The Cosmic Christ in All Her Glory Among Us
This week’s rhythm of loving evolution: Beckoning
We are offered a lure from Spirit, a call of the divine, an invitation to learning, opening, and hearing how God is beckoning us to become and be in new and deeper ways.
As you read this article, you are invited to listen for how spirit is beckoning you—and us, communally—into our divine participation and WeCreating the loving evolution of Christianity and the world.
Beloved Community – Part Four
ICN Living Lineage Series
In welcoming the divine reality of our Beloved Community, we have consciously included the non-material presence of spirit guides in our midst over the last weeks in part three. Now, we turn to specifically and truly integrate the substance of material reality as a vital and fundamental dynamic of our living community, our divine communion.
Somewhat paradoxically, this is a re-in-corp-oration (a re-bodying) of both the more-than-human realm and a re-unifying of the divine feminine as the Source and lifeblood of our communal vitality.
This is deliberate, and needs to be called forth explicitly—not as a division of masculine and feminine, but because of the long history in Christianity and other traditions of denying, suppressing, and disowning the feminine in abusive, toxic, and deeply harmful ways—to both women and men.
We also recognize and honor the feminine and masculine in both male and female forms, across the spectrum and beyond. While most often linked and associated, the energies and qualities of the feminine and masculine are not the same as nor bound to biological sex and gender identity.
Today, we need to expressly emphasize the feminine—especially in an evolving Christianity—because of the great imbalance and oppression that has been ongoing for centuries. Only with this rebalancing and healthy integration can we inhabit our holistic divine being, a whole communion of life that is incarnated through matter in particular forms.
ICN embraces and celebrates the Divine Feminine
It is perhaps primarily from the heritage of patriarchy and toxic masculinity that we have been separated from nature, from the earth. As such, the human was separated from the rest of the universe. In doing so, we disowned our greater community, our truer communion with nature, with animals, with the cosmos, and with matter.
As a core element of the divine reality of our beloved community, in harmony with a primarily feminine integration with the substance of life, we choose to come home to our true communion with the more-than-human realms.
In integration with spirit and matter, we have welcomed spirit guides. And now we welcome the entirety of the material universe as “Christ,” the body of God, the divine family of our true being.
Our living community with all things.
This is not the only aspect of the divine feminine—far from it. And we have explored and welcomed various other dynamics in the past, including her personal forms, Christ-Sophia nature, and embodied presence in us.
You can explore these more through our past divine feminine writings—one of which comprises the rest of the writing below, drawn from Advent, 2023. You can also read more in Paul’s book, Is It Okay to Call God Mother.
“By virtue of God’s immersion in the world’s womb, the great waters of the kingdom of matter have, without even a ripple, been imbued with life. The immense host which is the universe is made flesh.”
— Teilhard de Chardin
— Teilhard de Chardin
The question of consciousness is one of the enduring mysteries of both science and spirituality. Certainly no one has all of the answers about it, and we carry conscious and unconscious assumptions about its nature, particularly depending on our religious upbringing and cultural background.
Many of our presuppositions about the nature of consciousness, especially in the heavily-Platonic-influenced Christian tradition, are rooted in a separation of matter and spirit. Without going into the long philosophical and theological history of this split, it will suffice to say that this orientation is a more traditionally masculine and dualistic approach. As such, consciousness is often separated—implicitly and explicitly—into the realm of spirit and immateriality, detached from the physical.
The more feminine principle of life does not split knowing and being, awareness and presence, mind and body. It does not privilege the experience of reality from the objective and removed perspective, but rather lives enmeshed in the manifest, through the energy of imbued presence in the midst of the substance of things. Things like the trees, the soil, the cat, the baby crying, the dirty toilet, the grief of loss, the joy of delight, the lack of sleep, the sick, the hurt, and the pearls of irritation. And everything else that is alive and dead, growing and composting, here and now. All that has been and is yet to come.
This is where our consciousness lives while we’re on this earth. And it is not only present in our mental recognition and reflective human awareness.
We are learning more about the consciousness of animals, plants, and even fungi. While the nature of these other forms of awareness is still somewhat undetermined and being further discovered, we are seeing our human-centric assumptions and “domination attitude” dismantling more and more. Those in power in some parts of the world still cling to these ways of being, but they cannot hold their grip for too long—our evolving consciousness as a whole won’t allow it.
Escaping the confines of materiality (and spirituality rooted in similar fundamental assumptions, even when they are in opposition to it), we can come to not only see but also experience how all of life is animated in spirit. There is a mystical, fundamental—perhaps even quantum—presence of spirit/energy/consciousness in all things. This is the Cosmic Christ. And she lives and moves among us.
