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Return To Spirit: After the Mythic Church

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Australian psychologist and priest Desmond Murphy's book arises from a concern to undercover the deep dynamics at work in the radical upheavals that have taken place in the Catholic Church during the last three decades. Why have these changes taken place? What happened to the reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council? Why are there traditionalists, conservatives, and progressives fighting it out for control of the Church? Why have so many left the Church, others become cynical, still others turned to other sources of spiritual nourishment? What role does the Church hierarchy really play in the hearts and minds of the faithful?

Murphy addresses such far-ranging questions in an interdisciplinary work that draws on historical studies, the `new physics', and contemporary theology. However, the main source of the new paradigm he proposes for understanding the Church is Transpersonal Psychology.

Transpersonal Psychology (TS) is primarily the work of an American, Ken Wilber, who has developed a remarkable synthesis of psychology, science, and spirituality, drawing on a range of religious traditions. Some see him as the contemporary successor to Carl Jung. TS is difficult to explain in a nutshell, but proposes a hierarchical sequence of stages through which human consciousness progresses.

When applied to the community of the Church, TS has some similarities with Fowler's Stages of Faith; both help us to understand the diversity of worldviews in the Church that so often results in confusion and conflict. However, Wilber's paradigm, as applied by Murphy, is much more ambitious in scope. It claims to explain the major dynamics at work in the Church, including what it holds to be the counterproductive work of those working for a `Catholic restoration', and to assist those wishing work for the evolution of the Catholic Church to a higher spiritual level.

The paradigm Murphy proposes is ambitious and revealing. It warrants careful consideration and discussion. It avoids judgment of our contemporarie! s in the Church. It presents a powerful vision of a Church in touch with and concerned for the spiritual development of its people. It will give understanding and encouragement for many dissatisfied with the pace of change in the Church today. And it presents an innovative encounter between the Catholic community and a credible new psychology that treats the spiritual dimension of the human person with rare sympathy. [Book of the Month Selection, John Garratt Catholic Book Club.]

I was encouraged to see Ken Wilber's Transpersonal Psychology in a real-life application. I found Murphy's synopsis of Wilber's works to be an excellent review of Transpersonal Psychology. I can understand the process of transformation that Murphy proposes for the Church. But after reading the book, I was left with the nagging question of "Why?" The same stumbling blocks that Murphy describes in 1997 were there when I took leave of the Catholic Church 30 years ago. I am afraid that these stumblings blocks are always going to be there. As I see it, the Catholic Church has too many skeletons in the closet.(Many of them were probably left behind during the Inquisition.) Not only that, the Church is so bogged down its canon law that I cannot even see it transforming from the mythic to the rational, much less to the higher spiritual realms. After reading the book, I had this image of a man sitting on top of a the carcass of a dead elephant trying to get the elephant to get up and move down the road. I just sat there and thought about it and wondered why the man would not just leave the elephant and continue on his journey unencumbered by the dead weight. Murphy says that "More can be done as part of the Church than outside of it." Of course, I disagree with this, because I spent many years trying to work inside of the church, and I found myself being depleted, because of the resistance I encountered. I have now found that there are spiritual paths out there that don't require you to fight your way through the quagmire of "tradition, hierarchy, and dogma." I'm sure that Murphy is well aware of these, having read Ken Wilber. One can get right to the spiritual without having to tiptoe around meaningless doctrine. Who needs to try to drag a dead elephant into the twenty-first century?