Some thoughts on Thomas Berry’s Contributions to the Western Spiritual Tradition

Some thoughts on Thomas Berry’s Contributions to the Western Spiritual Tradition Matthew Fox

Caribbean poet and nobel prizewinner Derek Wallcott says: “For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night.  The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.”

I believe Walcott names an accomplishment of Thomas’ poetic and mystical side—Thomas calls all of us to fall in love with the world in spite of the folly of human history. It is a major challenge and Thomas creates a context when he says “ecology is functional cosmology”--a context in which we can recover the zeal that comes from falling in love with the world once again.  He puts our own personal and collective histories into context and he puts the context into a sacred context by reminding us that the primary sacrament is the universe itself.  Every other sacrament, being and action is derivative of that holy sacrament.

Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry

When I think of Thomas I am reminded of the great mentor relationships of western history.  I think of Teilhard de Chardin’s influence on Thomas Berry in the same light that I think of Plato’s influence on Aristotle and Albert the Great’s influence on Thomas Aquinas for example.  Thomas had a mentor and all studies show that when young men have mentors they go into deeper paths and new spirals of achievement.

Let us consider some of the influence of Teilhard on Thomas’ thought as we remember that Thomas was a founder and president of the Friends of Teilhard Society in New York.  Teilhard, we recall, was too radioactive in his philosophical works to be allowed by the church to be published in his lifetime, but rather than allow his life’s work to be forgotten altogether bequeathed it not to his Jesuit Order but to a lay woman who published it after his death.

One of the basic issues Teilhard dealt with was the dismal dualism that has so haunted Christian thought at least from St. Augustine onwards (and that was derived from Platonism).  Augustine, recall, declared that “spirit is whatever is not matter.”  Aquinas and Eckhart both disagreed with this dualism but so does Teilhard in a very big way.  He writes: “Matter and Spirit: These were no longer two things but two states or two aspects of one and the same cosmic Stuff, according to whether it was looked at or carried further in the direction in which it is becoming itself or in the direction in which it is disintegrating.  Matter is the Matrix of Spirit.  Spirit is the higher state of Matter.”[1]

We find this non-dualism and this flow of matter to spirit and spirit to matter taken for granted and running through all of Berry’s work.  It shows in his sensitivity and passion for beauty and for the “numinosity” that he so often recognizes in the habits of nature whether microcosmic or macrocosmic.  Berry puts poetry and substance into the new direction of a non-dualistic consciousness.  One that Teilhard struggled to lay out and that Aquinas and Eckhart before him also paid a price for preaching.  (Aquinas taught that spirit is the “élan” in everything including matter and that spirit was also our capacity for knowing all things and that body and soul were “con-substantial.”)

Another area where Teilhard and Berry connect is their passion for their work, their passion for announcing and defending the earth.  Teilhard writes that “to understand the world knowledge is not enough.  You must see it, touch it, live in its presence and drink the vital heat of existence in the very heart of reality.”[2] Seeing, touching, living, drinking the vital heat—those are metaphors for his own passionate love of the earth.   Anyone who knew Thomas or heard him speak also felt the passion in his work.  His was not an abstract or detached attitude of knowledge about.  It was a love affair, a passion, a vital heat rose in the room when he spoke.  This was wisdom, not just knowledge.  Thomas was a wisdom teacher not a knowledge teacher.  Wisdom includes both knowledge and heart, mind and passion.  And of course a call to creativity because wisdom is always present in creativity.  “A completely new type of creativity is needed,” Berry said.  “This creativity must have as its primary concern the survival of the earth in its functional integrity.”  Berry was a warrior on behalf of Mother Earth.  He was a Green Man in the fullest sense of that word

Teilhard does not dwell on the story of entropy in matter but waxes joyful about nature’s youthfulness and constant newness.  He writes: “Till the very end of time matter will always remain young, exuberant, sparkling, newborn for those who are willing.”[3] Here he calls on the attitude of the observer.  If you approach nature tired and cynical and pessimistic you may very well project that pessimism onto nature.  But “for those who are willing,” nature offers ample evidence of a bias in favor of youth, exuberance, sparkle and newness.  Those of us who knew Thomas Berry or heard him speak or read his works know which choice he made.  He was one “of the willing.”  His spirit, while never naïve, and always critical, was also profoundly hopeful.  He was renewed by his studies of nature.  Nature itself gave him a perspective on resiliency.  I once heard him respond to a student’s question of despair about the Bush presidency and Thomas responded: “Bush will not be president for ever.”  A perspective that kept his hope alive no doubt.  Anthropocentrism can be very debilitating.  It can suck life out of one’s spirit.  Attunement to nature’s ways often reignites life and renews it.  It did that for Teilhard and for Berry.

Thomas, like Teilhard, was very attuned to beauty.  The language of beauty permeates his work and his commitment to an aesthetic (not effete) awareness was visible to all who read his books or heard him speak.  He had a poetic flare in the very language he spoke or wrote in.  This parallels Teilhard’s teaching that “purity is not a debilitating separation from all created reality, but an impulse carrying one through all forms of created beauty.”[4] From that perspective, Berry sported the kind of purity that Teilhard championed—not a purity of distance and separation but a purity that awakened curiosity and interest and study of “all forms of created beauty.”  Berry had that sense of love of beauty; his hungry curiosity and undying search for beauty burned in his heart and mind.

Teilhard champions a “cosmic sense” when he says that “the cosmic sense must have been born as soon as humanity found itself facing the frost, the sea and the stars.  And since then we find evidence of it in all our experience of the great and unbounded: in art, in poetry, and in religion.”[5] Thomas’ life work, we might say, was to rekindle that cosmic sense that ought to be in art, poetry and religion.  Yes, and in education too.  The modern age cut us off from a cosmic sense when it declared the universe was a machine and when it set man up as the final arbiter of existence.  The beauty and aesthetic was drained from the universe and the earth itself by that world view.  No animals or plants housed souls according to Descartes.  But Berry, in the tradition of Teilhard but also in the tradition of Saint Paul (of whom a recent scholar has written that he held a “metacosmic” sense of the Christ[6]) and of Aquinas insisted that the cosmos itself needs to be accepted as “the primordial sacred community, the macrophase mode of every religious tradition, the context in which the divine reality is revealed to itself in that diversity which in a special manner is ‘the perfection of the universe.’”[7] To recover a sense of the sacred one recovers a sense of the cosmos, of a whole that we all serve.

Thomas is explicit in placing his vision in the lineage of the Cosmic Christ written of in John’s Gospel (Christ as the “light in all things”) and Paul and of Aquinas and Teilhard when he writes: “If Saint John and Saint Paul could think of the Christ form of the universe, if Aquinas could say that the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly and represents it better than any single creature whatever, and if Teilhard could insist that the human gives to the entire cosmos its most sublime mode of being, then it should not be difficult to accept the universe itself as the primordial sacred community.”[8]

Of course our sense of the cosmos has been profoundly deepened by our awareness of evolution both on earth and in the universe.  Teilhard was explicit about the wonder and awe he underwent on studying evolution (what a far cry this is from silly fundamentalists who, because they do not value awe but stick to literalism miss the sacred dimensions of the evolution story).  Teilhard writes: “That magic word ‘evolution’ which haunted my thoughts like a tune: which was to me like unsatisfied hunger, like a promise held out to me, like a summons to be answered.”[9] Evolution became a vocation, a calling, for Teilhard.  A magical calling.  It was the same for Berry whose work is not an argument about evolution either for or against but a journey with evolution and its profound and meaningful gifts to our sense of the whole and our sense of the sacred.

Indeed, Berry goes further.  He believes that it will take a “shamanic personality, a type that is emerging once again in our society,” to bring about this deeper sense of the sacred.  Not philosophers, not priests, not prophets but shamans are needed.  “This intimacy with our genetic endowment and through this endowment with the larger cosmic process, is not primarily the role of the philosopher, priest, prophet or professor.  It is the role of the shamanic personality.”[10] Berry used to say that the two biggest failures of the twentieth century were education and religion.  Here he seems to be naming why they so failed.  Lacking a sense of intimacy with the cosmic process, neither priest nor professor is offering what the young need today.  The young need something greater than “our own rational contrivances.”  We need to become “sensitized to the spontaneities” of the “ultimate powers of the universe” and this “intimacy with our genetic endowment” is the work of shamans.  Maybe if we had shaman schools (instead of what Berry labeled present education-- “barbaric academia”) neither education nor religion would be failing us so profoundly.

The Call to Shamanhood

Shamanhood was an important category to Thomas Berry.  (He once told me that he considered me more of a shaman than a teacher or priest and only lately have I begun to explore the message he was transmitting to me by that observation.)  In a recent book of interviews and commentaries with the late poet William Everson, author Steven Herrmann talks at length about “The Shaman’s Call.”  In hearing his reflections I hear very much the echoes of Thomas Berry’s at-easeness with Shamanhood, his call for more shamanhood, and his recognition of the rise of shamanhood in our time.  Everson was a beat poet who became a Dorothy Day Catholic and a Dominican brother and later exited the order to “recover his aboriginal roots.”[11] He says he “took the figure of the shaman as the most direct route to a ‘recovery of nature.” Berry was always on the lookout for routes to a recovery of nature.

Part of the journey of the shaman as Everson understood it is through animism, “back into the instinctual, which is the basis of the archetypal.”[12] Berry too continually calls us back to our instincts.  Beyond the rational.  Writes Berry: “None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources.  We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our prerational, our instinctive, resources.  Our cultural resources have lost their integrity.  They cannot be trusted.”[13]

Shamanism was Everson’s path back to the unus mundus, or what Jung called the “one world” of unitary consciousness.  Trance-like techniques are employed by shamans through drumming and dancing and by poet-shamans through writing or speaking a poem aloud.  Trance is invoked.

The shaman often carries a wound but often this wound is that of the larger community itself.  “Shamans are, nevertheless, highly susceptible to psychic infections from their communities, because their wounds remain ‘open, susceptible to impression from the outside.”  Was not much of Berry’s strength shamanistic insofar as he was both carrying and then articulating the profound wound of the community—anthropocentrism, our being cut off from the earth and our deepest animal instincts, from the universe and the community with all beings?  This is the work of the shaman who “descends in trance, through wounds in the collective psychic structure, like a diving bird, to awaken images of healing for the race.”[14] Berry named the collective psychosis of our race: Our split from the rest of nature.

The shaman’s wound “is also the source of the poet’s greatest creativity, powers, ego-strength, and gift to the community.”[15] How much of Berry’s strength and perseverance in study and in telling his insight to the world was inspired by his wound which was also our wound?   Jung proposed that “the earth and psyche are not two, separate realities, but one ‘unitary world’ which he called the unus mundus.”  Surely this is Thomas Berry’s passion also—to move us all to a sense of the unus mundus, a new (and ancient?) marriage of earth and psyche that the modern consciousness in particular devastated to the point that, in Berry’s words, we are all “autistic” in our relationship to nature.  A shaman heals the community.  Berry did that.  He was more than a priest and more than a professor.  Eliade wrote that the shaman “is the great master of ecstasy.”  Berry did not just write of gloom and doom; he also indulged in memories of ecstasy.  He did not preach guilt so much as beauty, harmony and health.  He motivated others through a spirituality of blessing more than guilt.

I believe we might safely argue that Thomas Berry, not unlike Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Everson, was himself a shaman calling us to our collective shamanhood, that is to re-experience the ecstatic trance, the “numinous” relationship with the cosmos, that is our birthright and is also our way back to our own healing, our own instincts, our own ground precisely as Meister Eckhart uses that term to denote the Godhead, the “Source without a source” (Aquinas), the Mystery without a name that will never be given a name.

Thomas Berry, Moses and Hildegard

Speaking in general terms and using a biblical metaphor, I think Thomas stands up as a kind of new Moses leading all religious people, people of religious sensibilities and certainly Christians, out of a bondage of a land of anthropocentrism to a land of cosmology and ecology, a land flowing with milk and honey.  A land that promises to respond to the great needs of the great human heart.  He leads us out of the land of “autism” (his word) into a land of renewed communication with other beings and other species who are in fact very eager to communicate, to reveal themselves to us.  He leads us out of the land of “academic barbarism” (his words—which I love) to a land of educational responsibility where the power of knowledge is subsumed to the greater common good.  Where PhD’s instead of destroying the earth (his observation) are employing wisdom to save the earth and her beauty.  He leads us out of a land of psychologism where disenchantment, cynicism, trivia, inertia, violence, commercialism and what Thomas calls the “illusory world of advertising” reign, into a land of enchantment, beauty, wonder, intimacy become are our values—a place where caring matters.

He leads us out of the land of domestication to revelry of the sacred which always has something in common with the wild.  For example, he writes: “Wildness we might consider as the root of the authentic spontaneities of any being.  It is that wellspring of creativity whence comes the instinctive activates that enable all living beings to obtain their food, to find shelter, to bring forth their young: to sing and dance and fly through the air and swim through the depths of the sea.  This is the same inner tendency that evokes the insight of the poet, the skill of the artist and the power of the shaman.”  How beautifully Thomas marries the wild energy, the sacred energy of the more than human world with human creativity in that powerful passage.  Such a reminder that we are capable as a species of domesticating even Divinity Itself, making Divinity into our tidy images.  Thomas leads us out of the land of boredom to a sense of awe and with awe comes gratitude and with awe comes reverence--what Thomas calls a “sense of the numinous.”  In this way he is setting faith in the premodern context of the sacredness of all creation, of cosmology, of the more than human.

If a “new Moses” is too strong a term for some to name Thomas’ contribution, then surely we could settle on another term, “prophet.”  The primary work of the prophet as Rabbi Heschel teaches, is to “interfere.”  And Thomas is nothing if not a great interferer.  He is so subtle about it they haven’t caught up with him yet.  Prophets wake a sleeping people and Thomas does that.  Prophets cry in the wilderness and Thomas does that.  Prophets call people who are wallowing in injustice and neglect back to justice and Thomas does that.  He calls us to Eco-Justice which is the necessary context for all other justice struggles be they economic, racial, gender or class.  He calls us as the prophets of old did to the Great Work and thus to leave trivial work behind.  He calls us to reach for the Ecozoic Age and indeed, in his thoroughly challenging phrase, to “reinvent our species.”

In trying to assess Thomas’ contribution to western spirituality, I believe we are assisted by his own work.  In a brief essay on Hildegard of Bingen he wrote this about western spirituality: “Thus far Christians have been so concerned with redemption out of this world, so attached to their spiritual life development or their social mission of reconciliation that they have had little time for their serious attention to the earth.  Nor do Christians seem to be aware of the futility of social transformations proceeding on an historical-industrial rather than on a comprehensive ecological basis….We find relatively few Christian guides in the past to enlighten or to inspire us to a more functional relationship between the human and the natural worlds.”[16] But then Thomas offers three examples of the past:  Benedict offered an agrarian model, he being the father of course of western monasticism; Francis of Assisi offered a model based on the universal community of creatures; Hildegard is a third model with her sense of the earth as “a region of delight, we might almost say of pagan delight” which she has found from within her own experience and in a “unique model of Christian communion.” Hildegard writes: “The entire world has been embraced by this kiss [of God and creation].” Thomas adds: “Because of this erotic bond, the earth becomes luxuriant in its every aspect.”[17] I propose that Thomas enfolds Benedict’s agrarian model, Francis’ community model and Hildegard’s erotic model into his work.

Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Berry

I see in Thomas Berry’s work a fourth model which I would call the cosmic scientific model and I think the precursor of this model is in fact Thomas’ own namesake whom he quotes so often, St. Thomas Aquinas of the 13^th century who was condemned three times by the church before they canonized him a saint.  Like Thomas Berry, Aquinas had the imagination, the scientific curiosity and the courage to propose a whole new direction for Christian theology in his day and the direction was that of incorporating science and of course the breakthrough science of Aquinas' day was Aristotle, a pagan, who came to Europe by way of Islam.  Aristotle came double-tainted into Christianity and this is why Aquinas was condemned three times because he was working overtime with those who were more than Christian.

Some of Aquinas' observations follow. “Faith comes in two volumes: Nature and the Bible.”[18] We all know Thomas Berry’s notorious remark that he has repeated more than once—that we should “put the Bible on a shelf for twenty years.”  This is simply a logical conclusion that we have been overdoing the book-bit in the name of revelation at least since the invention of the printing press.  Why is it that by now EVERY seminary, every school that pretends to be training spiritual leaders, does not have scientists on its faculty telling us the revelation of nature, its mysticism and the ethics to be derived from that as well as biblical theologians?  We must find the balance anew between the revelation of nature and the revelation of the Bible.

In fact in the Bible there is a whole tradition, the wisdom tradition, scholars now agree was the tradition of the historic Jesus which is total nature mysticism.  One prevalent teaching of scholars today is that Jesus as a child, being considered illegitimate, was excluded from the synagogue so he went out and played in nature while others were meeting to pray indoors and that radicalized him.  It comes through in all of his parables and all of his teaching which are all nature based.  Wisdom literature is not based on reading books.  Jesus was illiterate like most of his country people.

Another connection between Aquinas and Berry—Berry is of course carrying this in all new directions-- is Aquinas' observation that “every human person is capax universi (capable of the universe).”  That’s who we are as a species.  That’s how big we are and neither our souls nor our hearts nor our minds will be satisfied and therefore relieved of temptations to greed and power until they are reset in the context of cosmology and the universe itself.  In this regard the exciting teachings of the universe story in our time that emerges from the work of Thomas and Brian Swimme in recovering a universe story fulfills Aquinas’ observation.

Consider for example the great Otto Rank, the father of humanistic psychology who broke with Freud over many issues.  Rank came to the conclusion that the number one problem for human beings is the feeling of separation that begins with leaving the womb which was our universe for nine months and the rest of life is about trying to find a reunion with the cosmos.  He says: “We surrender ourselves in art or love to a potential restoration with the union of the cosmos which once existed and was then lost.”  He talks about “original wound” (much better than “original sin”) that haunts our species.  This is that wound: That we feel separated from the cosmos.  He says the only solution is the Unio Mystica, being one with the all, in tune with the cosmos.  And indigenous people all know about this.  Rank said: “This identification is an echo of an original identity not only merely of child and mother but of everything living.  Witness the reverence of the primitives for animals.  In humans identification aims at reestablishing a lost identity with the cosmic process that has to be surrendered and continuously reestablished in the course of self-development.”[19] Thomas Berry's work is a profound work of human healing because it restores that lost identify and relationship and passion between the human and the cosmos.

Gaston Bachelard, the late twentieth century French philosopher, comments on what happens when cosmos and psyche reconnect.  In the Poetics of Space he talks of the holy trinity of Immensity, Intensity and Intimacy.  When you have an experience of Immensity—in Thomas’ words, an experience of the cosmos, or relationship to it, it is an intense experience.  All awe is both an intense and intimate experience.  Humans cannot separate the immense, intense and intimate experience and Thomas Berry by leading us into a cosmic awareness again, an awareness as important for our hearts as for our minds, is bathing us anew in Immensity, Intensity and Intimacy far beyond any mere anthropocentric relationship could ever do for us.

Bachelard declares that “grandeur progresses in the world in proportion to the deepening of intimacy…a primal value.” We have to take back immensity as a primal intimate value where “we are no longer shut up in the weight of the prison of our own beings.”  The new cosmology helps us to do this and so do solitude and meditation.  I honor Thomas and Aquinas and others who are helping us to name the vastness of our souls.  Ernest Holmes put it this way:  “Spirituality is a word that is often misused.”  (He said this 100 years ago!)  “From our viewpoint, spirituality is one’s recognition of the universe as a living presence of the good, truth, beauty, peace, power and love.”  Holmes recognizes that spirituality is not spirituality if it is psychologized—if it is not about the universe.  Holmes was right and Thomas Berry is right.

Thomas Berry carries us into diversity as well.  Many western philosophers have fought over the issue of the one vs. the many but neither Aquinas nor Thomas Berry is the least bit in doubt about the resolution.  Many times I’ve heard Berry quote Aquinas on exactly this issue of the wealth of diversity.  Berry calls the universe the primary artist.  “In every phase of our imaginative, aesthetic, and emotional lives we are profoundly dependent on this larger context of the surrounding world.” The tragedy of the ecological crisis is a soul crisis because we have been gifted with so much.  Aquinas says: “Because the divine goodness could not be adequately expressed by one creature alone, God has produced many and diverse creatures so what is wanting in one in the representation of divine goodness might be supplied by another. Thus the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness ….”[20] So the celebration of diversity is honored in both Aquinas and Berry’s thinking.

The sense of cosmology, looking at the whole and not the part, is intrinsic to all post-modern thinking but also to all premodern thinking including Aquinas and indigenous people   This is how Aquinas put it: “Divinity is better represented by the whole universe than by any single thing….Not only are individual creatures images of God but so too is the whole cosmos.”[21] How many theologians or preachers have you ever heard say that—that the cosmos is an image of God?  Thomas Berry says it.  Berry talks about the “grand liturgy of the universe”—an image of the universe itself as a ritual—and he calls us to participate in this cosmic ritual.[22]

Aquinas says that “there is beauty in the very diversity”[23] that we find in the cosmos.  In addition, he sees the universe itself as a mirror of Divinity when he observes: “God has produced a work in which the divine likeness is clearly reflected: I mean by this the world itself.”[24] The world itself is a mirror of the Sacred, a mirror of Divinity, a face of God, a Christ, a Buddha, Shekinah, the Goddess—call it what you will—all that is renamed in Thomas Berry’s contribution and in his celebration of beauty and diversity.

Another dimension to Berry’s work that is pushed in Aquinas is that of asking the question: What is the human’s role in all this?  Why are we here?  Aquinas says: “God wills that humans exist for the sake of the perfection of the universe.”  By ‘perfection’ he means bringing to completion the tasks of the universe.  Like Thomas Berry he is setting us in an ethical context of carrying on the Universe’s work.  As Aquinas very bluntly puts it: “It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe.  The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself.”  And he says “we bless God by recognizing the divine goodness.”[25] If I were to pick one line for Thomas Berry’s epitaph it would be that.  Thomas taught us to see with new eyes (old new eyes?) the divine goodness, to see the beauty within all systems—eco, cosmic, fireball, relationship of microcosm (atoms) to macrocosm.  He reseeds the goodness or blessing that is inherent in all of being.  He calls us to our “Great Work.”

It’s interesting that many traditions of the world propose that the consequence of seeing the world cosmically and seeing it in a context of goodness is right behavior.  Without this consciousness we are short on right behavior.  For example, Black Elk says: “The human heart is a sanctuary at the center of which there is a little space, wherein the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the Eye. This is the Eye of the Great Spirit….”  Thus  our cosmology becomes our ethics.  Black Elk continues: “The first peace—which is the most important peace—is that which comes in the souls of people when they realize their oneness with all its powers….”  Thomas Berry draws us to this very teaching, that at the center of all hearts lies the center of the universe and Wanka Tanka the Holy One.  If Black Elk is correct, then Thomas is an ethical teacher showing us the way to recover our peacefulness and ways of reconnecting to the powers of the universe itself.

Still another dimension to Thomas Berry’s work is intimacy, a common word throughout his work.  Aquinas put intimacy this way: “God is in all things in the most intimate way.  Insofar as a thing has existence it is like God.”[26] This is what Black Elk is saying: Wankan Tanka is within all things; Hildegard said “no creature lacks an intimate life.”  So our questing for intimacy is responded to by the yearning for intimacy from other beings of the universe and this planet.  We have a right to intimacy and things are set up biased in favor of intimacy.  An anthropocentric consciousness is not capable of providing intimacy and this is why television is run over with soap operas—an infinite amount, unending number, of pseudo-love shows that are destined not to satisfy.  Intimacy is found in a more than human context and we are invited to participate.

