In the World Womb
The Loving Evolution of Christianity and the World – Part Four
We are in the world womb. What we see and feel is held within the encompassing darkness of all that we know and cannot know. Beauty and warmth and comfort have been our succor. Joys and delights in the fullest of moments. Anguish too. All that we have tasted and touched. All that we all have endured and given. The fullness of life.
Can you feel them? The contractions squeezing our entire world.
Is this the end?
Or is it only just the beginning?
Let’s not be glib. As if the entire history of life on earth has been but a placenta. Let’s not be too quick to jump that leap of immaterialism, or as a progressivist coping strategy. Let’s not wave away the immensity of loss, suffering, and destruction that is coming, that has already begun.
We often like to think of evolution as the slow and steady advancement of life into further forms of complexity and capacity of consciousness. Progress. The long arc of justice bending its way through time and space. Steps on a staircase—though intermittent in length—always taking us further on up.
But in reality, evolution is messy. It is often violent and chaotic. Not unlike birth. And this time it’s different. Never before have we faced such an existential crisis of global proportions. None of us know how to “handle” this. How to cope. How to understand it.
There will be no C-Section. We are headed down that birth canal one way or another. Kicking and screaming feet-first will only cause more pain. Does that mean that putting our head down and waiting for the push is giving up? No. Just the opposite.
But then, what does that mean for our world as we now know it? How do we respond now?
Can We Save It?
“Maybe these sweeping feelings are aiding that longing to fall into other sites of power, to get lost properly. Maybe there's an unheard-of celebration in the soil, and maybe the only way to these subterranean festivities is with a choreography of loss, a cartography of tears - the kind that blinds us from seeing too clearly.”
- Bayo Akomolafe
If you’ve read parts 1-3 of this series, you know that this is not about giving up. This is not about passivity or mystical quietism.
But we will not be saving the earth.
At least not you. Not me. Not any of us.
To believe so is to stand under the illusion of control and pride. Let’s look at control first.
We are relentlessly faced with our own individual impotence, our own inability to really do anything about the situation we find ourselves in. We don’t have the power to make a real change. If we allow it, we feel this deep inside.
The empire knows this too. And so we are told the story of personal responsibility. If you just do your part and if enough people get on board…and lobby and organize and vote and…if only each would take some accountability and change, even just a little….
It is not enough. As someone recently remarked, we feel guilty about forgetting our tote bags at the grocery store while megalomaniacs burn billions directly into the atmosphere on a joy ride through “space.”
The story of aggregate individual efforts not only foregoes the possibility of collective emergence (probably intentionally), but it also lays the burden of guilt and responsibility onto the shoulders of individuals—crushing us with an existential threat far greater than any person can bear—while shifting the focus away from the systems and structures that are the greatest threat to the earth.
It is not in our control. We are all, to a large degree, victims of the larger systems around us that truly control such things. Again, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make personal changes or adjust our life habits—but to really make a difference, this cannot be the focus of the story. (More on this in the next part of the series).
Perhaps that makes us angry, so we double-down and really take on our role as the rescuer. We will not be victims. We will do our part!
And so comes pride. Perhaps manifesting in the historical Christian foible of taking our savior complex onto ourselves. But even the traditional Christian story did not speak of saving the world in perpetuity. It speaks of destruction and recreation. Apocryphal literature, like the book of Revelation, is complex and should not be read literally—nor as prophetically representative of future events. But rather as a mythical pattern of collapse and renewal, if we even want to try to include the best of what such stories have to offer.
That does not mean we leave things to their destruction or become obsessed with prophecies of impending doom. We do seek to live as regenerators. But perhaps with a little less desperation, a little less certainty. Maybe all of this is bigger than we can know. Maybe there is something happening that is beyond just the science of it all.
As we take on our participation in the body of Christ, in the divine life which is seeking to save the world, our earth-being seeking to save ourselves, we do not run the show. And we find that we don’t have to cling.
Yes, we all have work to do. Vital and incredibly important work. But not saving the earth.
What if the earth does not need saving? What if it has been waiting to be born anew?
If we hold this possibility, we just might reimagine what it is we are in service to. Are we trying to hold on? Or are we, just maybe, just perhaps, in the midst of a radical transformation of reality and life as we know it on this planet?
We never truly know what is possible and what isn’t. And that’s where faith comes in.
A Deeper, Integral Christian Faith
Faith, despite its bastardization at the hands of hyper-rational/mental Christianity, is not the adherence to a particular set of beliefs. This is head-faith. Trusting in mental systems of understanding of “theology” that present the illusion of certainty through right-thinking. Yes, we need mental discernment—though often highly over-emphasized—but this is not where we find our faith.
