A spirituality of life as gift
This article by Rev Dr Gregory Moses is a follow on to his article published in the Autumn 2019 edition of The Swag. There he attempted to make sense of the kind of society and culture we seem to be in right now. In the last section of that article he mentioned some possibilities in the way of where we might go from here. This is the first of two articles, the second of which will be in the Autumn 2020 edition. This article looks at Process Theology. The next will follow up on this looking at what Eugene Stockton called the Aboriginal Gift, for our sake as church and for our sake as human beings living in this country.[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]
These two articles taken together are a re-writing of a paper given in Sydney in July, 2019 at the Australian Catholic Theological Association conference.
The object of this article is to help develop a spirituality, a total way of doing business with respect to the past, the environment and community and the transcendent. Right now, in consequence of my previous article and research before that, I think we need a total way of doing business which is neither organic, everything determined for us in advance as supposedly in traditional societies and cultures; nor individualistic consumerist, with the main goal being supposed individual happiness (effectively for those who can afford it!) as increasingly in our culture starting to gobble up everything; but something more like artistic, a creative non-organic post-modern way of recouping a kind of identity which truly re-integrates community and nature and the transcendent. Inspired by a certain kind of thinking I have been in for a while (see next paragraph), for this purpose I will have a go at developing something along the lines of a way which experiences the total way we have been given in creation and community and human life as gift to be more or less creatively received in a way which is best for all of these in our activity in the present moment. This reality in its turn then becomes a gift passed on for the sake of a certain total future for ourselves, our communities and creation.
To do this I will be using something called Process, or Process-Relational Philosophy and Theology, something I picked up in Leuven in 1978 and have been part of in some way ever since. As well as being inspired by it, this is the only kind of theology I know really thoroughly, as well as anyone in the country probably. So, if I am going to make even a small contribution to the kind of spirituality we might need in our society and culture, it has to be out of this!
In the paragraph before last, I say ‘supposedly’ on purpose. There is evidence that the cultures of our First Nations people had inbuilt resources for adaptation to changing circumstances, new stories, new ceremonies etc. it is just that the intensity and speed of the threefold invasion of European diseases, European addictions and European settlers was such as largely, in some places almost totally, to overwhelm those resources. Whether our resources are any better for adapting to our circumstances and our many problems, well, we will find that out, or our grandchildren or great grandchildren will.
1. The Process Relational Metaphysical Vision: the background theory
The notion of Process Relational Trinitarian Theology as what I call an Artistic Spirituality of Life and Creation as Gift starts with the ‘background theory’, the Process Relational metaphysical vision. Don’t be scared of the word, “metaphysics”. It is just a way of talking about people having a go at describing what the world might really be like. This kind of vision about what the world might really be like had its origins after Relativity and in the early days of Quantum Physics, and it strives to be compatible with and inspired by contemporary sciences, though without being restricted to that. It attempts to overcome all the modern dualisms, towards ‘a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience might be interpreted.’ (Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Process and Reality from 1929). It does this in the name of adequacy to all of our experience, including scientific, ethical, artistic and religious experience. It does this also for the sake of the smoother attainment of the good and the beautiful in our lives, in our relationships with each other, in respect of our communities, and within the concerns we have as an emergent, creatively interacting part of Nature.
The Process vision first of all is thoroughly dynamic. Process people suggest that the world consists in events, happenings, more or less dynamic processes of various kinds in sometimes complicated connections. This is the case, rather than the world consisting in substances or enduring substantial things with properties which more or less maintain their identity independently of time and relation. Substances are cashed in as certain kinds of connected systems of happenings or processes where the complexity of relations are strong enough to maintain a certain evolving continuity of character over time though never exactly the same. In some versions, these events or processes or connections of events may be nested inside each other. In other versions all bona fida events are microscopic. For all versions time is of the essence, and everything takes some time to happen. Don’t worry too much about this.
Secondly, and more importantly for our spirituality probably, the Process or Process-Relational universe is strongly relational, strongly connected rather than either atomistic lots of little bits more or less existing by themselves or totally holistic, just one big whole. It is also into creativity in a big way.
Everything, including you and me here and now, is a more or less creative taking account of a certain total past environment, and a giving of itself to be taken into account by the future of that environment. This is broad enough to include electronic events on the one hand and the event of you here and now reading this article, or me here and now writing it. (I get this kind of example from a Process Theologian Marjorie Suchocki, reflecting on herself sitting in a library preparing a lecture for her students, and what has brought her to that point). That latter is also a particular way of taking account of your/my total social and natural environment including but not only your own past, at a certain point in your life, for the sake of the future of that environment, including your own future and everyone and everything connected to you. Striving to be less anthropomorphic in our statement but rather more abstract: everything is reception, transformation and transmission of something like energy and information from total past environment to total future environment.