Another dimension to Berry’s work that carries us to the next century is his profound study of deep ecumenism which embraces the wisdom of all our religious traditions and of science itself.  He brings together what has been rent asunder in the 17^th century, science’s wisdom and the potential wisdom of religion.  We see in Thomas the yoga of study itself.  By his life style Thomas reminds us of something that our educational system has practically forgotten and that is that learning itself is prayer.  Learning itself can be a spiritual practice. The pursuit of truth is a spiritual act, a meditation.  The rabbis of old knew this—studying Torah is prayer.  Aquinas knew that—his study was his prayer.  Our secularization of education has sucked out of us the joy and commitment and thrill and yoga that study is.  The excitement and spiritual experience of learning is so often left behind.  Whether you study languages, mathematics, science, if you bring your heart to it, it is a spiritual discipline.  We thank Thomas for that as well as Aquinas.

And finally, Thomas Berry is a true elder to the young—so important in our time.  The young are yearning for elders and there are so few.  What can you say of the captains of industry, the Enrons, the Andersons, the Talibans, the World Coms, the Vaticans in this moment of history? They all suffer from a terminal disease called Patriarchal Excess and from Adultism.  They want to use the youth but are not there to awaken the stories of the youth.  And Thomas Berry has been inspiring youth for years.  The real work of the elder is to pass on stories that motivate the young to be generous and alive and use their god-given gifts to effect history so that history will not be the nightmare that Walcott named it but will be closer to that “love of the world” that it can become.  Thomas Berry has done this for so many individuals.  Recently I received a letter from a 22 year old Jesuit novice who told me this story: He read my work and found Thomas Berry that way and decided to take a Greyhound bus down to North Carolina to spend a day with Thomas.  “Now I know what I have to do with the rest of my life and what my generation has to do,” he wrote me.  That is eldership.  That is the kind of effect Thomas’ being and work have had on countless people and will have.  I visited Earth Haven in North Carolina, an off the grid community, drawing very bright people to commit their lives to what is sustainable.  This is the monastery of the twenty first century.  To get to the 22^nd century there will be people this generous and this alive to truly alter our ways of living on this earth.  They are beholden to Thomas Berry and his work and Tom has visited them.

These are just two examples of Thomas Berry as elder.  In effecting the relationship of young and old he is challenging everyone to grow into our role as elders and to reject our culture’s heresy of ‘retirement’ as finding the nearest golf course and squatting there until they bury you.  Instead, start investing your time, wisdom, imagination and excess money if you have some into those movements that can make us sustainable and carry our species into a 22^nd century that will be more honorable.

If human history survives and our species survives into the 22^nd century, I believe that history will record that among us a certain prophet rose in the latter part of the 20^th century imbued with the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin, the intellect of Aquinas, the eros of Hildegard, the humility of Francis, the science of Einstein, and the courage and imagination of Jesus.  His name was Thomas Berry.  We will remember him by carrying on his vision, by building institutions and movements and infiltrating all of our professions from education to politics to business to worship with his many and sustainable visions.

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[1] Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 26f.

[2] Ibid., 71.

[3] Ibid..

[4] A letter written in 1920.  See Robert Speaight, The Life of Teilhard de Chardin (NY: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 109.

[5] Teilhard de Chardin, “Sketch of a Personalistic Universe,” (1936), p. 82.

[6] Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography, (NY: Doubleday, 2004), p. 249.

[7] Thomas Berry, “The Earth: A New Context for Religious Unity,” in Anne Lonergan and Caroline Richards, ed., Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology, (Mystic, Ct: Twenty-Third Publications, 1987), 38.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter,p. 25.

[10] Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 211.

[11] Steven Herrmann, William Everson: The Shaman’s Call: Interviews, Introduction, and Commentaries (NY: Eloquent Books, 2009), 150.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Berry, Dream of the Earth, 207f.

[14] Herrmann,, William Everson: The Shaman’s Call., 162f.

[15] Ibid., 155.

[16] Thomas Berry, “Foreward,” in Gabriele Uhlein, Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen (Santa Fe: Bear & Co., 1983), 14.

[17] Ibid.

[18] See Matthew Fox, Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality (NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2003), 57.

[19] See Matthew Fox, “Otto Rank as Mystic and Prophet in the Creation Spirituality Tradition,” in www.matthewfox.com, “recent articles.”

[20] Fox, Sheer Joy., 97.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Berry, The Dream of the Earth, 215.

[23] Fox, Sheer Joy., 97.

[24] Ibid., 89.

[25] Ibid., 95.

[26] Ibid., 87.

Kid Spirit. Deep Ecumenism or Interfaith

Kid Spirit. Deep Ecumenism or Interfaith

Matthew Fox

It is an honor to be asked to address the important topic of “Deep Ecumenism” or Interfaith in this primal issue of Kid Spirit magazine.  Let me say that it is so important that young people be treating the “big ideas” and showing “their colors and share each others’ belief systems, cultures, art, traditions, ideas and values” as the Mission Statement of Kid Spirit so wisely articulates.  Without a new and deeper appreciation of one another’s traditions and diverse ancestors, our species will not survive for it will choose war instead of peace; ignorance instead of understanding.  It is wonderful that the young people of Kid Spirit are taking initiative and leadership in this important work of sharing and learning.

Among these big ideas and sharing of colors is the sharing of the wisdom traditions of the world.  So often adults get hung up on the differences between religions—then they fight and go to war over whether “my god can beat up your god” or “my god beat up your goddess.”  Enough of that!  The world is too small today for such petty posturing, such little ideas.  Bravo to Kid Spirit for going for the big ideas!  It is universally taught in all the world’s religions that NO NAME for the Divine Creator suffices for so great a mystery.  And thus every name says something; but no name says everything.

And all religions, at their deepest level, honor the wisdom of other faith traditions.  For example, Howard Thurman, the great African American mystic who was close to both Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., declared that “it is my belief that in the Presence of God there is neither male nor female, white nor black, Gentile nor Jew, Protestant nor Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, nor Moslem, but a human spirit stripped to the literal substance of itself before God.”  While these words were published in the 1950’s, they echo what many young people are experiencing today as the Internet and travel and immigration bring us all together rubbing elbows with people of a variety of faith traditions.

The key is what Thurman warns us about: “our spirit being stripped to the literal substance of itself before God.”  It is that bare honesty that counts the most.  We all have much to learn from one another but most of all from looking to the naked truth within our own spirit and our own selves and the best in our own traditions.  The Dali Lama warns us that the number one obstacle to interfaith is a bad relationship with one’s own faith tradition.  What a warning this is!

All traditions honor the sacredness of creation.  How important is this at this time when global warming and the destruction of other species is proceeding at unstoppable rates?  Dostoyevsky, writing from his tradition as a Russian Orthodox Christian, wrote in the nineteenth century: “Love all creation.  The whole and every grain of sand in it.  Love every leaf, and every ray of light.  Love the plants.  Love the animals.  Love everything.  If you love everything you will perceive the Divine Mystery in all things…and you will come, at last, to love the whole world with an all embracing love.”  Isn’t this good advice for all of us?  Won’t the plants and whales, the elephants and the polar bears, the soil and the waters, rejoice if we humans were to live this way?

Thich Naht Hahn, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, writes how “all beings in the animal, plant, and mineral world are potential Buddhas.”  Speaking as a Christian, I can say this: All beings are other Christs, they are the Cosmic Christ that John’s Gospel writes about when it says Christ is the light in all beings (today’s science teaches that photons or light waves exist in every atom in the universe).  To destroy rain forests or other species is to crucify the Christ all over again.

Black Elk, speaking form the Native American tradition, declares that we should know that “the Great Spirit is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains and all the four-legged animals and the winged people.”  But God is also “above all these things and peoples” as well.

All world traditions call us to our capacity for service and compassion.  The Jewish teaching is that Compassion is the secret name for God.  In the Koran the most used name for God is “the compassionate one” and Jesus taught his followers to “be compassionate as your Creator in heaven is compassionate.”  Buddha calls his disciples to compassion as well.  The Dali Lama says that we can do away with all religion and all ideology, “but we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion.”  How are we doing?  Have we learned much, taught much, practiced much compassion lately?

All spiritual traditions honor our likeness to Divinity that is found in our imaginations and creativity.  An ancient meso-American poem, for instance, honors creativity this way: “The true artist, capable, practicing, skillful, maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with her mind.  The true artist draws out all from his heart.  The good painter is wise, God is in her heart.  She puts divinity into things; he converses with his own heart.”  The Hebrew Bible talks about humans being the “imago dei,” the image and likeness of God the Creator.  Hafiz, the Sufi Muslim mystic, writes: “All the talents of God are within you.  How could this be otherwise when your soul derived from His genes!”

The Hindu Upanishads declare: “Where there is creating, there is progress.  Where there is no creating, there is no progress: Know the nature of creating.  Where there is joy, there is creating.  Know the nature of joy.  Where there is the Infinite, there is joy.”  Joy and creativity go together!  Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic, says that the only work worthy of human beings, the only work that satisfies, is creative work.

Dona Marimba Richards writes about African spirituality when she says: “Few have understood what music is to us.  Black music is sacred music.  It is the expression of the divine within us….Our music manifests our relationship with the whole as it puts us in tune with the universe.  It explains to us the mysterious workings of the universe and ourselves as cosmic beings….As in ritual, in music the human and the Divine meet….Dance, for us, is a religious expression.”

The world religions teach about the multiple names for Divinity.  For example, the ancient Baghavad Gita of India proclaims that “God has a million faces” and the Rg Veda declares that “The one Being the wise call by many names.”  In the Muslim tradition there is a beautiful prayer that recites the “100 most beautiful names for God”—names that range from “The Great One” to “The Alive” and “The Witness” and “The Forgiver.”  Thomas Aquinas, writing from the Christian tradition, says that every being in the universe is a name for God—and yet none of them are.

The names of Wisdom and Sophia in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles honor the feminine side of God as does the title of “Tara our mother” in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and the Tao in Taoism.  The Tao is “The Great Mother, Mother of the Universe.”  An ancient prayer to Isis in Africa calls her “Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements.”  Medieval Christians appropriated Isis as the Black Madonna and more recently as the Brown Madonna of Guadalupe.  Benedictine abbess and Christian mystic, musician, artist and healer of the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen honors Mary as the “ground of all being, mother of all joy, glowing, most green and verdant sprout.”

Another common teaching among world spiritual teachings is that of quieting the mind, of calming down, of making silence.  We call it meditation or contemplation.  Given today’s science, we might say such practices are about calming the reptilian brain which, being 420 million years old, plays a dominant role in our lives.  But reptiles are not good bonders as a rule; they like solitude.  Crocodiles lie alone in the sun.  Solitude is what we all encounter in meditation.  So solitude befriends our reptilian brains. How important is that?  Well, the reptile is win/lose.  The reptilian brain offers an action/reaction response.  Our species can’t run on that brain’s energy any longer.  It is killing us all and killing the planet.  We have to learn to meditate in order to calm the reptilian brain and allow the more recent brain, our mammal and compassionate brain, its proper space.  So the teachings to calm the mind, to find that stillness where we face God and Nothingness directly, these are especially valuable in our time.  “Be still and know that I am God,” say the Hebrew Scriptures.

Thich Nhat Hanh says: “Meditation is stopping, calming, and looking deeply.”  Breathing exercises help with this and so too does doing art.  Meditation is about focusing and centering.  We can do that by sitting but also by walking or by painting or writing poetry or composing music.  We can learn to let go, at least for a while, of the past and of our future worries and live fully in the present, fully in the Now.  The Tao te ching puts it this way: “Empty your mind of all thoughts.  Let your heart be at peace….Each separate being in the universe returns to the common source.  Returning to the source is serenity.”

We have treated about seven  themes that all the spiritual traditions teach in common.  There are many more as well.  Though diverse in their expression, these traditions share the same common wisdom.  It is important at this time in human and planetary history, when so much is in jeopardy, that we pay attention to what our traditions share in common instead of focusing on their differences.  As Rumi, the Sufi and Islamic mystic put it seven centuries ago: “All religions, all this singing, is one song.  The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall…but it’s still one light.”

------

All citations can be found in Matthew Fox, One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths (New York: Tarcher, 2000).

Kudos to Steven Hermann and Walt Whitman

Kudos to Steven Hermann and Walt Whitman: A Review of “Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy, and the World Soul” by Steven B. Herrmann By Matthew Fox

Thanks to Walt Whitman and to Carl Jung and to William Everson, mentors to the author whose in-depth probing of Whitman’s work unveils a treasure house of profound building blocks toward forging a post-modern spirituality.  Just as Whitman has been credited with re-inventing poetry through free verse, so with this study we get a feel for how authentically he also accomplished a reinvention of religion.  He and Hartmann are to be praised.  As Whitman put it, “The people, especially the young men and women of America, must begin to learn that religion, (like poetry), is something far, far different from what they supposed.  It is indeed too important to the power and perpetuity of the new world to be consign’d any longer to the churches, old or new, Catholic or Protestant—Saint this, or Saint that.  It must be consign’d henceforth to democracy en masse, and to literature.  It must enter into the poems of the nation.  It must make the nation.”  (p. 287)

Whitman’s spiritual genius breaks out everywhere in this profound study.  Consider his position on spiritual democracy that is so inclusive of women’s wisdom and experience.  “Democracy, in silence, biding its time, ponders its own ideals, not in literature and art only—not of men only, but of women.  The idea of the women of America, (extricated from this daze, this fossil and unhealthy air which hangs about the word lady,)  develop’d, raised to become robust equals, workers, and, it may be, even practical and political deciders with the men—greater than man, we may admit, through their divine maternity, as always their towering, emblematical attribute—but great, at any rate, as man, in all departments.” (250)  These words written multiple decades before women even had the right to vote!

Consider his position on deep ecumenism—and how it begins with the lower chakras (“throbbings”) in dance, where all shamanism begins, with our connection to the earth, and is cosmic because it embraces “all the voices of the universe.”

I hear the dance music of all nations…bathing me in bliss.

Give me to hold all sounds, (I madly struggling to cry,)

Fill me with all the voices of the universe,

Endow me with their throbbings, Natures also,

The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances,

Utter, pour in, for I would take them all!  (p. 250)

Consider his 150 year ahead-of-his-time inclusion of same-sex marriage as part of spiritual democracy.  And consider his call for a truly cosmic and universal creation-based “spiritual democracy.”  All his songs resonate with the labor groans of an emerging post-denominational, ecumenical, eco-based and justice-based spirituality yearning to be born in our time.

To entertain the themes that emerge from this in-depth study of Walt Whitman is like standing underneath a refreshing waterfall on a hot summer day.  Here are some of them: vocation; work; joy; ecstasy; sacred body; mystical sexuality; evolution of consciousness; nature—trees!; animals (green man); conscience, justice; religion’s failure; Europe’s failures; chant and spiritual praxis; mysticism; prophecy; evil; “vocalism,” i.e., art as meditation; the return of the feminine; native American wisdom; democratizing of spirituality including ecstasy, prophecy and conscience; ecology; earth consciousness; deep ecumenism; symbolic existence, metaphor; throat chakra; drum, ecstatic dance and ritual.

As institutional religion continues to embarrass itself and lost its grip and interest and moral legitimacy with ever new revelations of hypocrisy, priestly pedophilia, hierarchical privilege and cover-up, heresy-hunting, denunciations of science, homophobia, sexism, power addictions, fear, selling of cheap guilt, conniving with empire-builders and just plain boredom masquerading as worship, Whitman’s invitation to an ecumenical, earth-based spirituality calls all the louder to souls hungry for solid, sane and intelligent spirituality.  This book serves up many deep and tasty dishes.  Wisdom food abounds.  We are famished.  We are ready!

Let Walt Whitman speak:

“If anything is sacred the human body is sacred.”  (205)

“Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me, I know nothing else but miracles.” (288)

“Comradeship, uniting closer and closer not only the American States, but all nations, and all humanity. That, O poets! Is that not the theme worth chanting, striving for? Why not fix your verses henceforth to the gauge of the round globe?  The whole race...contributed by every nation, each after its distinctive kind.” (287)

Hartmann comments: “The idea of a new post-Judaic, post-Christian, post-Islamic, post-Hindu, post-Taoist, post-Buddhist religion is unique to America and the multi-culturalism that Whitman achieves in ‘Passage to India’ and “Democratic vistas’ is what makes him so unique among the poet-shamans of the world.”  Indeed.  His time has come.  So has ours.  This book opens needed doors for all of us.  Dare we enter them?  Dare we leave behind what we must to travel more lightly through these opened doors?    Time will tell.  And time is running out.

Ernest Holmes as a Creation Spirituality Mystic

Ernest Holmes as a Creation Spirituality Mystic Dr. Matthew Fox

If Jesus is correct when he says “by their fruits you shall know them,” then Ernest Holmes is a mystic to be admired because of the many fine practitioners and followers of his work that even I have encountered in the and Church of Religious Science over the years. I have often felt a deep connection with persons who live out Homes’ teachings and so I would like here to draw some parallels between his teaching and the tradition of Creation Spirituality which he is clearly a part of and which has occupied me for some thirty-five years of work and research.

1.First is Holmes’ understanding of the spirituality/cosmology connection. His very definition of spirituality is as follows: “Spirituality is a word too often misused. From our viewpoint spirituality is one’s recognition of the Universe as a living Presence of Good, Truth, Beauty, Peace, Power, and Love.” (p.33) Notice how the universe itself plays a central role in his understanding of spirituality. That is creation centered spirituality indeed. And ours is not a neutral universe but a loving one full of goodness (i.e. blessing), truth, beauty and more.

It follows that Holmes demonstrates a keen interest in cosmology as when he says: “The Science of Mind does not deny the physical universe. The objective universe is the Body of God. That body includes our physical being.” (p. 4.) The universe is how we name the divine in the human for “Every man becomes a unique manifestation of the Whole, a microcosm within the Macrocosm; rooted in the Infinite, he personifies it….God incarnate in man.” (p.31) Not only humans manifest Divinity but “everything that exists is a manifestation of the Divine Mind; but the Divine Mind, being inexhaustible and limitless, is never caught in any form; It is merely expressed by that Form. The manifest universe, then, is the Body of God.” (p.87)

Consciousness is a universal phenomenon. “It is enough for the intelligent person to know that the entire planetary system manifests intelligence and organization; that is, it manifests intelligence plus direction, and intelligence plus direction means consciousness.” (108) Another word for such consciousness would be Wisdom!

2. For Holmes, spirituality is about practice, not just theory. He says: “For every science there must be a technique or a way of proving its truth. …We must lay even more stress on the use of the Science of Mind than we do on seeking to establish its Principle….The first thing that any student of this science should do is determine to make daily use of it. In this, as in all other things, we should be practical. Too much study of any principle without making conscious use of it will lead to mere theorizing, and I am sure we all wish practical results.” (pp5f.)

3.Religion and Spirituality are not necessarily identical. Holmes writes: “People are more interested in God than they are in religion, because religion has been more or less mixed up with superstition, theology, and ecclesiasticism”. Holmes criticizes religion for being too small at times, too committed to its tribal gods. “When we use the word “God” or “Spirit” we do not mean a tribal God, but the Supreme Mind and Power back of all created form, the Intelligence which responds to us, the Intelligence which rises through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, and blossoms in the human mind as it approaches the conscious recognition that is it one with the Oversoul….The nature of man’s being is God.” (107) Furthermore, religion sometimes succumbs to Bibleolotry and Homes warns us: “The real Bible is inscribed on the walls of our own consciousness which by pure intuition knows that the Universal Intelligence that we call God exits.” (p. 108) And so he instructs his followers that “when people say “that they are not interested in a new religion, be sure to explain to them that you are not offering them a new religion you are merely seeking to give them an interpretation of life.” (110) He believed Science of Mind “does not necessarily create a new religion or sect, for it may be added to any spiritual system of thought since it is a complement to all”. (p.5)

4.Holmes prefers original blessing (goodness) over original sin when he writes: “The Will of God is never toward suffering ….Man must constantly reaffirm his belief in the Infinite Goodness if he expects to exclude the idea of evil from his thought.” (137f.) This is like Julian of Norwich saying “God is goodness” and Meister Eckhart teaching that “whenever we speak of the God of creation we are talking about Goodness.”

Holmes says: “God’s Will is always toward Life and more Life….The Life within you is God; whatever is true of God is true of your Life, since your Life and the Life of God are not two but One…. This Life within you, being God, did not begin and it cannot end; hence you are immortal and eternal…. The God that is within you is Truth, Beauty, Harmony, and Wholeness. Every apparent imperfection from which you suffer is a result of ignorance.” (116f.) Hildegard of Bingen agrees for she wrote: “God is Life” and Thomas Aquinas said: “God is Life, per se Life.” Holmes adds: “I know there is a Power for Good which is responding to me and bringing into my experience everything that is necessary to my unfoldment….I know there is a Power for Good that enables me to help others and to bless the whole world.” (434)

5. Holmes understands the distinction between Jesus and Christ and teaches the Cosmic Christ when he writes: “The reference to Christ is not to the man Jesus but to the Divine Incarnation in all people.” (154) And again, “every man is an incarnation of God….each man is an individualized center of the Consciousness of the one God….”(90f). Religious Science is dedicated to teaching “an absolute union of man with his Source….The whole process of evolution is a continual process of awakening. It is an understanding of this indwelling union which constitutes the spirit of God.” (p. 96) “Every man is an incarnation of God”—and a unique incarnation.

Holmes cites the “I am” sayings that are attributable to the Christ as being applicable to all of us when he writes: “I am the Christ dwelling at the center of every soul: human, yet Divine; Infinite, yet flowing through that which is apparently finite…I am the abundance within you….I am the Creativeness within you….I am the Sustainer within you. In the heart of each I live; at the center of all creation I dwell. I fill all space. I am All-in-all, over all, and through all. From the mightiest form to the smallest atom, my presence covers all, pervades all, and animates all.” (131-135) It follows that the Kingdom of Heaven means the kingdom of Harmony, of Peace, of Joy and of Wholeness. It is an inward Kingdom. “Heaven is not a place but an inward state of consciousness….The Kingdom is not external but within….within the mind.” (92) It follows that “there is a great difference in believing God to be within you or outside you.” (117)

6. Holmes works continually from a perspective of Deep Ecumenism. He cites from that Tao te Ching, the Gita, the Upanishads, Talmud, Koran, Bible, Hermetic philosophy, and more. He says: “All Scriptures declare that man is the spiritual image and likeness of God.” (p. 89) He cites Professor Max Muller affirmatively when he says: “The true religion of the future will be the fulfillment of all the religions of the past….love and embrace what is good in each.” (p. 105) Holmes believes that “All sacred scriptures have proclaimed the Unity of Life; that every man is a center of God Consciousness. This is the meaning of the mystical marriage, or the union of the soul with its Source. Jesus boldly proclaimed that he was One with the Father. This is the basis of all New Thought teaching, the Spiritual Union of all life.” (95)

Curiously, the name of my book on Deep Ecumenism is One River, Many Wells and Holmes invokes a similar imagery when he writes: “In the Colorado Rockies there is a beautiful valley form which many fountains gush forth. Each fountain is different, more water comes from some than from others, but there is only one body of water at a deep, subterranean level which flows through each one of them…. We as individuals each have our own thoughts, feelings, hopes, aspirations, and desires and each is directly and intimately connected with the one Divine Life, energy, and Power. Each of us is a fountain of Life. There is a God-pressure back of each one of us, a Life-force seeking outlet though our thoughts and acts. There are many fountains, many individuals, but only One God-pressure back of all.” (23)

Holmes sees water imagery everywhere. “Throughout the Bible we have this simile of water, typifying the flowing Power of pure Spirit. It is impossible to think of Spirit as being anything solid. It is always fluid….We can hasten the advent of this Good by definitely clarifying our thought and by daily meditating upon the invisible Source, the wellspring of Life within each one of us.” (166) Meister Eckhart also wrote about the Holy Spirit as a “rushing and violent river.”

