Dawning a new day - Centre Spread - influence of social movements

"God's spirit blows fresh breezes across the barren deserts of sacred traditions and time-honoured institutions. A new day is dawning over the spiritual landscape and new possibilities for spiritual pilgrimage open up on all Sides."

--Diarmuid O'Murchu

The closing decades of the 20th century were characterized by emerging processes of spirit movements that changed the face of the spiritual landscape of the Earth community. As it faces into not only a new century, but a new millennium, such a turning toward the new carries both symbolic and actual potential for the dawning of a new day. But initially, let's recapitulate. Movements for justice, for liberation and for peace drew together peoples from a wide range of both human and religious traditions in a work that challenges both the institutions and the narratives of those traditions to their core.

The feminist/women's movement raised human consciousness to the inordinate gender disparity in almost all cultures and social systems in today's world, and to the language, narratives and symbol systems that render women all but invisible. And most recently a growing recognition of the profound significance of the ecological movement called for both a new consciousness and a new way of being in the Earth community.

New breezes: liberation, ecology and feminism

Each of these movements, as O'Murchu suggests, blew "fresh breezes across the barren deserts of sacred traditions and time-honoured institutions." It was as if nothing within the political, social and cultural/religious worlds was left untouched. As a result, such movements were approached fearfully by some as a time of extraordinary "disintegration," a breaking down of the "time honoured" and "the true." They called forth fundamentalist responses that clung, at times fanatically, to a particular institution, belief, or articulation of that belief regardless of other human and religious values or practices.

For many others, however these movements were and are seen as movements of the life-spirit, the life-force that permeates the Earth community and its unfolding. They invited participants into processes of deep reflection and grounded praxis toward human, social, cultural and cosmic transformation. These movements have only just begun; their inherent processes are in an embryonic stage of evolution. The invitation, the challenge into the 21st century and the third millennium, is toward their interrelationship, the spiralling interconnectedness of these processes beyond hierarchical dualisms and binary oppositions: of love and justice, of the material and spiritual, of the ethical and the ritual, of the processes for life and transformation that are emerging in this day. These are the processes that will engage the spiritual quest of those entering a new age of human, of cosmic, unfolding. It is these processes I will now address.

Attentiveness to the spirit, to what is life enhancing and what is death-dealing in human experience, has been a hallmark of both liberation movements and the emerging theologies closely connected to these movements.

This attentiveness has led to a deeper human consciousness and narration of

stories of oppression and destruction, not only of the human but also of the earth or planetary community. Awareness of and response to the systemic nature of this oppression has, however. sometimes blinded the human community to the interconnectedness of the personal, the interpersonal, the structural, and the ecological, and to the profound relationship between the life-enhancing and the death-dealing, which the natural world demonstrates daily. Attentiveness to the spirit is, therefore a process which calls forth a new listening within one's own being to the irrevocable interlinking of life and death to this movement within one's relationship with others and within the universe. Such attentiveness will discern those death-dealing elements which are destructive of life and the life-giving ones which are enhancing of life. From this, new stories of the spirit or life-force at the heart of each relational encounter will emerge, while the shadow of death dealing will likewise be named with courage and fidelity.

Analysis of these human experiences draws on the human wisdom developed during the 20th century in the human and social sciences--psychology, sociology and anthropology. This process discerns and affirms what is indeed the wisdom of the spirit in these disciplines. It then engages this wisdom in a way that enables an uncovering of ideologies, a naming of pathologies, an understanding of human, social and cultural systems and a further uncovering of the life-enhancing and death-dealing. Such analysis brings the processes of the mind or intellect into dialogue with those of the body or the experiential in a way that seeks to be integrative--moving backward and forward and in all manner of directions between and among these processes. It calls for a new wisdom that, like that of the ancient wisdom of traditions, draws on life and the knowledge or sciences of life experience as a profound source of the spirit. Thus, the dialogic of human and religious traditions, which has often been isolated into an oppositional dualism, will be reestablished to the enrichment of these traditions and of the life of the Earth community.

Encountering divine in new ways

Telling the story of the human encounter with the divine or life-enhancing spirit has characterized the spiritual pilgrimage of those within most religious and spiritual traditions. That telling, however, is always a retelling as communities in each new era encounter the divine and the human in new ways. The processes of articulating the human experiences of this era and analyzing them have necessarily led to a profoundly felt need to retell the grand narratives of human and religious history. The awareness that these grand narratives are no longer functioning as they once did has been articulated significantly by postmodernism as one of the ways of naming this present time. What this retelling is calling forth and will continue to call forth is a new imagination together with a new engagement with the spiritual symbols and traditions of this era and with those of myriad other religious and cultural stories within human and planetary history. The merging narratives will, therefore, be multiple, pluriform and always in process.

