Ecological Spirituality by Diarmuid O'Murchu

This author is one of the leading contemporary anthropologists and theologians. He challenges existing paradigms and seeks to reflect current human knowledge into our spiritual frameworks.

Spirit connecting with spirit

His central theme is to define spirituality as Spirit connecting with spirit. He adopts an understanding of God as an energizing and creative Spirit, inviting us into a deeper and wider engagement with the whole creation and not merely with church or religion. He argues that our understanding of God will need to change away from the ruling, patriarchal Father to the energizing Spirit who empowers everything from within.

A crisis of values

He suggests humanity is undergoing a crisis of values. Humanity needs to outgrow the highly destructive dualistic splitting of the sacred and the secular so that our economics, politics, and social policies can incorporate spiritual values into all our engagements with the web of life.

He regards the concept of eco-spirituality as a wide range of discourses. Their common interest is in showing that the current ecological crisis is an essentially spiritual crisis of values. Answers to it should not be merely technological or material but should be sought on a spiritual level, through the foundation of an “inner ecology” and an enlightened reflection about the meaning of life, the Other, the sacred. 

O’Murchu acknowledges the 2009 Hindu Declaration on Climate Change which asserts: Humanity’s very survival depends upon our capacity to make a major transition of consciousness, equal in significance to earlier transitions from nomadic to agricultural, agricultural to industrial, and industrial to contemporary technology. We must transit to complementarity in place of competition, convergence in place of conflict, holism in place of hedonism, optimization in place of maximization.

He adds that consciousness can be explained as the love of God poured out in energizing empowerment for everything in creation, humans included. The dualistic split between sacred and secular has no place in this divine synthesis.

Re-imagining God

Another important theme in the book is the need to reframe and reconfigure our understanding of God. He suggests the Christian tradition and understanding of God needs to reflect creation and ecology. Just as several Indigenous Peoples around our world recognise the Great Spirit,

we are called to recognise how God, as energizing and creative Spirit, invites us into a deeper and wider engagement with the whole creation.

Part of this change in God paradigm importantly includes the desire among a growing number of scripture scholars to move away from imperial language related to kings and kingdoms. Instead they seek to use language that is likely to better represent what Jesus desired in the liberation and empowerment of gospel faith. To that end, O’Murchu uses the Aramaic-related translation companionship of empowerment.

Humanity is not the centre of the universe

Throughout this book O’Murchu highlights a major challenge to our contemporary anthropology. We need to outgrow our species domination in favor of viewing ourselves as a derived species, one that depends on the life of the larger web for everything that constitutes our being and becoming. Eco-spirituality requires us to outgrow and abandon our superior status and view the earth (and its resources) not as an object but as a lifeform that begets all other lifeforms, humanity included.

Rejecting patriarchy and power as the basis of community

No analysis of contemporary spirituality would be complete without acknowledging this shift in consciousness away from power from on high and toward empowerment from the center outward. All major religions, not merely Christianity, are wrapped up in power structures that are no longer credible today. He asks: “Can we patriarchal humans, addicted to domination and control, die to our power compulsion so that we can be raised to a more egalitarian, mutually empowering way of being for our own benefit and that of all creation?” 

O’Murchu’s views are challenging but deserving of careful reflection. One cannot help but think that, given the state of the world, a total re-set is required for survival of our species. Otherwise, total collapse seems inevitable.