7. Part of the fluidity of the spirit in us is our Creativity as I point out in my recent book, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet. Holmes also underscores the power of our creativity when he writes: “The real creative power of the mind is deeper than the intellect. It passes into the realm of feeling and acceptance…. you will frequently find people who have splendid intellects, whose logic is almost perfect, but who seem never to penetrate the deeper mind where the creativity resides…There must be added this deep feeling and conviction that enable one to commune with the Invisible. As I have so frequently said, the best comparison I can think of is the feeling that an artist has toward beauty, for beauty is an invisible essence, an all-pervading, all-penetrating something that cannot be adequately expressed in words but only in thoughts. It is an inward emotion of the mind which reaches out until it strikes some corresponding chord emanating from the Universe Itself….This is what an artist feels….Perhaps this is the real and true meaning of communion; something beyond prayer as ordinarily thought of; something which cannot be described but can be felt. God does speak to the heart more than to the intellect….” (164f) Holmes connects creativity to Spirit: “We do affirm the Spirit as transcendent, having the ability to create new thoughts while new thoughts create new situations.” (321)

8. Holmes acknowledges our role in combating Evil and how our creativity can contribute to evil or to good. “The whole Divine nature is reproduced in us, but we are ignorant of the fact. Our thought is creative, but in our ignorance we use it destructively. Theology has called this the problem of evil. We call it a misuse of that which is Good….To learn to think in the right manner is to learn to create that which is Good, and which gives complete expression to the self without ever containing anything destructive or negative.” (201) How do we choose to use our creativity? “These same laws, wrongly used, impose suffering upon us. We can use our minds to be happy or unhappy; we can think peace or confusion; we can be loving and kind, or disagreeable, because we are free. If we were so created that we did not have this freedom, we should be eternally bound. Life would have no meaning. Everywhere we look in our own lives and the lives of others we see the use and the abuse of this power. For instance, the atomic bomb could destroy civilization, yet atomic energy could run the machinery in the world…We are finally discovering that the very power that makes us sick can heal us, the very things that bind us can free us, and that the imagination we use to destroy our happiness rightly used, could create situations that would make everyone happy. Well, this is the meaning of the serpent and the savior and the great symbol which runs throughout the Bible depicting the right and the wrong way to use the Power which is within us; the Power that is greater than we are.”

Evil is not to be projected onto any particular person or place. “In spiritual mind practice evil is never treated as an entity but as an operation of thought. The practitioner never deals with evil as though it were big or little, and he must be careful not to locate it anywhere, in any person, or any group of persons. It is easy enough to see that the mentality of a practitioner must be kept free from the belief in evil, which unfortunately obsesses most persons’ thoughts much of the time.” (167)

Love overcomes evil. “To understand that Love overcomes both hate and fear is one of the chief requisites of a scientific mental practitioner. Love does not overcome hate and fear by argument or force, but by some subtle Power of transformation, transmutation, sublimation, invisible in its essence but apparent through its act….Love is the victor in every case…. Love sets the captive free.” (331?) At the same time we should not flatter ourselves that we can overcome goodness. “It appears that we have the ability, at least temporarily, to pollute this Stream of Life with the consciousness of hate, despair, or any negative thought which denies its purity. But of course we do not really have the power to destroy, only to mold and remold.” (166)

Much of the cause of evil is fear. “Fear is the great enemy of man”. (376) It is possible for us to catch fear from others “much as we world catch a cold, for we are all unconscious mental, emotional, and spiritual broadcasting stations.” (This is a lot like Rupert Sheldrake’s teachings on morphic resonance.) Holmes continues: “This takes us back to a thought in the Bible which says that a man’s enemies shall be those of his own household, for our real enemies are our fears and phobias, our doubts and uncertainties, our anxieties and our inner conflicts.” (359) Holmes recommends that we learn to “tune in to the Mind of God, which is free from fear and doubt.” We do this by prayer and meditation. “Mental fear is resisted by a whole and happy mind….The quickest and most effective method to get rid of fear is to get quiet and lift up the whole thought in confidence and faith to something bigger than we are. (360f) Ultimately, God should be loved and trusted rather than feared. (364)

9. Celebration of life, wonder and youthfulness are signs of the spirit. Holmes believes that “Youth is not a time of life—it is state of mind. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Whether seventy or sixteen, there should be in every man the love of wonder, the sweet amazement at the stars and the star-like things and thoughts, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for What next?, and joy in the game of life. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hopes, as old as your despair.” (177) Meister Eckhart taught that God is “the newest thing in the universe” and therefore the youngest spirit of all. To be God-like is to be young in spirit.

In all these nine ways—and many others—Holmes’ spiritual genius is on a parallel with great creation mystics of the past from Jesus to Hildegard to Aquinas to Eckhart to Julian of Norwich and more. We are blessed to be drinking from his wisdom today and today that wisdom is needed more than ever.

Advancing from the Modern Quest for Miracles to a Post Modern Science of the Miraculous

Opening Address This paper is based on Matthew Fox’s Opening Address presented at the Seventeenth Annual ISSSEEM Conference, The Science of the Miraculous (June 21-27, 2006).

by Matthew Fox

ABSTRACT

The mechanical model of the Universe that so dominated the modern era effectively banished the deep wondrous and miraculous to a distant realm outside daily existence and experience of psyche and creation.  Modern religion responded by defining miracles as essentially “divine interventions contradicting nature’s laws.” But what if existence itself is miraculous and wondrous and our capacity for awe, reverence, gratitude and “isness” itself were the true meaning of the miraculous? Is this not what the mystics teach and what post-modern science is destined to teach us as well?

Approached with an appropriate sense of wonder, we can see the depth of the miraculous within nature and within human nature in particular. Modern science removed the fantasy that we and our earth occupy the physical center of the universe, but post-modern science has demonstrated that we do live right in the middle of the scale of things, and we have the creative powers to discover our place in the scheme of things. Reawakening awareness of the sacredness of being, the sacredness of existence, enlivens our sciences to recognize the light of the multitude of divine sparks. Awakening wonder  empowers compassion, and sparks our creativity to heal the damage we have done by believing we were masters of the world, when we are actually embedded in the web of creation.

We will explore these and other questions about the miraculous within nature in general and within human nature in particular.

Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 1

We are thinking together this evening

about the topic of miracles and I

have chosen as a framework: “Advancing

from the modern quest for miracles to a

postmodern science of the miraculous.” I

want to begin with a few peoples' thoughts

about what a miracle is or isn't.

I am sure you all know Einstein's statement

that there are only two ways to live your

life. One is as if nothing is a miracle and

the other is as if everything is a miracle.

That observation is profound. In fact it will

form a kind of substrate of much of what I

have to say this evening. It is expressed, I

think, in the words of Meister Eckhart in

the Fourteenth century when he said “isness

is God.” The miracle of existence is

the substrate of any other miracles we may

encounter. Another insight comes from one

of the truly authentic saints walking on the

planet at this time, and that is our brother

Thich Nhat Hahn, our Vietnamese

Buddhist brother. He says, “Our true home

is the present moment. The miracle is not

to walk on water. The miracle is to walk

on the green Earth in the present moment.”

To me, coming from the Western tradition,

this is an exact echo of what Jesus said, when

he said, “The Kingdom and Queendom of

God is among you.” So, walking on the

green Earth and being fully present to the

moment of walking on the Earth is itself a

miracle far greater than walking on water.

Implications of this are the real profound

moral dilemmas of our time, such as the

suffering of Mother Earth and her creatures;

the implications of this are profound. We

should be careful of rushing into extraordinary

versions of the miraculous, when in

fact what we think is ordinary is already

extraordinary.

I would like to begin with some reflections

on what is a miracle after all. The word

“miracle” etymologically comes from the

word mirari which means to wonder at and

also to smile. They go together nicely. To

wonder deeply is to smile. It is to break

into joy, gratitude, and release. I would

propose that the modern era was not real

good at smiling. It was very serious about

things like “torturing Mother Earth for her

secrets.” (Francis Bacon). Development of

our powers of smile, wonder and awe were

seriously diminished in Western civilization

in the modern era. We were about more

serious stuff as we know, serious stuff that

has culminated in nuclear bombs,

submarines to deliver them and the ability

to tear down a rain forest in a day, that it

has taken God and nature 10,000 years to

give birth to and will not occur again on

this planet and perhaps not anywhere in the

universe. Webster's dictionary says, and you

must understand, I do not live by Webster's

dictionary, but it reveals a lot, when it

defines miracle this way: “an extremely

extraordinary event manifesting divine

intervention in human affairs.” A second

definition: “an extremely outstanding or

unusual event, thing or accomplishment.”

Of course Webster's dictionary comes out of

the modern era, and the whole idea that a

miracle is some kind of Zazam effect, that

is, God intervening with nature's course is

peculiarly modern.

I think it comes from this, in the modern

age, Westerners were taught that the

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Universe was a machine, which is a pretty

done thing, a finished thing. We made up

this idea that a miracle is breaking through

the machine rigidity, the absolute laws of

this Universe as we have been taught about

it. But as you move from modern to postmodern

science and modern to postmodern

consciousness and also welcome in

pre-modern consciousness, (which has the

much fuller experience of the awe of nature

and existence); as we make that move, we

shift profoundly our understanding of

miracle.

What then does miracle really mean?

Here are some antonyms, the

opposite of miracle, because one of the best

ways to negotiate a spiritual concept is to

go to its opposite first. For example, if you

want to know what justice is, take in

injustice, feel the kick in your gut at what

is unjust and you will begin to taste what

justice is. Let's first go to antonyms,

opposites of miracle: mundane, dull,

ordinary, routine, everyday, commonplace,

boring, unexciting, humdrum, dreary,

monotonous, unremarkable, tedious,

mechanistic, repetitive, predictable. It all

makes you tired, doesn't it? This is stuff

that feeds the old cynics, the old goat in all

of us. It feeds cynicism. This is not what

the miraculous is about. There is a lot of

this feeling in the air today. Wherever there

is cynicism there is this wallowing in what

I call the opposite of the miraculous.

Now, let's look at what the miraculous

means. What are synonyms for miraculous?

Amazing, astounding, astonishing, incredible,

unbelievable, phenomenal, marvelous,

extraordinary, mind blowing, inextirpable,

wonderful, wondrous, remarkable,

surprising, awesome. That is what miraculous

means, to be struck by awe. How

present then is the miraculous in our daily

life, in our work, in our citizenship on this

blessed planet?

The Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti several

decades ago said, “I am waiting for a rebirth

of wonder.” This is where science comes in

today to really feed us with the authentic

meaning of miraculous. What we are

learning when we are hearing the stories of

creation, the 14 billion years that brought

all of us here, and the kinship we have with

all of the beings of this Universe as we know

it: All of this is enough to pump awe to a

whole new level, never before and perhaps

rarely experienced certainly in recent

Western history. I want to look at the

subject of awakening our studying of

miraculous nature, studying miraculous

nature. I want to begin with this observation,

it is very important for scientists and

other serious people to recall, that to study

is a form of yoga. Study is a spiritual

practice. Study is a prayer. This is the

Jewish tradition for sure, where, to study

Torah is to enter into prayer, so long as you

bring your heart into the study. It was also

part of my tradition as a Dominican. We

were taught that the hours you spent

studying are just as prayerful as the hours

you spend chanting the psalms, or any other

kind of prayer. In fact there is a classical

story of Thomas Aquinas, who was a

Dominican. He was visiting a monastery

and writing a book. A brother came up and

said, “We are chanting the offices

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me that the playwright Antonin Artaud

wrote something very appropriate for this

critical moment in our history when he

said, “It is good that from time to time

cataclysms occur that compel us to return

to nature, that is, to rediscover life.”

Cataclysms occur to get us to return to the

fuller understanding of nature, which is the

rediscovery of life itself. What I am saying

then is that life is a miracle. Our being

here to study life is a miracle. I propose

that every breath you take and I take is a

miracle. The fact that the flowers over 100

million years ago fine tuned the oxygen on

our behalf and other animals' behalf is a

miracle; because the atmosphere at that time

was not appropriate for our lungs and

would have not allowed our presence on this

planet. I would say that all of these

accommodations to our presence are

wondrous, amazing, awesome and therefore

miraculous.

Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize after

his death for his book The Denial of Death.

He has another book and there is this

amazing sentence that speaks to what I am

talking about. He says, “Ancient people,

unlike modern people, had not yet lost their

awe of nature and of being.” He says it all

in this one sentence. The indigenous and

pre-modern people, unlike modern people,

had not yet lost their sense of awe at nature

and being. That is what we need to recover.

That sense of awe is the miraculous. Our

ancestors had this for tens of thousands of

years and we have pretty much erased it in

the last few centuries. When we recover this

sense of awe of nature and the awe of being,

we will be in a whole new place. We will

downstairs. You should come down.”

Aquinas said, “I am busy. Leave me alone.

I am studying.” Then the guy came up

again and said, “You have got to be down

here. We are praying.” Aquinas slammed

his hand on the table and said, “I am

praying! Get out of my room!” So the

whole idea is that to study is to pray, if you

bring your heart to it. That is the point.

Acertain amount of the Western quest

for knowledge has not brought its

heart to it. It has not been an interaction

with wisdom. It has just been an interaction

with knowledge and that is not

enough, because that is not human.

Knowledge by itself is raw power. Do you

remember the teaching from the Celtic

people, that says, “Never give a loaded gun

to a young man who has not first learned

to dance”? Knowledge in itself is a loaded

gun. It needs to find receptors who have

hearts. The mind is not a disembodied

reality. The mind is meant to connect to

the heart. The whole teaching then from

the Celtic people is that a person who has

not learned to dance, has not learned to first

celebrate life, is in no place to be taking life.

At this time in history, people who have

been studying nature must recover their

capacity for heart knowledge and bring that

into the project. That of course it seems

to me is what your entire organization is

about, reconnecting heart and mind.

Indeed, this reconnection is the very

struggle we face as a species today, a struggle

of whether we are even sustainable or not.

It is a struggle of how we are treating the

rest of nature, which of course will result in

our own capacity for survival. It seems to

Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 5

was told that I may never walk again. At

thirteen I was able to walk again. It was

an overwhelming blessing. I said to

myself, “I will never take my legs for

granted again.” This taking for granted

is what our civilization has to get over.

David here, the gentleman who I was

eating dinner with, was telling me how he

and his wife are working as medical people

in Uganda for one month a year. I was

asking what he learned from it. One of

the points he stressed was how much we

take for granted in our lives here. The

basics, including the stress of living in

drought in Africa, in living with AIDS in

Africa and so forth, we just don't know;

we are out of touch with how miraculous

our very existence is on a daily basis.

Iwill put out some questions. These are

for you to answer more than me. You

people have more scientific degrees than I

do. I ask: Is light a miracle? Is enfleshed

light or matter, what David Bohm calls

“frozen light,” a miracle? It's one in a

billion form of light. Is water a miracle?

Is breath a miracle? And the lungs with

which we process breath? Is the human

brain a miracle? Is the eye a miracle? It's

all wondrous. It's all amazing. We make

a huge mistake if we wait until our

deathbed to say thank you for it. As

Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer

you say in your whole life is thank you,

that will suffice.” But he didn't say, “And

wait until your last breath to say it.”

Are rainforests miracles? Are elephant's

miracles? Whales? Dogs? Polar bears?

How surrounded are we by miracles? What

no longer be beating up on nature,

including our own, and we will no longer

be neglecting the gift and the preciousness

of existence. We will not be taking

existence for granted.

One of the exciting people here this

evening, and you are all exciting, but

I ran into one fellow I haven't seen in years,

Courtney Milne sitting over here. He is a

photographer and a mystic who has done

some brilliant photographic books on the

wonders of the world. He has traveled all

over the world to get photos on the sacred

sites of the world, from Ayers Rock to

Machu Picchu and others. He had tremendous

mystical and other kinds of experiences

all around the world including having

his camera stolen in one sacred place. He

just came up to me before dinner and told

me this amazing story. He said, “I did all

of these books about these sacred spaces,

places all over the world. For the last seven

years I have been taking photographs of one

place--my back yard, the pond in my back

yard. I have 35,000 photographs if you

want to see them. Each one is more

revealing of the beauty, depths and sacredness

of this one place, which rivals Ayers

Rock and Machu Picchu.”

That, my friends, is exactly what I am

talking about. It is what Thich Nhat Hahn

was talking about. We are walking on

miracles everyday. You don't have to get on

a jet plane and fly to Machu Picchu to

know those things. Mother Earth is

blessing us everyday. If you have feet to

walk, that alone is a miracle. I know that

because when I was twelve I got polio and

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Baudelaire was saying. It is a story about

the yearning of the rest of creation to see

our hearts and a reminder that we are kin

with the rest of creation. To really grasp

the depths of this we have to rediscover this

sense that Einstein talked about that the

miraculous is a daily event. We must not

take life for granted.

As Rabbi Hessel says, “Life without wonder

is not worth living. What we lack is not a

will to believe, but a will to wonder.” The

will to wonder, the will to be open to awe,

that is the miraculous that can come alive

in our time and it must, because it is in

that context that we become warriors on

behalf of health and well-being of the other

creatures on this planet.

Let me give you one example of where

I find today's science reminding us of

how miraculous our lives are. We all know

the story about how Moses went to the top

of the mountain and found God in a

burning bush, took his shoes off out of

reverence and so forth. Mt. Sinai. You can

spend several thousand dollars and make

that pigrimage yourself to Mt. Sinai if you

care to. However, given today's physics, the

truth is that every bush, we now know, is

a burning bush. Protons and light waves

are in every atom in the universe. And

those beings that are green, who have taught

the rest of us how to eat, because they have

learned how to eat the sun with photosynthesis,

these beings are especially burning.

You don't have to take a trip to Mt. Sinai.

You can step right outside this hall, pick up

a leaf and you are encountering a burning

bush.

are we doing about it? How are we allowing

this wonder and this awe to seep into our

souls, our minds, our bodies and our

educational systems? Our political systems?

Our economic systems? Our worship

systems? Have we created armored suits so

that none of this is really received by us at

the depth at which it is coming at us?

There is a beautiful statement by

Baudelaire, the nineteenth century French

poet and art critic. He says, “We walk

through forests of physical things which are

also spiritual things that look on us with

affectionate looks. “We are continuously

being blessed by the beings of the world.

But are we preoccupied with our agendas so

strongly that we are not receiving?”

There is a beautiful story that happened last

year near where I live in San Francisco on

the ocean outside of San Francisco Bay. A

whale got stuck tied up in ropes. She had

a rope right through her mouth and she was

thrashing around and getting tighter,

beginning to drown. Five men went out in

rubber suits with machetes to try to release

her. It was a very dangerous task. One flip

of her tail and they would have been done

for, but she remained very still for the hour

and a half of this operation. One of them

was working on the rope in her mouth, eye

to eye with her for over an hour. They

succeeded and undid the ropes. This is

what happened then. The whale took three

laps, three circles. You would do that too

if you had just been liberated from prison.

Then she went up to each of the five men

and nudged them. A thank you. For me

that is a profound story. It is just as

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ago. It is all wondrous. It is all amazing.

It is all, therefore, miraculous. It was

Aquinas who said, “Revelation comes in two

volumes, nature and the bible.” This is what

religion in the West has been missing for

centuries. It has put all its eggs into the bible

basket. The bible is only 2,500 years old.

The universe is over thirteen billion, and this

contains the sacred writings of divinity. It is

in all of our bodies. Our bodies are much

older than the bible. Our bodies are cosmic

bodies. We must be paying more attention

to the revelation of nature.

For that task, we of course call upon the

sacred vocation of the scientist, because the

scientist unpacks, unveils, therefore helps

reveal the grace that nature is, the presence

of the divine that nature is, the sacred

throne on which the Goddess sits. Again,

Aquinas said this in the thirteenth century

and of course his whole effort was to bring

science into Christianity and he paid a price

for it. He was condemned three times

before they canonized him as a Saint. Keep

that in mind. He said, “A mistake about

creation results in a mistake about God.”

That ennobles the scientific quest as much

as any one sentence can ennoble it. Turn

it around and it means this: an insight into

creation is a revelation of God. It adds to

our understanding of God. To take the

example of the photographer who has spent

so much serious time taking pictures of just

his backyard pond, as he tells me he is going

deeper and deeper into the wonder, the

miracle of that one place. This is true of

you people who spend hours and hours,

years and years, months and months in your

sacred study, which is your prayer, in your

Today's physics has democratized the

theophany that was the launching pad of

the entire Western spiritual tradition. Be

with that for a minute folks. This is

stunning. That is just one tiny example.

Take another example in the Christian

tradition. John's gospel says, “Christ is the

light in all things.” We now know there is

light; there are photons in every atom in the

universe. This means that the Christ

presence is in every atom in the universe,

which parallels exactly the Buddhist

teaching that the Buddha nature is present

in all beings in the universe. All of this is

about awakening our awareness of the

sacredness of being, the sacredness of

existence. It is becoming simpler for us to

realize these things. We don't need all of

the paraphernalia of organized religions and

churches to get to the heart of the matter.

As a species we have to travel much lighter

at this time. We need a deeper spirituality,

but not necessarily more religious institutions.

Meister Eckhart put it this way in the

Fourteenth century. He said, “Every creature

is a word of God and a book about God.”

In other words, every creature is a bible. He

said, “If I spend enough time with a

caterpillar, I will never have to prepare a

sermon, because one caterpillar is so full of

the divine.” What we know from science is

that every caterpillar has a fourteen billion

year history, as do every one of us. The

caterpillar carries the carbon, nitrogen and

magnesium from the supernova explosions

from five and one half billion years ago, but

also the hydrogen and the helium from the

original fireball of thirteen plus billion years

Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 8

hunting/gathering exercise and it takes the

same spiritual warrior-hood that any other

spiritual practice takes. It takes strength. It

takes integrity. And it takes caring. Many

of you have invested many years into this

kind of hunting and I want to acknowledge

that. Let's now turn to one of the most remarkable

sentences about miracles that I have

ever read. This comes from my brother

Thomas Aquinas. He says, “The greatest

miracle of all is a virtuous life.” The greatest

miracle of all is a life lived virtuously. Now

we are talking about the miracle in the

human. I alluded to the miracle of the

burning bush, the miracle of the light in all

things and the miracles of the fourteen

billion years that got us here. Now let's look

at human nature. This is an astounding

statement that blows me away, that human

virtue is the greatest miracle we have got

going for us. Think about it. Is what

Gandhi did a miracle? Taking on the British

Empire, not firing a shot, and winning? Is

what Martin Luther King did a miracle?

Filling the jails and bringing about some

basic civil rights legislation and turning

segregation, at least at many levels, around.

Is what Malcolm X did a miracle? Including

his own conversion in Mecca where he got

over his own reverse racism and accepted

every human being as a child of God? Is

what Oscar Romero did--standing up to the

military in El Salvador, and to his own

church, because the Vatican was attacking

him for standing up to the military in El

Salvador--a miracle? Is what Dorothy Day

did--working and living among the poorest

of the poor in urban areas and starting houses

laboratories or at your computer examining

the miraculous that is the wonder and awe,

whether it is in the microcosm or the

macrocosm or in between in this sacred

place we call nature.

I am doing a book currently on the recovery

of the sacred masculine because it is obvious

that the divine feminine is back, the

Goddess is back. She's pissed, but she is

back. The Black Madonna is back and she

is whipping things up. The sacred

masculine has to step up to the plate. The

divine feminine needs a partner. I am keen

on that. One of the archetypes I am trying

to arouse for men to get going again is the

archetype of the hunter/gatherer. Certainly

for 95% of our species we were

hunting/gathering. I am asking now, how

have we taken this energy of

hunting/gathering? Which was certainly a

survival mechanism among other things.

How have we translated that into our world

today? I look around and I say, “Oh, it's

hunting for a shopping deal, a sale.” Is that

hunting/gathering in today's version?

