Ancestral Grace Quotes

“As I suggest in a previous work (O'Murchu 2000), we need a new metaphor to transcend the spiritual malaise of our time. I propose the metaphor or homecoming, and my central argument is that we need to come home, not to God, religion, or church, but to the creation to which we innately belong. Our exile, alienation, and estrangement are not from God, but from creation. With God everything is basically okay. Our spiritual not-at-home-ness has to do with our ambivalence and ambiguity toward God's creation.

The long journey involved in this homecoming has several dimensions. It involves coming home to where God first encounters us, not with the threat of judgment or punishment, but with the embrace of unconditional love. From God's point of view. that is expressed first and foremost in the cosmic and planetary creation. Long before humans ever came to be, long before formal religion was ever conceived, God was birthing forth ancestral giftedness in the unfolding of stars and galaxies, of planets and quasars, including the paradoxical cacophony of building up and tearing down (Jer. 1:10) as the web of universal life unfolded.”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story

“Among the most accessible of writers on this subject is the systems theorist Ervin Laszlo. Many of his seminal ideas, articulated with the average reader in mind, come together in his description of the ‘Akashic field’, the interactive realm of quantum fluctuations, culminating in a supercoherent state empowering all structures in creation, whether atoms, organisms, or galaxies. Laszlo goes on to raise a crucial question, central to the deliberations of this book. ‘Could it be that our consciousness is linked with other consciousnesses through an inter-connecting Akashic field, much as galaxies are linked in the cosmos quanta in the microworld, and organisms in the world of the living?’ The link with contemporary brain studies is informatively reviewed by Wallace.”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story

“For Jung, the collective unconscious can simply be described as an envelope of wisdom embracing everything in creation, humans included. For Jung, it is essentially of God and may well be considered as the wise and enduring power of divine Spirit infused throughout the whole of creation….Long dismissed as an esoteric illusive fantasy, the collective unconscious begins to look very similar to the notion of the creative vacuum of pure space, or modern physics.”
― Diarmuid O'Murchu, Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story