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Enclosed are the table of contents and the Introduction for "One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from World Faiths" by Matthew Fox. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: “Finally, Religion 1999” I. RELATING TO CREATION 1. Deep Ecumenism and the Universality of Experience 2. Creation—All Our Relations 3. Light/Fire 4. Community and Interdependence II. RELATING TO DIVINITY 5. Names for God: The Multiple Faces of Divinity 6. The Feminine Face of Divinity 7. Wisdom, Another Feminine Face of the Divine 8. Form, Formlessness, Nothingness 9. The Divine ‘I Am’: Humanity’s Share in Divinity III. RELATING TO OURSELVES: PATHS TO ENCOUNTER AND ENLIGHTENMENT 10. Meditation and Mindfulness 11. Holy Imagination: Art and Ritual as Paths to Mindfulness 12. Joy 13. Suffering 14. Beauty 15. Sacred Sexuality 16. Dying, Resurrection, Reincarnation IV. RELATING TO THE FUTURE: WHAT THE DIVINE IS ASKING OF US 17. Service and Compassion (including Justice and Celebration) 18. Spiritual Warriorhood V. CONCLUSION: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? HOW DEEP ECUMENISM EXPLODES OUR IMAGINATIONS WITH 18 NEW MYTHS AND VISIONS "[What happened in the first century] was an explosion of imagination that we would call myth-making....But as it turns out, it was hardly the myth or the message that generated Christianity. It was the attraction of participating in a group experimenting with a new social vision." --Burton L. Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins Introduction: “Finally, Religion 1999” It is not easy being a human being. Unlike other species, we are not born with enough programmed DNA to see us through our survival. The best choices we make must come from intuition, cooperation and learning. We depend on traditions and elders to teach us—and of course on experience, trial and error, and creativity as well. We find ourselves up against many obstacles not only to surviving but to living lives of quality and happiness. Wars, strife, famine, hurricanes, floods, fires, catastrophes of many kinds—divorce, death, sickness, poverty, abuse, slavery, oppression, betrayals—the human journey is not easy. Nor is it simple. Our strongest assets—our intelligence and our creative powers—can also get us into our deepest quagmires. Is much of the ecological peril that we face today not due to our inventions that have warmed the climate, put holes in the ozone and polluted the waters? One thing that can make human existence meaningful and give us the courage and creativity to navigate our ways is healthy spirituality. When religion is true to itself and itself healthy, it is about spirituality, for spirituality is meant to be the core of religion. But religion, like everything else that humans touch, can become distorted and misused. It can develop its own institutional ego, even while preaching to individuals about the need to humble their personal egos. This happens. It has often happened. Therefore, it is evident that one can also be spiritual without religion. In times like ours, when the planet is reeling from abuse and misuse at the hands of humans, when human inventions and discoveries have shrunken time and space on this planet so that we can communicate by Internet and satellites instantaneously with others around the globe, when livable space for our own and other species is dwindling and being depleted, it ought to prove especially beneficial to look to spirituality to help us find our way back (and forward!) to what it means to be human. In this book I try to go to the core of human religious traditions as we know them to find the spirituality that is there. It is clear that once we return to the depth or core of religion we find much more than dogmas, concepts, institutions, commands. We find a striving for experience of the Divine, however that be spoken of, we find both form and formlessness, male and female, experience and practice. We also find that in their core and depth we do not encounter many different religions so much as one experience that is expressed variously and with great diversity and color flowing in the name of different traditions and cultures. This is what the fifteenth century theologian Nicholas of Cusa recognized. Cusa was a scientist and mystic and even a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. Nicolas of Cusa, well-steeped in the mystical teachings of Meister Eckhart and a compatriot of Hildegard of Bingen who lived just a few miles down the Rhine from Cues three centuries previously, foresaw the times we are living in today and the spiritual demands of our times. He wrote: "Humanity will find that it is not a diversity of creeds, but the very same creed which is everywhere proposed….Even though you are designated in terms of different religions, yet you presuppose in all this diversity one religion which you call wisdom." (see Cos Xst bk) In our own time, the Dali Lama has expressed similar views when he said in an interview: "I believe deeply that we must find, all of us together, a new spirituality. [Interviewer: Which wouldn’t be ‘religious’?] Certainly not. This new concept ought to be elaborated alongside the religions, in such a way that all people of good will could adhere to it. [Interviewer: Even if they have no religion, or are against religion?] Absolutely. We need a new concept, a lay spirituality. We ought to promote this concept with the help of scientists." (Tricycle, p. 39) But the Dali Lama, true to his own tradition, insists that work is necessary for this new spirituality to emerge. The work he speaks of is an inner work, one that develops the seeds of peace within each of us. "Everything starts with us, with each of us. The indispensable qualities are peace of mind and compassion. Without them it’s useless even to try. Those qualities