Monday, January 5, 2026

Evolution of Worship and Religions: Part V - Becoming Aligned with the Sacred (15)



The Evolution of Worship and Religion:
From Cosmic Awe to Processual Faith

A Metamodern Journey through the History of the Sacred


FROM BELIEF TO TRANSFORMATION
PART V - ESSAY  15

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

The sacred is not what we believe about the world,
but what the world invites us to become in response.



Essay 15

Becoming Aligned with the Sacred

Beyond Belief & Toward Participation


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.

IV. Misalignment, Suffering, and Creative Reorientation

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
believe in sacredness,
or to name the Sacred,
but to learn its nature -
how to lean into life
without enclosing it
to finality and conclusion.

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,
but by divine adjustments.
A quiet drawing-forward,
an allurement, reaches
through what is unfinished
to guide, to comfort, to heal.

Even now, humanity senses
divine silence and the grave,
not in denying these events,
but in the opening of
a sacred way through them.

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,
be becoming within the
heart of the Sacred.


R.E. Slater
January 4, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved




~ Continue to Part VI, SM 1 ~


Evolution of Worship & Religion


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Process Philosophy & Theology

  • Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. Free Press, 1978.

  • Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. Fordham University Press, 1996.

  • Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Westminster Press, 1976.

  • Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Fortress Press, 2008.

  • Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God. IVP Academic, 2015.

  • Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology. Chalice Press, 1989.

Sacred, Participation, and Religious Evolution

  • Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. Harcourt, 1959.

  • Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The Meaning and End of Religion. Fortress Press, 1991.

  • Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution. Harvard University Press, 2011.

  • Armstrong, Karen. The Case for God. Knopf, 2009.

  • Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular. Stanford University Press, 2003.

Metamodern, Relational, and Participatory Thought

  • Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2010.

  • Connolly, William E. A World of Becoming. Duke University Press, 2011.

  • Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Columbia University Press, 1994.

  • Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. Harper & Row, 1959.

Optional Integrative Thread (your project lineage)

  • Slater, R. E. Evolution of Worship and Religion (Essay Series). Relevancy22 Blog Archive.

  • —— Processual Divine Coherence (working archive).


at

No comments:

Post a Comment