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Matthew Fox on Creation Spirituality
CS is about recovering nature and all of creation as sacred again. It reaches back to the earliest humans who were struck with the awe of their existence in the midst of the awe of nature and it is found in the earliest writer of the Hebrew Bible (“J” source) and in the Wisdom literature of the Bible which scholars all agree was the primary influence on the historical Jesus as were the prophets who also speak often out of a CS context and message. CS holds up the archetype of the Cosmic Christ (or Buddha Nature or Image of God) as a symbol of the sacredness of all things, micro and macro. The universe itself is the ultimate sacrament therefore.
CS is found among indigenous peoples everywhere–Aboriginal teacher and activist Eddie Kneebone said that Creation Spirituality strikes him as being parallel to the “Dreamtime” of his people. Lakota teacher Buck Ghosthorse once said to me: “Do you want to know how sacred water is? Go without it for three days and nights.”
The eco collapse occurring around the world is forcing many to fast from clean water or clean air, from food too. Can this collapse awaken us to act against climate change before it is too late? CS supports eco-activists and others seeking social, racial, gender and environmental justice. It is a spirituality of passion and compassion, of moral outrage and unleashing of creativity and hope. It is the way of many mystic/prophets or contemplative activists over the centuries including but not limited to Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Julian of Norwich, Nicolas of Cusa, Thomas Merton, Dorothee Soelle, Howard Thurman, and many more.
CS is in active dialog with scientists about the new cosmology and much more. Thomas Berry writes: “An absence of a sense of the sacred is the basic flaw in many of our efforts at ecologically or environmentally adjusting our human presence to the natural world. It has been said, ‘We will not save what we do not love.’ It is also true that we will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred….Eventually only our sense of the sacred will save us.”*
*Thomas Berry, “Foreward,” in Kathleen Deignan, ed., Thomas Merton Writings on Nature: When the Trees Say Nothing (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2003), 18f.
Creation Spirituality in Contrast to the Dominant Religious Paradigm (Fall/Redemption Religion)
In my book Original Blessing, published in 1983, I offer a list that contrasts the two traditions of Fall/Redemption Religion and Creation Spirituality. Just recently I met a forty-something man who told me that “those four pages from your book totally changed my understanding of Christian history and they should be made available to everyone.” So I went back and re-read them. I agree. Thus I offer the contrast here in a slightly updated rendition.
Fall/Redemption