are indispensable; they are also inevitable. I’ve told you: We will surely find them in ourselves, if we take the trouble to search for them. We can reject every form of religion, but we can’t reject and cast off compassion and peace of mind." (from Violence and Comp, Dialogues on Life today, doubleday, jan, 1996 q.v.) Inner work, that which learns compassion and peace of mind, is key to being human and is the key practice in spiritual traditions. This book does not intend to offer a course in comparative religions—such studies are readily available. Rather, what I offer here is hopefully an interactive book, a book that itself elicits experience--an experience in experiential dimensions of faith, namely spirituality. How do I do this? My method is to pick sayings from all the world's spiritual traditions and group them by common themes, themes that I believe are of interest and importance to all peoples in our perilous times today. The citations are not complete or exhaustive, nor are they intended to be. They are intended to be suggestive and invitational in order to elicit interaction from the reader. I hope this interactive approach stirs the reader's thinking and imagination to think and to act. As the Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hahn put it, what matters "is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice." (p. 24) I hope that this book and the structure of it will contribute to shared practice more than to doctrinal differences. We have had enough of them. But practice leads to ideas and includes categories, themes or concepts and so this book’s concepts are carefully chosen and situated. There lies a kind of subtle logic between the connection of the chapters. Each of the themes chosen interact with other themes (for example, the relation between joy and beauty or between creation and community). Father Bede Griffith, a Benedictine monk who lived for over half a century in India running an Ashram for Christians and Hindus there, says that the time has come "to share one another’s spiritual riches." (G, 7) That is my goal in this book. Isn't it time that instead of trying to convert one another we delved into one another's spiritual riches? We get to the core of religion by going to the heart experience, not by dwelling on doctrines that so easily divide even within religious traditions. As Griffin put it, "If one starts with doctrines the arguments are endless….But when one comes to the level of interior experience, that is where the meeting takes place….It is in this cave of the heart that the meeting has to take place. That is the challenge." (G, 16) My hope is that the themes chosen in this book and the sayings in them will take us into the cave of our hearts. What is Deep Ecumenism? I begin with an observation from Meister Eckhart who says that "Divinity is an Underground river that no one can stop and no one can damn up." There is one underground river—but there are many wells into that river: an African well, a Taoist well, a Buddhist well, a Jewish well, a Muslim well, a goddess well, a Christian well, and aboriginal wells. Many wells but one river. To go down a well is to practice a tradition but we would make a grave mistake (an idolatrous one) if we confused the well itself with the flowing waters of the underground river. Many wells, one river. That is deep ecumenism. This book is an effort to get us into the wells and hopefully deeper into their Source. Father Bede offered another metaphor for deep ecumenism: Look at your fingers—if you look at their top side, you see five distinct entities, each waving in the breeze. But if you follow them down to their origin, they all merge in the palm of the hand. So too with our religions. If we just look at their top side, they appear distinct and independent and autonomous. But if you look at their source, they all come from the same Center. Each of these images of Deep Ecumenism, the well and the palm of the hand, are telling a common story: That it is necessary to travel deeper, to let the superficial go, to go to the center, the cave, if we are to connect to the underground river. This is what mystics mean when they instruct us to seek out our inner person as opposed to our outer selves. Wherever possible I use primary sources that include various scriptural texts of our religions but also the mystical writings and in some cases the pottery, poetry, funeral texts and other findings that lay bare the efforts of our ancestors to express their wisdom about life, spirit and the mysteries of being human. In some way this book is a Source Book. A return to our sources that name our spiritual experience can lead us to a return to Source itself however we name it. In this book I deliberately let the spiritual traditions speak on their own to the hearts and minds of the reader. I have tried to interfere as little as possible. I quote from the texts of ancient Kemet or Egypt in calling upon African wisdom, from the Baghavad-Gita, from the Hebrew and the Christian Bible, from the Qu’ran, from the Tao te Ching, from Buddhist Scriptures and Celtic authors and indigenous seers and scientists. These quotes will be in bold. But I also cite great mystics from these traditions and their citations will also be in bold. I hope the citations alert the imagination of the reader to make her or his connections. I follow no particular order in presenting citations from various traditions—this too is deliberate. I want to ensure mixing at many levels of our awareness. In this book I find myself to be a weaver and a mixer. My job is to weave threads from different spiritual traditions into a common web, a common tapestry, that still values the diversity and color of diversity and difference. This task of weaving and mixing does not surprise me for the post-modern times we live in are a time of mixing. The Internet