Part Seven: WeCreating the Future of Christianity & the World

We love love. And rightly so. It may be the strongest and most meaningful force on the planet. It is what joins us together in deep connection and relationship in our lives. It would probably safe to say that for most, love is what makes life worth living.

Our storytelling is steeped in love as the primary driver. Rare is the movie, book, or show that doesn’t have love of another, longing for love, or the loss of love as one of, if not the central, thrusts of the story. If you try, you can probably hear the Beatles song still echoing in refrain in your head from the title of this article—sans one word of course.

In the English language, love is a “mega-multi-meaning word,” combining a number of different emotions, relations, aspects of connection, affection, romance, attraction, actions, and more. As such, it can seem all-encompassing, a singular monolith.

Especially in Christianity, it is the heart of our spiritual life as well. It is the first and second greatest commandments. It is the center of the life and teaching of Jesus. It is literally the prime word for how we describe God.

And yet, even still, it is not all we need.

The Great Missing Force in Our Lives

Love, most believe, is centered in the realm of the heart. This is our primary relational center, and the seat of where we find meaning in our lives. In a recent Pew Research study, “family” was by far the highest answer for where people most find meaning, with “friends” also coming in the top three or four in most countries.

With or without love, we also seek to find a purpose for our lives. While it may be tied to deeper aspects of our will and underlying motivations, purpose is centered in our mental structure of consciousness. It is directional, most often singularly focused, and motivated by our “self”—which is to say our individual personhood. This is not inherently bad of course, and our initiatives of purpose can lie anywhere along a spectrum of beneficial to destructive. Purpose is usually more easeful and grounded when paired with a healthy structure of meaning rooted in substantial relationships and a deeper story of our lives, rather than just personal, purposeful striving. This is head and heart in harmony and balance, which in itself is often a challenge to live into in this world.

And yet in this world of searching for meaning and purpose, we may feel an ache of longing underneath. A sense, perhaps faint, that there is still something missing. That there is something more.

In religious and spiritual circles, this longing for something more is often attached to God, to a need for the divine in our lives. And this is true, to an extent. But very often, perhaps rooted in the longing for that which seems unattained or not yet present, the “something more” God we long for is made an object of pursuit. A transcendent and separate being or reality we strive toward, give ourselves to in devotion, and ultimately desire to be in union with.

In this scenario, like a great romance, we pursue God and God pursues us, until we “find God” and we are saved, we become a Christian, or we live in the right way so as to remain close to God (the moralist approach). And that’s the crux of the story.

After all, God is love. And love is all you need, right?

But what if this longing isn’t for something or someone external to us—even God—but rather for something deeper within. A force and energy we need not search to find, for it is of our true essence. It comes rooted in our intrinsic value and present in our truest being. And yet, for so many, especially in this day and age, it is missing. It has been lost, covered over, denied, even forgotten.

It is our divine vitality.

And we need it desperately in this time, perhaps now more than ever.

Divine Vitality

There is a sacred flame that burns deep. An inner fire of life. It is the spark of divine animation. And its glow illuminates our very being, whether it blazes or flickers.

Sometimes we feel it as a current. A swell of force like a rising tide propelled by a source much greater than the moon. A sacred fount that bubbles up from deep below. This wellspring never runs dry, and is always flowing.

And yet, many haven’t learned how to tap this well. They don’t teach it in school, after all—nor sadly in most expressions of Christianity (nor many other religions). It even is often buried and covered over, as so many of us live and move in head-centered societies and heart-up inner awareness.

Divine vitality comes from the spiritual womb, the source point of Origin, the fountain of life.

“And from your womb/innermost being will flow rivers of living water.”

— Jesus

Though it may be latent in experiential reality, divine vitality is ever-present and unending. It is a living force which may be suppressed, blocked, or negated, but it cannot be extinguished. It is within every single one of us, even if just as a portal to this source of immense potency.

Our human vitality is what sustains us through our lifespan, but it is only a part of a greater life force of our existence. Divine vitality, when invoked and channeled, arises into our being and is woven into our most authentic humanity, and we are continuously created by and through it in each moment. It is not a singular event, but a great enlivenment of abundant life and dynamic presence at any and all times.

This is an ongoing, living act of WeCreating our very being. For it is God and us at the most co-essential level. The truest essence of who we truly are, both human and divine, co-present from the foundation.

And the force that arises from this source of wholeness isn’t just what sustains us, but rather it is what invigorates and empowers us in our spiritual becoming. It is what inspires, animates, energizes, and enlivens us into an entirely new way of being.

