“The cosmos is not a place but a story. It is not a system but a communion.”
— Brian Swimme
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We are living through more than a political crisis. More than an economic crisis. Even more than an ecological crisis. We are living through a cosmological crisis, a collapse in the stories that once held meaning, coherence, and hope.
In modern political discourse, this deeper rupture often goes unnamed. Our debates obsess over growth, efficiency, freedom, security, sovereignty. But beneath all this is an unspoken void: we no longer know what we belong to. We no longer know what the world is.
This is not a crisis that can be solved with better messaging, faster technology, or a new voting system. It is a crisis of orientation. And it demands a new conversation, about the sacred, the soul, and the stories that can carry us through collapse without descending into denial or despair.
The Great Unravelling
For much of Western history, the cosmos was understood as layered and alive: body, soul, and spirit; visible and invisible; human and divine. To live politically was also to live within a moral and metaphysical order.
But the rise of mechanistic science and materialist metaphysics disenchanted the world. We became, in Thomas Berry’s words, “a collection of objects, not a communion of subjects.”
The Enlightenment brought many gifts, but also a reduction. Religion collapsed into dogma. Spirituality became private. Meaning was outsourced to markets, machines, and metrics.
Now, in the twenty-first century, we find ourselves floating in what many have called the meaning crisis. Institutions are hollowing. Traditions are fragmenting. Trust is eroding. We can no longer answer, with any shared clarity, the most basic political questions: What is the good? Who are we to one another? What is the world for?
The Politics of a Flattened World
Into this vacuum step the twin temptations of modern politics:
* On the one hand, technocracy; the promise that better data and smarter systems can compensate for the loss of moral orientation.
* On the other hand, authoritarian nostalgia; the call to return to a mythic past of order, hierarchy, and meaning, usually enforced through exclusion and control.
Both are reactions to cosmological disorientation. One denies the sacred by managing without it. The other weaponises the sacred by co-opting it.
Neither invites us to reimagine meaning relationally, humbly, or co-creatively.
Process Cosmology: The Sacred as Becoming
Process thought offers a radically different approach. In the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Catherine Keller, and Brian Swimme, we find a vision of the universe not as static or predetermined, but as an unfolding of creativity, relation, and value.
In this cosmology:
* The world is not finished. It is becoming.
* God is not an omnipotent puppet-master, but the lure toward deeper coherence, complexity, and compassion.
* The sacred is not somewhere else, but woven into every moment of encounter, emergence, and response.
Such a view resacralises the world, not by returning to old certainties, but by seeing relationality itself as holy. To participate in politics, then, is not to fight for control. It is to care for the unfolding of shared life.
This is not theology as escape. It is cosmology as civic responsibility.
The Ethic of Care as Spiritual Praxis
The ethic of care, as developed by thinkers like Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, and Joan Tronto, provides not only an ethical frame, but a spiritual practice in a processual world.
Care insists that attention is sacred. That responsibility is shared. That response-ability is cultivated, not claimed. It values presence over performance, connection over clarity, and commitment over control.
In a disenchanted political landscape, care may be our most immediate way of reweaving the sacred. It asks us to treat others not as instruments or obstacles, but as participants in the same unfolding cosmos.
Green Politics and the Sacred Thread
Among political movements, the Green tradition comes closest to integrating cosmology, ethics, and care.
* It acknowledges ecological interdependence; not as a technical problem, but as a moral and spiritual reality.
* It supports participatory democracy; not just as a governance tool, but as a ritual of co-creation.
* It resists the reduction of life to numbers, growth curves, and system logic.
To be Green, at its core, is to live and act as if the world is alive, interconnected, and worth caring for. It is to re-inhabit the cosmos not as a battlefield or a spreadsheet, but as a living field of relation.
This is political. And it is sacred.
Inner Work and Outer Practice
Inner Work:
* What is my cosmology? What kind of world do I believe I’m living in?
* When did I last experience a moment of sacred attention, where care and presence became one?
* What rituals, practices, or relationships help me stay attuned to a deeper order of meaning?
Outer Practice:
* Create or participate in a community ritual that honours life’s interconnectedness, seasonal, civic, or spiritual.
* Support Green policies and candidates that see ecology not just as science, but as the ethics of relationship.
* In every political conversation, ask not only “what works?” but “what honours life?”
Closing Invitation
We cannot build a sustainable future on a metaphysic of extraction and control. We cannot navigate collapse with a cosmology of disconnection.
But we can begin again.
We can root politics not in spectacle or statistics, but in relationship, rhythm, and reverence. We can remember that to care is to enact the sacred. That to participate in democracy is to join the dance of the world’s becoming.
Let us not retreat from the sacred. Let us reweave it, together, in process.
