religious
experience. It does this
also for the sake of the smoother attainment of the good and
the beautiful in our
lives, in our relationships with each other, in respect of our
communities, and
within the concerns we have as an emergent, creatively
interacting part of
Nature.
The Process
vision first of all is thoroughly
dynamic. Process
people suggest that the world consists in
events,
happenings, more or less dynamic processes of
various kinds in sometimes complicated connections.
This is the case, rather than the world consisting in
substances or enduring
substantial things with properties which more
or less
maintain their identity independently of time and
relation. Substances
are cashed in as certain kinds of connected systems of
happenings. In some
versions, these events or processes may be nested inside each
other. In other
versions all bona fida events are
microscopic. For
all versions time is of the essence, and everything takes some
time to happen.
Don't worry too much about this.
Secondly, and
more importantly probably, the Process or Process-Relational
universe is
strongly relational, strongly connected rather than either
atomistic lots of
little bits more or less existing
by themselves or
totally holistic, just one big whole. It is also into
creativity in a big way.
Everything,
including you and me here and now, is a more
or less creative
taking account of a certain total past environment, and a
giving of itself to
be taken into account by the future of that environment. This
is broad enough
to include electronic events on the one hand and the event of
you here and now
reading this article, or me here and now writing it. (I get
this kind of
example from a Process Theologian Marjorie Suchocki,
reflecting on herself sitting in a library preparing a lecture
for her
students, and what has brought her to that point). That latter
is also a
particular way of taking account of your/my total social and
natural
environment including but not only your own past, at a certain
point in your
life, for the sake of the future of that environment,
including your own future
and everyone and everything connected to you. Striving to be
less
anthropomorphic in our statement but rather more abstract:
everything is
reception, transformation and transmission of something like
energy and
information from total past environment to total future
environment.
In other words,
everything is an environmental event or else a connected
series of such events.
But not only that. Everything, and everyone, adds something to
the process,
everything and everyone makes a difference in the world,
albeit oftentimes oh
so slight. This latter conviction is one of the features which
stops the scheme
being strongly holistic to the point of being totalising.
Everything is an environmental event, but it is also a little
bit individual,
it cannot be entirely cashed in terms of its ensemble of
social relations, one
is not just a product of all the things and people that/who
influence you.
The Process
Theologian Marjorie Suchocki puts
all this in
language which is even more in line with the intentions of
this paper. From her
Preface to The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in
a Relational
World (P&F Press, Claremont, CA, 2005), pp. x - xi:
"Spirituality
is the integration of the experience of the Other and the
others into the
depths of the self and a consequent giving of the self to the
Other and others
in responsible (and "response-able") living. In and through
this
giving and receiving, the self is continuously formed as spirit.
In a sense, of
course, every instance of the self is a receiving of otherness
into the
becoming of the self, and integration of this reception, and a
consequent
giving of the self in influence to
others, over and
over again. We live in this process of receiving, integrating,
and giving in
every moment of our lives. But as we know too well, it is
possible to live very
shallow lives... Spirituality seeks to overcome this...to
overcome smallness of being, to
develop a wideness of personality
that lives and acts towards a greater good.."
Thirdly, though
really putting the same in different words, the Past, Being
in the sense of what is, what is already there as a result of
previous
becoming, is also gift.
In respect of
this, see Charles Hartshorne, introduction in Philosophers
in Process, edited D.
Browning (Random House, N.Y., 1965), p. xix.
"to be is to be available for all
future
actualities". Compare Process and Reality, p. 27:
"...every
item in its universe is involved in each concrescence. In
other words, it
belongs to the nature of a 'being' that it is a potential for
every
'becoming'."
One of Charles
Hartshorne's ways of explaining all this was to cite a poem
called The
Builders, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Look it up for
yourself on the
Internet! What is important here is that the way we have been
given is not to
be looked at as some kind of limitation, but as rather a bundle of potentialities
for constructing our present
and future lives, from the poem, "the blocks with which we
build".
This construction would then become itself a gift, a bundle of
potentialities
given to me for further constructing a certain total future,
my own future,
that of all the people connected to me, and that of nature in
respect of which
we are all creatively interacting parts. And so on.
2.
The Theological Vision in broad outline
Enough of this
metaphysical stuff, even if it does seem to be doing a lot of
our work for us.
Let's get on to the theological vision.