Hunting for a parking place, is that

hunting/gathering? When I get into the

depth of it the first thing that comes to my

mind is the scientist. What is the other side

of Mars? What is at the extreme of these

expanding galaxies? Everyday in the paper

there is evidence that scientists are hunting

and gathering. It is a beautiful thing that

we converted that energy into something so

powerful and significant as learning the

story of how we got here. The story of

where here is, therefore, hopefully of where

we might be going and how we can get

there. The quest for truth is a

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to say we are half way through the life of

the Earth. At 8-10 billion years the sun is

going to gobble the Earth up. It's going to

go away. So we are in the middle. If we

had come a lot sooner or if we had come

a lot later, we would not be in a position

to be examining, to be studying the kind

of holy lessons, holy beings that we are

living with and studying today.

Furthermore they say that in terms of the

history of the universe, being fourteen

billion years old nevertheless, that we are

here at this time, we are still able to pick

up the receding galaxies, and that before too

long future generations are not going to be

able to pick up the receding galaxies. And

we are able to pick up the sound of the

original fireball and the radiation and light

from the original fireball, and that too will

not be so visible in future time. We are at

the right place to be here. Like Goldilocks

and the Three Bears, this mattress is too

soft, this one is too hard, this one is just

right. We are at a miraculous place, just

like where Goldilocks found herself to be.

Furthermore they say the size of our bodies

is so interesting. They believe, having done

the counting on this, that if you look at all

the beings in the universe, the macrocosmic

beings, the big ones and the microcosmic,

humans lie right in the middle. And they

say that our bodies are the right size to be

studying the universe because if we were

much larger, if our heads were larger our

brain would have to put all its energy into

processing our body and not into looking

through telescopes or whatnot to the rest of

the universe. This is stunning and

astounding and therefore miraculous

of hospitality in the poorest places and

bringing a lot of young people into that arena

of service, a base community that stood up

to the dictatorial rulers in Latin America for

decades, even amidst great persecution--is

that a miracle? Is what Mozart accomplished

a miracle? And Mother Theresa? And

Hildegard of Bingen?

Our admiration, that is what miraculous is

about, admiration for the greatness of

human courage and integrity, what we

honor and those we honor the most and

praise the most. This supports Aquinas's

thesis that to live a virtuous life is

profoundly miraculous and admirable. It

comes home to all of us because every one

of us is called to live a life of integrity and

courage that is wondrous.

Every one of us is unique and every one

of us is in a unique place today. Also,

all of us are living at a very unique time in

planetary history, human history and even

cosmic history. In their recent book, View

from the Center of the Universe, two very

fine cosmological thinkers, Joel Primack (a

very active NASA astrophysicist) and his

wife Nancy Abrams have put together this

wonderful book essentially on what we have

learned in the last five years from the

Hubble telescope about our universe and

our place in it. They have come to some

amazing conclusions. Of course we are not

the center of the universe like pre-

Copernican thought. There is something

peculiar going on with us and here are some

of their findings. First of all, the Earth is

going to live 8-10 billion years and we are

at the 4.5 billion year mark, which means

Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 10

archeologist's interest has focused on art

work, such as the paintings in caves 40,000

years ago. That is when they have found

our immediate ancestors. Just recently,

archeologists found human tools and beads

from the beaches of Morocco, in cave strata

that have been dated to 82,000 years ago.

These are the oldest ancestors we have

found to this moment. We know they are

our ancestors because they were busy

making beads for artistic ornamentation. If

for the anthropologist the working definition

of a human being is a biped who makes

artistic things, I don't know why our

education systems don't catch on.

Where is creativity in, “no child left

behind?” This is why the most creative

youngsters in our country, which are inner

city kids, are dropping out like flies, because

there is absolutely no acknowledgement of

their humanness, i.e. their creativity, in the

classroom. It is not just the young who are

dropping out. I was in Napa a few months

ago and a woman said, “I am a teacher. I'm

a great teacher. I love teaching and I'm

quitting. Every good teacher I know around

here is quitting. We never felt it was our

job to give an infinite amount of exams to

kids. We think it is our job to educe from

the kids their curiosity, their creativity and

their mindfulness. This is no longer the

agenda in education in this country.” I've

been working lately with an African

American, a thirty-two year old poet, rapper

and filmmaker. We are trying to reinvent

education from the inner city out.

Beginning with an after school program

from 3:00 to 6:00. It is built around several

elements; one is a spiritual practice with the

information. This is why they talk about

the view from the center of the universe.

We are not centered as they thought before

Copernicus, but there is something going

on. We are in the middle of something.

We have the chops to relate to it. We have

the intelligence. We have the creativity.

And we have the hearts, if we put ourselves

to the task. What this underscores is, on

the one hand, our dignity as a species, and

also our responsibility, and those go

together. What Eckhart called our nobility

is also our responsibility.

What are some of these virtues that are

calling us today to our miraculous

life of being virtuous human beings? One

of them that does not get nearly the press

that it deserves is curiosity. Curiosity is one

of the most holy enticers and forces of

allurement in the entire universe.

Unfortunately I have never had a class in

Curiosity 101 or much less Curiosity 303.

I wonder if we shouldn't be teaching

curiosity or at least encouraging it and

awakening it much more fully than we do

in the processes we call education. We

should be rewarding curiosity because

without it we truly withdraw, take for

granted, grow stale and freeze--truly freeze.

Another virtue that I think is appropriate

for our time is the virtue of creativity.

Remember the word virtue, virtus in Latin,

means power. We are talking about our

powers. Our species is precisely defined by

our creativity. When anthropologists go out

looking for our ancestors, they just don't

look for biped's bones, they look for biped

bones with artifacts next to them. Some tool

makers are considered to be pre-human, so

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They will be the viruses to change education;

we won't have to work through school

boards. Life is too short for that. As an

example of what these kids can do, Professor

Pitt has made a four minute DVD, a video

about the subject and spirit of meditation.

What is refreshing for me about this is several

things, one is you can see that Pitt is

presenting a spiritual practice he has been

doing since he was ten, for over twenty years,

this is serious teaching here. He's teaching

it with the new art forms of rap and video

making. What I find when I see this is a

great load off my shoulders. The new generation

can step up to the plate. They are ready

to step up to the plate. They have whole

new languages, whole new art forms to tell

the important stories today. They do need

us elders for content. Pitt has told me he

has been waiting twenty years for me to show

up because he knew he needed the content.

Meanwhile, he has been preparing. He has

become a crafts person, a filmmaker and he's

done his inner work. Now he's ready to do

his warrior work. In this four minute video,

you can get a feel for the new languages of

creativity that are at the finger tips of our

young people today.

Does that give you hope like it gives me

hope? There is a whole new thing

happening. I spoke on Fathers' Day at

Howard Thurman's church in San

Francisco, and afterwards this young

African American man came up to me. He

said, “You're the first adult I've heard who

understands my generation.” This is exactly

where we are at, we know that we have new

tools, we know we are powerful. But we

don't feel that our parents know it; we don't

body. That is to say he will be teaching you

Kung Fu or the marriage of heaven and

earth, which are things he learned when he

was ten years old in the ghetto in the inner

city and it literally saved his life. We are

both convinced that it is this awareness of

our power through our bodies and creating

boundaries with our bodies that is so

essential for young people to hold for

themselves. He has taught these same

practices in juvenile detention homes with

profound results. For the first time in these

kid's lives they have learned to calm the

reptilian brain and to get in touch with their

own powers of silence and self-inner

discipline. A big part of our program is also

a thirty minute teaching each day, which will

be about the new cosmology, the wonders

of our body, the genius of Howard

Thurman, or some other worth while topic.

Then the last hour and a half of their

afternoon is going to be spent making

movies, making rap, poetry, theater about

these topics, the new cosmology, the

wonders of our body, Howard Thurman's

spiritual philosophy of community, or some

other worthwhile topic. We are very excited

about this. We see a way here--without

arguing about it, without going to school

boards and all the politics--of just bringing

it forward. The kids will be viruses because

they go to school the next morning, they are

going to go to school and say hey this

learning thing can be fun. We are making

movies, making rap about our place in the

universe.

We have learned that the universe has

set it up for us for fourteen billion

years. No one is teaching us this in school.

Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 12

break loose, can finally emerge. This is what

the Buddha calls for, what Isaiah called for,

what Mohammad called for and what Jesus

called for. Our capacity for compassion,

where has it been? It has been swamped

lately with the reptilian brain. We can find

a way to quiet that reptilian brain. This is

what meditation does. Because reptiles like

solitude, to lie in the sun alone, they are

monks. You befriend your reptile brain by

taking care of the solitude needs that are in

you. Then the mammal brain can flourish.

No other virtue is as all-important,

according to every spiritual teacher that has

ever walked this earth or worked it.

Compassion can finally begin to happen.

The middle brain, the mammal brain can

finally emerge. Remember that the reptilian

brain is four hundred and twenty million

years old. The mammals compassionate

brain is two hundred ten million years old-

-half as old--but it does not get the

attention, especially in the modern era, that

it clearly deserves. Then igniting creativity

and putting it to the service of compassion

is where it's at today regarding our virtuous

work on this planet. This is service; all of

us are called to participate in the healing of

this planet in some way.

It is so clear that our creativity is our way

out of problems, i.e., clean fuel, clean energy

and so forth. Recently there was this article

in the paper, something I've never thought

about before, about scientists hunting,

gathering for some problem solving.

Scientists are eyeing the jet stream, an

energy source that rages night and day, 365

days a year, just a few miles above our heads.

feel that the school system knows it. We

know Dick Cheney and George Bush don't

know it. The media doesn't know it.

Mother earth in her suffering today is not

passive, she's active and she is awakening a

lot of young people, and a lot of creativity

everywhere. That is why the virtue, the

power of creativity needs to be tapped into

everywhere. These young people need

intergenerational wisdom. They need elders

who can help them with the content. They

need what scientists and explorers of human

nature and more can help them with. Not

because you want to make some kind of

esoteric fancy, get out-of-your-body experiences.

No, we like to stay in our bodies,

on this healthy body of mother earth.

Because currently it's not healthy--it's

unhealthy--because humans have been

taking a lot of weird trips lately. It is very

important, our invitation from the young,

though they may not articulate it always

very clearly. They want us in on the

picture. It's going to be a joint project, the

marriage of elderly wisdom with youth

wisdom. With these new art forms there is

no telling what can happen. I presented

Dr. Pitt's video at one place, and an older

gentlemen came up to me and said, “I can't

imagine any young person seeing that and

not being curious about meditation.” Isn't

it about time that we are curious about

meditation? What makes meditation so

important today? It can calm the reptilian

brain. When you can calm the reptilian brain

then that mammal brain, which is

our capacity for compassion, can finally

Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 13

compassion is the whole ballgame, the whole

law. Compassion being the most used name

for God in the Koran by far. Is God the

compassionate one? We have a wonderful

marriage here of science and its teaching

interdependence and our spiritual traditions

and our capacity for compassion. So

compassion then becomes a virtue that will

be the hallmark of our generation. We are

talking about the next evolutionary step of

our species. We don't have 500 years for it

or even 100 years. This has to happen

swiftly, time is running out on us. Time is

running out, and also we are adversely

affecting the other species.

Compassion is not about sentimentally,

feeling sorry or pity for one another. This

again is Webster's dictionary mistake.

Webster's dictionary says the idea that

compassion is about a relationship between

equals is obsolete. In fact, I propose that

Webster's dictionary is obsolete. “Passion

means justice,” says Meister Eckhart, calling

from the Jewish tradition. Justice is about

finding the balance. David was telling me

that one thing he's learned from being in

Africa is how unbalanced our world is. In

terms of accessibility to basic health care,

accessibility to basic healthy water, and so

forth. We have to hunt and gather the forces

of justice. The forces of balance again.

Because that is what compassion is about.

Compassion is not something sentimental

sweet or mushy. Compassion is about finding

the dance in the world between ourselves and

others and within all the communities of

which we are a part. This of course means

the human community as well.

If they can tap into these fierce winds the

worlds entire electrical needs would be met,

they say. The trick is figuring out how to

harness the energy. But the jet stream blows

from west to east six to nine miles over the

northern hemisphere with speeds up to 310

miles per hour twenty-four hours a day.

This is a very interesting concept. I never

thought of that. This, plus solar energy,

plus wind energy on the earth, plus so many

other ways to go. Again, we're living in a

moment of the unleashing of our creativity.

This is really the strong point of our species-

-our creativity and our capacity for compassion.

Here again is where today's science

really serves compassion. Science has

rediscovered an ancient mystical awareness

of interdependence. Interdependence is

now obviously one of the primary principals

of today's physics. Interdependence is

the basis of all compassion. Thomas

Merton, a Catholic monk who died perhaps

of assassination a number of years ago, two

hours before he died, gave a talk on compassion.

He said, “Compassion is keen

awareness of an interdependence of all living

things that are all part of one another.”

Science had confirmed this. You and I are

literally living with the atoms of the stars,

the galaxies, and indeed the molecules in

our lungs are those that Buddha breathed,

that Jesus breathed, that others have been

breathing. We are living interconnected

lives in every sense of the word.

What we have now is a new basis for

human behavior and it matches

ancient teachings: Jesus saying, “be you

compassionate as your creator in heaven is

compassionate,” and the Buddha taught that

Think right now of the sacredness of

water, because that's the real issue

around the world and it's going to become

more of an issue. Who is going to own the

water? Thomas Merton one day wrote in

his journal, “It's raining outside my

hermitage. I'm going to take my hat off and

walk in the rain, because some day they will

be selling us the rain.” That day is here

already. I was taught by a Native American

teacher, a Lakota man named Buck Ghost

Horse several years ago. He said: “you want

to know how holy water is, how miraculous

water is? Go without water for three days.”

It's simple, it doesn't take a sermon, doesn't

even take scientific investigation. Just go

without it for three days and you will know

what a miracle that first sip of water is. The

truth is people all around this globe are

going without water on a regular basis, and

without healthy water. These are some of

the lessons I wanted to share with you

around this topic of our daily experience of

the miraculous.

One more virtue that needs special

attention today is the virtue of

generosity. Sometimes we forget how

generous nature is. Are we aware for

example that the entire earth system runs

on one billionth of the sun's energy

everyday? The sun is giving away all this

energy all we need is one billionth. Are we

thanking the sun? There is a beautiful

poem from Hafiz, the fourteen century Sufi

mystic, that says, “Even after all this time

the sun never says to the earth, 'you owe

me.' Look what happens with a love like

that, it lights up the whole sky.” There's a

give away going on, there's a give away

going on in nature all over the place and

we are invited to the table. Not just to

receive but to deliver. That is, we have to

grow up as a species. We have been taking,

especially western civilization, from mother

earth and her children, her creatures for so

long. Now mother earth is asking of us,

“Isn't it time that you act like grown ups

and give as well as take?” That act of giving

is what we mean by generosity. I found the

word generosity so primal to the miracle,

the miracle of being human. When you

can tap into your generosity, our being fully

human, the miracle of your power, of your

virtue is shining. What I find about this

word generosity is terribly interesting. I

find it to be one of the richest words in our

language.

Behind the word generosity is a Latin word

genero, to beget, to produce, to create, to

cause to exist, to bring to life. So it's the

basis of our word generate, to be generative.

To be generous is to be creative. The word

generosity incorporates our creativity. In

addition, behind the word generosity is the

word genes or origin, birth, descent, father,

family, nation, offspring, race, ancestors.

All of these include the word generous. It

is our ancestors too. There is this

cosmological meaning to generosity too.

You're bringing in fourteen billion years of

ancestors when you're tapping in to your

powers of generosity. That is a miracle. In

addition the word generous comes from the

same source as the word generosity. Your

genius is the showing off of your generosity,

the display of your generosity. This is not

about building your ego up. It's about

participating in the generosity of the rest of

Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 14

nature. The miraculous, wondrous, stupendous

generosity of the universe. Which has

dared to bring our species aboard; a species

very exaggerated in our intellectual capacities,

and very feeble in our capacity for heart

and compassionate steering of the intelligence.

We've been proving the last few

centuries the deep danger of knowledge,

naked knowledge. Our species has to shift

and now, to the hunting and gathering of

wisdom. To draw the wisdom from all the

spiritual traditions of the world, including

science. To draw from our own hearts from

that of our children and from the warnings

that science is giving us. Part of the hope

of our time is the despair. I look at human

history and see nothing moves humans like

necessity. The truth is that we are living in

a moment of immense necessity. This is

one way we draw on our capacity for

generosity and creativity. One story I was

told by a scientist a few years ago that really

stuck with me is this: when our ancestors

discovered fire they left Africa. I would say

it was especially curiosity that had us leaving

Africa and we went on our ways. A bunch

of our ancestors landed in Euro-Asia and

the ice age hit. They just left the hot

savannas of Africa and now they're in an ice

age. I bet they spent a thousand years

blaming one another. Who turned off the

heat? What did you do? What bad dreams

did you have? Meanwhile they got to work,

they started killing mammoths, learned how

to sew them. They learned how to live in

caves and tell stories at night (instead of

watching television, watching other people's

stories at night). They developed all kinds

of survival mechanisms. But the point is

they survived. We come from tough stock.

Now we have self-pity that always goes

along with patriarchy. Patriarchy by

definition feels sorry for itself, because it

banished the mother capacity of compassion

within itself, so it has to look for mother

outside. It falls into to self-pity. One

concrete example would be the Vatican in

our time; It is overwhelmed with self-pity.

Because it destroyed the mother principal

within itself, that's called karma. We have

all kinds of whining and cynical media

people and politicians telling us, “Woe,

woe, woe! We can't do it. We don't have

the creativity. We don't have the energy,

don't have the time. We don't have the

money.” All self-pity. Every one of us

comes from very strong stock. Our

ancestors made it from the heat of Africa

through the ice age. Don't tell me we can't

make it today from this precipice of global

warming to a new way of living on this

planet. Every one of you in your work as

healers, searchers, investigators, scientists--

every one of you, every one of us and

everyone of the community that we

represent has a profound role to play in this

gathering of wisdom. This gathering of

wisdom and hunting for wisdom will be the

hallmark of our generation. These are some

thoughts I brought to share with you. We

might learn something from Gregory

Bateson when he says “the hardest teaching

in the Christian gospels is Saint Paul when

he says God is not mocked.” Gregory

Bateson says, “This saying should be

applied to the relationship between

humanity and ecology, the processes of

ecology are not mocked.” In other words

there has been a ledger that has been kept,

not by a God in the sky but by what

Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 15

Hildegard called the “web of creation”. She

says humans are a part of the web of

creation. There is give and take as there is

in a web. She says if humans ignore the

justice that keeps the web together then

God, she says, will allow creation to punish

humanity. It's not God seeking vengeance.

It's the web of creation that's going to put

us in our place.

That is the moment at which we gather

today, that is the reason we are asking

questions about where is the miraculous and

how is our grasp of the miraculous shifted in

this post-modern time? You people have the

stuff that we all have within us, the chops.

To stand with the strength of the spiritual

warrior. The strength of the green man, the

strength of the goddess and of the Black

Madonna. At this time in history to reopen

the human agenda and the human perspective

to the basic truth that the miraculous

happens with every breath we take. If you've

ever been present for a birth of a baby you

know how stupendous and sacred that first

breath is. If you've been present at the last

breath as a person dies you know how special

that breath is. There is no reason then for

us to take every breath in between for

granted, quite the opposite. Every breath in

between can be the energy that brings out of

us our Divine-like generosity, compassion,

joy and creativity. That would be miraculous.

Don't you agree?

• • •

1. This paper is based on Matthew Fox’s Opening

Address presented at the Seventeenth Annual

ISSSEEMConference, The Science of theMiraculous

(June 21-27, 2006).

∞ ∞ ∞

Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 16

It's about Love!

It’s about Love, Stupid!  A word about Religion & Gay Marriage from a theologian  

Dr. Matthew Fox

When I read churches pontificating about what God says against homosexuals, my stomach gets knots in it.  The “God says” argument doesn’t hold water because the Bible is filled with “God says” items that do not cut the mustard any longer.  Consider for example the following admonitions from the Bible: Ex 35.2 says a person working on the Sabbath should be put to death.  Leviticus 11:10 says eating shellfish is an “abomination” (just like homosexuality).  Leviticus 25.44 says you may buy slaves from the nations that are around us.  Do you think Canadians would mind?  Or Mexicans?

Like anything else in life, one has to use the brains God gave us to determine priorities even and especially when reading Scriptures. Which of the priority teachings might apply to gay marriage in the Bible?  I would propose three.

One is the admonition that “God is Love.”  That is quite startling and still, after centuries and centuries, quite fresh.  God is Love.  Where we give love and receive love there is God.  Love is the better part of ourselves as human beings.  And it is God showing through our giving and receiving in good times and bad, in sickness and in health.

My Bible does not say “God is heterosexual love.”  (Does yours?)  But that God is love.  Marriage is supposed to build on love, develop it, nurture it and celebrate it.  A good argument for gay marriage.  Marriage celebrates and protects love.  Of whatever stripe.

The second Biblical teaching that honors gay marriage is Jesus’ teaching to put justice first, to support the anawim, those without a voice, the outcasts, the oppressed ones.  Gay and lesbian people have clearly been oppressed.  Some were arrested, some were put in mental hospitals and given lobotomies, some were beat up, some were murdered (such as the late Matthew Shepherd), most have had to hide and pretend—even from their families (I know one gay man who, as a child of ten, was sat down by his father with his four brothers and told: “If I ever found out that one of my sons was gay I would hang him from a lamp post and pull his guts out.”  I know a Philipino man who, thanks to the Roman Catholic hierarchy, felt so ashamed of his sexuality that he went to live in Africa for nine years rather than shame his family.  (And, since I am on the subject of the pope, why not be honest and say pedophilia is a sin but human love is not so please, sir, clean up your own house and put it in order before you pontificate about the “sickness” and “sinfulness” of gay love.)  Clearly, then, Jesus’ teaching to stand by the oppressed applies to a sexual minority as it does to any other minorities.

Lastly, the religious rhetoric against gay love is always buttressed by the famous line, “it’s not natural.  It’s against nature.”  But Science, whose job it is to explore nature, has found just the opposite.  That there are gay couples among at least 464 other species ranging from dolphins to birds, from dogs to seals.  So it is natural…. for a minority.  (It is not natural for a heterosexual but neither is heterosexuality natural for a homosexual.)

Religious people have to study creation as well as Bibles, just as St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in the thirteenth century when he said: “A mistake about creation results in a mistake about God.”  (He did not have the scientific evidence at that time that we have today about the naturalness of homosexuality for 8 to 10 % of a given human population.)  Homophobia makes a very big mistake about God, the author of nature’s immense diversity.  Including sexual diversity.  God is author of nature and that means that God is author…yes, of gay as well as straight passions.

The love that is celebrated in gay marriage is society’s love, not just that of man to man or woman to woman.  We all profit from faithful love whether such joy be lived out in heterosexual or homosexual contexts.  Indeed, rather than “threatening” heterosexual marriage, I would predict that gay marriage will help resuscitate a dying institution because it is bringing joy back and gratitude for love from a segment of the population that has been denied it for so long.  All marriage will prosper from gay marriage.

So let us all rejoice that notions of God is Love; and Justice Matters; and Nature is God’s Doing are happening in a fresh way in the state of California.  And let us move on to other topics of pressing and genuine moral concern such as the fate of the Earth.

Matthew Fox is an Episcopal priest and author of 28 books on spirituality and culture including Original Blessing and One River, Many Wells..  See www.matthewfox.org.

Some Reflections on Alex Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors

Some Reflections On Alex Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors By Matthew Fox  ©

I like the idea of a chapel of sacred mirrors.  I like the idea of anything dedicated to bringing a sense of the sacred back.  In fact, nothing is more primal for the survival of our species than a renewed sense of the sacred.  At least that is what a dream told me several years ago, one of those dreams so lucid and so powerful that it woke me up.  A wake-up dream.  A voice said to me in my sleep in the middle of the night: “There is nothing wrong with the human race today except one thing: We have lost the sense of the sacred.”  And I woke up, startled.

