Welcome

Brief Biography:

 

Diarmuid O'Murchu, a member of the Sacred Heart Missionary Order, and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin Ireland, is a social psychologist whose early working life had been in social ministry, predominantly in London, UK. In more recent years he has worked as a workshop leader and group facilitator, conducting programmes on Adult Faith Development across several countries. He is a widely read author, with many of his books listed on this webpage. Now as a retired missionary, he lives in Dublin, Ireland.

 

 

 

12 Quotes of Enduring Inspiration

What then surely is most new about our modern understanding of life is the idea of evolution, for it enables us to see life not as an eternally repeating cycle, but as a process that continually generates and discovers novelty.  Lee Smolin.

When the mind can engage reality as a question rather than imposing prefabricated answers on it, then one can participate creatively in evolution. Ilia Delio.

While I have no doubt that the origin of life was not in fact a miracle, I do believe that we live in a bio-friendly universe of a stunningly ingenious character.  Paul Davies.

In my view, the human community and the natural world will go into the future as a single sacred community or we will both perish in the desert.  Thomas Berry. 

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man(kind) will have discovered fire.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.   Albert Einstein.

The presence of the wide evolving cosmos calls for a genuinely new paradigm, different from the anthropocentric concern with human sin in the context of feudal obligations. We need to turn the page on the satisfaction theory and allow it to take a well deserved rest.
                                                                                                        Elizabeth Johnson.

A society that believes that the body is somehow diseased, painful, sinful, or wrong is going to create social institutions that wreck destruction on the body of the earth itself.
                                                                                                        Paula Gunn Allen.

The greatest battle, however, the battle that is waged within the soul of each person and that has been responsible for the majority of atrocities that continue to plague us today, remains unwon. The battle I am referring to, of course, is the battle against tribalism.  Jason D. Hill.
                                                                                                                             

There is definitely something spiritually counterintuitive about this business of incarnation, and to really get what’s at stake in this mystery, is for me the acid test as to whether you understand what Christianity is all about.  Cynthia Bourgeault

The kind of religion we lack today cannot be found in the religious traditions of the past which are linked to static categories; what is needed is a new type of religion that can use all the ‘free energy’ of the earth to build humankind into greater unity.  Ursula King.

The mystic is a religious anarchist and utopian, who speaks for an ancient tradition of protest against religious alienation. The mystic tries to undermine the law, and to create religious happiness by melting God down.   Don Cupitt.

DEDICATION:

Long before the foot rested firmly on the soil,
Long before we modelled the first footprints of a child
Long before we roamed the savannahs of the wild,
In Africa, my home, God was smiling!

Long before we stalked the animal to prey,
Long before we forged the flintstone from the clay
Long before we distinguished the night time from the day
In Africa, my home, God was moving!
 

Long before the music of the rattle and the drum,
Long before the silence when the voice could only hum
Long before the spoken word became our daily crumb,
In Africa, my home, God was weaving!
 

Long before we flicked two flint stones into flame,
Long before we gathered round the fireside in our playing.
Long before the power that entitled us to name,
In Africa, my home, God was carving.
 

Long before we ritualized our living and our dying.
Long before we solemnized our laughter and our sighing.
Long before we danced in our worshipping of high,
In Africa, our home, God was dancing.
 

Long before the ancients forged the ancestral line,
Long before our peoples used the night-sky as a sign,
Long before our hunters and gardeners would design,
In Africa, my home, God was sculpting.
 

Long before the planet was divided into parts,
Long before religion bred fear into our hearts,
Long before the disempowering forces came to caste,
In Africa, my home, all knew freedom.
 

Long before the conquerors ravaged our resource,
Long before the missionaries brought their wisdom to impose,
Long before the West even knew the planet's source,
In Africa, our home, God had risen.
 

Long before the writing appeared upon a page,
Long before the White God adopted holy rage,
Long before the Cross would crucify a sage,
In Africa, my home, God wrote poetry.