“The Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Religion” by Seán ÓLaoire (Transcript and Video)

Nov 7

I’ve been a listener/follower of Father Seán ÓLaoire’s teachings for some time now. Seán’s perspective on who we are, why we are here, and where we are going is deeply insightful and quite inspiring (though I must preface that I take ALL spiritual teachers and their messages questioningly). I came across this video just a few weeks back and thought, “hmm, this crystallizes much of Father ÓLaoire’s spiritual vision.” It contains a beautiful progression of how we are evolving as a species and specifically, how we are evolving religiously/spiritually. This homily is an A to Z journey starting with the roots of primitive religion and advancing to more transcendent perspectives which he calls spirituality (homo-spiritualus). Fantastic! I’m now passing it on to fellow sojourners via my website to enjoy.

NOTE: As it turns out this video is a summation of the two that proceeded it. I’ve included links to those videos at the bottom of this page.

Peace Always,

Keith Basar

TRANSCRIPT: In the summer of 1963, in between the end of my junior year in high school and the beginning of my senior year in high school I spent seven months in a little village in West Cork called Cloghroe. Cloghroe is an area in which Gaelic is still the mother tongue. I spent the summer visiting all ofthe older people in the village and collecting proverbs from them. At the end of the summer I collected 432 proverbs that got published in the school as the little booklet of proverbs. What I learned then was that stories are the archived wisdom of any culture. You want to go to the wisdom of any culture, listen to their stories, their mythology, and if you want to get the the essential distillation of the stories go to the proverbs — these extraordinary one-liners. I always remember one old man whom I was visiting. He said to me, “you know what, if Christianity had never come to Ireland we could live according to the proverbs. He was absolutely right. When you learn the prophets of any culture it's the the distillation of their wisdom. Every culture has figured out how to bein harmony with God and be in harmony with nature. So all of us are storytellers. I've got my stories, you've got your stories. The question is that we must constantly measure our stories against our experiences of life. For many of us the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we promulgate are stories that have been given to us by other people — and we have accepted them unthinkingly.

Sometimes these stories do not jive with our actual personal experiences. So if your stories or your cosmology or your theology isn't preparing you to be able not just to survive life, but to thrive on life, you're listening to the wrong stories. You're telling yourself the wrong stories.

So the question I want to ask today is what stories are you telling yourself? What stories are you believing — whether it's your own personal story, your family stories, your cultural stories, or the stories you hear from the mass media. What stories are you listening to and believing? And what stories are you telling yourself? So my homilies for me are the stories I tell to myself and to others.

I just shared one short story with you (from “A Sensible God” - chapter 1 — you can hear it on the video I’ve included). That's one of my stories. It represents my experience and my truth in my journey from a four-year-old little child to a 75 year old man. As I recapped the homilies the last two weeks I want to measure that against the theory of the origin and evolution and the further trajectory of religion — as it becomes mystical, esoteric spirituality.

I told you at the beginning (two weeks ago - “Incarnation as Ordination”) that today on planet earth there are about 4,300 different religions. Sociologists of religion divide them into two categories. They claim there are basically two kinds of religions — the “ascending religions” and the “descending religions.” Very briefly, an ascending religion is a religion that is coming from the left brain. It's about the intellect it's about rationality, thinking stuff through. Basically it’s the origin of most of the monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There are two versions of it. There’s the western version and eastern versions. Both are focused on heaven — so they're both ascending — focused on God, on Heaven, and on the afterlife.

In the west the version looks like a “one and done.” You have one incarnation. At the end of this incarnation there's a judgment and you either get the thumbs up or get the thumbs down. You spend the rest of eternity either in heaven or in hell. The eastern version I call the “repeat and rinse version”: reincarnation — where you keep coming back again and again and again until finally you get you get it right. And then you do not have to come back down here anymore. Both of them, whether east or west, the ascending religions talk about the ineffability of God — our utter inability to know God, even if we can experience it. So God is utterly transcendent. The ideal of an ascending religion is to finally leave this incarnational mess on planet Earth and to go back to the heavens. This is the focus and is a kind of masculine version of religion.

The descending religions very often are called more feminine versions. They’re much more earth-based like wicca, or witchcraft in the very best sense of that word — nature based religions. They come more from the right brain — a creative “living in the now,” the rather than living [in a] future heaven or dreading the past sins we've committed. The descending religions live in the now and talk about the immanence of God. The fact that God is enshrined in nature. A kind simplification of that would be pantheism — that God is simply the sum total of everything we can experience.