It’s not just the fundamentalists though who have this understanding. It is anyone who holds their deep, fundamental trust in any idea or concept. The precepts and outlook of science. In a methodology or system of understanding. In evolution or spiritual practice. In saving the earth. In any thing that we use to brace ourselves against the waves of our experienced reality.
The real experience of faith is rooted in the unseen Mystery. It is the core trust that we choose, not with our heads, but from the deepest part of our being. In the God, not of our mother’s understanding—nor even the God of our own understanding—but in the God beyond God. In the infinite mystery of God-Beyond-Us, always further than our mind can quite grasp. But also always more present than our own most intimate being.
To be people of faith means that at the ground of our being, our personal and collective being, in the “inner sanctuary behind the curtain,” “we have this hope as an anchor for our soul” (Heb. 6:19). The hope of infinite mystery intertwined with mystical immanence in the very core of our being.
Faith in an unseen order. An eternal purpose that is not cold and dark. That is not unconscious and random, but is incredibly loving and profoundly generative. The Mystery that we can’t see yet may feel to be more true than anything we know.
Faith in an ever-present upspringing of spirit in the fibers of our embodied presence. In the unfolding of consciousness now and always, giving of itself from the fount of life, the divine wellspring flowing forth with unending vigor and joy. In the womb of all things. From the world womb. From the unified whole, the source within your very own spiritual womb.
In the meeting point of the infinite and the immanent, faith is born again today. Sometimes we call it love.
And not alone. For God is also with us still. The very present forms of God-Beside-Us are always there to guide us along the way, to sit with us, to love and care for us. Just as we might do for one another and for the world.
Toward the Black Hole
“When we sink into the center of our internal Christ-Singularity and enter the reality on the brand-New Creation side of the ending black hole (the Omega-point), we experience the love that concludes all things. Our spirit and soul resonate with the purpose that comes from being included in the story of God involving the entire Cosmos.”
– Mo Thomas
There is no light ahead. There is no way to see what is on the other side, or if there even is another side. Our conjectures will not help us. Our plans will run their course. Not without meaning. Not without purpose. And the Christ-singularity awaits.
There is a freedom in not knowing. A release into the divine womb of care. Letting our Mother do her work while we live and play in our own perfect way.
In our hearts, we have one another within this great womb. In our mystical kinship we share our hopes and our fears. Our joy and our despair. Savoring together and grieving together.
We might become evolutionary doulas, walking with and beside one another through the deaths and the births. Wisdom guides ourselves, holding hands and hearts. Touchpoints of faith and love.
We might find ourselves in hospice care of the old or in the midwifing of the new. Preservation and transformation. Gardens and Laboratories. Compost and regeneration. Sanctuaries of pews sanctuaries of plants.
We might simply weep tears of the womb. The mystical prayer of tears for all that is unseen and unknown. For all that already has been and will be. To wash what words cannot touch.
Or we might be the rain dancers of expectancy. Actively waiting with joy for the water to break, while we dance in the streets and in the forests. There’s always a place for the holy fools.
Whatever we do and be, may it be in the flow of faith from the depths of Mystery in and through our unique and loving becoming, into the here and now in this particular and precious life. Sacred and wild play from the depths of our souls.
The immensity of this global existential crisis means that it carries an extreme amount of energy. Yes, more than we can have any chance of holding individually—but if we can bear it collectively, in the world womb, it just might be the well of vital energy desperately needed to transform ourselves and this world into the new heaven and a new earth we have for so long dreamt possible.
I’m not sure yet if I’ve fully found the hope. In my better moments, sometimes I’m able to touch it. I am, however, full of love. And love hopes all things—regardless of the outcome. I believe nothing is more generative than a womb immersed in love.
I offer all of this with humility, for I don’t have any answers either. I have no “knowing” beyond my own faith. Beyond the Mystery that from time to time wells up in my belly and in my heart.
As I sat one day in the gazebo, wasps hovering above, the fields around buzzing and humming with insects jumping and birds flying from flower to grass—there, yes there, it came again. The wave of apprehension. How long will this be here? Will we still be here?
And then I was enfolded in a deeper sense. The sound did not fade but grew immensely. The watery echo of the womb reverberated along with the steady heartbeat of life, keeping time with the underlying pulse of the Mother.
This is all my precious womb.
If you could only taste but one drop of nectar
from the fields filled with the flowers of Life
the fields beyond this simple meadow
This blade of grass within which you sit.
I AM giving birth
Through the water and the trees
Through the fires and the floods
Through the mountains and the hollows
Through the melting ice and the earthquakes
And yes, through each one of us,
Bearing a new heaven and a new earth within and without.