is mixing people of all cultures, ages and religions. Ecumenism is a recognition of religion's need to mix. We are finding more and more what an amazing mix this universe is, our bodies are (containing hydrogen atoms from fourteen billion years ago is quite a mix), our DNA is, our societies are. Consider, for example, what an amazing mix is found in African American culture where African spirituality, slave history, protest songs, drumming cadences and creative music all combine with European influences to create a unique expression of spirit and transcendence. This book is a mixing, a stirring together of the "essence" of religion, namely spirituality. The third millennium ought to be a time of mixing, not of conquering. Mixing, not converting. The mixing includes a mixing with science and with creation. Perhaps this book represents a start at putting together a Scripture for the twenty-first century. It offers a kind of distillation of the best of our spiritual traditions and a grouping of them according to themes that strike me as pertinent to our soul and social needs. (Carl Jung said that it is to the mystics that we owe what is best in humanity.) We have to bear in mind, of course, that the most ancient religions on our planet are not of a textual nature but of an oral lineage. I try to make up for this lack with story. Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, a scholar of African religions and culture, makes some very important points about the general neglect of indigenous wisdom by Western theologians. “A powerful, expressive modality allows Westerners and, increasingly, Asians to speak of the ‘great religions’ and mean by such an expression Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism….When the way to transcendence is found in peoples’ lives as they deify their own nationalism and history, that becomes sufficiency and greatness for them.” (197f. of Afrcocentric Idea) Asante points out that human civilization is so ancient in the Nile valley that it antedates the Arab invasions by five thousand years and this resulted in the “dispersal of the secret societies to various other places on the African continent” where an oral tradition survives to this day among the Yoruba Ifa, the Shona Mbira and the Asante Okyeame systems. “The Arab jihads swept out of Arabia and conquered North Africa, stamping out, for the most part, the indigenous Egyptian language and establishing Islam as religion and Arabic as language.” (198) Asante's lament could apply to indigenous religions the world over in one form or other. Among the sayings I choose, I also include today's science along with many spiritual traditions, for many scientists in our time are seeing wisdom once again in a recognition of the mystery and wonder of the new cosmology. They are the teachers of nature's wisdom. While not being exhaustive, I also try to avoid exhaustion. By this I mean that not every tradition will be cited for every theme. Ultimately, however, each tradition will be heard for its wisdom. This is not just a book for westerners to learn about other traditions, but hopefully to learn more about their own. The Dali Lama warns that the biggest obstacle to interfaith sharing is peoples' unhealthy relationships to their own faith. (225) The citations from Western spiritual sources predominate in this book because that is where so much unhealth lies. So many people I encounter have been wounded by their own tradition. So many are ignorant of the deepest spiritual teachings of that same tradition. Many Westerners do not even know their own mystical tradition or spiritual practice. At times I will mix tradition’s insights in one paragraph but mostly I let them speak for themselves on separate pages and I invite the reader to participate by mixing. If pursued in depth and used to unite instead of to separate our various wisdom traditions, the themes of this book can assist the simplifying of our religions, stripping them down to their essentials, that is, to spirituality. The Dali Lama has observed that "the reality is that the majority of people today are unpersuaded of the need for religion". He calls, however, for a "spiritual revolution". (bk, p. 33) The task of awakening to our spiritual heritage as a species is an important one as our species weighs into unprecedented challenges and possibilities in the future that calls us on. Recently, after one of our Techno Cosmic Masses, a twenty-one year old came up to me and said: “Finally, Religion 1999. I’ve been waiting for this all my life.” When I asked him what was key to the experience for him he replied: “When I experienced a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim woman prayer leader and preacher, a Christian priest and an African song leader all at the altar together leading us in prayers of gratitude I said to myself, ‘Finally religion is catching up. Finally Religion, 1999.’” This young man is correct. It is time for religions to quit bickering and start contributing. As the Dali Lama puts it, "now more than ever we need to show our children that distinctions between 'my country' and 'your country,' 'my religion' and 'your religion' are secondary considerations....In today's increasingly complex and interdependent world, we are compelled to acknowledge the existence of other cultures,...other faiths." (184, 222) The young generation today are facing survival issues around realities of earth degradation and economic exploitation and growing chasms between haves and have-nots that are unprecedented. Is it not time for our religions to get back to their essentials—which is meant to be the teaching of spirituality—and to contribute wisdom to an increasingly despairing world? This is not a time for denominational one-up-man-ship. It is a time to pull wisdom from any and all of its sources and to let folly go. Even and including