If we have lost a sense of the sacred we can darn sure bring it back.  And Alex Grey is surely doing his best to do so with his major gift of a chapel of sacred mirrors.

One thing that moves me regarding his Sacred Mirrors is that Alex Grey is locating the sacred in us! Imagine that!  Such an affront to all those fear-based and guilt-based ideologies that tell us we do not have what it takes, that salvation or wholeness must always come from the outside. (Mel Gibson should be given a free escorted tour of the Chapel of Mirrors.)  In contrast, Alex, like Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century, is proposing that our beauty and grace come from the inside—that we already have “all that is necessary inside us.” (Hildegard)  It was there all along but we did not recognize it.  Alex’ art allows us to recognize it.  And not only to recognize it but to meditate on it and to contemplate it.

And what is the “it” that we contemplate in the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors?  Is it narcissistic navel gazing?  Certainly not.  It is that “Buddha Nature,” that “Christ within,” that “Shekinah,” that “Goddess,” that “Imago Dei or Image of God,” that “Divine Spark,” that is in all of us.  Just as Alex portrays the many layers of energy fields and many forms of embodiment that Incarnation (God-made-flesh) takes in us, he invites us to meditate on the unseen layers of innerness that are ours.  We are such multi-layered beings.  Physically, energy-wise, emotionally, psychically, spiritually, we are many beings all at once.  We are our ancestors and our experiences of glory; we are our enemies and our experiences of abuse; we are Buddha and we are the Christ; we are everyman and everywoman; we are the perpetrator and the victim.  It behooves us to pay attention, to walk the walk of these sacred mirrors.

And why “mirror”?  There is an ancient mystical teaching, summarized as “speculative mysticism,” about us being mirrors of God.  (The word for “mirror” in Latin is “speculum.”)  Speculative mysticism has nothing to do with speculating: it has to do with mirroring who we truly are—our being “images of God.”  A mirror presents an image after all.  Saint Paul, on one of his better days, put it this way: “And we, with our unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors the glory of the Lord, all grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the image that we reflect”  (2 Cor. 3:18) Yes!  We do indeed reflect the glory or doxa or radiance of the Cosmic Christ and the Buddha Nature and Alex assists us to experience this deep truth.  But only if our faces are “unveiled,” that is to say only if we work out of our true (or inner) selves and not our outer or superficial, veiled, personas.  We need to know ourselves honestly and deeply for this divine image to shine.  But Paul is challenging us even further by suggesting that we grow “brighter and brighter” into our divine mirrorhood, into being true images of God.  That is what life does to us: Its joys and its sorrows, it ecstasies and its disappointments, all render us more glorious and resplendent reflectors of Divinity.  Or does it?

There is a cosmic sense to the sacred walk through the Chapel of Mirrors that Alex Grey has composed for us.  This cosmic dimension to our spirituality provides good medicine and a profound healing for westerners who have been far too deeply tainted by Augustine’s introspective conscience and his “personal salvation” neurosis.  When you add Augustine’s excessive introspection the modern scientific notion of rugged individual atoms making up our existence you begin to realize how the modern scientific era effectively destroyed our sense of community beginning with a sense of our kinship with the cosmos.

In contrast, Russian Orthodox philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev expresses this more cosmic sense of transfiguration when he writes: “The central idea of the Eastern fathers was that of theosis, the divinization of all creatures, the transfiguration of the world, the idea of the cosmos, and not the idea of personal salvation…. Only later Christian consciousness began to value the idea of hell more than the idea of the transfiguration and divinization of the world…. The kingdom of God is the transfiguration of the world, universal resurrection, a new heaven and a new earth.”  It is this sense of cosmic transfiguration that Alex Grey regains for us in the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

Still another healing that occurs in this Chapel is the healing of bad relationships to our bodies.  Again, especially in the West, a remnant of Augustinian and Neoplatonic suspicion of matter, has pit matter against spirit.  With today’s physics that teaches us matter is very slowly moving light (even “frozen light” in David Bohm’s words), we no longer have to set spirit in opposition to matter or spirit versus body.  Body and matter are not obstacles to spirit—they are unique incarnations of spirit.  This comes through strongly in these Sacred mirrors.  It is in our bodies (not outside them or fighting them or in spite of them) that we recognize spirit in its multiple and beautiful variations.  Truly, this is an incarnational spirituality, one that honors the holiness of flesh.  Our flesh and that of all beings.  There is a lot more unembodied light in the universe than embodied light.  Therefore we beings who are privileged to exist as embodied light, far from denouncing our embodiment, ought to reverence it and utilize it in communion with other angelic and light beings.  All of it a symphony of divine celebration.

In these ways—and many others—Alex Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors allows a sense of the sacred to return in every day things—such as the joys we feel at eating, nourishing ourselves, enjoying lying on the holy earth, playing with animals and plants, soil and one another.  Sexuality becomes part of the sacred again as it once was in the West in the Song of Songs and as it is in other religions of the world.

Grey assists us in this primal task of reenchanting our existence—not by seeking addictions outside us but by relearning about the mysteries within.  Thank you, Alex, for letting us see newly!

Otto Rank as Mystic and Prophet in the Creation Spirituality Tradition

Matthew Fox © In his chapter on “Nature and Spirit” in Psychology and the Soul, Rank declares himself thus: “I believe that we have entered a new phase of spiritual development, one that affects both physics and psychology.” Like so many of Rank’s brilliant observations, this short sentence carries huge messages and multiple, rich layers of meaning within it.  How telling that Rank is interested in our “spiritual development” and how this evolutionary step for our species will occur in the coming together of physics and psychology.  It is our “spiritual development” that provides the larger context for our “physics” and of “psychology”—and not the other way around.  It is Rank’s own “belief” and conviction that history is revealing (or awaiting?) a new chapter in humanity’s evolution.  Indeed, a “new phase” is being born.

Rank, writing these words in 1930, was so prescient and so profound in his grasp of the depth of history and of human nature that even today, some seventy-two years later, the new era or “phase” of which he speaks is still struggling to be born, still being unpacked.  It is still new.

Yet, as Rank would be the first to testify, this ‘new phase’ is born of inherited stories, myths, ideologies, belief systems, fears and experiences from very long ago.  The ancients and ancestors are a living part of this new turn in spiritual development.  One of the prophetic contributions of Rank is his high regard for the wisdom of the ancients of whom he declares: “Primitives disclose to us the deeper sources.”[i] If we are looking for depth (which I consider as good a definition of ‘spiritual’ as we can find), Rank says we ought to consider the ancients because they reveal the “deeper sources.”

Rank believes that we inherit the souls of our ancestors.  We all have a premodern soul in us or remnants of the same.  Rank, so deeply post-modern, admires the wisdom of the premoderns and goes hunting for it.  In doing so he sets himself up against the modern mentality that saw truth only in scientific cognition and ridiculed the consciousness and mysticism of premodern peoples in order to deny it among moderns.  (Theodore Roszak points out that the Enlightenment “ridiculed” mysticism as the worst offense against science and reason.)  Freud ridiculed mysticism, reducing it to infantile regression and a yearning to return to the womb.  Rank respects mysticism and includes it in any view of a whole and healed personality.

In this essay will explore Rank as Mystic; Rank as Prophet; and how Rank is a creation-centered mystic and prophet.

Rank as Mystic

I will explore six areas in which Rank emerges as a bona fide mystic.

1. Unio Mystica. Premodern and ancient peoples, like Rank, saw physics (i.e. nature and macrocosm) and psychology (human nature and microcosm) as one.  All of life was a celebration of this union of psyche and cosmos.  And this was a source of great wonder and admiration for Rank.  After all, people still seek “an identity with the cosmic process” and this very rediscovery of cosmology will provide the surest healing for our deepest woes which stem from our separation from the cosmos.  This unio mystica, our “being one with the All” and our being “in tune with” the cosmos, the earliest humans knew intimately.  “This identification is the echo of an original identity, not merely of child and mother, but of everything living—witness the reverence of the primitive for animals.  In man, identification  aims at re-establishing a lost identity with the cosmic process, which has to be surrendered and continuously re-established in the course of self-development.”[ii] Once again Rank instructs us to look to the primitives—in this instance for the wisdom of animal relationships, indeed the “reverence” that primitives have for animals.  Are we capable of recovering reverence?

Here Rank reveals a profound ecological consciousness, one that is about “all our relations” as the Lakota people pray in their most sacred ceremonies.  This should come as no great surprise since, as Thomas Berry has observed, “ecology is functional cosmology.”  To bring cosmology back, as Rank insists on and Berry has done in his masterful work with physicist Brian Swimme, The Universe Story, is to bring ecology alive. Rank is doing what Berry preaches sixty years after Rank: “Reinventing the human,” thus preparing us for a new, “ecozoic,” age which will be marked by new (and ancient) relationships of intimacy with nature both micro and macro.

In Rank’s view we do not toss off the souls of our ancestors, we incorporate them and fold them into our souls and therefore into the new cultural and ecological environments in which we find ourselves.  This context calls on our powers of will, our ethics and our creativity, and this makes us truly human and brings meaning to life.  We are called to act and give birth.

2. Language.  William James, whose work Rank studied, identifies one of

the marks of mysticism as being “ineffability.”  And Meister Eckhart, whom Rank also read, tells us that we “always stammer when we speak of God and divine things.”  Anyone who has read Rank is familiar with his stammering and his dances with ineffability.  For the mystic things are often best left unspoken.  Silence rules when one is struck by awe.  Yet Rank tries to speak the ineffable and to stammer about the Beyond and what he calls the “unknown.”  Rank praises religion “because it admits the Unknown, indeed recognizes it as the chief factor instead of pretending an omniscience that we do not possess.”[iii] While acknowledging and respecting mystery or the Unknown, Rank—like other mystics—does not find it easy to talk about.

Rank is not the succinct poet that mystical writers like Eckhart or Rumi or Julian of Norwich are.  Yet, in reading Rank, sometimes plodding along with his convoluted sentences and mixed images, there are moments of epiphany, breakthrough images and phrases that arrest the mind and move the heart, that speak so deeply to our depth experience that a mystical “aha” is voiced in acknowledgment of the truth he speaks on our behalf.  One admires Rank for keeping at it, for not giving up the fight to take back language itself from the modern, mechanistic, age that rendered even our talking of mysticism a subversive act.

3.The Irrational.  One great effort Rank makes to name the mystical is his much used term, the “irrational.”  It may be better to speak in English of the “other-than-rational” or the “more-than-rational,” but I will stick with Rank’s term here.  After all it is the concept born of the experience that matters most.

And what is that concept for Rank?  In invoking the “irrational” Rank is being the pesky prophet: He is standing up to and calling our attention to the excessive rationality of the modern era, of modern science, of mechanism, of reductionism, of Freud, of Newtonian causality, indeed of patriarchy itself and of the dominant culture of the West.

Why else is Rank so enamored with the “irrational” (read: “more than rational”)?  Because the animals are irrational and the winds and the sea and the tigers and the stars and the planets and the rocks.  Yet they all speak to us.  And often of the Unknown and the mystery behind all things.  As Eckhart says: “All creatures are gladly doing their best to speak of God.”[iv]

All kinds of beings—beings that an anthropocentric civilization chooses to ignore—live their wonderful lives with little or no rationality.  Furthermore, humans too live our lives far more irrationally than modern science and modern education would have us believe.  (I use that word “believe” consciously and in a Rankian fashion—the ideology of scientism is a belief system and its belief is that the rational is what counts.)  In business we call rationality the “bottom line.”  Rank actually believes that values count.   But values are not born of rationality—nothing deep is in Rank’s view.  Values are born of the “irrational.”  They are born of love.

What else does Rank intend with his willfully chosen term “irrational?”  He says: “The epitome of the irrational is the marvel of creation itself.”  Wonder is irrational, not rational.  And marveling is everything. This Jewish spiritual consciousness is echoed in Heschel when he speaks of “radical amazement” and reminds us that “awe is the beginning of wisdom.”  The rational gives us knowledge but wonder gives us wisdom.  Rank sought wisdom, he had seen enough of knowledge (body counts are rational-- “bottom lines” we might say for military minds).  Wisdom might be defined as the bringing together of the rational (knowledge) and the irrational (awe and love).  Whole civilizations fall, Rank felt, such as the Roman Empire, because they chased after the rational at the expense of the irrational.  And chased after a patriarchal agenda (the masculine preference for the rational) at the expense of the feminine (for women are “carriers of the irrational.”)

To write this essay on Rank I have rented a cottage at the ocean north of Bodega Bay, California.  Rank said that his work would “flourish under western skies” and himself chose the Bay area and then Lake Tahoe to write Beyond Psychology. I also take his words to mean that we must visit his places to arouse our souls as his was aroused.  When I arrived here, standing on a cliff over the roaring ocean with undulating waves and mammoth boulders strewn by glaciers centuries ago and still being worked over day and night by the relentless sea, as I listened to the sea gulls and saw seals swimming and imagined whales diving and was blessed by a hawk swooping down over my head a Rankian thought went through my being: “The epitome of the irrational is the marvel of creation itself.”[v]

Rank has spoken the ineffable for us.  In his own poetic way he has named the unnamable for he has pointed to where we will find experience that is deep and worthy of being named “spiritual” experience.  It is in nature.  The wilder and freer the better.

This morning I took a walk and encountered a bull and his consort fenced in on the land.  They stared at me, eye to eye we were, this bovine couple and myself, as I walked on. Is a cow rational?  Is the sea rational?  The sky?  The wind that howled all night?  The darkness that blanketed all?  The fog that enveloped the distant sea this morning?  The food I will eat for breakfast?  The warmth I feel with the gas heater lit up?  No, the rational—the making of a gas heater and the engineering that made this warm cottage possible—is good and fine but it serves the irrational.  If it does not, if the irrational serves the rational, then ideology trumps reality and we are lost souls indeed.

Ideology derives its power precisely from the fact that it is irrational though it comes disguised as rational.  Ideology represents the shadow side to irrationality, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it comes pretending to be scientific, objective and rational.  But scratch the surface and you find what often drives it is unconscious fear, dread, guilt and the compulsion to control.

This demonstrates the power of the irrational: Repress it, forget it, deny it and it will come up in other forms to sting us with its poison.  We imbue our ideologies with our distorted values—for only the irrational serves as a carrier for our values.  “Vital human values”—ethics itself—derive from the irrational, from our experience of what matters, of what is truly vast and vulnerable and worthy of our attention and protection.[vi] In other words, what is truly marvelous.  The irrational is that which “does not fit into our scheme of things”—it takes us beyond our personal, private, tribal, anthropocentric agendas into a vaster world, a cosmic place, whence we derive our truest values.  This locus for ethics echoes a statement shared with me by an Aboriginal in Australia who said to me: “We derive our rules for living in the environment from our Dreamtime.”  Dreamtime being of course the creation story of the Aboriginals and their on-going creation story, for creation to these ancient peoples  is a dreaming and a singing into existence that never ceases.  Irrational?  Yes.  Profoundly so.

Rank observes that life would not be life without the irrational.  “Rationalistic psychology was only an outgrowth of the mentality of our age which is, or rather, was up to recently, so highly rationalized that the irrational had only the neurotic form of expression.” Repress the healthy irrational and neurosis will sting you—and sting all of a culture.  But what is the cure to this excessive rationality?  “To attempt to cure this result of rationalism by more rationality is just as contradictory as a war to end wars, or an effort to strengthen a weakening democracy by more democracy.”[vii]

The cure is to step out of excessive rationality and make room for the irrational which represents the power of life itself.  “The only remedy is an acceptance of the fundamental irrationality of the human being and life in general, an acceptance which means not merely a recognition or even admittance of our basic ‘primitivity,’ in the sophisticated vein of our typical intellects, but a real allowance of its dynamic functioning in human  behavior, which would not  be lifelike without it.”[viii] What is lifelike is irrational and we ought to be paying attention to this first and foremost.  If this means getting off our intellectual high horses and making room for its dynamic functioning in our lives so be it.  (At our university we call this “art as meditation” and “ritual-making” and “body prayer,” namely getting graduate students and their professors to be irrational together.  It is good for the soul as Rank insists.  Indeed, it is necessary soul food.  Without it we do not have education for wisdom, only education for knowledge, i.e. the rational.  Without it we do not have a common ethic; instead we turn our morality over to lawyers whose excessive litigation is always rational.)

What are the negative consequences if we ignore the irrational in education and culture and our living?  “When such a constructive and dynamic expression of the irrational together with the rational life is not permitted, it breaks through in violent distortions which manifest themselves individually as neurosis and culturally as various forms of revolutionary movements which succeed because they are irrational and not in spite of it.”  Notice that Rank is not abandoning the rational—he says here that the rational and irrational life are perfectly compatible—but there must be a balance and our culture, lacking appreciation of the irrational, is far from balanced.  But to its peril.  For ideology will take over in its stead, anything to bring alive the irrational.  Karl Marx succeeded so amazingly because he offered hope to the poor.  Hope is an irrational thing.  It keeps people in dire straits alive.

What else is irrational?  How about the following: Dreams, music, dance, art, ritual, sex, love-making, babies, laughter, play, massage, drumming, singing, the smells of newly cut grasses, tastes of spicy foods, silence, grief, color, creativity, peace, clowning, nature, wilderness, prayer, fear, animals, angels or spirits, children, beauty, paradox, myth, stories, games, sport (that is not rational or business driven), campfires, chant, darkness, tenderness, forgiveness, meditation, God, birds, trees, plants, flowers, food.  AND “legitimate foolishness,” the folly that accompanies wisdom.  Holy folly.

What would life be without these?  Where would we derive our values, our reasons for living, our zest for carrying on?  The irrational includes the “dynamic forces governing life and human behavior.” In our culture these forces are stigmatized as “irrational.”

We need, says Rank, a whole new civilization—one that includes the irrational.  For “human nature is at bottom irrational.”  Rank is interested in the ground (Eckhart’s word) of our souls, the truth about what is at the “bottom” (Rank’s word) of our beings.  And what most touches us in the depths is the “irrational.”  But because society is rational (or pretends to be) we suffer from its “rational ideology” which is in fact born of an “inhibited negation of life.”[ix] The cure is to be found in this analysis: Instead of an inhibited negation of life, why not a community celebration of life?  This celebration of life, this optimism, begins with awe and wonder, with marveling at creation itself.

Rank is a creation-centered mystic of the highest order.  The Via Positiva, a rediscovery of the awe and wonder, the delight and joy of existence itself, is the basic cure for self and society’s tiredness and pessimism.  A new falling in love with life is the medicine prescribed by Rank and other creation-centered mystics.  Consider, for example, Eckhart: “Isness is God.”

And Aquinas: “Joy is the human’s noblest act” and “God is supremely joyful and therefore supremely conscious.”[x]

4.The Beyond.  Another favorite concept of Rank’s is that of the “beyond.”

Says Rank: “The individual is not just striving for survival but is reaching for some kind of ‘beyond.’”  Beyond is something we reach for.  It is not there yet.  One might say it is ‘eschatological,’ or in the future.  Yet it beckons us, reaches out to us.  It is that which we do not yet possess; yet it is reachable.  But it calls for a  reaching, an effort to move past one’s present condition.  The word “beyond” implies being yonder, being at a frontier, being at an edge, being on the edge, growing.  Eckhart says: “God is delighted to watch our souls enlarge.”  An enlarging of our souls takes us to our ‘beyond.’  Webster’s dictionary defines beyond as “a distant place usually within sight.”  Being at the horizon.  Adventure.  Stretching.  Something great to strive for, something great to welcome us in, to welcome us home.  A homecoming.  A return to our origins.

In Art and Artist Rank insists that the ancients’ passion for developing our relationships to the macrocosm, so fully experienced by way of ritual, can be our passion today.  Humanity’s will, that is its power of choice to create, is called forth by struggle and survival issues.  Our species, which is so deeply troubled by its own mortality, seeks still to go beyond, to reach beyond, “to reach for some kind of beyond.”  It is, in Rank’s view, that very reaching that characterizes us as a species.  Call it immortality; call it going beyond death, call it cutting through denial.  Call it our children; call it our monuments, our creativity, our art.  Call it nationalism, call it capitalism, call it fame, call it fear.  Still it beckons us, reaches to us, pulls us to some kind of beyond.  We cannot escape it.  We can respond to it or we can deny it.  But we cannot escape it.

Rank speaks of the need to move beyond psychology.  How is this done?  “Man is born beyond the psychological era only through vital experience of his own—in religious terms, through revelation, conversions, or rebirth.”  Vital experiences take us beyond, wake us up, feed us with revelation and conversion and rebirth.  Vital experiences are the experiences of ecstasy and union, joy and beauty that no one can take from us.  They are, reports Dr. Kubla Ross, those moments people remember on their death beds when they die peacefully.  They are grace.  Grace breaks through.  These are mystical moments.  Mysticism is our breakthrough moments of union, of ecstasy, sometimes hot or orange ecstasies, and sometimes cool or green, green/blue ecstasies.  They are what nourish the soul for soul is, says Rank, our “power of rebirth.”[xi] They make us young again, new again.  Eckhart says the first gift of the Spirit is newness.

What are some other synonyms for “beyond?”  How about the following: Transcendence; infinity; spirituality; cosmos; grandeur; immensity; mysticism; God; magnanimity; creativity; surprise; Spirit; eternal life.

Rank believed that we “negotiate with the problem of the Beyond” in at least two deep instances: Art and love.  There is an experience of union that overcomes separateness.  As Kramer puts it, “in the jointly created—and endlessly re-created—‘moment’ of empathy between artist and enjoyer, lover and beloved, I and Thou, client and therapist, separateness is dissolved only to be rediscovered, enriched, and renewed by the dissolution of the individual into the void.  ‘Love abolishes egoism,’ said Rank, ‘it merges the self in the other only to find it again enriched in one’s own ego.’”[xii] We have “beyond experiences” and invariably they are about a “dissolution of…individuality in a greater whole.”[xiii] Beauty does this to us and the experience of truth and art do the same.

What is this “greater whole?”  Rank dares to cite the mystics in The Trauma of Birth published in 1924, the book that got him expelled from Freud’s circle.  Rank says the mystic “cries out in beloved ecstasy: ‘The I and the You have ceased to exist between us, I am not I, You are not You, also You are not I; I am at the same time I and You, You are at the same time You and I’.”[xiv] Rank saw separation from the cosmos as the greatest issue besetting our species.  This cosmic separation is temporarily healed by our experiences of mystical union, the return to an original identity of union with the cosmic process which “has to be surrendered and continuously re-established in the course of self-development.”  When we surrender ourselves in art or in love we are undergoing a “potential restoration of a union with the Cosmos, which once existed and was then lost.  The individual psychological root of this sense of unity I discovered (at the time of writing The Trauma of Birth, 1924) in the prenatal condition which the individual in his yearning for immortality strives to restore.  Already, in that earliest stage of individualization, the child is not only factually one with the mother but beyond that, one with the world, with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved.”[xv]

This passage echoes Eckhart when he talks about our pre-origins in the Godhead where the unity is so great that no one will have missed us when we return.  We return at death but before that in encountering our “unborn self” in meditation and in other unitive experiences.[xvi]

For Rank, because he is at home in the cosmos, the world “bears the mark of infinity.” (Gaston Bachelard)  Rank’s world is not a rational world that humans make but the whole world that constitutes the very meaning of the Greek word “cosmos.”  French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in his moving book, The Poetics of Space, describes what living in a cosmos is like.  There the soul experiences immensity and grandeur.  We are at home with solitude for great things well up in the soul because of solitude.  “Immensity is within ourselves.  It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts up again when we are alone….we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense.”  Our soul is a vast place full of hidden grandeur and in our experiences of unity or grace “we discover that immensity in the intimate domain is intensity, an intensity of being, the intensity of a being evolving in a vast perspective of intimate immensity.”  Intensity, Immensity, Intimacy—in the human they all occur at once.  There follows a new level of self-appreciation and gratitude for being here.  “Slowly, immensity becomes a primal value, a primal, intimate value.  When the dreamer really experiences the word immense, he sees himself liberated from his cares and thoughts, even from his dreams.  He is no longer shut up in his weight, the  prisoner of his own being.”[xvii] The feeling of ecstasy results in a taste of profound voluptuousness.  (Eckhart says “God is voluptuous and delicious.”)  Liberation and healing follow.  I believe Rank saw all this.  This is why he champions so fiercely the reunion of microcosm and macrocosm.