This is crucial to our spirituality because it anchors our sense of where we find God, where we look for the divine. If we are searching for heaven in an entirely removed realm, and expecting spirit to appear only in an ethereal ghostly haze—an immaterial, faint external object—we will continue to disembody and disconnect from “earthly” things (which is tellingly often used as a pejorative). And in so doing we will further doom the earth.
The Christ-principle in its most cosmic sense is rooted in the immanence and immediacy of the divine in materiality. In and through the physical, which is not divorced from spirit. Christ is the divine incarnated, enfleshed, and somatized. So Christ Consciousness is the living, embodied awareness from the divine entwined and present in us, coming in the energy and knowing through our very material element of being. This is God-With-Us, Emmanuel in the heart of matter, in the deepest substance of all things.
“Our Lady Christ of the Earth 1” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
The Feminine Christ Immersed in Life
“This recovery of the feminine divine is essential in correcting an almost exclusive emphasis on the masculine nature of God in the Christian tradition. In and through a scientific lens, sacred Wisdom manifests as the evolutionary intelligence inherent in all of Her creatures, including, but not limited to, the human ones.”
— Bruce Sanguin
This is why at ICN we practice Whole-Body Mystical Awakening. Because we are dedicated to doing the spiritual work of reinhabiting the fullness of our embodied divinity. We are seeking to cultivate the Christ Consciousness that lives within us, awakening to the energy and aliveness of spirit incarnated in us.
Many spiritual practices are centered in the mind, which is helpful insofar as that goes. WBMA most often starts in the heart, but it is centered in the whole body. And the body is rooted in material reality, which is grounded and present in and through the earth. We most directly enter into this awareness in our practice through our feet center, though we engage in the somatic presence and experience in all of our embodied centers and whole-being.
Materiality goes beyond the human of course, and therefore is certainly not bound to gender. Though there is a deep groove of the manifest world being linked with the feminine. We speak of Mother Nature and Mother Earth. Gaia is the feminine goddess, the soul of the earth. In Hinduism, Shakti is the feminine life force energy, which we’ll look at more here shortly.
Again, the feminine is immersed in the substance of life, not in hard, inert materiality, but in the flowing, dynamic energy and soul of matter. Nature is not an object we subjugate and extract from. It is the body of God amidst which we dwell—not as separate beings but an intricate and intimate intrabeing. We don’t just connect to nature, we are nature. And in our growing Christ Consciousness we can further evolve into our becoming nature. This integration is a crucial part of our incarnated divine participation, not only for our wholeness but also to have the grounding and strength to show up fully in the world.
In our awakening to Christ Consciousness permeated through our embodied being, we welcome the feminine energy that is the very life force of the universe. This is the Christ Energy, the sacred Wisdom woven in the fabric of all things. It is the evolutionary intelligence and vibratory energy that is the substratum of everything and is the potency behind all growth and change.
Interspiritual Roots of This Energy
“When we engage these Shaktis, we touch into the deep structures of the cosmos and of ourselves. We touch the source code, the hard drive of consciousness itself.” — Sally Kempton
In Hinduism, Shakti is the fundamental cosmic energy that underlies all things. It is a feminine power, embodied in goddesses but more prevalent as the dynamic force that permeates the whole universe. It is the active dimension of the divine, responsible for life, creation, and ongoing evolution.
This innate power in material reality is something that we can actively engage with, if we recognize its force and welcome its flow. We can awaken to the dynamic energy of this inner divine power. It can vitalize our embodied experience with a divinely energized and charged felt sense of physical presence.
Perhaps most commonly, Shakti is released in us through the unfurling of Kundalini, the hidden power of spiritual awakening latent within us. To awaken Kundalini is to bring alive the cosmic energy within us, to welcome the current of divine charge throughout our body. Her energy transforms our nervous system and rewires our inner architecture, so that we can more consciously participate in our awakened divine consciousness as an embodied experience. She gives us the power to transform our consciousness in creative ways, personally and collectively. When we share with others in communal movements of divine energy, we engage in and create channels that make it easier for spirit to move in the world. In our Christian mystical tradition, we might call this the cosmic feminine Christ Energy.
When I (Luke) had my awakening experience of this Christ energy, it was very helpful for me to learn about Kundalini and its experience. It was the best way I could describe it at the time—and in many ways still is. And learning about the experience more in depth helped clarify and recognize what was going on and how to respond to it—in ways that weren’t covered by similar experiences in the Christian tradition, such as a baptism of holy spirit.
In the Kabbalism of Jewish mysticism, this is resonant with the concept of “Shekinah,” the feminine dwelling of God in the midst of the people, in the embodied flow of divine energy among us. She was the Wisdom of God, personified, and Wisdom manifested in creation, behind all the processes and regular patterns of what we call “science.”