religious folly. One reason I depend in this book so heavily upon mystical writings is offered by Carl Jung when he observed that “it is only the mystic who brings creativity to religion.” If we are to make our faiths live again—not for their own sakes but for the survival of our species—then we had better become mystically literate again. The style of this book is an effort to further the cause of mystical literacy. The mystics are fun and they invite us to fun; they are also outlandish and they invite us to play at the extremities of the heart. They are also prophets who urge us to rejuvenate our systems of education, economics, and all our work worlds and professions. Some people will raise objections to what we are doing by calling it “syncretism.” Are we fusing too many religions together, they will ask. The word “syncretism” actually comes from the creating of a federation of cities in Crete. In itself, the creating of a federation of religions striving to be spiritualities in our time does not seem like such a horrible prospect. It certainly beats going to war with one another. Perhaps Father Bede Griffiths had the best response to the objection of syncretizing when he observed: “We have, of course, to guard against syncretism of any kind, but this only means that we have to learn to discriminate within each tradition between that which belongs to the universal religious tradition of mankind and that which belongs to its own limited and particular point of view.” (p. 99 of Christ in India) While we want to honor the differences between faiths, it is time to emphasize the likenesses or what Griffiths calls “the universal religious tradition of mankind.” Father Bede experienced the “most profound sense of ‘mystery’ and ‘sacrament’ found in Hinduism and life in India. He marvels at the temples in whose holy place at the center, the garbha griba, there is encountered the center “at once of the universe and of the soul. It is the ‘womb’ from which all things spring and at the same time the ‘cave within the heart’, the secret place where man enters into communion with the ultimate mystery.” Is it wrong to want to visit such a place? Is it syncretism to say that other religions, including Catholicism, strive to create such caves of the heart? To point out that Francis of Assisi often sought out caves to pray in? That is the profound point that Griffiths is making: We need to discriminate about that which belongs to the universal religious tradition of mankind. In laying out the eighteen themes of this book we are inviting in the universal tradition of mankind. The horrible wars in Bosnia and Kosovar in our day; the Inquisitions, Crusades, pogroms, religious wars and colonial conquests in the name of religion—haven’t we seen enough of the shadow side of religious power? It is time our species grew up. This means, among other things, that instead of relating religion to religion with our reptilian brains and our testesterone in high gear (“my God can beat up your God”) we ought to relate religion to religion from our deepest hearts and most creative (“mindful”) minds. Reptiles, after all, do not engage in religion or pretend to, so why would we want to engage one another religiously at that level? Our deepest hearts and fullest minds are our mystical and intellectual capacities. This is what this book is trying to accomplish. A meeting of hearts and minds at a deeper place, a place of wells and watering and wisdom and mystery, not judgment. Relating heart to heart and creative mind to creative mind about issues that concern our species profoundly. What are these issues? I propose eighteen. They constitute the chapter titles for this book. I group them into four areas: Relating to Creation; Relating to Divinity and its Multiple Forms; Relating to Ourselves through Paths to Mindfulness; and Relating to the Future and What the Divine is Asking of Us. Within these groupings are the individual themes that can be found listed in the Table of Contents. This book ends with a big surprise--it surprised me, I hope it surprises others. When we focus on key issues of concern such as the eighteen themes I employ as chapters in this book, we are de facto involved in myth-making. This book, though I did not intend it, has proven to be a step in remythologizing our faith lives. By "our" I do not mean just Christians or Jewish peoples. But all those traditions represented here including science. Deep Ecumenism leads us to new myth-making and ushers in a social vision that might seize the moral and spiritual imagination of our species not unlike what occurred 2000 years ago in Palestine. It is in the deepest message of each faith, I believe, that we encounter the likenesses. But for this to happen each faith must get to its deepest essence and know its spiritual sources. In the West today, discoveries of ancient and lost manuscripts this century and new scientific methods as well as the new cosmology from science have contributed to a rare opportunity to reinvent both Judaism and Christianity. This return to the sources can provide a social vision and community inspiration that takes us beyond empire building and religion by institution. Hopefully, the themes chosen here will bring ancient and needed messages up from the deep. The paths down the wells will indeed vary and there lies the beauty and novelty of human diversity. But the path must never be confused with the Source. As Meister Eckhart put it, "all paths lead to God for God is on them all equally for the person who knows." (…) Hopefully this book will contribute to our shared knowing and practicing so that our childrens’ children will know ways to live peacefully on and with this Earth and healthy directions to travel. University of Creation Spirituality Oakland, California August 4, 1999 |
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