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Spiritual evolution--believe it or not?
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Meet Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, a fossil dating back 4.4 million years. In spite of the fact that some conservative Christians are fond of insisting that “evolution is only a theory”--it is not. It's a fact. The mechanism of evolution (Darwin argued for natural selection) is the theoretical part.
Evolution is of course the adaptation and mutations that occur in an organism over time. As environments change, the organisms that live in the environments must change.
It is beyond me how people cannot believe in the evolution of the natural world. If, when I moved to the mid west from California I would have walked around in shorts and tee shirts throughout the winter I would have lost my legs and arms by now. When you are in a new environment you must adapt if you are to survive. This is not only a biological truth but also a spiritual one.
When the life you have been living changes, when circumstances change, as people near and dear come and go, you either evolve into something more or something new—or you shrink into or you fade away. The evolution we see in the material world mirrors what is also a fact: spiritual evolution.
To evolve means that while some things remain the same—others are always changing.
Like many Protestant churches, The Lake Street Church of Evanston celebrates the first Sunday in October as World Communion Sunday. For more than a decade, we have celebrated this Sunday with an interfaith service comprised of eight different religious traditions. We gather with Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Indigenous, Jews and Muslims to celebrate not only our religious diversity but also our deeper unity as human beings.
My dear friend, the late Brother Wayne Teasdale, developed the term interspirituality. He said that the dramatic shift in global human consciousness is preparing us to live in a universal civilization in which human beings recognize their spiritual interdependence as human beings. We can remain rooted in our own tradition, he said, without being stuck in it. Being rooted in a tradition is what keeps us our feet on the ground. But we can also branch out.
We branch out because more light is available than can be seen through the prism of our parochialisms. In this way we can cultivate a new and larger spiritual community; one that is rooted in our own tradition but not limited to it. We can move from a parochial understanding of religion to a universal understanding of interspirituality.
We are all a part of each other.
In the Abrahamic traditions, there are admonitions to welcome the stranger. On his road to enlightenment the Buddha welcomed strangers and strange experiences. The Hindu sacred text, The Upanishads, says “Let a person never turn away a stranger from his house; that is the rule. Therefore a man should, by all means, acquire much food, for good people say to the stranger: 'There is enough food for you.’”
I was recently invited to address a group of Muslim Imams-in-training to talk about Christianity as a religion embodies great diversity. I know I will learn something from these Imams. I hope I can help them better understand Christianity.
The interspiritual community becomes a guru, a giver of light, as we learn to welcome the strangers of other communities into our own—not to convert but to better understand how we are already connected.
It is true that countervailing forces are always present. But a collective shift of consciousness is palpably rising up within and among us. Barbara Marx Hubbard calls this Conscious Evolution.
While the evolution of the physical world is a fact, its mechanisms remain a mystery. The evolution of spiritual consciousness is no less a fact—and no less a mystery. It is also an enduring reminder that all things are possible.
As the writer of the Epistle of I John in the New Testament reminds us: “Beloved, we are God’s children now, it does not yet appear what we shall be…”
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