Welcoming Divine Vitality in Us

This is not something we can understand or grasp by the mind alone. It cannot be grasped or seized upon by the mind. We even cannot fully feel into it through our heart, nor from connection in relationship, though that may get us a bit closer. And we can’t “discover” it from a place of higher perspective—which actually might take us further away from entering it. It cannot be elicited in us by witnessing, only inhabited through immersion.

Coming into the lived experience of the flow of divine vitality in our embodied being happens primarily through processes of invocation and evocation that touch into the inner depths from which divine vitality can arise.

We’ll explore some ways and processes next week, but while there are spiritual practices that seek to help us engage in connecting more fully with our divine vitality, in many ways it isn’t so much about the how or specific methodologies. It is not something we conjure up. Coming into it is to some degree always an act of grace and a sacred mystery.

In the integral language of Jean Gebser, the source is rooted in the magic structure of consciousness, which always is somewhat “shadowy.” It actually requires something of a “sacrifice of consciousness” in allowing the spotlight of our mental structure to dim down a bit.

There is no definitive map to it. No easy three-step process. So, we turn to poetry.

In the words of Rumi,
“I wish I could show you the astonishing light of your own being.”

Love is Not All You Need—or is it?

I said before that love is conventionally associated with the heart, and this is true. There is also a love that is more commonly held deeper in the body: Eros.

While this form of love is generally linked to sexual desire or attraction, that is only one way that it exhibits. Even as far back as Plato, he saw eros as a dynamic and creative force, a bridge between the mortal and the divine.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead connected eros with divine love, with God providing “the ‘initial Eros’ or ‘eternal urge of desire’ that lures each finite actual occasion toward the most beautiful possibilities available to it given its local circumstances” (from Matthew David Segall). Or put another way in perhaps the most well-known expression from Whitehead, “the creative advance into novelty.”

Ken Wilber calls eros “spirit-in-action,” the way of love connected to the evolutionary force of life itself. He describes it as “the fundamental, intrinsic, evolutionary drive of the Kosmos to evolve…Eros is a self-organizing force responsible for the ceaseless drive…created by evolution itself.”

The beauty of our recognition of evolution is that this creative force of God is always ongoing and ever-unfolding—even through our very own participation in it. Creation is not a one-time event bestowed from on high by a distant and separate creator God (another example of transcendency bias).

We could say that this evolutionary eros of the universe is simply another name for divine vitality. We can call it the love of God drawing all things into active participation in the creation of new life, the attractive force of joining together to create the future.

Biologically, this moves toward physical procreation, which we see in the way of eros and sexual attraction (which, of course, isn’t just limited to biological reproduction). Spiritually, this creativity can take many more diverse and inspired forms. The motivation and drive itself grows from survival, propagation, or personal desire to more holistic forms of evolution. Our inspiration and desire intensify toward generating the new forms of life needed for the future—be they spiritual, organizational, mystical, structural, cosmological—whatever shape they might take.

We can feel and welcome eros as an evolutionary force of creativity that proliferates through acts of intentional relationality. Coming together to breed the future that is necessary not just for survival, but for the thriving and blossoming of our world, even the universe. We might even call it WeCreating.

Of course, there is an intimacy to this sacred act, though we need not sexualize it. The creation of life has always come about through intense relationality. We can recognize the immense potency of the evolutionary urge and inner force that calls us to bring forth life. And we can channel it into the new creative expressions we will discover together.

God’s Love as Our Force of Life

“Love is not a guide; it is, rather, an engine, the self energy of Being, life itself.”
– Raimon Panikkar

Maybe love actually is all we need, if we embrace a holistic understanding and engagement in love that encompasses eros as a prime channel of divine vitality—though perhaps not the only one. There are other channels too, and we see some today that are twisted, distorted, and veiled in shadow. We must speak to these also, and will in part nine of this series.

But when love, eros, divine vitality is welcomed, tapped into, and lived forth, divine creativity is the most powerful force of enlivenment we can experience. I couldn’t overstate its effect on our state of being. It is the portal of our present lives into our experience of the eternal—not reached through the threshold of death—but rather from the living source and origin of all flowing into our very life, making us anew in our continual becoming and outpouring into the world.

Teilhard de Chardin described this evolution, the creative transformation of human love, as happening when we can find the sufficient force pulling us from our “personal divine centre.”

In our terms, we might call it the spiritual womb of God at the source of our own womb center. This is the portal of the eternal, the wellspring of divine vitality and the fountainhead of eros. From here flows the creative force of life and loving evolution.

If we can grow into living from this divine font, we will be realizing Teilhard’s great prophecy,
“The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.”

Be sure to catch our “Becoming” offering next week, where we’ll share ways of welcoming and engaging with divine vitality in us, including a guided meditation practice of invocation.

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All Images are open-source, used with permission, or created by ICN