So you look around and you see the stars at night, the moon, the sun, the oak trees, the mountains and God is the sum total of all of that. That’s a kind of the descending version. For that version heaven is a distraction. You have no idea if it exists, however, you're going to get there — so you’ve got to focus on the here and now and be present. That would be the kind of the descending model. Religious sociologists divide all 4,300 religions all into one of these two buckets.

I believe that there's a third way, a third kind of religion. You find it in shamanism particularly. Which is the oldest religion on the planet. It goes back at least 40,000 years and it's found all over the planet and all of the continents. For shamanism there were three levels to reality. There was the upper level, the middle level, and the lower world. The objective and the great gift of the shaman was to be able to move between these levels of reality and retrieve lost souls. To do that they depended on nature and particularly on plant life. So very many of them used what they call plant medicine — like peyote or ayahuasca. Gifts given them by God, by nature and by the flora particularly, in order to access the other realms — the upper realms and the lower realms as well. In some senses this personal religion is like a tree, particularly a deciduous tree. There's a great phrase in the Hebrew for that it's called “haḥayyīm,” which means the tree of life. Look at a great, great tree — a great big oak tree. If you could see underground it’s almost a mirror image that the surface of the earth provides. A mirror image of what the tree looks like above and below the ground — mirror images of each other. The root system is as wide and as deep as the branches and the leaves go into the sky. For me, that’s the real kind of religion. One which is grounded in the here and now, but is reaching towards the heavens. They're not disconnected from each other, and they're both feeding each other. It's not just that the root system is taking nutrients from the soil and feeding it to the trunk, and to the limbs, into the branches, into the twigs, into the leaves. The leaves also, through photosynthesis are garnishing energy from the sun and transferring it down through the trunk into the root system and they're feeding the roots. So the roots are feeding the leaves as much as the leaves are feeding the roots. That's real mystical religion for me — this dance between heaven and hell, to heaven and earth — which is not just dependent upon one or the other.

I focused a lot on the Celtic religion as a shamanistic system. For the Celts we believed as well in the three levels of reality. There’s the heavenly realm, which is inhabited by the gods and the goddesses. There's the earthly realm, which is inhabited by the Flora and the Fauna, and there's the underworld, inhabited by the ancestors and by the fairy folk. For the Celts there were three orders of priesthood, the Ovates, the Bards and the Druids.

The Ovates were the the wisdom keepers of the future. They kept the wisdom of the future, calling us constantly back into alignment with nature. There were prophets. And I’ve said many times, a prophet is not somebody who foretells the future, but rather somebody who attempts to forestall the future. The prophet is not somebody who can predict the future. The prophet is somebody who's attempting to prevent the future. The prophet can see very clearly where we're headed by our actions, our behavior and our relationships — and is trying to stop us after making this extraordinary mistake and pull us back into our alignment with God or with nature. So this was the function of the Ovate for the Celts.

Then there were the Bards, and the Bards were the keepers of the past. They were the historians and the genealogists. They were the poets, the minstrels, the storytellers and the performing artists. Their function, particularly in storytelling, was not just to entertain their audience or not just to inform the audience, but to transform the audience. The function of any good story, and the function of any great storyteller is not simply to entertain you, although he can do that, and not just to inform you, although she can do that as well, but to transform you — to take you in your imagination into the other realms which are just as real but not as easily visible to you.

The third group were the Druids. These were the intellectual giants of the Celtic world. There were the scientists, the astronomers, the theologians, the priests, the philosophers, the psychologists, the lawyers, and the judges.

All of these groups dealt with the notion of liminality. “Limina” is a latin word meaning a threshold, as you come from outdoors into indoors you go over a limina, a threshold. But for us Celts we had a special term for that it was called a “colloid” — literally a “thin place.” A place between the veil , the mystical and the mundane is diaphanous. Between the sacred and the secular is diaphanous. So these were entry points into other dimensions. There could be sacred places like a mountain top or a lake, but there could also be events like storytelling or music or people. People are what I would call mobile tabernacles of the sacred. People in whose company you realize that you're in sacred terrain and you're moved by them. They don't have to open their mouths. The energy they bring into any situation is an energy of the transcendent meeting the imminent. I'd call those mobile tabernacles of thin places.