In other words, everything is an environmentally sensitive event or else a connected series of such events. But not only that. Everything, and everyone, adds something to the process, everything and everyone makes a difference in the world, albeit oftentimes oh so slight.
This latter conviction is one of the features which stops the scheme being strongly holistic to the point of being totalising. Everything is an environmental event, but it is also a little bit individual, it cannot be entirely cashed in terms of its ensemble of social relations, one is not just a product of all the things and people that/who influence you.
The Process Theologian Marjorie Suchocki puts all this in language which is even more in line with the intentions of this paper. From her Preface to The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World (P&F Press, Claremont, CA, 2005), pp. x-xi:
Spirituality is the integration of the experience of the Other and the others into the depths of the self and a consequent giving of the self to the Other and others in responsible (and “response-able”) living. In and through this giving and receiving, the self is continuously formed as spirit. In a sense, of course, every instance of the self is a receiving of otherness into the becoming of the self, and integration of this reception, and a consequent giving of the self in influence to others, over and over again. We live in this process of receiving, integrating, and giving in every moment of our lives. But as we know too well, it is possible to live very shallow lives… Spirituality seeks to overcome this…to overcome smallness of being, to develop a wideness of personality that lives and acts towards a greater good.
Thirdly, though really putting the same in different words, the Past, Being in the sense of what is, what is already there as a result of previous becoming, is also gift.
In respect of this, see Charles Hartshorne, introduction in Philosophers in Process, edited D. Browning (Random House, N.Y., 1965), p. xix. ‘to be is to be available for all future actualities’. Compare Process and Reality, p. 27: ‘…every item in its universe is involved in each concrescence. In other words, it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming’.’ [Note: ‘a concrescence’, literally ‘a growing together’, is a Process technical word for the more or less creative environmentally sensitive events or happenings or processes which make up the world.]
One of Charles Hartshorne’s ways of explaining all this was to cite a poem called The Builders, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Look it up for yourself on the Internet! What is important here is that the way we have been given is not to be looked at as some kind of limitation, but as rather a bundle of potentialities for constructing our present and future lives, from the poem, “the blocks with which we build”. This construction would then become itself a gift, a bundle of potentialities given to me for further constructing a certain total future, my own future, that of all the people connected to me, and that of nature in respect of which we are all creatively interacting parts. And so on.
2. The Theological Vision in broad outline
Enough of this metaphysical stuff, even if it does seem to be doing a lot of our work for us. Let’s get on to the theological vision.
In the theological vision, this appropriation of life and creation as gift happens under the influence of the Divine Lure or Divine ‘Initial Aims’, God’s dreams for us and for our communities and creation, but made specific to the present situation in which I find myself. But slow down a bit, first I need to say a little bit on Divine Action
Divine Action
For process relational metaphysics generally, the ultimate laws of nature, i.e. the laws that govern individuals of whatever level or quality and also ‘compound individuals’ (like us) are all probabilistic rather than deterministic. It is only aggregates like tables and billiard balls which admit to (nearly) deterministic laws.
All action of individuals on individuals is manifested, thus, as a shifting of probabilities, e.g. high grade natural events we call ‘mental’ events shifting the probabilities of the firing of neurons in various segments of the brain.
Divine action is modelled in somewhat similar fashion. The Divine Lure or Divine Initial Aims as they are called in theistic Process Relational Thought (see later), bring about a shifting of probabilities which sets the cosmic process up in the first place, without which there is no cosmos, but which also enters into the coming together of every particular occasion.
The element of the Divine Lure being made specific to the situation in which I find myself is also obviously very important when it comes to situations of discernment and counselling in pastoral practice. What Pope Francis tells us to do in complicated situations of daily ministry thus turns out, in Process thinking, to have a metaphysical ground!
Inside this general shifting of probabilities there can be a localized shifting of probabilities where for one reason or another the Divine Lure gets to be intensified. We now go on to look at this as it applies to us Christians.
The Christ, the Christian Community, Church and Sacraments
Jesus’ life and work and the community of disciples around Jesus brings about a focussing and local intensification of the Divine Lure, to such an extent as even to shift the probabilities of certain kinds of events occurring: demons are cast out, the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised and the poor have the gospel preached to them.
The in-breaking of the Reign of God continues, hopefully, in the Christian community or communities of disciples, extending the focussing and local intensification of the Divine Lure, God’s dreams for us and for our communities and for creation, throughout history and in every place and time.
Preaching, liturgy, prayer and sacraments combine to keep the focussing alive in the community of disciples, as does Christian community life of charity, constituting the community of believers itself, hopefully, as a grace-filled relational matrix out of which believers and non-believers and even the natural world (cf. Romans 8) may draw and to which believers in turn contribute.
Thus the basic structure, as related to the ‘background theory’. We now go to reflect some more on God and Trinity in Process Relational Thinking, and how this perspective may be able to enhance our Spirituality of Creation and Life as Gift.