5.The Now.  Rank praises the experience of union with the cosmos as being

one of the suspension of time—“present, past and future are dissolved” at that moment.  He further elaborates on the “Now” experience in his essay on “Nature and Spirit.” Indeed, these observations constitute the very last page of his book, Psychology and the Soul, forming a kind of culminating crescendo to his study of the soul and its history.  “In the psychic realm, the only reality is the Now. (italics his), the same Now that physicists find so incomprehensible, useless, and even unthinkable.”[xviii] Rank criticizes Freud for dwelling in the past for “in so doing, he neglects the truly psychic element—the present, active self, and its corresponding Now.” Thus for Rank the creative process, the choice to give birth that is the basis of all ethics, happens only in the now. Creativity is not of the past; therefore our healing will not come from knowledge of the past but from current choices, choices made by the “present, active self, and its corresponding Now.”  Rank applies his philosophy of the Now and practices what he preaches (or is he preaching what he practices?) when he tells us that his “dynamic therapy” is based first and foremost on an emphasis that shifts “from the past to the present, in which all emotional experience takes place.”[xix] The Eternal Now is reenacted in the healing paradigm Rank presents.  The emphasis on the Now is not speculative; it dictates a trust of what is really going on.  This sounds very zen-like.

Meister Eckhart talks similarly when he says that God is creating everything of the past and everything of the present and everything of the future in the depths of your soul now.  Eckhart deveops the Now consciousness when he writes: “God is in this power as in the eternal now.  Were the spirit at every moment united with God in this power, people could never grow old…There everything is present and new, everything which is there.  And there you have in a present vision everything which ever happened or ever will happen…everything is present and in this ever-present vision I possess everything.”[xx]

Another creation mystic, the historical Jesus, also speaks of the importance of the Now when he says: “The kingdom and queendom of God is among you.”

It is from these experiences of the eternal now that our memories are stamped forever with what we truly cherish.  Therefore it is from these glimpses of a restoration of a primal unity (Eckhart talks about our return to our “unborn self”) that our truest values emerge.  Without honoring these Now experiences, we do not share values in common.  We have no shared ethic.

6.Letting Go.  Like the mystics of old such as Eckhart, who says “we sink

eternally from letting go to letting go into the One,” Rank talks about the constant separations that life asks of us.  “I have learned that the capacity to separate is one of life’s major functions.  Life in itself is a mere succession of separations, beginning with birth, going on through several weaning periods and the development of the individual personality, and finally culminating in death—which represents the final separation.  At birth, the individual experiences the first shock of separation, which throughout his life he strives to overcome.  In the process of adaptation, man persistently separates from his old self, or at least from those segments of his old self that are now outlived.  Like a child who has outgrown a toy, he discards the old parts of himself of which he has no further use.”[xxi]

If we fail to learn to let go, the result is neurosis.  The neurotic “is unable to accomplish this normal detachment process. He cannot live through and emancipate himself from the various fundamental separation stages in life.  Owing to fear or guilt generated in the assertion of his own autonomy, he is unable to free himself, and instead remains suspended upon some primitive level of his evolution.  He stays fixated, so to speak, upon a particular worn-out part of his past that he cannot sever himself, and his whole present behavior is directed and symbolized in terms of this unaccomplished separation.”[xxii] Thus the neurotic never tastes the Now.  He is too busy living in the past and bracing himself for an imagined angst-ridden future.  The neurotic is not just the artiste manque; he is also the mystique manque. Rank is not only a mystic himself—he calls us all to the unio mystica and to the “marvel of creation,” to the irrational and the beyond, and to the Now and to deep and constant letting go.  To fail to respond is to invite loss of soul.

Mysticism is our “Yes” to life.[xxiii] Rank proposes that neurosis is by definition a refusal to say Yes; thus it is a refusal to be a mystic: “All neurotic reactions can be thus reduced to one Big No that men hurl at life.”[xxiv]

Rank as Prophet

If mysticism is our “Yes” to life, prophecy is our “No” to life’s imposters.  Rabbi Heschel defines the primary work of the prophet as “interference.”  Rank is constantly interfering, constantly being prophet.  He interferes with psychology and interferes with the modern era’s biases against mysticism and against indigenous wisdom and against spirituality itself.  Indeed, Rank combines his mysticism with his prophecy in the very title of his last work, Beyond Psychology.  For prophecy—interference—and mysticism—experience of transcendence or the “beyond”—both take us beyond psychology.

Rank, always the prophet, also translates “beyond” into critical thinking about culture.  Not only must we move “beyond psychology” but beyond rationality as we saw above.  And beyond patriarchy or masculine ideology--women he warns us should find their own psychology and not borrow Freud’s which is man’s “last attempt to control nature this time his own.”  This in his essay on “Feminine Psychology and Masculine Ideology”. He calls us beyond anthropocentrism by his love of cosmos and the macrocosm and by his call for “reverence” for animals and he calls us beyond the hubris of the modern era, the arrogance toward indigenous peoples.  He calls artists to move beyond the “art mania” of a culture that ignores the true roots of beauty and creativity.  He calls us beyond boredom, back to wonder, beyond adultism, back to healthy child-likeness.  He practices what he preaches when he signs his letters as “Huck” as in Huck Finn whose childhood he believes is worth all of us remembering.  He calls us beyond neurosis, beyond the artiste manque as he calls us to our authentic will, i.e. choice to create.

The prophet, says American philosopher William Hocking, is “the mystic in action.”  We have seen Rank as mystic, as champion of the Unio Mystica, of Speaking the Unspeakable, of the Irrational, of the Beyond, of the Now, of Letting Go.  Rank is also a mystic in action, a prophet who chose time and again to “interfere.”

Being a mystic in a rationalistic culture that dreads the mystic is itself interfering with that culture.  Therefore we have already seen Rank in his role as prophet insofar as we saw him championing mysticism and as we saw him moving beyond anthropocentrism to ecological awareness, “all our relations.”  We listed many of the “beyonds” that he was committed to either explicitly or implicitly.  We know the story of the price he paid for his commitment to a bigger view of the world and of the psyche than Freud and his followers were willing to admit.  He had to go “beyond Freud,”—a term he used himself[xxv]--beyond his mentor and friend and father-figure and this was never easy for him.  Indeed, it cost him his marriage as his wife stayed in the Freudian camp.  Rank’s story parallels that of other prophets: He was not honored in his own village.  Indeed, he was vilified.

But he did not respond in kind.  He never attacked Freud personally nor his followers, even though they attacked him.  Nor did his anger and hurt get projected onto his enemies.  Nor did it fester within him causing blame and bitterness.  There was no bitterness in Rank and this testifies to his greatness of soul.  Indeed, his call to let go of the hero and become one’s own was a call he himself heeded.  (The theological word for “hero” is “saint.”)  I believe Rank was a holy man as well as a spiritual genius because he stayed free of bitterness and found non-violent ways to deal with his anger.)

Rank, though not a practicing Jew, was always faithful to the heart of Jewish spirituality and that is, in my opinion, the marriage of mysticism (our Yes to life in spite of all its obstacles) and prophecy (our interference or “No” to injustice and falsity that prevents life from unfolding).  The two impulses blend beautifully in Rank’s work.  Consider, for example, how he is calling for a love of life when he insists that the fear of death is preventing us from living fully.  Or when he names the neurotic impulse as using our creativity falsely employed to escape life and when he dares challenge the artist to put more effort into living an artful life and renounce ‘objets d’art’ if needs be to accomplish this.  Or when he, in line with the Biblical teaching that we are all made in the image and likeness of the creator, says we are all co-creators and must get on with our task. Or when he reminds us that Marx’s success was in appealing to the irrational or hope among the world’s poor.  The fact that the first chapter of his final book is on “Psychology and Social Change” and the seventh chapter calls women to create their own psychology and move beyond patriarchal ideologies are proof positive of his commitment to interfere.  His courage is as real as his analytical depth and breadth.  So too is the fact that the social workers in America, people who work daily with the poor and neglected of society, responded so warmly and deeply to Rank’s message.  The Schools of Social Work in Philadelphia and in New York welcomed him to their cause.

Rank’s prophetic courage and insight is further evidenced in his willingness to take on psychology as it was practiced up to his time, that is to say in the person of his mentor and friend Freud.  To bring this about he himself invokes on more than one occasion the likeness of himself to Einstein.  He seeks an Einstinian revolution in psychology, one that moves from so-called “objectivity” a la Newton to one of relationship and relativity a la Einstein.  This conscious effort to move from modern science to a postmodern one on Rank’s part is clearly a work of interference.

Rank does not mince words about the strength demanded in the task of interfering.  “In The Trauma of Birth (1924), extending Freudian determinism from object to subject—from patient to therapist, psychoanalytically, speaking—I jolted Freud’s ‘physical’ standpoint  by analyzing the relationship (his italics) between research subject and observer in the analytic situation itself.  This relativistic orientation led in my more recent publications to a relativity-based psychology in which there is no longer a fixed position for the observer—that is, consciousness—but only the moment-to-moment dynamic relation of the twosome.”[xxvi] He extends this Einstinian stretch to the very definition of psychology on his final page of Psychology and the Soul when he declares: “Psychology has less to do with facts than does physics…[Psychology] is a science of relationships—a way of observing relationship and relativities…..It is in essence a science of relations…”[xxvii] Instead of isolating the individual to yield certain “scientific results,” we ought to acknowledge that “all living psychology is relationship psychology” whether the relationship be between two persons or between multiple persons as in the family or larger social groups.[xxviii] Here Rank is naming the very essence of a feminist philosophy and applying it to his profession: That essence being relationship.

Rank is to be commended for his daring to apply critical judgment and interference to his own profession and his own livelihood.  Many are the intellectuals who critique every system but their own, every structure but the one that is feeding them.  Rank dared to critique his very livelihood and in the process paid the price of a prophet without succumbing to regret or guilt.

To speak cosmology in a modern world is prophetic for it stands up to anthropocentrism.  Rank’s insistence on micro/macrocosm consciousness is deeply prophetic therefore.

In a lecture delivered in 1938 at the University of Minnesota, Rank repeats his call for a feminine psychology and he adds the issue of children’s neglect as well.  “We do not possess a real psychology of the woman nor do we understand the child psychologically.”  What we have in psychology “is in essence man-made: that is to say, man has projected his own psychology into the woman and into the child.”[xxix] How ahead of his time Rank was in pointing to what we can call today Adultism—the projection of adult attitudes into children.  How far this has taken us can be observed as we learn that Macdonald Corporation for example addresses its advertising promotions to three year olds!30 And then the dominant culture wonders why obesity is stalking our children.

Instead, Rank suggests that adults ought to learn from the children (Jesus offered the same subversive advice).  The child is more mystical, more at home with the irrational.  “The child lives mentally and emotionally on an entirely different plane: his world is not a world of logic, causality, and rationalism.  It is a world of magic, a world in which imagination and creative will reign—internal forces that cannot be explained in terms of scientific psychology.”  To honor the child’s wisdom is to recover a respect for nature itself.  “The child lives in a world of magic, where no logical or rational—that is, man-made—laws govern, but where the irrationality of nature herself, of which the woman is still so much a part, predominates.”[xxx] Instead of projection of adult ideologies into children, Rank proposes a radical alternative: The way of love, of a love that is more than sentimental and anthropocentric.  We cannot remove the child’s fear or insecurity, but we can “alleviate [them] by love, a love that connects the tragically separated individual again with cosmic life” (italics his).  Of course, for this to happen, adults must themselves possess a relationship to the cosmos.  Rank continues: “Instead of psychologizing the child, we should respect his irrational nature and learn from him to accept it humbly in ourselves as well.  We are not in the least more secure than he is, we are not less irrational at bottom.  All we do is pretend to be; that’s our tragedy, our false heroism.”[xxxi]

Rank and the Creation Spirituality Tradition

The creation spirituality tradition is found among indigenous peoples the worldover and is the oldest tradition in the Bible tracing its roots there to the J Source in the Hebrew Bible as well as to the prophets and to Wisdom literature.  It is the tradition of the historical Jesus who not only knew wisdom literature but also grew up in the richest land of Israel, Galilee, and found there the food for his parables all of which invoke creation’s beauty and relationships (seeds and bushes, fishes and sheep and goats, wheat and chaff, birds nesting and falling from their nest, the beauty of lilies in the field and more).  The creation spiritual tradition looks on the spiritual journey as happening in four paths, paths that intersect and repeat themselves in ever advancing spirals of fullness and consciousness.  (These four paths are in conscious distinction from the three paths of Purgation, Illumination and Union that were invoked by patriarchal Christianity that dominated religious language for 1700 years.  These three paths conveniently exclude the role of justice, the experience of joy and pleasure, and creativity.)

The four paths of the creation spiritual journey are named as follows:[xxxii]

1. 1.     Via Positiva: The experience of joy, delight, wonder at creation in its

fullness.  Clearly Rank is at home with this experience, the “marvel at creation itself.”  But we ought not to underestimate the effort it takes in the midst of culture’s many betrayals.  In fact, in Rank’s view, the “new hero” will be one committed to the via positiva: “The new hero, still unknown, is the one who can live and love in spite of our mal du siecle.”

1. 2.     Via Negativa: The experience of darkness, nothingness, suffering but

also silence. The proper response is letting be and letting go.  Suffering becomes our teacher.  As does silence.  Rank speaks of the via negativa by trusting the one suffering (the client in therapy) to undergo his or her pain and to be with it.  He also countenances, as we have seen, the principle of continuous separations or letting go’s.  And he insists that all difference need not be negatively conceived.  The Via Negativa is, among other things, about accepting difference.  The neurotic refuses to let go, “he is unable to accept this—his difference—positively.  He is compelled by a deep-rooted self-denial to interpret his difference negatively, as inferiority.”[xxxiii] The via negativa includes letting go of denial and self-hatred and fear of being different.

1. 3.     Via Creativa.  From the filling of Path One and the Emptying of Path Two

there is born “breakthrough” (Eckhart’s word) or what Rank would call Rebirth and connecting to our primal will which is our capacity for creativity.  “The individual is both creator and creature,” declares Rank , but for the neurotic “the creative expression of will is a negative one, resting on the denial of the creator role.”[xxxiv]

But creativity is a choice, as all morality is.  We face life and death every day and we are free to choose on a daily basis.  “I put before you life and death—choose life” says the Scriptures.  (Deuteronomy 30.19)  So also says Rank who declares: “Do not be reluctant to give birth.”  Creativity becomes the linchpin to Rank’s therapeutic method offering the patient “a much more active role than being merely an object upon whom the therapist operates, like a surgeon.  Thus, my concept allows for operation of the patient’s own will as the most constructive force in the therapeutic process.”[xxxv] And by will we all know Rank means the choice to give birth.  I have written in greater depth about Rank’s contribution to a spirituality of art in “Rank and the Sp. Journey” and Creativity but let me cite just one confession by Rank on this subject, a subject so dear to him that it came up in his very first book, The Artist.  “What I called the artist in that book was something other than the man who actually paints.  I meant by artist the creative personality….I emphasized not the biological and eternal factors but this inner self of the individual, whatever you want to call it: something in the individual himself that is creative, that is impelling, that is not taken in from without but grows somehow within.”[xxxvi] Compare Eckhart: “The truth does not come from outside in but from inside out and passes through an inner form.”

1. 4.     Via Transformativa.  The proper use of our creativity and all our delight,

suffering, silence and solitude is to channel those energies into compassion and justice-making, into healing and celebration.  That is the prophetic work par excellence: Rank interferes with sadness and degradation, with abuse and soul-loss through what he called “empathy” and “identification” in the therapeutic process.  “Correct understanding is one of empathy based on identification, whereas intellectual understanding is again projection to a certain degree, a compelling of the other to our own thought, our own interpretation.”[xxxvii] Surely empathy and identification are forms of compassion.  Rank practiced this and spoke of it: “Love abolishes egoism, it merges the self in the other to find it again enriched in one’s own ego.”[xxxviii] All psychologists—and indeed all workers—felt the original call to this noble vocation of compassion.  The trick is to get it back.

Thus we see that for many reasons Rank stands out as a mystic and prophet in the creation-centered tradition, a genius in spirituality as much as in psychology.[xxxix]

Conclusion

Rank observed that “new personality types are created during social and spiritual crises of religious, political or economic origin.”  I believe Rank was such a type.

While writing of Rank’s spiritual genius at California’s coast, I am witness to the blue sky reflecting the deep blue ocean on this stunning and sunny August afternoon.  I adopt his words that his work “will flourish under Western skies” to mean that at our quite new University of Creation Spirituality located in Oakland, California under “western skies,” his work is indeed flourishing as we commit ourselves to teaching lessons of mysticism and the new cosmology by incorporating the beyond and the irrational through a pedagogy that includes creativity, ritual, body prayer and art as meditation, as well as intellectual study--all for the purpose of building up prophets.  Especially prophets willing to stand up in their own professions and speak out, interfere, heal and infiltrate. Like Rank did. Rank’s teaching and his example will inspire us always.

---

30 See Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Perennial, 2002)

---

[i] Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology (New York: Dover, 1941), 245.

[ii] Otto Rank, Modern Education, M. Moxon, trans., (New York: Knopf, 1932), 376.

[iii] Ibid., 44.

[iv] Matthew Fox, Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1991), 59.

[v] Beyond Psychology, 250.

[vi] Ibid., 14.

[vii] Ibid., 289.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid., 23, 15, 278.

[x] Matthew Fox, Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 119f.

[xi] Otto Rank, Art and Artist (New York: Knopf, 1932), 128.

[xii] Cited in Robert Kramer, “The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy: Carl Rogers, Otto Rank, and ‘The Beyond,’” in Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 35, no. 4, Fall 1995, 95.

[xiii] Art and Artist, 110.

[xiv] Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Dover, 1924), 177.

[xv] Art and Artist, 113.

[xvi] See Fox, Passion For Creation, 77, 214-218.

[xvii] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 184, 193, 195.

[xviii] Otto Rank, Psychology and the Soul, Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman, trans. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 127.

[xix] Otto Rank, A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures, Robert Kramer, trans. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 268.

[xx] Fox, The Passion For Creation, 113.

[xxi] Rank, A Psychology of Difference, 270.

[xxii] Ibid.

[xxiii] See Matthew Fox, Prayer: A Radical Response to Life (New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 2001).

[xxiv] Rank, A Psychology of Difference, 258.  Italics and caps his.

[xxv] Ibid., 116, 242.

[xxvi] Rank, Psychology of Soul, 113.

[xxvii] Rank, A Psychology of Difference, 127f.; 95.

[xxviii] Ibid., 270f.

[xxix] Ibid., 271.

30 See Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Perennial, 2002).

[xxx] Ibid., 272.

[xxxi] Ibid., 273.

[xxxii] See Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 2001).

[xxxiii] Rank, A Psychology of Difference, 268.

[xxxiv] Cited in Kramer, “The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy,” 103.

[xxxv] Rank, A Psychology of Difference, 268.

[xxxvi] Ibid., 242.  For more on Rank and the spirituality of creativity see Matthew Fox, “Otto Rank on the Artistic Journey as a Spiritual Journey, and the Spiritual Journey as an Artistic Journey” in Matthew Fox, Wrestling with the Prophets (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 199-214 and also Matthew Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet (New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 2002),

[xxxvii] Ibid., 209.  See also page 94.

[xxxviii] Cited in Kramer, “The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy,”  95.

360 Vision - Heretic Interview with Matthew Fox

Education vs. Incarceration: A Solution

(Offered by Professor Pitt, president of DLF and Dr. Matthew Fox, president of FCS)

Introduction

Dirty Lenz Films (DLF), a for profit media production company that has produced the trilogy “Hip Hop Dynasty” and Friends of Creation Spirituality (FCS), a non-profit with a 23 year track record in California that has sponsored cutting edge education programs for adults, have teamed up to provide a solution to the high rates of educational failures and drop outs among our at-risk youth in America. It is well documented that where education fails, incarceration is the usual result. Consider that it takes $30,000 per year to house a prisoner in jail; and $5000 a year to educate a youth. Consider too that souls are often lost in prison and often redeemed in learning. In the state of California currently, 60% of high school youth are not graduating from high school. In cities like Baltimore and St. Petersburg, Florida, 75% of black youth are not graduating from high school.

Does this mean the young people in our inner cities are stupid? Or is the way and form in which we are doing education stupid? We at DLF and FCS believe the latter names the situation correctly and we have an analysis of how to correct it and a plan to implement that medicine. The key is that the media has so saturated the mind set of young people with negative images and symbols of themselves that the very term “education” is a negative one. So negative in fact that Oprah, who tried to bring money to the ghetto for education, gave up and started programs in African villages instead. She reported that there was no interest in education in American inner cities.

The key is that the message being sold our young people via MTV, rap songs that make the radio, movies and billboards with symbols of themselves saturating their neighborhoods and presents a warped warrior’s handbook. It teaches young people to fight but not to reflect. It taps into the reptilian brain but ignores the mammal brain where compassion is learned. It results in a treadmill to jail, the new form of slavery. The school system, even if it were doing an excellent job, would not be enough to combat the media’s influence since the young people leave school and encounter “what’s cool” among their peers and as defined by the media. What is currently cool is a warped message of what it means to be an adult. MTV is the children’s fathers and even parents attempting to steer their kids straight often have their values muted and poisoned by the prevalence of the warped warrior message machine driven by the media and its corporate backers.

We at DLF and FCS have another goal entirely: To offer a healthy warrior handbook: One that sponsors the following values: inner peace, tranquility, love, power, strength, honor, majesty and respect.

1. Toward a Healthy Warrior Handbook

How do we accomplish the task of permeating the pop culture with a message of an authentic warrior handbook? The strategy is twofold. First, we create a media blitz that tells a new story: That it is cool to develop your capacities for inner peace, tranquility, love, power, strength, honor, majesty and respect.

The media blitz will create a symbol of a new kind of African American hero, a Professor Pitt, who is a healthy warrior who has done his inner work (martial arts) and outer work (acquired skills of making movies and creating contemporary stories whose underlying premise is value based) and is bringing this to the community. Already a film trilogy of Kung Fu meets Hip Hop has been produced by Pitt; in addition, a comic book series of seven books is being written; a DVD has been produced; and CDs exist and will be promoted.

A media blitz is being designed that will go to the following cities: New York; Atlanta; Oakland and Bay Area; Chicago; Los Angeles and Dallas (possibly). This media blitz will include billboards and posters in inner city neighborhoods where the kids go to and from school; radio spots; t-shirts; ads on CBS afternoon programs that reach mothers who are watching soap operas and 60 Minutes and, in the evening, David Letterman. The ads tell of the movie that is coming soon and of the Awe Project, a new kind of education that is coming soon. Questions will be raised in kids’ (and their parents’) minds: “Who is this Professor? Who is Pitt?” This is how pop culture works. You create a buzz and curiosity and new image or symbol and reinvent what is “cool” for kids. We re-invent hip-hop with positive messages about the healthy warrior handbook. The media is clearly been interested only in negative messages. That is why we do our own media blitz, not relying on the current guardians of the media. Eventually, when the media sees that a positive message also sells, they will come on board. Instead of images of pimps, negative rappers and dope dealers, we fill the void with a black super hero who—believe it or not is not a cop--named Professor Pitt.

In addition, we continue to produce television programs on P-I-double-TV, a kind of “hip hop Sesame Street for Adults” which interviews healthy and positive and cutting edge hip hop artists that offer healthy role models and messages for the youth. This will be the first ever hip hop culture television show covering all aspects of the culture. We will walk this program into PBS to make it a regular program.

