The Grand Option: Personal Transformation and a New Creation

by Beatrice Bruteau

In The Grand Option, renowned author Beatrice Bruteau advances her healing vision for humankind. This collection of beautifully written essays encourages readers to seek personal transformation based on heightened consciousness and Christian spirituality. Bruteau contends that this transformation will produce a profound sense of personal freedom, thus enabling individuals to commune with the Divine and with each other. Bruteau’s Trinitarian anthropology brings with it the potential for transforming humanity from a collection of individuals in conflict to a community of wholly developed persons working toward a shared vision. Her message is as compelling as it is concrete. Using the disciplines of philosophy, theology, psychological anthropology, and feminist theory, she interprets New Testament texts in ways that speak to contemporary readers. Bruteau also explores the central Christian symbols of the Imago Dei, the Incarnation, and the Trinity, as well as issues such as global spirituality, transcendent freedom, and contemplative insight.

180 pages, Paperback

First published July 28, 2001

Reviews

[Brian Wilcox · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend recommended this book to me, and I'm so glad. Of the many hundreds of books I've read or studied from, this would be in the top ten or twenty. I highly recommend The Grand Option for persons who seek to gain insight into a way the Christian teaching of the Trinity can apply non-dogmatically to consciousness evolution. Bruteau does well in drawing off the highly-esteemed insights of Teilhard de Chardin.

Bruteau writes in light of an evolving understanding of the workings of matter-energy. An ordained Episcopalian, Bruteau's work here transcends religious sect.

This is not an easy read, nor need it to be, for Bruteau presents a grand matter for us to consider and to inspire our own evolution in and with the interdependent web-of-Life. For as in the image of the Trinity, the author places evolution in its rightful context ~ relational. Relationship, then, is the nature of Life, and, so, this work comports well with Buddhist teaching on impermanence, in which all is impermanent, meaning a constant flux, together.

[Elizabeth Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

While THE GRAND OPTION is perhaps Bruteau's least unified publication (it originated as a collection of lectures), it's also a concise summary of her most significant thought. I found this book exceedingly helpful in solidifying my understanding of the difference between choice freedom and creative freedom, humanity's role in evolution's next step, the role of creativity in faith, our central purpose as human persons, the significance of incarnation and theotokos in Trinitarian movement, etc.

Here's where BB lands in her sense of God: "If I am asked, then, 'Who do you say I am?' my answer is: 'You are the new and ever renewing act of creation. You are all of us, as we are united in You. You are all of us as we live in one another. You are all of us in the whole cosmos as we join in Your exuberant act of creation. You are the Living One who improvises at the frontier of the future; and it has not yet appeared what You shall be." Here's a divinity I ache to know.

[Anita · Rating 5 out of 5]

How is the evolution of humanity different from evolution of life thus far? Humanity has the option whereas previously life evolved without such conscious involvement. This book really made me wonder how I had missed so much in what Jesus said and what he was trying to get across. The reason is most likely to do with the way the domination way of thinking has not only been the way of society, but very much the way of Christianity. The Holy Thursday Revolution is a big part of this book and is the subject of another book by Bruteau by that name. She is a very unusual theologian!

[Naum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[Jana]

This one was just plain over my head. I finally gave up.