Contents:
It follows the Christian calendar, including prayers for each season i.
This last question and answer are something Bruce and I are discussing; it is under review. When the science of evolution is told as sacred story, the human heart requires new prayers to express itself. This is the God that scientist RichardDawkins is so hard on in his writings. As an aid to private devotional practice, they stir the soul to awaken to a cosmic identity - being the presence of the evolving universe in human form. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Living Systems in Evolution. Each section begins with a brief introduction and continues with one or more prayers on the subject.
Christmas, Lent, Easter, etc. Each section begins with a brief introduction and continues with one or more prayers on the subject. However, this is no ordinary prayer book, as the title ought to let you know. It is a prayer book based on what Sanguin calls "evolutionary Christian spirituality. To integrate science into our spirituality would be a daunting task all on its own.
To do so with a specific scientific model in mind even more so and fraught with dangers as well. It has been the conflation of theology and liturgy with science in mistaken and unhelpful ways which has led to the position many within the Christian faith find themselves today; namely, feeling as if science and faith are incompatible which they are not.
If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics Paperback – November 1, A collection of prayers like If Darwin Prayed comes along once in a very long time. “If Charles Darwin had not been in a spiritual muddle because of the in-adequacy of his era's dominant theology, he might well have prayed with the power and.
As a Christian I believe that all truth is God's truth and all we do should be done to glorify God. However, I also believe that wisdom dictates some aspects of our lives are more difficult to bring together and some lines of thought much harder to walk between. So, to enter this minefield claiming that not only are these two things not incompatible but they can also be conjoined in our spirituality is brave and, perhaps, foolhardy. Sadly, Sanguin cannot even focus on this task at hand and manages, along the way, to incorporate into his theology a good deal else besides any science of evolution.
The hint of this comes in his introduction when he speaks of the 'evolutionary nature of reality. What this step actually does is allow Sanguin to label any change, transformation, or transfiguration as just another aspect of evolution.
When it comes to the biblical revelation, or any other source of 'wisdom' ranging from Krishna, to Buddha, and more , Sanguin can now claim that these early spiritualists 'intuited' the 'evolutionary nature' of existence and we can see it in this or that aspect of their teaching. That word, 'intuited', became a signal for me by about halfway throughout the book. What it said was: By the time I finished this book I found myself in the midst of pluralism, relativism, please note: And they cross that line by far enough that I can definitively say they are in the land of mumbo-jumbo , and lots of bad theology.
Does Sanguin succeed in his goal? Almost twenty years ago, on a silent retreat, I had an experience in which I understood myself to be the presence of the universe in human form. The dualistic separation between myself and the universe collapsed. I realized that, after I was a product of the evolutionary process of the cosmos. More than that, the universe was continuing its evolutionary unfolding in and through me.
My identity shifted from a very small and buffered sense of myself to a self-image as large and unified as the universe itself. At this point in the story, my wife always reminds me that this kind of talk sounds outrageously narcissistic unless I point out that this universal identity is also true of every reader of this sentence!
Interestingly, though, it was this experience of realizing my larger cosmic identity that was the surest remedy for my narcissism. My little self ego was swallowed up by a more expansive identity: I awoke to a universe that was alive in me and animated by Spirit. When we pay close attention to this cosmic impulse to evolve, and consciously consent to its influence and power, we awaken to a dimension of ourselves that the ancients called our soul. We discover our intrinsic purpose, one that is soul-sized, and we gain the desire and capacity to be centres of a sacred evolutionary impulse to create the future that Jesus called the kin g dom of God.
Our creative self-expression becomes a moral imperative from the perspective of this big self. In and through this self-expression we discover that the future is within us. Within the miracle of a living and evolving universe, our understanding evolves regarding God, the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, what it means to be a faith community, and what it means to be human.
There is no final, unchanging form of Christianity. The failure to update our theological and liturgical models has resulted in modes of worship, spiritual practice, and images of God, that are out of sync with reality and Reality as we know it to be. Updating Our Image of God. God comes to you in whatever image you have been able to form of. The wiser and broader and more gorgeous the image, the. What if our images of God were informed by evolution as both a biological and spiritual impulse? The great story of the universe reveals that there is no disconnection anywhere in the universe.
We are cousins with stars, giraffes, amoebas, bananas—let alone monkeys! We share an unbroken lineage with all of life. This is a stunning revelation. Mystics have intuited it, but now science has revealed it to be fact. We share a single energy with every form and every mode of consciousness in the universe.
This knowledge should be the cause for great celebration in our churches every Sunday and in our prayer life throughout the week. The illusion of separateness is just that—an illusion reinforced by a modernist ideology of materialism.
The congregation I have been serving in Vancouver has been encouraging. This collection is my way of listening to the whispering of the angels of Canadian Memorial United Church in Vancouver , British Columbia. Evolution is all about adapting to changing life conditions. And conditions have indeed changed in our neck of the woods. Our church is located in a neighbourhood that boasts the highest percentage of people in the world who claim no religious affiliation.
Mention the word Christ out loud in a local Starbucks and watch it empty. Part of this aversion to Christianity is due, of course, to a checkered history with violence and rigid belief systems. But it is my experience that when these intrepid souls discover that there is a community that is taking the discoveries of science and integrating them with our own rich wisdom tradition, they are willing to give us half a chance. Very often, their early impressions come through a Sunday morning service. These savvy visitors pay attention to the language of the prayers and the cosmology reflected in the hymns.
The Three Faces of God. Just a quick note about the God I am addressing in these prayers. American philosopher and founder of Integral Philosophy, Ken Wilber, helped me to see and validate what he calls the three faces of God or the of God. God emerges in the consciousness of human beings and through these three faces: Sadly, many traditions, including Christianity, have privileged one face over the others and have actively attacked or suppressed the faces of God.
The reader may notice that many of these prayers—but not all—begin with the traditional for Christianity second-person face of God, referring to God as the Holy One. This is not because I reject the first- and third-person faces of God.
Rather, this is simply an acknowledgment that the second-person face ofGod is the portal through which the majority of people in mainline Christianity will be able to expand into and eventually embrace the other faces of God. Rather, it is an affirmation that God is personal. It has taken the universe almost fourteen billion years to arrive at the qualities of consciousness—compassion, empathy, freedom, and love—that we associate with personhood.
It is only natural that we would apply a metaphor which attempts to express an astounding evolutionary achievement—personhood—to the Ultimate Source. God is more than we could ever mean by personal, and yet is certainly not less than what we mean by this metaphor.
In my book The Emerging Church I include two chapters that describe how our images of God and Christ will be translated through our stage of consciousness, or worldview. If a person sees the world through a mythic or traditional worldview, then he may interpret the second-person face of God the Great I-Thou as literally a man with a white beard in a long, flowing gown—in other words, as a person.
This is the God that scientist RichardDawkins is so hard on in his writings. I often wish that he would turn his considerable intellect to the God of process theology or evolutionary theology.