2. Reinvention of Education

The second leg to the strategy concerns education itself. Education as we know it today does not sell in ghettos. But we are talking about launching a new form of education (that in fact is more ancient than what we have in many respects), and one that respects the inherent creativity and curiosity of the youth. This form of education is called “The A.W.E. Project” (Ancestral Wisdom Education). The Program has been spelled out as the YELLAWE project (Youth and Elder Learning Laboratory for Ancestral Wisdom Education) in the book authored by Dr. Matthew Fox, The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human, and is based on his thirty year experience of providing alternative forms of pedagogy with adults. A pedagogy that was deeply transformative for peoples’ lives and that worked! Now we want to distill that pedagogy for the youth. Accompanying the book is the DVD by Professor Pitt putting to 10 rap/videos the “10 C’s of Education” that Fox speaks of as needed to balance the “3 R’s” of reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic.

A renowned scientist said recently to Dr. Fox: “Kids today don’t need to learn facts in school. The facts are immediately available on their i-pods and computers. They need to learn experience. And Yes, we do have to reinvent education fast.” We believe that by reinventing education in the inner city and on Indian reservations, we will hasten that day when education is re-formed everywhere.

These 10 C’s—so neglected in current education and so appealing to young people-- are the following: Cosmology and Ecology (our place in the universe and our role in safeguarding the health of this planet); Contemplation or Meditation (one can learn to calm the reptilian brain through “martial arts” and drumming, chanting and other forms of meditation); Chaos (how to integrate and get along with chaos in our lives); Creativity (inner city kids are very well endowed with creativity yet studies show that arts are mostly ignored in today’s curricula); Compassion (we all have it in us); Community (moving beyond the ego to serve a greater tribe); Courage (all leaders wrestle down fear); Critical Consciousness (our ability to judge and critique); Chakra and Character Development (strengthening our capacities for self-empowerment and respect for self and others); Ceremony (all indigenous peoples have recognized the importance of ceremony for keeping community alive and for teaching the young the big stories and value stories that matter, especially rites of passage at adolescence).

The overarching goal of the YELLAWE program is to position disengaged at-risk high school youth in the public school system (and beyond) to become healthy and productive adults through wisdom-based academic support and enrichment activities, as well as the provision of job skills development, apprenticeship opportunities and entrepreneurial / micro-enterprise formation activities. We will begin in Oakland with a model of the program and move out to other cities.

With these two basic elements, Entertainment (and penetration of pop culture through film, cd’s, radio, comic books, advertising) and Education we have a non-violent revolution that one might call Edutainment. It is using the post-modern language that young people are born into today in our culture to excite learning.

The Educational component will begin with an after school program (3-6PM Mon-Thurs) whose curriculum looks like this: --30 minutes: healing arts (a grounding exercise that gets inner discipline going through bodily action learning to meditate and calm down) --40 minutes: help with homework (tutors provided) --30 minutes: teaching of important and often neglected topics such as: The New Cosmology: Our place in the Universe (already the authors of the important book, “The View From the Center of the Universe” have volunteered to join our faculty to help teach this); the wonders of our bodies; Heroes and Sheroes and Models to learn from (this may range from ancient African leaders to Malcolm X, Howard Thurman, Dr. King, Gandhi and Dorothy Day); starting your own business. --90 minutes: Creativity! The youth will learn to make video films; or to rap; or create theater or ceremony based on the content of the teaching. That is key: That substance replace mere feelings of anger or chaos or depression.

There will be apprenticeships available and internship opportunities, for example in working at one of two theaters that FCS operates or has access to in downtown Oakland; or in starting a business such as a café; or in learning to grow urban gardens; or in how to produce comic books; or how to do a TV show or make film. Students will be paid from $10 to $20 per afternoon for attending YELLAWE so that they can have some pocket money but also so that they begin to feel the relationship between learning and earning.

There is a strategy behind this after-school program: To make learning so fun and meaningful that the students themselves, who return to regular school classes the next morning, become the viruses to change the school system. “Hey, learning can be fun! I am making a movie. Listen to my new rap about the universe,” etc. The word gets out that learning is fun. Then the motivation is there to go deeper.

We are confident that this program will soon lead to a demand for charter schools that follow the model and, eventually, to the public schools themselves.

Adults will not be neglected (Elders, after all are mentioned in the title of YELLAWE along with youth.) Parents, whose interest will be piqued by the excitement of their kids, will have an opportunity to participate in their own version of YELLAWE and of course staff and teachers will be trained as well. Clergy and prisoners released from jail will also be invited. No doubt the media blitz will attract many inquiring adults to investigate and study with us. We anticipate a fully accredited bachelor completion program and a master’s degree and a doctor of ministry degree in YELLAWE education. Already we have heard from elders on Indian reservations and from indigenous leaders in Hawaii of their keen interest in working to bring YELLAWE principles to transforming education among their communities. A new job market will open up—one that appeals to creative and caring teachers and artists. We will be filling a void created by cut backs in art instruction in the public school system due to No Child Left Behind laws.

In Oakland, the YELLAWE program will be housed in Historic Sweet’s Ballroom (HSB) – a very unique venue with an amazing history of hosting great bands and singers including Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey and others from its beginnings in 1924. HSB will helps sustain YELLAWE by providing a venue for convening fundraising events to ensure the fiscal survival of partner community-based organizations which offer vital basic, supportive and specialized services to at-risk populations. HSB will also contribute to building community through offering an ideal space for ceremony and renewal of ritual.

3. Building Community through Ritual

African spiritual teacher Melidoma Some says that “there is no community without ritual.” For this reason FCS has been actively engaged in deconstructing and reconstructing Western forms of ritual for nine years. The “Cosmic Masses” which began in Oakland and are now occurring all over North America (Burning Man has invited FCS to bring the Cosmic Mass to the desert in summer, 2007). The Cosmic Mass reinvigorates ancient Western ritual by deconstructing the forms of worship inherited from the modern era and utilizing post-modern language such as electronic music, images, dj, vj, rap, dance and live music. In addition, Sweets Ballroom has been and will be a venue for rituals ranging from Native American ceremonies and pow-wows to Tibetan Buddhist chanting and horn playing and more. The ballroom is ideally suited for a variety of ritual making including possible hip-hop Sundays.

Through Edutainment we will create a trend, but a trend with substance. We will make a true warrior’s handbook cool. Even education will become cool. The media blitz scheduled for December starts the wave and begins the tsunami.

Now it is time to invite financial warriors to join us at the table, people who are as committed to helping the young save themselves as we are. We have the program, the talent, the vision. We need people with money to join us, to step up to the plate and make their contribution to this much-needed project. We know you are there and that you care and we offer an opportunity to co-partner with us.

10 Points: Science and Spirituality

Matthew Fox January 31, 2007

Chapter V: 95 Theses or Articles of Faith for a Christianity for the Third Millennium

Like Luther, I present 95 theses or in my case, 95 faith observations drawn from my 64 years of living and practicing religion and spirituality. I trust I am not alone in recognizing these truths. For me they represent a return to our origins, a return to the spirit and the teaching of Jesus and his prophetic ancestors, and of the Christ which was a spirit that Jesus’ presence and teaching unleashed.

Wie Luther stelle ich 95 Thesen vor, oder in meinem Falle 95 Glaubensbeobachtungen, die aus den 64 Jahren meines Leben und meiner religiösen und spirituellen Praxis stammen. Ich bin sicher, daß ich mit der Erkenntnis dieser Wahrheiten nicht allein dastehe. Für mich stellen sie eine Rückkehr zu unseren Ursprüngen dar, eine Rückkehr zum Geist und der Lehre Jesu und seiner prophetischen Vorfahren, und zu dem Christus, dessen Geist durch die Gegenwart und Lehre Jesu entfaltet wurde.

1.

God is both Mother and Father.

Gott ist Mutter und Vater.

2.

At this time in history, God is more Mother than Father because the feminine is most missing and it is important to bring gender balance back.

In unserer Zeit ist Gott mehr Mutter als Vater, denn das Weibliche fehlt am meisten, und es ist wesentlich, das Gleichgewicht der Geschlechter wieder herzustellen.

3.

God is always new, always young and always “in the beginning.”

Gott ist immer neu, immer jung und immer „im Anfang“.

4.

God the Punitive Father is not a God worth honoring but a false god and an idol that serves empire-builders. The notion of a punitive, all-male God, is contrary to the full nature of the Godhead who is as much female and motherly as it is masculine and fatherly.

Gott als strafender Vater ist keine anbetungswürdige Gottheit, sondern ein Götze, der den Imperialisten dient. Die Vorstellung eines strafenden, männlichen Gottes widerspricht dem umfassenden Wesen der Gottheit, die ebenso weiblich und mütterlich wie männlich und väterlich ist.

5.

“All the names we give to God come from an understanding of ourselves.” (Eckhart) Thus people who worship a punitive father are themselves punitive.

"Alle N amen, die wir Gott geben, stammen aus unserem Selbstverständnis." (Meister Eckhart*) Deshalb sind diejenigen, die Gott als strafend bezeichnen, selbst strafend.

6.

Theism (the idea that God is ‘out there’ or above and beyond the universe) is false. All things are in God and God is in all things (panentheism).

Der Theismus (die Vorstellung, daß Gott irgendwo `da draußen´ ist oder oberhalb oder außerhalb des Universums) ist falsch. Alle Dinge sind in Gott, und Gott ist in allen Dingen (Panentheismus).

7.

Everyone is born a mystic and a lover who experiences the unity of things and all are called to keep this mystic or lover of life alive.

Jede und jeder ist als MystikerIn geboren und als LiebendeR, der oder die die Einheit aller Dinge erlebt und berufen ist, dieses Mystische und diese Lebensliebe lebendig zu erhalten.

8.

All are called to be prophets which is to interfere with injustice.

Alle Menschen sind berufen Prophetinnen und Propheten zu sein, was bedeutet, sich in Ungerechtigkeit einzumischen.

9.

Wisdom is Love of Life (See the Book of Wisdom: “This is wisdom: to love life” and Christ in John’s Gospel: “I have come that you may have life and have it in abundance.”)

Weisheit ist die Liebe zum Leben (siehe das Buch der Weisheit: „Weisheit heißt: das Leben zu lieben.“ und Christus im Johannes-Evangelium: „Ich bin gekommen, damit ihr das Leben habt, Leben in Fülle.“)

10.

God loves all of creation and science can help us more deeply penetrate and appreciate the mysteries and wisdom of God in creation. Science is no enemy of true religion.

Gott liebt die ganze Schöpfung, und die Wissenschaft kann uns helfen, tiefer in die Mysterien und die Weisheit Gottes in der Schöpfung einzudringen. Wissenschaft ist kein Feind echter Religion.

11.

Religion is not necessary but spirituality is.

Religion ist nicht notwendig, wohl aber Spiritualität.

12.

“Jesus does not call us to a new religion but to life.” (Bonhoeffer) Spirituality is living life at a depth of newness and gratitude, courage and creativity, trust and letting go, compassion and justice.

"Jesus ruft uns nicht zu einer neuen Religion, sondern zum Leben" (nach Bonhoeffer*). Spiritualität heißt, das Leben in tiefer Neuheit und Dankbarkeit zu leben, in Mut und Kreativität, Vertrauen und Gelassenheit, Mitgefühl und Gerechtigkeit.

13.

Spirituality and religion are not the same thing any more than education and learning, law and justice, or commerce and stewardship are the same thing.

Spiritualität und Religion sind ebensowenig das gleiche, wie Bildung und Wissen, Gerechtigkeit und Gesetz oder Treuhänderschaft und Kommerz.

14.

Christians must distinguish between God (masculine and history, liberation and salvation) and Godhead (feminine and mystery, being and non-action).

Christen müssen unterscheiden zwischen Gott (männlich und Geschichte, Befreiung und Erlösung) und Gottheit (weiblich und Mysterium, Sein und Nicht-Handeln).

15.

Christians must distinguish between Jesus (an historical figure) and Christ (the experience of God-in-all-things).

Christen müssen unterscheiden zwischen Jesus (einer historischen Gestalt) und Christus (der Erfahrung von Gott-in-allen-Dingen).

16.

Christians must distinguish between Jesus and Paul.

Christen müssen zwischen Jesus und Paulus unterscheiden.

17.

Jesus, not unlike many spiritual teachers, taught us that we are sons and daughters of God and are to act accordingly by becoming instruments of divine compassion.

Ähnlich anderen spirituellen Lehrern lehrte Jesus uns, daß wir Söhne und Töchter Gottes sind und uns deshalb als Werkzeuge des göttlichen Mitgefühls zu verhalten haben.

18.

Ecojustice is a necessity for planetary survival and human ethics and without it we are crucifying the Christ all over again in the form of destruction of forests, waters, species, air and soil.

Ökologische Gerechtigkeit ist für das Überleben des Planeten und eine menschliche Ethik notwendig. Ohne eine solche kreuzigen wir den Christus immer wieder in Form der Zerstörung von Wäldern, Wasser, Spezies, Luft und Boden.

19.

Sustainability is another word for justice, for what is just is sustainable and what is unjust is not.

Nachhaltigkeit ist ein anderes Wort für Gerechtigkeit, denn was gerecht ist, ist auch nachhaltig, und was ungerecht ist, nicht.

20.

A preferential option for the poor, as found in the base community movement, is far closer to the teaching and spirit of Jesus than is a preferential option for the rich and powerful as found in, for example, Opus Dei.

Eine Option für die Armen, wie beispielsweise in der Bewegung der Basisgemeinden, ist der Lehre und dem Geist Jesu viel näher als die Option für die Reichen und Mächtigen, wie beispielsweise im Opus Dei.

21.

Economic Justice requires the work of creativity to birth a system of economics that is global, respectful of the health and wealth of the earth systems and that works for all.

Ökonomische Gerechtigkeit braucht das Wirken der Kreativität, um ein Wirtschaftssystem hervorzubringen, das global ist, das Achtung hat vor der Gesundheit und dem Reichtum der planetaren Systeme und das für alle Menschen funktioniert.

22.

Celebration and worship are key to human community and survival and such reminders of joy deserve new forms that speak in the language of the twenty-first century.

Feier und Kult sind Schlüssel zur menschlichen Gemeinschaft und zum Überleben. Derartige Anstösse zur Freude verdienen neue Formen, welche die Sprache des 21.Jahrhunderts sprechen.

23.

Sexuality is a sacred act and a spiritual experience, a theophany (revelation of the Divine), a mystical experience. It is holy and deserves to be honored as such.

Sexualität ist eine heilige Handlung und eine spirituelle Erfahrung, eine Theophanie (Offenbarung des Göttlichen), eine mystische Erfahrung. Sie ist heilig und verdient es, als solche geehrt zu werden.

24.

Creativity is both humanity’s greatest gift and its most powerful weapon for evil and so it ought to be both encouraged and steered to humanity’s most God-like activity which all religions agree is: Compassion.

Kreativität ist sowohl die größte Gabe der Menschheit wie auch ihre mächtigste Waffe für das Böse. Deshalb müssen wir zum Mitgefühl ermutigt und gelenkt werden, das – wie alle Religion übereinstimmend sagen – die gottesähnlichste Handlung der Menschheit ist.

25.

There is a priesthood of all workers (all who are doing good work are midwives of grace and therefore priests) and this priesthood ought to be honored as sacred and workers should be instructed in spirituality in order to carry on their ministry effectively.

Es gibt eine Priesterschaft aller Arbeitenden (die gute Werke tun und Hebammen der Gnade sind und darum PriesterInnen), und diese Priesterschaft sollte als heilig geehrt werden, und die Arbeitenden sollten in Spiritualität unterrichtet werden, um ihr Amt wirksam ausüben zu können.

26.

Empire-building is incompatible with Jesus’ life and teaching and with Paul’s life and teaching and with the teaching of holy religions.

Imperialismus ist nicht verträglich mit dem Leben und der Lehre Jesu und dem Leben und der Lehre des Paulus und mit der Lehre der heiligen Religionen.

27.

Ideology is not theology and ideology endangers the faith because it replaces thinking with obedience, and distracts from the responsibility of theology to adapt the wisdom of the past to today’s needs. Instead of theology it demands loyalty oaths to the past.

Ideologie ist keine Theologie, sondern gefährdet den Glauben, weil sie das Denken durch Gehorchen ersetzt und von der Verantwortung der Theologie ablenkt, die Weisheit der Vergangenheit an die heutigen Bedürfnisse anzupassen. Statt Theologie verlangt sie Loyalitäts-Eide auf die Vergangenheit.

28

Loyalty is not a sufficient criterion for ecclesial office—intelligence and proven conscience is.

Loyalität ist kein ausreichendes Kriterium für ein Kirchenamt – wohl aber Intelligenz und ein unter Beweis gestelltes Gewissen.

29.

No matter how much the television media fawn over the pope and papacy because it makes good theater, the pope is not the church but has a ministry within the church. Papalolotry is a contemporary form of idolatry and must be resisted by all believers.

Ganz gleich wieviel die Fernsehanstalten den Papst und das Pontifikat hofieren, weil das eine gute Show macht, ist doch der Papst nicht die Kirche, sondern hat nur ein Amt innerhalb der Kirche. Pontifikalismus ist eine zeitgenössische Art des Götzendienstes, dem alle Gläubigen widerstehen müssen.

30.

Creating a church of Sycophants is not a holy thing. Sycophants (Webster’s dictionary defines them as “servile self-seeking flatterers”) are not spiritual people for their only virtue is obedience. A Society of Sycophants — sycophant clergy, sycophant seminarians, sycophant bishops, sycophant cardinals, sycophant religious orders of Opus Dei, Legioneers of Christ and Communion and Liberation, and the sycophant press--do not represent in any way the teachings or the person of the historical Jesus who chose to stand up to power rather than amassing it.

Eine Kirche von Sycophanten zu schaffen ist nichts Heiliges. Sycophanten (laut Lexikon „unterwürfige, sich selbst suchende Schmeichler“) sind keine spirituellen Menschen, denn ihre einzige Tugend ist der Gehorsam. Eine Gesellschaft der Sycophanten – sycophantischer Klerus, sycophantische Seminaristen, sycophantische Bischöfe, sycophantische Kardinäle, sycophantische religiöse Orden wie Opus Dei, die Legionäre Christi oder `Gemeinschaft und Befreiung´, sowie eine sycophantische Presse – vertreten in keiner Weise die Lehren oder die Person des historischen Jesus, der sich gegen die Macht aufgelehnt hat statt sie anzuhäufen.

31.

Vows of pontifical secrecy are a certain way to corruption and cover-up in the church as in any human organization.

Pontifikale Verschwiegenheitseide sind in der Kirche ein ebenso sicherer Weg zur Korruption und Vertuschung wie in allen anderen menschlichen Organisationen.

32.

Original sin is an ultimate expression of a punitive father God and is not a Biblical teaching. But original blessing (goodness and grace) is biblical.

Die Ursünde ist äußerster Ausdruck eines strafenden Vatergottes und keine biblische Lehre. Der ursprüngliche Segen (Güte und Gnade) aber ist biblisch.

33.

The term “original wound” better describes the separation humans experience on leaving the womb and entering the world, a world that is often unjust and unwelcoming than does the term “original sin.”

Der Ausdruck „ursprüngliche Wunde“ beschreibt besser als „Ursünde“ die Trennung, die die Menschen beim Verlassen des Mutterleibes erleben und beim Betreten einer Welt, die oft ungerecht und abweisend ist.

34.

Fascism and the compulsion to control is not the path of peace or compassion and those who practice fascism are not fitting models for sainthood. The seizing of the apparatus of canonization to canonize fascists is a stain on the church.

Faschismus und Kontrollzwang sind kein Weg zu Frieden oder Mitgefühl. Und diejenigen, die Faschismus praktizieren, sind keine passenden Vorbilder der Heiligkeit. Der Mißbrauch des Kanonisierungs-Apparates zur Kanonisierung von Faschisten ist ein Schandfleck auf der Kirche.

35.

The Spirit of Jesus and other prophets calls people to simple life styles in order that “the people may live.”

Der Geist Jesu und anderer Propheten beruft die Menschen zu einem einfachen Lebensstil, damit „die Menschen leben mögen“.

36.

Dancing, whose root meaning in many indigenous cultures is the same as breath or spirit, is a very ancient and appropriate form in which to pray.

Tanzen hat in vielen ursprünglichen Kulturen die gleiche Bedeutungswurzel wie Atmen oder Geist und ist eine sehr alte und angemessene Form des Betens.

37.

To honor the ancestors and celebrate the communion of saints does not mean putting heroes on pedestals but rather honoring them by living out lives of imagination, courage and compassion in our own time, culture and historical moment as they did in theirs.

Die Vorfahren zu achten und die Gemeinschaft der Heiligen zu feiern, bedeutet nicht, Helden auf ein Podest zu heben, sondern sie dadurch zu ehren, daß wir in unserer eigenen Zeit, Kultur und Geschichte phantasievoll, mutig und mitfühlend leben, wie sie es in ihrer taten.

38.

A diversity of interpretation of the Jesus event and the Christ experience is altogether expected and welcomed as it was in the earliest days of the church.

Wie in der Frühzeit der Kirche ist eine Deutungsvielfalt für die Ereignisse um Jesus und die Christus-Erfahrung erwartungsgemäß und erwünscht.

39.

Therefore unity of church does not mean conformity. There is unity in diversity. Coerced unity is not unity.

Einheit der Kirche bedeutet deshalb nicht Konformität. Es gibt eine Einheit in der Vielfalt. Erzwungene Einheit ist keine Einheit.

40.

The Holy Spirit is perfectly capable of working through participatory democracy in church structures and hierarchical modes of being can indeed interfere with the work of the Spirit.

Der Heilige Geist ist durchaus in der Lage in partizipatorisch demokratischen Kirchenstrukturen zu wirken; und hierarchische Modelle können das Wirken des Geistes auch behindern.

41.

The body is an awe-filled sacred Temple of God and this does not mean it is untouchable but rather that all its dimensions, well named by the seven charkas, are as holy as the others.

Der Körper ist ein ehrfurchtsvoller Tempel Gottes. Und das bedeutet nicht, daß er unberührbar sei, sondern daß alle seine Dimensionen – benannt als die sieben Chakren – gleichermaßen heilig sind.

42.

Thus our connection with the earth (first chakra) is holy; and our sexuality (second chakra) is holy; and our moral outrage (third chakra) is holy; and our love that stands up to fear (fourth chakra) is holy; and our prophetic voice that speaks out is holy (fifth chakra); and our intuition and intelligence (sixth chakra) are holy; and our gifts we extend to the community of light beings and ancestors (seventh chakra) are holy.

Deshalb ist unsere Verbindung mit der Erde heilig (erstes Chakra); und unsere Sexualität ist heilig (zweites Chakra); und unsere moralische Empörung ist heilig (drittes Chakra); und unsere Liebe, die sich gegen die Angst stellt, ist heilig (viertes Chakra); und unsere prophetisch sich äußernde Stimme ist heilig (fünftes Chakra); und unsere Intuition und Intelligenz sind heilig (sechstes Chakra); und unsere Gaben, mit denen wir an der Gemeinschaft der Lichtwesen und Vorfahren teilhaben, sind heilig (siebentes Chakra).

43.

The prejudice of rationalism and left-brain located in the head must be balanced by attention to the lower charkas as equal places for wisdom and truth and Spirit to act.

Das Vorurteil des Rationalismus und der nur im Kopf angesiedelten linken Hirnhälfte muß ein Gleichgewicht finden mit einer Aufmerksamkeit auf die unteren Chakren, die ebenso Weisheit und Wahrheit und handelnden Geist verkörpern.

44.

The central chakra, compassion, is the test of the health of all the others which are meant to serve it for “by their fruits you will know them” (Jesus).

Das zentrale Chakra, das Mitgefühl, ist der Prüfstein für die Gesundheit aller anderen, die ihm dienen sollen, denn „an ihren Früchten werdet ihr sie erkennen“ (Jesus).

