Preface: Locating the Sacred in Religious Evolution
Across the long arc traced in Evolution of Worship and Religion, one pattern recurs with remarkable consistency: the sacred is never static. From animistic participation in natural forces, through axial metaphysical abstraction, to later institutionalized belief systems and modern secular critiques, religious life continually reconfigures how humans relate to what they name as ultimate, holy, or the Sacred-divine.
This essay emerges from that historical trajectory. It does not seek to introduce a new doctrine of the sacred, nor to defend a particular religious tradition. Instead, it proposes a processual reframing: that alignment with the sacred is best understood not as belief in fixed propositions, but as participatory orientation within an evolving relational world.
Such a reframing is neither antiquarian nor reactionary. It is a constructive response to the historical exhaustion of belief-centered religion and the simultaneous insufficiency of purely secular disenchantment. What follows situates the Sacred not behind us, nor above us, but within the ongoing processes of becoming that constitutes reality itself.
Introduction: Beyond Belief
In much of Western religious history, alignment with the sacred has been treated primarily as a matter of correct belief and ritualized orthodoxy. That is, correct ideas held about God, about the cosmos, morality, or what constitutes effectuating salvation. Historic Orthodoxy has functioned both as compass and boundary, defining who was “in alignment with the Sacred” and who was not. While such frameworks offered coherence and continuity, they also produced rigidity, exclusion, and frequent dissonance with lived experience.
Modernity exposed these tensions. Scientific cosmology, historical criticism, and corporate pluralism and blending rendered many inherited belief structures increasingly fragile. Yet the collapse of certainty did not erase the human orientation toward the sacred; it merely displaced it. The persistence of longing, meaning-making, and moral imagination suggests that the sacred was never reducible to belief alone.
Process philosophy offers a constructive alternative. Rather than asking what must be believed, it asks how reality becomes. Within this framework, the sacred is not a static object of assent but a dynamic depth-dimension of relational becoming. Alignment, therefore, is not achieved through cognitive agreement, but through participatory responsiveness.
I. The Sacred as Process, Not Object
At the heart of process thought lies a decisive metaphysical shift: reality is composed not of enduring substances but of events, relations, and ongoing processes. Nothing simply is; everything becomes. Applied to religious reflection, this means the sacred cannot be adequately conceived as a fixed entity standing apart from (or over-and-above) the world of creation.
Instead, the sacred relates to creation as its lure toward coherence, intensity, and value within becoming itself. It is not imposed from without but arises through relational interaction. In Whiteheadian terms, it functions persuasively rather than coercively, inviting participation rather than demanding submission.
This understanding resonates with earlier stages of religious evolution - particularly animistic and indigenous traditions - while avoiding their cosmological limitations. The sacred is neither anthropomorphized nor abstracted into metaphysical remoteness. It is encountered where relations deepen, where novelty emerges, and where shared flourishing becomes possible.
II. Alignment as Orientation Rather Than Assent
If the sacred is processual, alignment cannot be defined as assent to timeless truths. Alignment becomes a matter of orientation - how one is situated within the flow of becoming.
Orientation is inherently provisional. It adjusts as contexts shift, as histories accumulate, and as new possibilities emerge. This distinguishes alignment from obedience. Obedience presumes a fixed command structure; alignment presumes responsiveness to evolving conditions.
Such responsiveness is ethical as well as metaphysical. To be aligned with the sacred is to cultivate attentiveness, care, and creative participation. It is to live with the world rather than over it, where recognizing that every action contributes - however modestly—to the direction reality takes.
III. Participation Over Possession
Belief-centered religion tends toward possession: truth is something one has. Participatory-centered spirituality emphasizes entry; whereas truth is something one joins. This shift carries significant implications.
Participation reframes worship as:
- engagement rather than compliance;
- ethics as relational responsibility rather than rule enforcement; and,
- theology as interpretive practice rather than final explanation.
Communities shaped by participation remain open to revision, dialogue, and growth, resisting the closure that often accompanies doctrinal fixity and finality.
In evolutionary terms, this marks a maturation of religious consciousness. The Sacred is no longer secured by institutional authority alone, nor dismissed by secular critique, but encountered through lived relationality.
A processual account of alignment does not deny suffering or failure. On the contrary, it takes them seriously as intrinsic to unfinished becoming. Misalignment is not primarily moral transgression; it is incongruence within evolving relational fields.
Where classical theologies often interpret misalignment as sin requiring correction, process theology interprets it as a call to reorientation. Suffering becomes a site of potential transformation - not because it is divinely willed, but because new possibilities can emerge from fractured coherence.