The most sacred sacrament for our Celts was our respect for nature. I believe that the goddesses were the archetypes of nature, and the gods are the archetypes of culture. There's this extraordinary marriage and dance that goes on in the Celtic cosmology between the goddesses and the gods, between nature and culture. That for me is a spirituality that weaves both together, like the tree mirror imaging the above, and below. That's where we talked about this notion of liminality. I don't tend to distinguish between religion and spirituality. In my opinion religion is simply the training wheels for spirituality. I use the example of a little toddler who’s just learning to stand, walk or to step around. As long as the child can see mother it'll begin to explore its environment. It'll crawl out into the hallway or into the city room, as long as when it looks back to see mother — it’ll keep exploring. If it can't find mother it will stop exploring. So even if mother moves around the house as long as the child can continue to see mother it'll keep exploring. That’s the function of religion — to give us the confidence to explore until finally as teenagers and adults we don't need to be in the kitchen on the apron strings of mother anymore. We're now free to move on.

Where I live I’ve got a well which goes down 260 feet into the water table which is fed by waters coming from the Sierra’s pristine snow melt. The area is really geologically diffuse. There are lots of different strata and as the water works its way up to the surface it’s taking on a whole bunch of toxins: lead, iron and zinc. I have to do a triple filtration system. I turn hard water into into soft water. I take the toxins out and have to kill the bacteria in the tank where I hold the water. So for me then religion is to spirituality as the well water at the top is to the water table at the bottom. We have to be very, very sure in order to imbibe or consume religion we need to filter out the kind of theologies, dogma and sometimes empty ritual, and sometimes literalistic interpretations of the great mythologies.

This great journey in human history has gone from ignorance, where initially we looked around us and we had no idea what end was up — what the stars were, what the sky meant, where we came from, where we go to. We went from ignorance to creating many gods. From ignorance to polytheism — and eventually from polytheism to monotheism — a belief system that there was only one God. Monotheism gets stuck in a fundamentalist mindset. It gets stuck in dogmatic decrees. It gets stuck in rituals which are merely empties signs, no longer creating what they symbolize anymore. We get stuck in the littlest interpretation of the great wisdom traditions, articulated in our stories and in our proverbs. We begin to unpack them literally and then we get lost.

We have to then move into spirituality. Spirituality itself is also something which is moving continually. We have to learn as spiritual people, not just exist as religious people, [and learn] how to surf the energies and the entities. We need to go trans-spatial — to be able to step beyond space. We need to go trans-temporal — to step beyond time. We need to go transpersonal — to step beyond the ego. And we need to go trans-rational — and I don’t mean irrational, I mean trans-rational. Reason can only take us part of the journey. That's what I had to say about religion versus spirituality.

Then I spoke about our notions of God and who God is not. I would make the claim that God is not a person or a trinity of persons for that matter — although we only we can only have a personal relationship with God. I used the example [of me] I live in the middle of the forest. The forest is not a person, but I'm a person and therefore my relationship to the forest has to be a personal relationship. As a person the only kind of relationship i have with God is as a person. But god is not a person. We can't confine God to a particular articulation. God is not a lawyer. He's not making decrees and punishing infractions of these decrees — although there are cosmic laws in the physical universe and in the spiritual universe — the law of karma or the law of gravity. God is not partisan. So the notion that there's a chosen people are that outside the catholic church [where] there's no redemption are ludicrous notions. God is no more partisan than the sunshine. No matter how many people stand outside in the sunshine nobody is denied light because there are other people standing somewhere else on planet earth under the same sun. God is not a micromanager. God is not involved in the details of our lives and deciding who's going to survive cancer and who's going to die from it [or] which football team is going to win today. God has no interest in those kind of things.

I talked about the different kinds of languages of God. Cataphatic language which is the language theologians employ — how many angels can dance in the head of a pin — that kind of language. Then there’s apophatic language which is the language of the mystics — which is “neti neti” X, no God is not X. Y, no God is not Y, Z, God is not Z. It's the Koan that asks, “what was what did your original face look like before your great grandparents were born?” What is “the sound of one hand clapping?” There are propositions that have no rational solution because they're trying to back you out of your intellect into your soul — so you can experience that which you cannot articulate.

The third kind of language is parabolic language — the language of parable, the language of story, and the language of proverb. This is the language that teachers have to use as they're speaking to us about the ineffability of the reality of the divine. So they use parables, stories, mythology and proverbs.

Then fourthly there's analytical language that religious sociologists will use. I talked about the five year eras I believe of religion becoming spirituality. We began speaking about the gods, seventy thousand years ago — trying to figure out who was responsible for all of this. Then secondly we think we figured out who they were — now we began to have a relationship with them — we began to speak not about the gods, but to the gods using prayer and ritual. Then the third era was speaking on behalf of the gods. (29:50) These were the prophets who purported to speak on behalf of the divine to the rest of us. Fourthly, was the mystic, who spoke as God because the mystics realize that only God is real — nothing exists except God. Everything we experience is simply a word of God made flesh. It's an articulation of the ineffability — and so they speak as God. Finally, there are the hermits who don't speak at all. They experience God so profoundly that there is no way they can even begin to articulate what the experience looks like.

