Just like a child evolving through the stages of toddlerhood to adulthood, each of us is also on an evolutionary journey through the stages of self-centeredness to tribal-centeredness to world-centeredness to, ultimately, cosmic-centeredness.
In other words: Each of us is a being of a greater creation, growing up into the awareness that we are part of a story much larger than the few short years we live in our own evolving body.
When we seek the meaning of our lives, we often turn to religious institutions to help us evolve. We sense that who and what we are right now is not the full image of what and who we might be. Even as our body rises and falls, grows empowered and then ages in ways that make us weaker, we sense that there is an inner body — a soul or spirit, a me inside of me, a watcher from within — that is both “my body” and not really or fully just “my body.” We sense there is more to life than the few short years that we live as creatures inside our American capitalist, consumerist, militarily addicted lives.
But often our religious institutions miss the intimacy of our deepest questions. Far too often our religions give us data rather than feeling, give us answers rather than explorations. We learn weird stories about dead men rising from graves or births from women who haven’t had sex or seas that part for some but drown others or blue-skinned warriors that ride in chariots or illiterate men who sit in caves as receptors of divine script. The religious stories that are told to help us grasp the story of our inside life quite often become irrelevant; they are unable to unlock the yearnings of our desire.
We need to evolve beyond the tribal security stories we’ve been told. We need new stories that connect the few short years we live in bodies to the evolving story that began billions of years ago in the miracle of Spirit becoming matter in what we refer to as the Big Bang. We need new stories that connect us into the greater tribe of creation itself.
We all belong to each other. We are all kinfolk. We are all part of a fabric of meaning that weaves rocks and hills, water and air, animals and humans together in a story of cooperation and communion. We need new stories of affirmation and encouragement that teach us to love this earth, love each other, love each self as one big connected, mutually interdependent body.
Only a new story that opens our tribe to a time when tribes are no more can save us. Only that new story can truly liberate us from capitalist, consumer militarism that amounts to death.