In the
theological vision, this appropriation of life and creation as
gift happens
under the influence of the Divine Lure or Divine 'Initial
Aims', God's dreams
for us and for our communities and creation,
but made
specific to the present situation in which I find myself. But
slow down a bit,
first a little bit on Divine Action
Divine
Action
For process
relational metaphysics generally, the ultimate laws of nature,
i.e. the laws that govern
individuals of whatever level or
quality and also �compound individuals� (like us) are all probabilistic
rather than deterministic. It is only aggregates like tables
and billiard balls
which admit to (nearly) deterministic laws.
All action of
individuals on individuals is manifested, thus, as a shifting
of
probabilities, e.g. high
grade natural events we
call �mental� events shifting the probabilities of the firing
of neurons in
various segments of the brain.
Divine action is
modelled in somewhat similar fashion. The Divine Lure or
Divine Initial Aims as
they are called in theistic Process Relational Thought (see
later), bring about
a shifting of probabilities which sets the cosmic process up
in the first
place, without which there is no cosmos, but which also enters
into the coming together of every particular
occasion. The element of the
Divine Lure being made specific to the situation in which I
find myself is also
obviously very important when it comes to situations of
discernment and
counselling in pastoral practice. What Pope Francis tells us
to do in
complicated situations of daily ministry thus turns out, in
Process thinking,
to have a metaphysical ground!
Inside this
general shifting of probabilities there can be a localized
shifting of
probabilities where for one reason or another the Divine Lure
gets to be
intensified. We now go on to look at this as it applies to us
Christians.
The
Christ, the Christian Community, Church and Sacraments
Jesus� life and
work and the community of disciples around Jesus brings about
a focussing and local
intensification of the Divine Lure, to
such an extent as even to shift the probabilities of certain
kinds of events occurring: demons
are cast out, the blind see, the lame
walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised and the poor
have the gospel
preached to them.
The in-breaking
of the Reign of God continues, hopefully, in the Christian
community or
communities of disciples, extending the focussing
and
local intensification of the Divine Lure, God's dreams for us
and for our
communities and for creation, throughout history and in every
place and time.
Preaching, liturgy, prayer and sacraments combine to keep the
focussing alive in the community
of disciples, as does
Christian community life of charity, constituting the
community of believers
itself, hopefully, as a grace-filled relational matrix out of
which believers
and non-believers and even the natural world (cf. Romans 8)
may draw and to
which believers in turn contribute.
Thus the
basic structure, as related to the �background theory�. We now
go to reflect
some more on God and Trinity in Process Relational Thinking,
and how this
perspective may be able to enhance our Spirituality of
Creation and Life as Gift.
3.
God' and 'Trinity' in Process Relational Thinking
I won't spend
too much time on this, as one could go for ages, just a little
bit more on God
and the importance for our spirituality of the doctrine of the
Trinity, even
though the latter is a minority position among us Process
people.
What all Process
Theists agree on is belief in a God who affects all and is
affected by all,
affected by the fall of the sparrow in the silent spring and
the flowers of the
field or lack thereof and the hair on your head falling out.
This is, moreover,
a God who persuades and does not determine, not by any means
an overgrown
absolute monarch or some kind of power-mad patriarch, in
Thomas Jay Oord's
terms, a God of Uncontrolling
Love. [ See
Thomas Jay Oord, The Uncontrolling
Love of God: An
Open and Relational Account of Providence, (InterVarsity
Press, Downers
Grove, Illinois, 2015.) I am not sure I agree with everything
he says, still
trying to work that out.] This is also a God who is genuinely
compassionate and
not just metaphorically so - though almost everybody says that
nowadays.
Within this vision,God is like the initial
Giving, the true and Cosmic Giver, ground of the Cosmic
Process in the first
place, without which there would be no Cosmos and no us, and
which also
determines the kind of Cosmos. This makes a universe in the
sense of a Cosmos
possible, sets up the boundary conditions within which the
universe happens but
also opens up possibilities within
the universe as it
happens.
But God is also
a fundamentally relational Process of Reception, Creative
Transformation and
Transmission, or Receiving, Integrating
into the
Divine Life, and Giving Back (even apart from the Trinity). In
the Christian
mystery the receiving and integrating is like the life,
passion, and death of
Christ, followed by the resurrection and ascension of the
crucified Lord into
the life of God. The flowing back into the universe, the
Divine Creative
Response in turn = in the Christian mystery the descent of the
Holy Spirit, in
consequence of the passion and death of Christ and his
resurrection and
ascension into the life of God.
