I am grateful for the timely invitation by our leadership team to reflect again on my earth-relationships. And I am grateful to Peter Clinch for offering me the focus of Diarmuid O’Murchu’s writing. The evening plunged me into a search for a credible moral imperative to fill a contemporary vacuum. I am pondering a cosmic morality as a foundation for living.

The aberrant Christian construct of a voyeuristic celestial ‘God’, judging and punishing human behaviour, is mercifully disappearing from western culture. I have long rejected any such basis for moral living. And I have long abandoned the associated notion of reward or punishment after death. Why then live morally? Am I to govern my actions by what others might think of me, be governed by a Freudian ‘superego’? I am unhappy with this as a basis for moral behaviour. Am I then to govern my behaviour by rules set by so-called leaders, whether religious or civil? In practice I do not look for such rules as a basis for behaving, apart from obeying the civic laws necessary for the functioning of a safe and orderly society. Do I manage my life in ways that will protect and enhance my inner sense of self, of wholeness, of integrity, of worthiness? The playwright Arthur Miller suggested that men in particular need to live by this imperative. I am not aware that such a motivation governs all my behaviours. Or do I search for a moral order in the humanism of literature and philosophy and art? I am well aware that these sources do influence my living, but the impact is subjective. There is no consensus for living here. In his essay on Existentialism and Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre addressed the issue of a credible morality. He asserted that humanly we are utterly alone in the universe. And therefore we are absolutely responsible in our actions for ourselves and for all other human life. How we choose to act is how we want our human society to be. A helpful but narrowly anthropocentric moral perspective.

As I look at our global community I recognize admirable integrity and generosity and altruism, but see most behaviours governed by greed and self-interest. I cannot detect any agreed and universal moral imperative governing life in our global community. As moral guardians the churches have lost credibility. Where does one search for moral guidance? How do we educate youth to live morally?

I am beginning to see that an actualized earth or cosmic spirituality offers a foundational moral perspective. I believe that it can arise from the lived experience of knowing and recognizing and reflecting on the being of all animate and inanimate forms of earth and cosmos. And of knowing and recognizing and reflecting on the interdependence of all beings. If the state of my personal being and all of my behaviours, through this interdependence, actually enhance or degrade all beings, then I have a universal and foundational guide for my behaviours. There is a cosmic moral imperative that I am called to embrace. This does not necessarily make any moral choice easy. But it is a foundation for morality. In terms, then, of a cosmic morality, what is good? It seems to me that good is what enhances cosmic communion. And evil is what contributes to cosmic disintegration or dysfunction. And the cosmic certainly includes my own personhood and the personhood of those whom I meet in my human engagements. But cosmic is also bigger, and invites me into a universal perspective.

O’Murchu writes about “a new interest and curiosity arising on the meaning of creation and its cosmic and planetary dimensions”. I believe that a cosmic moral imperative calls for much more than optional cosmic curiosity. A true cosmic morality will only be lived with conviction and commitment by those who have undertaken the pilgrimages necessary to recognize the being in all that is other, and to experience and know one’s personal place within the interconnectedness of all being. What are these pilgrimages? I think of my own lifetime of engagement with the heart of province and congregation life, of crossing oceans to engage the cultures of Fiji and Tonga and Africa, of entering the intimacy of so many counselling experiences, of friendships and what Paul VI described beautifully as recourse to the sentiments of the human heart, of decades of research with marine life, of months on the bosom of the Southern Ocean in a journey to Antarctica, of travelling to Lake Mungo, and of seeking to experience the best of the fine arts, to list some amongst so many of those life opportunities we are all offered, all potential pilgrimages that may be graced with moments of transcendence. I have found myself led into an experience of the being of all things, of being part of all, of an interconnectedness with all.