45.

“Joy is the human’s noblest act.” (Aquinas) Is our culture and its professions, education and religion, promoting joy?

"Freude ist das edelste Werk des Menschen." (Thomas von Aquin) Fördern unsere Kultur und ihre Berufe, die Bildung und Religion wirklich Freude?

46.

The human psyche is made for the cosmos and will not be satisfied until the two are re-united and awe, the beginning of wisdom, results from this reunion.

Die menschliche Seele ist für den Kosmos geschaffen und wird nicht zufrieden sein, solange diese beiden nicht vereint sind und Ehrfurcht, der Beginn der Weisheit, aus dieser Verbindung entsteht.

47.

The four paths named in the creation spiritual tradition more fully name the mystical/prophetic spiritual journey of Jesus and the Jewish tradition than do the three paths of purgation, illumination and union which do not derive from the Jewish and Biblical tradition.

Die vier von der Schöpfungstradition benannten Pfade repräsentieren die mystisch-prophetische geistige Reise Jesu und der jüdischen Überlieferung besser als die drei Pfade der Läuterung, Erleuchtung und Vereinigung, die nicht aus der jüdischen und biblischen Tradition stammen.

48.

Thus it can be said that God is experienced in experiences of ecstasy, joy, wonder and delight (via positiva).

Deshalb kann man sagen, daß Gott in einer Erfahrung der Ekstase, der Freude, des Staunens und der Begeisterung erlebt wird (via positiva).

49.

God is experienced in darkness, chaos, nothingness, suffering, silence and in learning to let go and let be (via negativa).

Gott wird erlebt in Dunkelheit, Chaos, Nichtigkeit, Leiden, Stille und im Erlernen des Geschehen- und Seinlassens (via negativa).

50.

God is experienced in acts of creativity and co-creation (via creativa).

Gott wird erfahren in Taten der Kreativität und der Mitschöpfung (via creativa).

51.

All people are born creative. It is spirituality’s task to encourage holy imagination for all are born in the “image and likeness” of the Creative One and “the fierce power of imagination is a gift from God.” (Kaballah)

Alle Menschen werden kreativ geboren. Es ist eine Aufgabe der Spiritualität die heilige Phantasie zu ermuntern, denn alle sind "im Ebenbilde" des Schöpferischen geboren und "die wilde Kraft der Vorstellung ist eine Gabe Gottes" (Kabbala).

52.

If you can talk you can sing; if you can walk you can dance; if you can talk you are an artist. (African proverb and Native American saying)

Wenn du sprechen kannst, kannst du auch singen: wenn du gehen kannst, kannst du auch tanzen; wenn du sprechen kannst, bist du ein Künstler. (Afrikanisches und indianisches Sprichwort)

53.

God is experienced in our struggle for justice, healing, compassion and celebration (via transformativa).

Gott wird erlebt in unserem Kampf für Gerechtigkeit, Heilung, Mitgefühl und Feier (via transformativa).

54.

The Holy Spirit works through all cultures and all spiritual traditions and blows “where it wills” and is not the exclusive domain of any one tradition and never has been.

Der Heilige Geist wirkt durch alle Kulturen und alle spirituellen Überlieferungen und "weht wo er will" und ist und war niemals einer Tradition exklusiv vorbehalten.

55.

God speaks today as in the past through all religions and all cultures and all faith traditions none of which is perfect and an exclusive avenue to truth but all of which can learn from each other.

Gott spricht heute wie in der Vergangenheit durch alle Religionen und alle Kulturen und alle Glaubensüberlieferungen, die alle nicht vollkommene oder alleinige Wege zur Wahrheitsind, sondern alle voneinander lernen können.

56.

Therefore Interfaith or Deep Ecumenism are a necessary part of spiritual praxis and awareness in our time.

Deshalb ist eine glaubensübergreifende oder Tiefenökumene notwendiger Teil einer zeitgemäßen spirituellen Praxis und Bewußtheit.

57.

Since the “number one obstacle to interfaith is a bad relationship with one’s own faith,” (the Dalai Lama) it is important that Christians know their own mystical and prophetic tradition, one that is larger than a religion of empire and its punitive father images of God.

Da "das Haupthindernis für eine Glaubensbegegnung eine schlechte Beziehung zum eigenen Glauben ist" (der Dalai Lama), ist es für Christen wichtig, ihre eigene mystische und prophetische Tradition kennenzulernen, die umfassender ist als eine Religion des Imperiums und ihr strafend väterliches Gottesbild.

58.

The cosmos is God’s holy Temple and our holy home.

Der Kosmos ist Gottes heiliger Tempel und unsere heilige Heimat.

59.

Fourteen billion years of evolution and unfolding of the universe bespeak the intimate sacredness of all that is.

Milliarden Jahre Evolution und Entfaltung des Universums weisen auf die innerste Heiligkeit allen Seins hin.

60.

All that is is holy and all that is is related for all being in our universe began as one being just before the fireball erupted.

Alles, was ist, ist heilig, und alles, was ist, steht zueinander in Beziehung, denn alles Sein in diesem Universum begann als ein Sein, bevor der Urknall geschah.

61.

Interconnectivity is not only a law of physics and of nature but also forms the basis of community and of compassion. Compassion is the working out of our shared interconnectivity both as to our shared joy and our shared suffering and struggle for justice.

Wechselseitige Verbundenheit ist nicht nur ein physikalisches und Naturgesetz, sondern stellt auch die Grundlage unserer Gesellschaft und des Mitgefühls dar. Mitgefühl ist die Umsetzung unserer gegenseitigen Verbundenheit sowohl in bezug auf unsere gemeinsame Freude wie auch in bezug auf unser gemeinsames Leid und unseren Kampf um Gerechtigkeit.

62.

The universe does not suffer from a shortage of grace and no religious institution is to see its task as rationing grace. Grace is abundant in God’s universe.

Das Universum leidet nicht an einem Mangel an Gnade und keine religiöse Institution darf ihre Aufgabe in der Rationierung von Gnade sehen. In Gottes Welt gibt es genügend Gnade.

63.

Creation, Incarnation and Resurrection are continuously happening on a cosmic as well as a personal scale. So too are Life, Death and Resurrection (regeneration and reincarnation) happening on a cosmic scale as well as a personal one.

Schöpfung, Inkarnation und Auferstehung geschehen auf kosmischer wie auf persönlicher Ebene ständig. Und das gilt auch für Leben, Tod und Auferstehung (Regeneration und Reinkarnation), die in kosmischem wie persönlichem Maßstab geschehen.

64.

Biophilia or Love of Life is everyone’s daily task.

Biophilie oder Liebe zum Leben ist unser aller tägliche Aufgabe.

65.

Necrophilia or love of death is to be opposed in self and society in all its forms.

Der Nekrophilie oder Todesliebe muß in uns selbst und in der Gesellschaft in allen Formen widerstanden werden.

66.

Evil can happen through every people, every nation, every tribe, and every individual human and so vigilance and self-criticism and institutional criticism are always called for.

Das Böse kann durch jede Nation, jedes Volk, jeden Stamm und jedes Individuum geschehen. Deshalb sind Wachsamkeit, Selbstkritik und institutionelle Kritik jederzeit gefragt.

67.

Not all who call themselves “Christian” deserve that name just as “not all who say ‘Lord, Lord’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven” (Jesus).

Nicht alle, die sich als „Christen“ bezeichnen, verdienen diesen Namen auch, wie auch nicht alle, „die `Herr, Herr´ sagen, ins Himmelreich eingehen werden“ (Jesus).

68.

Pedophilia is a terrible wrong but its cover-up by hierarchy is even more despicable.

Pädophilie ist ein furchtbares Vergehen, aber ihre Vertuschung durch die Hierarchie ist noch abscheulicher.

69.

Loyalty and obedience are never a greater virtue than conscience and justice.

Loyalität und Gehorsam sind niemals größere Tugenden als Gewissen und Gerechtigkeit.

70.

Jesus said nothing about condoms, birth control or homosexuality.

Jesus hat nie etwas über Kondome, Geburtenkontrolle oder Homosexualität gesagt.

71.

A church that is more preoccupied with sexual wrongs than with wrongs of injustice is itself sick.

Eine Kirche, die sich mehr mit sexuellem Fehlverhalten als mit Ungerechtigkeit beschäftigt, ist selbst krank.

72.

Since homosexuality is found among 464 species and in 8 percent of any given human population, it is altogether natural for those who are born that way and is a gift from God and nature to the greater community.

Da Homosexualität sich bei 464 Spezies und bei 8 % jeder menschlichen Population findet, handelt es sich bei denen, die so geboren sind, um eine völlig natürliche Sache, um eine Gabe Gottes und der Natur für die größere Gemeinschaft.

73.

Homophobia in any form is a serious sin against love of neighbor, a sin of ignorance of the richness and diversity of God’s creation as well as a sin of exclusion.

Homophobie ist in jeder Form eine ernste Sünde gegen die Nächstenliebe, eine Sünde gegen den Reichtum und die Vielfalt in Gottes Schöpfung wie auch eine Sünde der Ausgrenzung.

74.

Racism, Sexism and militarism are also serious sins.

Rassismus, Sexismus und Militarismus sind ebenfalls ernsthafte Sünden.

75.

Poverty for the many and luxury for the few is not right or sustainable.

Armut für die vielen und Luxus für wenige ist weder rechtens noch nachhaltig.

76.

Consumerism is today’s version of gluttony and needs to be confronted by creating an economic system that works for all peoples and all earth’s creatures.

Konsumismus ist die zeitgenössische Variante der Genußsucht und muß dadurch nicht Frage gestellt werden, daß ein Wirtschaftssystem aufgebaut wird, das allen Völkern und allen Wesen der Erde dient.

77.

Seminaries as we know them, with their excessive emphasis on left-brain work, often kill and corrupt the mystical soul of the young instead of encouraging the mysticism and prophetic consciousness that is there. They should be replaced by wisdom schools.

Die Universitäten, wie wir sie heute kennen, mit ihrer extremen Betonung der linken Hirnhälfte, töten und korrumpieren die mystische Seele der Jugend statt das vorhandene mystische und prophetische Bewußtsein zu ermutigen. Sie sollten durch Weisheitsschulen ersetzt werden.

78.

Inner work is required of us all. Therefore spiritual practices of meditation should be available to all and this helps in calming the reptilian brain. Silence or contemplation and learning to be still can and ought to be taught to all children and adults.

Innere Arbeit ist von uns allen gefordert. Deshalb sollten allen Menschen spirituelle Praktiken und Meditationen zugänglich sein und dabei helfen, das Reptiliengehirn zu beruhigen. Alle Kinder und Erwachsenen sollten Stille oder Kontemplation und Stillwerden lernen.

79.

Outer work needs to flow from our inner work just as action flows from non-action and true action from being.

Die äußere Arbeit muß von unserer inneren Arbeit ausfließen, so wie Handlung aus dem Nicht-Handeln entsteht und wahres Handeln aus dem Sein.

80.

A wise test of right action is this: What is the effect of this action on people seven generations from today?

Eine weise Prüfung für rechtes Handeln ist: Wie ist die Wirkung dieser Handlung auf die Menschen der siebten Generation nach uns?

81.

Another test of right action is this: Is what I am doing, is what we are doing, beautiful or not?

Ein anderer Test für rechtes Handeln ist: Ist meine Handlung, ist unsere Handlung schön?

82.

Eros, the passion for living, is a virtue that combats acedia or the lack of energy to begin new things and is also expressed as depression, cynicism or sloth (also known as “couchpotatoitis”).

Eros, die Leidenschaft für das Leben, ist eine Tugend, die der Trägheit entgegenwirkt oder dem Energiemangel, Neues zu beginnen, der sich auch als Depression, Zynismus und Faulheit ausdrückt.

83.

The Dark Night of the Soul descends on us all and the proper response is not addiction such as shopping, alcohol, drugs, TV, sex or religion but rather to be with the darkness and learn from it.

Die dunkle Nacht der Seele befällt uns alle; und die angemessene Antwort darauf besteht nicht in einem Suchtverhalten wie Einkaufen, Alkohol, Drogen, TV, Sex oder Religion, sondern darin, mit der Dunkelheit zu gehen und daraus zu lernen.

84.

he Dark Night of the Soul is a learning place of great depth. Stillness is required.

Die dunkle Nacht der Seele ist ein Ort sehr tiefen Lernens. Dazu bedarf es der Stille.

85.

Not only is there a Dark Night of the Soul but also a Dark Night of Society and a Dark Night of our Species.

Es gibt nicht nur eine dunkle Nacht der Seele, sondern auch eine dunkle Nacht der Gesellschaft und eine dunkle Nacht unserer Spezies, der Menschheit.

86.

Chaos is a friend and a teacher and an integral part or prelude to new birth. Therefore it is not to be feared or compulsively controlled.

Chaos ist ein Freund und Lehrer und ein notwendiger Teil oder ein Vorspiel jeder Neugeburt. Deshalb braucht man es nicht zu fürchten oder zwanghaft zu kontrollieren.

87.

Authentic science can and must be one of humanity’s sources of wisdom for it is a source of sacred awe, of childlike wonder, and of truth.

Echte Wissenschaft kann und muß eine der Weisheitsquellen der Menschheit sein, denn sie ist eine Quelle heiliger Ehrfurcht, kindlichen Staunens und der Wahrheit.

88.

When science teaches that matter is “frozen light” (physicist David Bohm) it is freeing human thought from scapegoating flesh as something evil and instead reassuring us that all things are light. This same teaching is found in the Christian Gospels (Christ is the light in all things) and in Buddhist teaching (the Buddha nature is in all things). Therefore, flesh does not sin; it is our choices that are sometimes off center.

Wenn die Wissenschaft lehrt, daß Materie „gefrorenes Licht“ sei (Physiker David Bohm), dann befreit sie damit die Menschheit davon, das Fleisch zum Sündenbock des Bösen zu machen und versichert uns statt dessen, daß alle Dinge Licht sind. Die gleiche Lehre findet sich in den Evangelien (Christus ist das Licht in allen Dingen) und in den buddhistischen Lehren (die Buddha-Natur ist in allen Dingen). Deshalb ist das Fleisch nicht sündig; unsere Entscheidungen sind es, die manchmal an der Sache vorbeigehen.

89.

The proper objects of the human heart are truth and justice (Aquinas) and all people have a right to these through healthy education and healthy government.

Die angemessenen Ziele des menschlichen Herzens sind Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit (Thomas von Aquin), und alle Menschen haben ein Recht, mit Hilfe von gesunder Bildung und gesunder Regierung dahin zu gelangen.

90.

"God” is only one name for the Divine One and there are an infinite number of names for God and Godhead and still God “has no name and will never be given a name.” (Eckhart)

"Gott" ist nur ein Name des Göttlichen. Es gibt unzählige Namen für Gott und die Gottheit, und doch „hat Gott keinen Namen und wird niemals benannt werden“ (Meister Eckhart)

91.

Three highways into the heart are silence and love and grief.

Drei Wege ins Herz sind die Stille, die Liebe und die Trauer.

92.

The grief in the human heart needs to be attended to by rituals and practices that, when practiced, will lessen anger and allow creativity to flow anew.

Wir müssen uns mit Hilfe von Ritualen und Übungen um die Trauer im menschlichen Herzen kümmern, die die Wut mindern und die Kreativität wieder in Fluß bringen.

93.

Two highways out of the heart are creativity and acts of justice and compassion.

Zwei Wege aus unserem Herzen sind die Kreativität und Taten der Gerechtigkeit und des Mitgefühls.

94.

Since angels learn exclusively by intuition, when we develop our powers of intuition we can expect to meet angels along the way.

Da Engel ausschließlich durch Intuition lernen, können wir bei der Entwicklung unserer intuitiven Kräfte damit rechnen, Engeln zu begegnen.

95.

True intelligence includes feeling, sensitivity, beauty, the gift of nourishment and humor which is a gift of the Spirit, paradox, being its sister.

Echte Intelligenz umfaßt Gefühle, Sensibilität, Schönheit, die Gabe der Zuwendung und des Humors, der eine Geisteskraft ist, mit der Paradoxie als Schwester.

* Aus Zeitmangel konnten leider die Zitate, deren ursprüngliche Sprache deutsch ist (Eckhart, Bonhoeffer) nicht im Original gefunden werden, sondern sind aus dem Englischen rück-übersetzt. (Anm. d. Übersetzers) Für die Übersetzung ins Deutsche verantwortlich.

A Report From Wittenberg

On Tuesday, four of us trooped to Wittenberg, the capital of the Protestant revolt, a three hour trip by car form Erfurt, Germany where we spent time in Meister Eckhart's priory. Four of us being Anne, a German citizen and mother of three boys who is also an avid reader and a mystic in her own right; Peter, an Englander who has been living in Germany for over twenty years and who has received a master's degree from Naropa Oakland; and Jim Garrison, president of Wisdom University and formerly president of the World Forum and the Mikael Gorbachev Foundation. And myself. Peter and Anne would prove to be invaluable not only as translators and interpreters but also as strategists and go-phers.

Our plans were to meet the press and others on Wednesday, May 18 at 4 PM at the door of Castle Church in Wittenburg where Luther nailed his 95 theses some 500 years ago. First, however, we had to stop by the city hall and get official documents to allow us to perform this action. The officials limited us to one hour (4-5 PM) and we were to station ourselves far away from the door "in order to let the tourists be unemcumbered in taking photos of the door." After considerable persuasion offered by Anne, they relented to allow us to be "near the door." But we could not pound nails into the door which today, unlike Luther's day, is no longer wood but metal casting containing his 95 theses. No pounding on that door even if one had permission to do so!

What to do? We decided on an A Frame board of two pieces 7feet by 2 feet held together by a flexible hinge since our scroll was about six feet in length. We set it up outside the short, four foot fence.

How telling it was to me that in the minds of the local authorities the tourists came first. More important than a group calling for a Reformation Today were the religious tourists (very few of them appeared to be pilgrims) who arrived in buses to take a photo at the door and move on. Didn't this fill out my point in the "New Reformation!" book that churches are museums today? Destination places for tourists rather than for pilgrims. And good for the economy (even if the economy may not be good for them!) This reality inspired me all the more to present my 95 theses.

Two nights previously we had heard the news that skinheads or Nazis youth of Wittenburg had defamed the doors in a protest by throwing bags of yellow paint on them. The paint still dripped from the painting at the top of the door but otherwise had been cleaned up by the time we arrived on Wednesday.

The German media was showing some interest. The editor of the very solid and influential theological magazine, "Publik-Forum" attended my talk in Bad Herrenalb and interviewed me for 90 minutes afterwards. It turns out he had left Christianity for some ten years or so and then reading Meister Eckhart brought him back. His photographer came to Wittenburg as did the photographer for "Bild" newspaper, a blue collar paper with ten million circulation whose editor interviewed me by phone that morning with Peter translating.

I retired inside the church to meditate and get out of the way of Peter and Anne who were building the A Frame apparatus. At 3:50 we received a call that the TV man who was coming was stuck in traffic and would be delayed forty minutes. What to do? We decided on two nailings of the theses. The first for the "Bild" and "Publik Forum" photographers. Then a pause and wait for the TV man to arrive. Only then did I give a brief talk, take questions, and nail the theses a second time.

In between the two events a bus arrived with many black people pouring out of it to look at the doors. They had an English-speaking tour guide. "Where are you from?" I asked one of them. "South Africa." When the guide had finished her speech, I spoke up and said: "I am a theologian from America and I am here to urge a New Reformation in our time and I invite you to stick around for a few minutes until the TV man arrives and hear more about what we are doing and why." The guide gave me a killer look and said "We are in a hurry to get to our next destination" but several members of the group hung back and said "this sounds far more interesting than what we are doing." They had to move on but we gave away about a dozen of the "New Reformation!" books to these South African tourists who, as they told me, were there to look into business connections with Germany.

One of the questions I received with the TV camara going was this: "Is this just about the corruption in the Catholic Church?" "No", I said. "The Protestant church is suffering differently from the Catholic Church--it is more from boredom and acedia, lack of energy to begin new things." And I cited a Protestant Pastor we met the day before who said he felt the church was essentially dead drawing as it does 5-8% of the population. A Reformation--better yet, a Transformation--is called for across the board as we enter a new millennium.

The day was chilly with clouds and some sun shining. The media, ranging from serious theological journal to TV station for the entire area (who promised to send us their footage in a few weeks) to the national blue collar newspaper to a local newspaper will presumably spread some seeds. More response may follow. At least we tried something to wake people up. We shall see what unfolds.

A New Reformation!

In a kind of miracle, and with help from many, many people, we managed to write a book--now called "A New Reformation!" and print it and get it (80% of it) translated into German--all within about two weeks. The deadline was not our making but the circumstances of my invitation to speak on Pentecost at Bad Herlaub, an invitation which was scheduled six months previous but which loomed much bigger after the election of Benedict XVI. I felt the scandal of this, the first Inquisitor General to be named pope, would awaken people and inspire them to participate in the quest for a New Reformation. Thus an action at Wittenberg.

Giving a lecture to 500 people at Bad Herlaub and a workshop the next day for about 60 others, much feedback came my way. Most of it was very positive but several individuals expressed resistance. "Why don't you forgive Cardinal Ratzinger?" one lady asked me. "Because justice comes first and then forgiveness," I replied. "You should go to Assisi and to Benedict country, not to Wittenberg," said one man. But Assisi is for sweetness, what is called for now is resistance. And resistance is signified by Wittenberg.

Another woman said: "Why a New Reformation? That signifies church institutions. There must be a better term." I thought about that and a better term might be "Transformation." I do want to go beyond Reformation to Transformation and it is time. But Reformation is a first step. And Wittenberg is archetypal--it represents a place where one once stood up to church power and said: "Stop. No longer."

That is needed today too and with the unleashing of spirit and inspiration that this Pentecost season promises, hopefully this act might assist in getting us moving from Reformation to Transformation, from Religion to Spirituality. One can hope.

Today, Tuesday, we took two trains, one as far as Frankfurt and then we switched to a second train to Erfurt. We intended to spend one day in Erfurt and from there to journey to Wittenberg. Why Erfurt?

Erfurt was a theological center for many centuries and it is the town where Martin Luther was trained as a priest and ordained as one. It was also the town where Meister Eckhart lived and worked 150 years earlier for a period of four years. They have just finished a reconstruction of the main body of the Predigerkirche which was his church and which was quite badly damaged in the war and ignored during the Soviet occupation. However, the oldest section, where Eckhart and his Dominican brothers prayed and preached in the late thirteenth century, was not damaged much and still stands much as it did in his day. The choir stall, for example, are the original ones.

In my love and zeal to know Eckhart I once visited Erfurt years ago when it was part of "East Germany" and I was followed by the Stassi (German secret police) from the moment I arrived in my car which had West German license plates since I had rented it in West Germany. When I arrived at the pastor's place where I hoped to get keys to let me into the church there were three cars full of Stassi. I did not want to get the pastor into any trouble so I never got inside and just walked around the perimeter of the property instead.

This trip was different and very special. The pastor, who it turns out was under constant surveillance by the Stassi under the old East German regime, is a great lover of Eckhart and he showed us around the interior including the choir stall where Eckhart sat as prior (yes, I spent time in it meditating and so many of his famous one-liners came to me as I sat there), the altar where he said Mass for the community of 72 members, the very chapter room where he gave several of his well known treatises to novices and others, the refectory where they all ate. And we were allowed to look through a book that dates back to the fourteenth century that has been preserved in the parish office there.

Being in the sanctuary where Eckhart preached--what a great gift. Very moving. Sitting in the choir stall that was his six centuries ago--what a privilege! Standing at the altar where he celebrated Mass as prior of his community--what a grace! Also to visit the church where Martin Luther was ordained and said his first Mass and lived as a theology student. So much history from the past; so much that calls us to a reborn future. Especially at Pentecost time.

This proved to be a very special warm-up for our trip to Wittenberg later that day.