Diarmuid O'Murchu > Quotes

“Spirituality is not just about religion, or church attendance, or fidelity to one or other legal requirement. Spirituality is understood to be an innate wisdom of the human heart that enlivens a zest for life, a search for meaning and purpose, a love for all that is good and beautiful, a passion to create a better world, a sensitivity to the life-energy (God, if you wish) that permeates the entire cosmos.”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, Our World in Transition: Marking Sense of a Changing World

“When you are confronted by evidence that the faith in which you were brought up no longer provides an adequate explanation for the nature, meaning and purpose of your life, you have three choices. You can refuse to accept the evidence and continue as before. You can abandon the faith you grew up with, because it has proved to be inadequate. Or, third, you can accept the new knowledge and use it to develop a more mature understanding of what lies at the core of your beliefs. The first response is intellectually dishonest. The second is intellectual laziness. The third is a stance of critical acceptance, leading to a reinterpretation of core concepts. . . . It requires courage and a plethora of other virtues that have been gathering dust in your spirit. Every advance in understanding invites us into a deeper faith. (Feehan 2012, 148, emphasis added) ❄”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, When the Disciple Comes of Age: Christian Identity in the Twenty-first Century

“As I suggest in a previous work (O'Murchu 2000), we need a new metaphor to transcend the spiritual malaise of our time. I propose the metaphor or homecoming, and my central argument is that we need to come home, not to God, religion, or church, but to the creation to which we innately belong. Our exile, alienation, and estrangement are not from God, but from creation. With God everything is basically okay. Our spiritual not-at-home-ness has to do with our ambivalence and ambiguity toward God's creation.

The long journey involved in this homecoming has several dimensions. It involves coming home to where God first encounters us, not with the threat of judgment or punishment, but with the embrace of unconditional love. From God's point of view. that is expressed first and foremost in the cosmic and planetary creation. Long before humans ever came to be, long before formal religion was ever conceived, God was birthing forth ancestral giftedness in the unfolding of stars and galaxies, of planets and quasars, including the paradoxical cacophony of building up and tearing down (Jer. 1:10) as the web of universal life unfolded.”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story

“I follow the line adopted by many social scientists who view each religion as culturally and historically conditioned, while spirituality is much more generic, deeper, and expansive.”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, Incarnation: A New Evolutionary Threshold

“Central to this spiritual view was a deep intuitive sense of the sacredness of creation itself, energized and sustained by the living Spirit who blew with the wind, warmed with fire-heat, flowed in the water, danced with the animals, and spoke in the vibrations of human sound.”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, Incarnation: A New Evolutionary Threshold

“For Jung, the collective unconscious can simply be described as an envelope of wisdom embracing everything in creation, humans included. For Jung, it is essentially of God and may well be considered as the wise and enduring power of divine Spirit infused throughout the whole of creation….Long dismissed as an esoteric illusive fantasy, the collective unconscious begins to look very similar to the notion of the creative vacuum of pure space, or modern physics.”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story

“Among the most accessible of writers on this subject is the systems theorist Ervin Laszlo. Many of his seminal ideas, articulated with the average reader in mind, come together in his description of the ‘Akashic field’, the interactive realm of quantum fluctuations, culminating in a supercoherent state empowering all structures in creation, whether atoms, organisms, or galaxies. Laszlo goes on to raise a crucial question, central to the deliberations of this book. ‘Could it be that our consciousness is linked with other consciousnesses through an inter-connecting Akashic field, much as galaxies are linked in the cosmos quanta in the microworld, and organisms in the world of the living?’ The link with contemporary brain studies is informatively reviewed by Wallace.”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story

“Inescapably, we are challenged to encounter and befriend the Holy One, not in a heaven hereafter, but in the evolutionary revelatory power of the sacredness in which we are immersed each day.”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, Incarnation: A New Evolutionary Threshold