In Hebrew, she was “Hokmah,” in the Greek, she was “Sophia,” in the Latin, she was changed to a “he” because the Latin word for wisdom was a masculine noun, “Logos.” In some early Christian traditions, this Wisdom was understood as the third person of the Trinity, Holy Spirit, and her pronoun was “she.”
Some early Christian traditions taught that Jesus was a manifestation of Wisdom: Sophia embodied as a human male, sent to return humanity to our original wholeness, and to show us the way back to our unity. As we would say it today, Jesus came to show us how to live in human and divine mutuality, reflecting and effusing both the feminine and masculine face of God as Father and Mother. As the image of God, we can them embrace all our human capacities, all qualities which have been split by a culture of Roman and Greek patriarchy. This division continues to this day. Yet, in truth, as we embrace our full nature and stature, we can come into unity, and thus experience true integrated “community.”
In the book of Wisdom 7:25, we read this about Wisdom, and this passage sounds like our descriptions of Jesus as Logos:
“She is a breath of the power of God,
Pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
Hence nothing impure can find a way into her.
She is a reflection of the eternal light,
untarnished mirror of God’s active power,
image of his goodness.”
The language and symbols we use are less important than the genuine experience of its reality. Whether we call it Shakti, Christ Energy, or something else, it is a signpost toward the mystical nature of embodied divine power that we can step into. That this experience is shared across mystical traditions—as a feminine experience—not only helps reinforce its reality, but can also inform us of different dynamics taught and explored in various ways.
In ICN, we have drawn from the spiritual wisdom of various traditions and practices. Though we are rooted in Jesus and the Christian mystical tradition, there is much to learn and gather from other spiritual sources. Integrating these spiritual understandings and experiences across traditions is a gift and creative exploration we are free to engage in Integral Christianity. And we are discovering resonant aspects of Christianity that have been present from the beginning, but were covered over and subsumed by empire and Greek philosophical/theological interpretations.
May we come into unity with the fullness of our divine and human nature, each of us accessing all our masculine and feminine qualities as reflections of God.
Charge from the Ground Up
“Recognizing your Shakti as it expands and empowers your inner gifts lets you flow at your growing edge and can also give you profound confidence that you are supported from within, and even from the universe itself.”
— Sally Kempton
It’s hard to overstate how important and vital the need is for us to come into our experiential participation with this embodied Christ energy. The realms of the mind and transcendent spirit, while liberating in many ways, will not be sufficient for the evolutionary calling that is before us. We desperately need to grow up as a species, and to do so we need to grow down into our rooted and substantive presence on, with, and through the Earth.
“Earth Body” by Andreas Clavadetscher
If humans are to have a future as part of the Earth, we will need to reintegrate our lived experience as a part of nature. Not a separate part, but an intraconnected whole. A conceptual understanding of this will only take us so far. It will really come alive in our being when we intimately engage with the life force and energy of materiality as a fabric of our very own being. When we are deeply grounded in the divine energy of matter, the Christ energy of the earth, the Shakti of the cosmos.
This will not only give us the embodied understanding we need to recognize our true nature, but it will also link us to the physical wisdom and resources that flow throughout Indra’s Net, that move in the mycelial mesh network, that dance in the quantum substrata of nonlocality.
From this rich and substantive base, we will find the energy and strength to live in empowered presence. To have the grounded stability and power to participate in affecting social change without being subsumed by despair, fear, or anger. To engage in mystical activism with the spiritual power and capacity to affect change in the subtle realms. To transmit this strength and cosmic force into one another and our local and global environments.
We might even go so far as to say that the second coming of Christ will appear in this way, not from the clouds in the sky but through the deepest substance of incarnation in materiality—the universe made flesh.
Imbued with life immersed in the world womb.
Growing with the divine power to rise into being all around us.
Illuminating the New Heaven in the New Earth in our midst.
— choose from —
3 Opportunities to meet online or in-person
1. Real & rare Gathering
2. Divine Vocation Retreat
3. Wild Becoming Retreat
You’re invited to join for our first ever in-person and online gathering open to the whole of the ICN Community.
Come be a part of any or all of the three retreats happening from
September 25 – October 4.
Statement of WeCreating Authorship
This article was WeCreated with authoring by Luke Healy and Martha O’Hehir.
All of the wisdom, creativity, and spiritual emergence in ICN comes from the communal field of wisdom and spirit speaking in and through the “We.”
All text in this article is human-authored without the use of AI, according to our AI policy: 0 out of 10
All Images are open-source, used with permission, or created by ICN