The new angle I wish to offer is, in fact, a very old one. I will take the story of evolution itself, with the contemporary insights and understandings on how life has been unfolding before our eyes — for many millennia, and for several billennia before we humans evolved. When we explore that story, with the aid of a multi-disciplinary hermeneutic we begin to glimpse a very different landscape, a place we recognise as being strangely familiar, a place from which we have been exiled, a place many now wish to reclaim as their true spiritual home.
More than anything else, you need to bring an open heart and a questioning mind to the reading of this book. It is all about the big picture, not the punctuated developments that have cropped up here and there in the past 5,000 years — during which the formal religions came into being. Religion one time had the tools to keep us in creative balance; more accurately it provided the crucial cement for the societal bonding required by patriarchal power. It is the imminent collapse of the patriarchal system that is forcing us to re-think the whole meaning of religion and its spiritual significance in our lives.
Today, our pilgrimage is different. The wisdom that led us into the desert places, one-time home to heroic spiritual asceticism, today is a barren bosom no longer capable of nourishing or sustaining us. The journey back home requires a whole new set of skills and learnings.
— Diarmuid O'Murchu, Religion in Exile: A Spiritual Homecoming