3. God’ and ‘Trinity’ in Process Relational Thinking
I won’t spend too much time on this, as one could go for ages, just a little bit more on God and the importance for our spirituality of the doctrine of the Trinity, even though the latter is a minority position among us Process people.
What all Process Theists agree on is belief in a God who affects all and is affected by all, affected by the fall of the sparrow in the silent spring and the flowers of the field or lack thereof and the hair on your head falling out.
This is, moreover, a God who persuades and does not determine, not by any means an overgrown absolute monarch or some kind of power-mad patriarch, in Thomas Jay Oord’s terms, a God of Uncontrolling Love. [ See Thomas Jay Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence, (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 2015.) I am not sure I agree with everything he says, still trying to work that out.] This is also a God who is genuinely compassionate and not just metaphorically so – though almost everybody says that nowadays.
Within this vision, God is like the initial Giving, the true and Cosmic Giver, ground of the Cosmic Process in the first place, without which there would be no Cosmos and no us, and which also determines the kind of Cosmos. This makes a universe in the sense of a Cosmos possible, sets up the boundary conditions within which the universe happens but also opens up possibilities within the universe as it happens.
But God is also a fundamentally relational Process of Reception, Creative Transformation and Transmission, or Receiving, Integrating into the Divine Life, and Giving Back (even apart from the Trinity). In the Christian mystery the receiving and integrating is like the life, passion, and death of Christ, followed by the resurrection and ascension of the crucified Lord into the life of God. The flowing back into the universe, the Divine Creative Response in turn = in the Christian mystery the descent of the Holy Spirit, in consequence of the passion and death of Christ and his resurrection and ascension into the life of God.
These three or four moments in God’s relation to the universe are sometimes given names: the Primordial Nature of God = God as Creator, the element within God which is unconditioned, primordial and self chosen; the Consequent Nature of God, the universe as it happens received in its completeness by God, creatively taken up into God’s life; and sometimes the Projective or Superjective Nature of God, the flowing back into the universe, like the descent of the Holy Spirit. Calling them Natures can be a little bit misleading however. God has only one Nature,
God is all of the above.
Which is to say: God = Creative-Responsive Kindness and Love, though as Whitehead notes not without an element of judgement, separating the wheat from the chaff as history goes on.
Process Trinitarian Theology
The three-fold structure of primordial, consequent and projective turns out to be less useful for Trinitarian theology than might be thought at first sight: these describe God-in-relationship-to-us and the rest of creation or creation-in-relationship to God rather than a structure within God.
What is more useful is the fundamentally relational character of every reality, In God this becomes unrestricted and in the Divine case can easily be pushed in the direction of the ancient idea of perichoresis or circum-incession, each in the Heart of the other.
Each person constitutes itself and is constituted on the basis of a totally open completely unrestricted actively receptive relationship of kindness and love with the other two. In Process technical language, there is no negative prehension in God: what is received is taken up and what is taken up is creatively and lovingly responded to and in turn received and taken up…
Joseph Bracken, the most important of us Trinitarian Process Theologians, gains further clarity in the direction of preserving the Divine unity with the introduction into process conceptuality of the notion of Fields (compare magnetic or gravitational fields) ontologically equiprimordial with, just as important as, the Events which constitute themselves on their basis and which in turn co-constitute the Fields out of which their successors draw.
This leads eventually to the notion of three Series of Divine Events (a person = a particular kind of series of events or happenings) in unrestricted relationship constituting themselves on the basis of and co-constituting one Divine Field of Activity. This Divine Field of Activity in turn constitutes the final environment for all Cosmic happenings: three Persons in One God, with operations ad extra, beyond God, always involving all three persons. [But a lot of process people don’t like the extra ontological baggage, and Joe Bracken seems himself to have moved on a bit.]
This is just a start: much more could be said (though this is probably more than you might want!). I suspect the low status given to the doctrine of the Trinity in Process Theology in its classical phrases has more to do with the mostly liberal protestant background of the key people involved, rather than with the background theory as such. It might also have something to do with the fact that the background theory was originally constructed by Unitarians.
Once Trinity is introduced it becomes possible to recoup into Process Theology and into our Process Relational Spirituality of Life and Creation as gift the Jewish-Christian-Islamic experience of the gracious giftedness of Creation, while also having an even more intrinsically relational personal God. Without Trinity, Creation becomes a kind of necessity in order for God to be a fully-fledged personal reality, to give God something to relate to so to speak, though not necessarily this creation. This considerably enhances the spirituality of creation and life as gift, while also giving an even stronger metaphysical ground to the relationality of all creation, taking us way beyond individualistic consumer logic.
The best thing I have read lately on Process Theology is by Roland Faber, The Becoming of God (Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon, 2017). For Process Theologians on Trinity, see among others: Trinity in Process edited Marjorie Suchocki and Joseph Bracken, (Continuum, N.Y., 1997). For Joe Bracken, see The One in the Many, (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2001). [/s2If]