These three or
four moments in God's relation to the universe are sometimes
given names: the
Primordial Nature of God = God as Creator, the element
within God which is
unconditioned, primordial and self
chosen; the
Consequent Nature of God, the universe as it happens
received in its
completeness by God, creatively taken up into God's life; and
sometimes the
Projective or Superjective
Nature of God, the
flowing back into the universe, like the descent of the Holy
Spirit. Calling
them Natures can be a little bit misleading
however.
God has only one Nature, God is all of
the above.
Which is to say:
God = Creative-Responsive Kindness and Love, though as
Whitehead notes not
without an element of judgement, separating the wheat from the
chaff as history
goes on.
Process
Trinitarian Theology
The three-fold
structure of primordial, consequent and projective turns out
to be less useful
for Trinitarian theology than might be thought at first sight:
these describe
God-in-relationship-to-us and the rest of creation or
creation-in-relationship
to God rather than a structure within God.
What is more
useful is the fundamentally relational character of every
reality, In God this
becomes unrestricted and in the Divine case can easily be
pushed in the
direction of the ancient idea of perichoresis or circum-incession,
each in the Heart of the other. Each person constitutes itself
and is
constituted on the basis of a
totally open completely
unrestricted actively receptive relationship of kindness and
love with the
other two. In Process technical language, there is no negative
prehension in
God: what is received is taken up and what is taken up is
creatively and
lovingly responded to and in turn received and taken up�
Joseph Bracken,
the most important of us Trinitarian Process Theologians,
gains further clarity
in the direction of preserving the Divine unity with the
introduction into
process conceptuality of the notion of Fields (compare
magnetic or
gravitational fields) ontologically equiprimordial
with, just as important as, the Events which constitute
themselves on their
basis and which in turn co-constitute the Fields out of which
their successors
draw. This leads eventually to the notion of three Series of
Divine Events (a
person = a series of events or happenings) in unrestricted
relationship
constituting themselves on the basis of
and co-constituting
one Divine Field of Activity. This Divine Field of Activity in
turn constitutes
the final environment for all Cosmic happenings: three Persons
in One God, with
operations ad extra, beyond God, always involving all three
persons. [But a lot
of process people don�t like the extra ontological baggage.]
This is just a
start: much more could be said (though this is probably more
than you might
want!). I suspect the low status given to the doctrine of the
Trinity in
Process Theology in its classical phrases has more to do with
the mostly
liberal protestant background of the key people involved,
rather than with the
background theory as such. It might also have something to do
with the fact
that the background theory was originally constructed by
Unitarians.
Once Trinity is
introduced it becomes possible to recoup into Process Theology
and into our
Process Relational Spirituality of Life and Creation as gift
the
Jewish-Christian-Islamic experience of the gracious giftedness
of Creation,
while also having an even more intrinsically relational
personal God. Without
Trinity, Creation becomes a kind of necessity in order for
God to be a fully-fledged personal reality, to give God
something to relate to
so to speak, though not necessarily this creation. This
considerably enhances
the spirituality of creation and life as gift,
while
also giving an even stronger metaphysical ground to the
relationality of all
creation, taking us way beyond individualistic consumer logic.
For Process
Theologians on Trinity, see among others:
Trinity in
Process edited Marjorie Suchocki
and Joseph Bracken, Continuum, N.Y., 1997.
For Joe Bracken,
see The One in the Many, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids,
2001. See also his
article in the Fall-Winter 1994 edition of Process
Studies.
A
Love Amply
Sufficing, More Than Enough
[These
are a few
thoughts put together in prospect of ORTCON, an Open and
Relational Theology Conference
I was intending to go to on the edge of Yellowstone National
Park in the U.S.
in July this year (2023).
That is, until
the wheels fell off my travel plans.
They are in the nature of a
blog, rather than a
proper paper or article.
I don't seem to
be capable of the latter any more. They are stimulated
by, and more or less in response
to, the work of theologian and
philosopher Thomas Jay Oord.]
I
would like to start
these thoughts with a reflection on one of the ancient names
for God, namely El
Shaddai. This
is often translated
as "God Almighty", as in Deus Omnipotens,
but as I hope to show and as other people (including Thomas
Jay Oord) have
pointed out, this is very misleading. A
better translation of the original Hebrew, we are told, would
be "God All
Sufficing", or "God who is more than enough". Some people then go
on to link this meaning
with the root of the word Shaddai, namely shad, =
breast. Thus,
something like: God who is All
Sufficing, like a mother is for a child at her breast. A meaning along
these lines is then picked up
in an extraordinary text in the prophet Isaiah, namely Isaiah
66 : 10 - 13, which
comes very close to making this sense explicit.