And then finally I spoke about incarnation as ordination. I said to us every Sunday, as I begin mass, that every single one of us is a priest. That our very incarnation ordained us. I look on the text of Isaiah, chapter six, which I read last week for — God’s saying to the seraphim, “whom shall i send, who will go on our behalf, and I say here I am Lord, send me.” [Its like] every single one of us stood in front of God and said, “here i am lord send me. I'll go down to this little planet in its turmoil. I'll parachute down there and i'll become an agent of evolutionary change into spiritual reality.

But we fall asleep, every single one of us almost, we’re asleep at the wheel. We have no idea who we are, who god is, what our mission is about, what our neighbor is, or what was our purpose in coming down here. So we’re struggling with the spacesuit and the vicissitude of social interactions and forgetting that we volunteered to be here now.

So your job when you [kind of] wake up to that realization is to totally accept your priesthood — to be become familiar with thin places. To be able to locate thin places, and thin events — so that you can be a veil piercer — so that you can help a community to glimpse the mystical reality behind the illusion of the merely physical. Anybody who's awake to that reality is ipso facto a priest.

Then there are specific ministries within the priesthood. There are four stages to that. You look at what is the need in my community — that’s the first stage — then you volunteer for it — stage two. Number three you're given the training and necessary to fulfill that function. And number four you're commissioned by your community to act in that capacity on your stay.

And they don't care what the need is, to be a bishop or elector or a social worker, whatever it is if there's a need, a volunteer, the training, and the commissioning, you’re a minister of God.

In forming community then, whether it's the community of C.O.J. or the community of our culture, or the community of our planet, that there are three facets that I emphasized again and again and again. When I was starting little Christian communities in Kenya, between 1972 and 1986, I used three Swahili words, “kujitegemea” which means self-reliance, “kujihudumia mwenyewe,” which means self-ministering and “kujieneza,” which means self-propagating. It’s about a community’s needs to be self-reliant. We can't depend on outsiders to meet our needs. That I believe, as we move forward over the next 10 years in our country, in our world, is going to become more and more important. That communities at every level become self-reliant, that they become self-ministering, and that they become self-promoting or propagating, in the sense that they're doing it so well that others are attracted to the model — and going to imitate it in their own communities. It's going to become more

and more important to be part of communities which are self-reliant, self-ministering and self propagating.

Finally, I concluded with a new vision I have of the cross. The old version of the cross — Jesus hanging on a tree nailed and pierced — for me that's not the final image of Christ consciousness. Rather, it is that the vertical arm of the cross represents the connection between heaven and earth, between the ascending religions and the descending religions, and the horizontal arm represents the connection between all living beings — what Native American Indians will “call all my relations.” At this intersection point is your splink of consciousness. You are holding these two pieces together by your own self-awareness.

Last week I talked about a new kind of version of that. I looked at the great story in the Book of Genesis of Jacob's ladder — with this stairway connecting heaven to earth. So again there are angels going up and down that. It's not just one-way traffic. There are people going up and down that. So that would represent the new vertical arm of the cross and the new horizontal is the journey from Jerusalem to Jericho. In the Book of Joshua we read that about the year 1210 BCE when Joshua conquered Jericho and the city fell. The people spent the next 200 years conquering the land of Canaan until they finally conquered Jerusalem in the year 1010 BCE [where] King David made this his headquarters. It was a 200-year physical in a military conquest. Jesus tells a story [of] the Good Samaritan. A man is going in the opposite direction from Jerusalem down to Jericho and he's mugged on the road. A priest sees him and ignores him, a Levite sees him and ignores him and then a Samaritan — the enemy of the Israelites, sees him, picks him up, ministers [to] him. [He then] takes him to Jericho, pays the bill and makes sure he's fine. This is a journey that starts in Jerusalem and winds up in Jericho. It's a conquest of spirituality, in which nobody is an enemy anymore. It's a conquest of healing. That for me is the horizontal arm of the cross. I actually invited the artists among us (we have many artists in our community) to try to create an artistic rendition of that new cross whose vertical arm represents the connection between heaven and earth — the Jacob's ladder, and whereas horizontal is the connection, the journey from Jerusalem to Jericho — a healing journey of a spiritual conquest, not a military conquest of physical people. So that’s where we went for the last two weeks so we opened it up now to a Question and Answer. (35:06)

SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDW2Y4qy4mA&t=1170s

Preceding Video #2 in series: “Incarnation as Ordination”

First Video #1 in series: “The Training Wheels of Spirituality”

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