In the Beginning Was the Spirit: Science, Religion and Indigenous Spirituality

This is a careful book and a very bold book. Diarmuid O'Murchu is seeking to push out the present boundaries of modern Science and Religion, which are rooted together in the values of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. These values were and are empirical, rational, investigatory, materialistic and individualistic. They saw the beginnings and growth of capitalism worldwide; the emergence of our present proof-based science; the European exploration and possession of cultures that had previously been largely unknown to Europeans, in Africa, India, northern and southern America, Australia; and a Christianity which has been based on the authoritarian values of Empire from the 3rd century onward under Rome. These values dominate our modern world. They put humans at the centre of the Universe, and in a grasping and arrogant way.

Diarmuid, a Catholic priest of the Sacred Heart Missionary Congregation, is the author of many books exploring the deep and profound roots of Christianity and its sense of the sacred. He has considered the global dimensions of Christianity for major disciplines in the West, especially the materialistic Science most valued today, which is of course the kind of Science questioned by the Scientific and Medical Network.

I don't feel like reviewing this book in the ordinary way, I feel like cheering it, and saying – yes, of course, this is the truth! And truth given in a kind, careful, elegant way, allowing the reader to pause from time to time in each chapter and consider what has been said without expectation from the author.

The sense of Spirit is present from the beginning of the book – the Spirit which is different from Soul and Religion – 'soul' is too individual in the way we usually mean it, and religion is too prescriptive with its God seen as a dominating male human figure. But as a Christian, the author has contemplated and lived with the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity: what he wants, though, is the inclusion of what he calls the Great Spirit – the spirit of the universe in which all creation shares. In the Christian Trinity, God the Father, and Jesus, are of course the first divine figures, very central. The Holy Spirit has been seen in what he calls a 'more ambiguous' role for many Christians – though less so in the Orthodox churches influenced by Eastern understanding.

The middle chapters of the book are a survey of some of the earlier spiritual beliefs of the human race. He gives an extended and fascinating account of indigenous peoples and their relationships to each other, to land, to spirituality and to the universe, in what we now call Africa, South and North America, and Australia. He considers too the ancient religions of the East, especially in India and China, especially Hindu, Jain and Taoist understanding of the roots of our existence. Whatever the difference in the content of the early religions, their deepest approach to the mystery of their lives is expressed by Chief Seattle, an American Indian protesting in 1854 at the enslavement of his country by the Europeans: "Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect." We have only to look at the dangerous mess of our modern world to see how true this is when this understanding is lost.

What can we learn from earlier societies that is relevant today? A long section of Diarmuid's book is an exploration of the original Great Spirit based on our early close connections with the earth and its creatures, where life is mysterious and the spirit present in all beings. In Eastern thought, spirit is synonymous with Chi, energy, the life force, our essential being. In Hindu thought, Brahman is the Great Spirit and Atman that element of the spirit at the individual centre of every living being: it is all One. I would like to quote Diarmuid's Pause on page 95: "It is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but they told the stories symbolically and we are dumb enough to take them literally". Modern rational cultures are largely oblivious of symbolism, of the depth of being – though of course many individuals relate and find their personal paths to a deeper understanding. Our knowledge in general is rational not spiritual, concerned with usefulness rather than with meaning.

The majority of societies on earth have seen the Spirit not as an impersonal power, but as a personal presence in each of us, and in the universe as a whole, creating a multitude of relationships at all levels of life – with individuals, friends, families, animals and plants, organisations, causes, the earth and the universe – all these are alive. We can relate from our own deepest being, because the Great Spirit is at the heart of all being, over time and space. We come from spirit and return to spirit at death. This has been at the heart of so many cultures since the beginning of human life on earth. But it is not a common experience in the modern world. This dimension is largely missing in most of our societies and in our present world order. It is also denied in most of the sciences and religions, and in the present organisation of human knowledge, where the Western propensity for cutting through the whole often destroys the integrity of what is there. Western thought is dualistic – things are either good or bad: but the wiser older understanding is that 'good' and the ' bad' is present in all: we live with ambiguity and need depth. So many of us feel that human society is following a disastrous path in many ways. This book is a plea for us to follow an older wiser path, where humans are seen as a recently arrived presence in a very old universe, and we need compassion, humility and wisdom, not acquisition. In the beginning was the Spirit: she is still here.