Alignment, therefore, is not linear progression. It is a continual practice of recalibration, learning to respond creatively to uncertainty and disruption rather than retreating into certainty and assurance.
V. The Sacred Without Coercion
One of the most consequential outcomes of this framework is its rejection of coercive sacred power. If the sacred operates persuasively rather than unilaterally as divine power, then domination, exclusion, and violence lose theological legitimacy. Hence, the church's teachings on divine sovereignty are appropriately reinterpreted within process theology emphasizing love and not divine enforcement.
This aligns with a broader ethical trajectory traced throughout Evolution of Worship and Religion series: as religious consciousness evolves, the sacred increasingly withdraws from authoritarian forms and reappears as relational depth, moral imagination, and participatory responsibility.
To be aligned with the sacred, in this sense, is to resist systems of oppression - whether religious, political, or ideological. Systems which suppress processually becoming outcome in favor of controlling outcome.
Conclusion: The Sacred as Ongoing Invitation
Becoming aligned with the sacred is not a final state. It is a posture of heart and mind and soul - one that is open, responsive, and unfinished. It does not promise certainty, but it offers relational, pantheistic coherence. It does not remove ambiguity, but it deepens relational, processual participation.
Within a processual worldview, the Sacred is not what stands above becoming. It is what calls relational becoming forward. Alignment, then, is less about belief than about fidelity to relational possibility - how one listens, responds, and contributes to the world’s processual unfolding.
Beyond belief lies participation.
Beyond possession lies orientation.
Beyond static holiness lies sacred becoming.
Alignment
We did not come to so simply
but to learn its nature -
how to lean into life
without enclosing it
The Sacred does not stand above us,
armed with certainty and despair -
but moves within the fragile grammar
of processual becoming.
We feel it when attention deepens,
when heartfelt care outpaces fear,
when the world answers our listening
with more than we had expected.
Not by command, but by invitation.
Not by cosmic portendings,
A quiet drawing-forward,
through what is unfinished
Even now, humanity senses
but in the opening of
Here, alignment is not escape.
It is staying. Remaining.
With hands and heart open.
With steps tentatively searching.
Participating in the slow courage
of what is still, and ever will,
- Part I - Foundations: The Birth of the Sacred
- Essay 1 - Animism and the Living Cosmos
- Essay 2 - From Tribe to Totem
- Part II - The Age of Gods
- Essay 3 - The Mesopotamian Fertile Crescent
- Essay 4 - Egypt, Indus, and Minoa Sacred Cultures
- Essay 5 - From Polytheism to Henotheism
- Part III - Axial Awakenings
- Essay 6 - Ancient Israel, Persia, and Monotheism
- Essay 7 - India's Axial Age
- Essay 8 - Greece and the Birth of Reason
- Part IV - The Sacred Made Universal
- Essay 9 - The Age of Universal Religions
- Essay 10 - Modernity and the Eclipse of the Sacred
- Essay 11 - The Rebirth of the Sacred
- Part V - Conclusion of Series
- Essay 12 - A Processual Summation of Worship and Religion
- Essay 13 - The Way of Cruciformity: When God Refused Power
- Essay 14 - Messiah: From Anointed Saviour to Suffering Sacred
- Essay 15 - Becoming Aligned with the Sacred
- Part VI - Supplementary Materials
- SM 1 - The Ancient History of Mesopotamia
- SM 2 - The History of Language in Ancient Mesopotamia
- SM 3 - The Ancient History of the Hebrew Language
- SM 4 - How the Ancient Near East Gave Shape to Israel's God:
- Why the ANE is Essential for Israel's Received Theology (I-II)
- Affecting Cultic Syncretism Across the Ancient Near East (III-V)
- Cultural Identity Formation & the Rejection of Syncretism (VI-IX)
- SM 5 - The History & Compilation of the Hebrew Bible:
- From Oral Memory to Proto-Canon (I-II)
- Exile, Redaction, and the Birth of Scripture (III)
- Second Temple Scribalization to Canonization (IV-V)
- SM 6 - The Unhelpful Oxymorons of "Biblical Authority" & "Inerrancy"
- SM 7 - The Evolution of Inerrancy: From Ancient Plurality to Modern Certainty
- SM 8 - A Historical-Theological Study of "Son of Man" vs "Son of God"
- SM 9 - The Song of Gilgamesh & Other Ancient Flood Stories
- SM 10 - Isaiah as a Living Textual Tradition: Manuscripts, Variants &Transmission
- SM 11 - From Scroll to Scripture: Bible Versions, Variants & their Histories
- SM 12 - The Gnostic Mysterion: the Crisis of Sacred Becoming
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—— Processual Divine Coherence (working archive).
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