Thus a possibly almost too
intimate, in any
case thoroughly experiential, thoroughly relational
connotation and
meaning. In its
connotations this is
about as far from the usual connotations of the abstract
metaphysical Deus Omnipotens as
is possible to imagine. Though
possibly get rid of the
"All", so as to cut off at the
pass any attempt
to push back in a metaphysical direction. Or else keep the
"All", but note that it is an
experiential rather than
metaphysical "All", as in the image that might be behind it.
What
if we were to
start the Nicene Creed this way, reinserting the more adequate
experiential
relational translation: I
believe in
God, Father All Sufficing (like a mother for a child at her
breast), Creator of
heaven and earth... And then go on to draw out the
details of the story of
this all sufficing Love in whom we
believe and which
grounds our hope and the living of our lives.
I
would then go on to
connect this with the image from the Psalms of the tree
planted besides flowing
waters, or the image at the end of the Sermon on the Mount of
the house built
on a rock, or the do not worry
section in the Sermon
on the Mount and other similar texts, or St Paul's thorn
in the flesh, "My
grace is sufficient for you".
So far
so good. Amipotence rather
than Omnipotence, and Thomas Jay Oord even makes use of a
similar interpretation
of El Shaddai, something I have been doing for some years. What it does do,
perhaps, is to place some
lower limits on the �potence� element of �Uncontrolling�
Love, yes, that is the way Love works with creatures endowed
with creativity of
their own (see below for more detail). A
Love intense and all including, beyond all boundaries and
barriers and
distinctions, identifying with and including the lost and
godforsaken, as is
expressed in the Crucified Christ. But
what we have to do with is also a powerful Love, a Can Do
Love, a love capable of making a difference, that creates out
of nothing, that
frees from slavery, that brings back the exiles, that raises
the dead,
qualified and revealed as much in the Resurrection of the
Crucified as in the
Crucifixion.
.
Even
so, apart from
some details like e.g. creatio
ex nihilo, my views so far are consistent with Oord, and maybe
even very
similar.
To
explore some of the
differences albeit obviously affected by my situatedness as a
Catholic
philosopher theologian (like Joe Bracken), I would like to use
another of my favourite images
for exploring the relationship between God
and the World, namely that of a mother or to be mother in
respect to the child
in her womb.
The
main value of this
image is that it makes some kind of sense to say the child is
totally dependent
on its mother and yet is developing and from a certain point
acting and
interacting in accordance with an inbuilt teleology of its
own.
The
limitation,
obviously, is that mother and child in the womb are on the
same ontological
level. God on the
other hand is not a
being among the beings, a same level cause, some kind of extra
addition to the
cosmic furniture, but that without which there are no beings,
that without
which there isn�t any cosmic furniture.
This
takes us to the
next step in the development of the imagery, namely a
principle coming from
Thomas Aquinas: �God
makes (or is making) free things acting freely and determined
things acting in
a determined manner�. This
preserves the
total dependence on the one hand and the evolving and from a
certain point
acting and interacting according to an inbuilt teleology of
its or their own.
In
this revised Process
Relational schema, however, there is an element of same level
cause operating
within the cosmic process, namely what Process people call the
Divine Lure. This
is, or does the job, of a lot of things all at once: the bias
in the cosmic
process, the qualification of the Giving of Being or of the
Divine Creativity
that enables a cosmic process in the first place and the kind
of process that
it is; also the Platonic ideals such as Truth, Goodness,
Beauty, also Harmony
and Peace; also what gets expressed in the dreams of the
prophets, what draws
us on into the reign of God that Jesus proclaims and starts to
make real. For
more, see my article on Process
Relational Philosophy and Theology as A Spirituality of
Creation and Life as
Gift.
The
full imagery, then,
is something like: God makes (or is making) free things
acting freely, more or less determined
things acting in a more or less
determined manner, under the influence of the Divine Lure.
Or something
like this, but remembering that
the Divine Lure is not
just Primordial to the Cosmic Process: it is also Consequent
on the Process
itself, the next step along the way, That Which Loves and
Continues to Love Everything Into Being and Into Life...