New names for divinity

Such a process is already underway, perhaps most explicit in the feminist and eco-feminist movements. From these movements has emerged a profound consciousness that the very naming of divinity characterized almost exclusively by patriarchal and power-dominant names, titles, metaphors and images--king, lord, destroying warrior, father, wronged husband, ultimate authority, avenger, to name but a few. These are woven into the warp and woof of the Jewish and Christian sacred stories and their enactment in ritual and celebration. A variety of sources are, however, nourishing new warnings of divinity within the telling of sacred stories. The sacred narrative itself has been plumbed for alternative images and metaphors that draw on female imagery--the womb of God, nursing mother, birth-giver, mother eagle, she-bear, bakerwoman, midwife, Sophia/ Wisdom. The bread baked by female hands, the blood and water shed from birth-giving female bodies inform or reinforce the sacred symbol system; evokes multiple images of divinity, humanity, and their interconnectedness in ways that provide entry into mystery rather than exclusion of so many from that mystery. The long history of female symbolizations of divinity, silenced by the emergence of patriarchal religions, provides a rich source for the new stories. Further, the billions-of-years-long story of the universe and the evocation of imagery from the new science--fractals, strange attractors, and more--also require a new articulation of the story of human and cosmic relationships with divinity.

It is not only images of divinity, but of humanity, of all living being and their interrelationship, that will need new language, that will engage a new imagination, that will find articulation in new stories. In this regard, the sacred stories of indigenous peoples will provide a rich resource--the native Americans of the American continents, aboriginal dreaming in the Australian context, ancient stories from the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Pacific. These, however, cannot be appropriated into a new colonizing stow, but must infuse the spiritual stories of the new dawning of the Earth community with values that have been lost in Western industrialized, capitalist, religious traditioning. Language of interconnectedness and mutual interdependence will replace language of dominance. The voice of every living entity, both human and other than human, will be heard toward the enrichment of the new stow, and those voices will be heard according to their own unique contribution to the story of the universe, as well as their resistance to anything that diminished that contribution.

New way of being and rituals

The new stories will require two accompanying processes if they are to flourish in a way that will transform human consciousness and human activity. First, there must be an engagement of a new ethic, a new way of being in the world, a way that is ancient as well as new. Verses 10 and 11 of Psalm 85 use the word "righteousness," This righteousness, understood as the right or just ordering of all relationships, is the goal of the movements toward justice and transformation. The difficulty of attaining such righteousness, or right ordering, was emphasized most profoundly for me recently in an address given by bell hooks to an auditorium filled with colleagues who have been working toward this transformative goal for three decades or more. She asked the audience, as it faced a new century and new millennium, "At what moment did we cease to infuse our social movements with love?"

This engagement with a new ethic, a reordering of all relationships within the Earth community so that they are relationships of love, will require a most extraordinary attentiveness to the life-force or spirit in our world. This is because the death-dealing powers that work toward the rape and pillaging, consumption and exploitation of the earth, its resources and its peoples are visibly present, palpably felt, and can engage the human spirit in anger and bitterness.

The human spirit needs a context of ongoing spiritual enrichment in order to remain faithful to this ethic of right relationships. This will be provided in the enactment of new rituals as the context for the retelling of the sacred stories. For so many in today's world, religious ritual has become a familiar, but empty, combination of movement, words, and symbols that fails to enrich and sustain a life of ethical engagement and spirit attentiveness. Ritualization of the new stories, like their retelling, will not be a rejection of the old, but will draw the material symbols of human and religious tradition and of earth sustainability into new meaning- making. Bread and wine, together with earth, air, fire, and water, can be infused with new meaning within the context of a new story. The pouring of water, sprinkling of ashes, burning of incense, and the use of a variety of symbols of materiality in the context of remembering and recreating can evoke new levels of consciousness of divine-human-cosmic relationships. Like the images of divinity, they will need to be multiple and varied in response to human need and variety of context. In this way, new stories will find their expression, not only in human ethics, but in engaged enactment of their new language and symbols.

The voices, the stories of the Other--other than male, other than Western, other than capitalist, other than white, other than human and so forth--are emerging toward the dawn of a new era. They are heralding a breaking forth of the spirit of the earth, of the human community, of the divine life-force. Processes are emerging among those who are seeking to be attentive to this spirit, to be engaged in this rebirth. A new listening to experience in the Earth community and to the traditions of human wisdom is leading more profoundly to a telling of and a listening to new stories that are both ancient and new, integrating the wisdom of ages with the tentative language and imagery of the yet to be born. A new ethic grounds the story(ies) in the materiality of human and planetary existence while its enactment in ritual(s) sustains the journey. Fidelity to the telling of and listening to the new story (ies) in all their dimensions and processes will ensure the dawning of a new day that can only yet be glimpsed in the creative imagination.

From Spiritual Questions of the Twenty-first Century: Essays in Honor of Joan Chittester, by Mary Hembrow Snyder, Orbis Books, (2001) Used with Permission.

Sister Elaine Wainwright is a Sister of Mercy in Brisbane, Australia

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