In August 2010, just past the waxing quarter moon, I attended a retreat on Celtic spirituality and peacemaking in Northern Ireland. The hosts of the retreat asked us to respect the safe and sacred space created by the community, and refrain from attributing direct quotes to any of the attendants or speakers. With that in mind, the following are excerpts from the journal I kept.
Day Five — Brigid, Patrick and the Pub
I read something interesting in Thomas Berry this morning, connecting the Eastern religious traditions with a focus on the spatial, and Western religious traditions with a focus on the temporal. (p. 42, The Sacred Universe
) The search and process of true-self authenticity, as he claims is the purpose of any religion, is located in the ever-present moment of wholeness and interconnection, and is in this way spatial, in Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism; whereas Western religious traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, conceive of the authentic self as a work-in-process, a being-becoming, so that at any given moment we are only a fragment of our whole selves along a linear journey towards an ultimate end. What we need, he says then, is a balance between the two, and more specifically to restore the balance in a Western society too overly focused on the temporal and linear, which has sacrificed the sacredness of the here-now immediate moment for the sake of some indefinite, idealized future.