Weekly Pause & Ponder

For much of Christian history, Christians have usurped the vision and challenge of the Companionship of Empowerment (Kingdom of God). We tend to overspiritualize the concept, assigning it to personal spiritual growth or salvation in a world beyond.... The Companionship of Empowerment is based on a vision inspired by the lure of the future. In essence, commitment to the Companionship is about striving to make the world a better place for all God’s creatures, a rediscovery of paradise where all can live in the nonviolent power of justice and love. It may sound utopian, but without this utopia, evolution can never advance into the greater complexity that God seems to intend for all creation. In this understanding, the new vision of empowerment is not merely about people and the human situation; it also embraces transformative challenges of global and cosmic proportions.  

Christianity’s Dangerous Memory: A Rediscovery of the Revolutionary Jesus by Diarmuid O’Murchu, pp.34-36.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

In every age, the meaning and impact of spirituality has been influenced by factors of global proportion. To understand the emerging spirituality we need to be aware of the global ferment of our time: a growing awareness of our planet as one Earth, destined to be shared equally by all...the growing realization that nothing in our world – religious or otherwise – can be comprehensively understood apart from a multi-disciplinary mode of exploration....  It is a spirituality that transcends what each and all religions claim to represent. It is a spirituality that engages with the search for meaning as people struggle to interrelate more authentically in what we progressively consider to be an interdependent world, within an eternally evolving universe.

Reclaiming Spirituality, by Diarmuid O’Murchu, p 171-172.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

God’s bestowal of grace began with time itself. It is interwoven in our history. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, all creation has been pressured from within to evolve. Inert matter evolved, becoming ever more conscious, until, at a particular moment in the concrete history of the world, self-reflective consciousness emerged in a species we call human. The material universe that came into existence and was maintained by grace finally became aware of the grace that had been there all along, the self-communication of the Holy Spirit that was at the heart of all life. In the Christian story we locate this moment of evolutionary history in the person of Jesus, the Christ, but we celebrate it in ourselves as well.

Field of Compassion: How The New Cosmology Is Transforming Spiritual Life, by Judy Cannato, p. 148

Weekly Pause & Ponder

When people begin to think about God in relation to this world, the stunning natural world opened up to our wonder but being destroyed by our wasting leads to a whole new approach. In former times, the basic conception of the world was that it was created in the beginning and remained a static entity; God’s activity consisted primarily in maintaining what had already been established. Now that we realize that the world is becoming, that genuinely new things come into being by evolution and other processes, fresh ideas of divine presence and agency are needed. To date these have centered on the Spirit of God, called the Creator Spirit in the great medieval hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. As it integrates the revelatory experience of a personal God into an expansive cosmological setting, ecological theology, replete in its fullest measure with social justice and eco-feminist insights, is mapping yet another new frontier.

Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God, by Elizabeth Johnson, p. 187.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

When people begin to think about God in relation to this world, the stunning natural world opened up to our wonder but being destroyed by our wasting leads to a whole new approach. In former times, the basic conception of the world was that it was created in the beginning and remained a static entity; God’s activity consisted primarily in maintaining what had already been established. Now that we realize that the world is becoming, that genuinely new things come into being by evolution and other processes, fresh ideas of divine presence and agency are needed. To date these have centered on the Spirit of God, called the Creator Spirit in the great medieval hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. As it integrates the revelatory experience of a personal God into an expansive cosmological setting, ecological theology, replete in its fullest measure with social justice and eco-feminist insights, is mapping yet another new frontier.

Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God, by Elizabeth Johnson, p. 187.