Call to Worship
“Morning has broken, like the first morning.”
We think about creation this morning.
We enjoyed the telling of the old Mayan creation story when our children were with us. Now we will consider, in the sermon ahead, a contemporary take on Creation, in theologian Matthew Fox’s work on Creation Spirituality.
Here are the words of Annie Dillard as our thoughts unfold on this new day:
Every day is a god,
each day is a god,
and holiness holds forth in time.
I worship each god,
I praise each day splintered down,
and wrapped in time like a husk,
a husk of many colors spreading,
at dawn fast over the mountain split.
Sermon
I don’t know! Michael likes Sermon Series’ so much, the idea must have been “catching!” He’s got me thinking “Series.” So, I decided to complement his sermon series on aspects of “Godtalk,” by planning a series on Contemporary Spiritual Thinkers.
Today, I begin a series of three by focusing on the life and work of Matthew Fox. In December, I’ve chosen to look at Bishop John Shelby Spong. I have some ideas for the third – a feminist theologian, like Mary Daly or Rosemary Reuther - but would like to hear your ideas as well. Let me know.
Matthew Fox is a spiritual theologian.
“I was born,” he writes, “on the winter solstice, 1940, at St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin.”He adds, “My own education has, I suspect, paralleled that of many of my contemporaries as we moved from The Ed Sullivan Show and Bishop Sheen to Elvis Presley and the Beatles, to JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., to Vietnam and liberation theology and Watergate, and from Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council to Pope Paul II and his Opus Dei. In short, from the 1950’s to the 1990’s.”
“My generation, Fox writes in journal entry, “was bold enough to question many things and to seek spirituality over religion. We haven’t succeeded in overthrowing the old order yet, and maybe there are some meanings to be found in my story about coming of age spiritually in the latter half of the twentieth century.”Fox was ordained a catholic priest in 1967. He holds Masters degrees in philosophy and theology from Aquinas Institute and a Doctorate in spirituality, summa cum laude, from the Institut Catholiques de Paris. A liberal theologian and progressive visionary, he was silenced in the 1980’s by the Vatican and later dismissed from the Dominican order.
Reflecting on that turn of events, he wrote: “Joseph Campbell used to say that ‘None of us has lived the life we intended.’ This is surely the case with me. Left to my own imagination, I could never have composed a scenario that was anywhere as interesting as my life has been: starting out as an eager altar boy, a good Boy Scout, a relatively docile Dominican brother and priest, receiving an advanced degree in spirituality, teaching bishops and many others around the world about our Western spiritual tradition, and then ending up being expelled from the Dominican order.”
After dismissal, in 1994, he was received as an Episcopalian priest, in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, by Bishop William Swing of the Diocese of California.
Fox is the founder and president of the University for Creation Spirituality in Oakland, California.
Creation Spirituality is what he teaches us about, what he has become known for, and, what got him into hot water with the Vatican.
Briefly, Creation Spirituality honors all of creation as an “original blessing.” It is quite the opposite of “original sin” as found in Christian ideas of “the fall” and redemption. Creation Spirituality as conceived by Matthew Fox seeks to integrate the wisdom of Western spirituality and global indigenous cultures – with the emerging post-modern scientific understanding of the universe. It seeks an awakening of artistic passion for creativity, and the rebirth of compassion through the profound understanding of the interconnectedness of all life.
Creation Spirituality is not new, according to Matthew Fox. It is an old tradition that is being newly discovered in our time. It can address contemporary critical issues, including the revitalization of religion and culture, the honoring of women’s wisdom, the celebration of hope in today’s youth, and the promotion of social and ecological justice.
Creation Spirituality looks to renew theologies and practices within religion and culture that promote personal wholeness, planetary survival, and universal interdependence.
Once upon a time, and in just about every culture, Fox reminds us, religion and science were teammates who offered to the people a cosmic myth that allowed them to understand their universe, to find meaning in it, and to live out their lives with meaning.
Fox talks about how religion and science have been at odds ever since the 17th century. Because of the split, he wrote, religion became privatized and science a violent employee of technology, with disastrous results for people.
He wants religion to let go of outdated, dualistic paradigms. He wants to sack the dualistic and patriarchal model of spirituality with its beginning in sin and its ending in redemption. (You can tell why he unnerved the Vatican!) He wrote: “To recover a spiritual tradition in which creation, and the study of creation, matters would be to inaugurate new possibilities between spirituality and science that would shape the paradigms for culture, its institution, and its people.”
Today, scientists around the world agree on the basic facts of the new creation story – it begins with the “Big Bang!” As Fox sees it, there is the potential for an experience of the human race as a single tribe bound together by a single, amazing new creation story.
Fox believes that a new creation story can help us feel our interconnection with other creatures and peoples on this surprising planet in this amazing universe of one trillion galaxies, each with 200 billion stars. The question of why WE exist, he writes, “take[s] on … more wonder because the nineteen-billion-year history that has birthed our planet and us is so vast, so complex, [and] so apparently full of chance and good luck.”
Imagine what might happen when science and spirituality come together again with a new cosmic story about our origins. It will be different from the early Mayan creation story we heard earlier this morning. It will also be very different from the Jewish-Christian one we know in our society, which, when taken literally from the Bible, causes great squabbling in our schools between science teachers and fundamental Christian Creationists.
When asked , “What is Creation?” Matthew Fox replies:
“Creation is all things and us. It is us in relationship with all things. … All things, the ones we see and the ones we do not; the whirling galaxies and the wild suns, the black holes and the microorganisms, the trees and the stars, the fish and the whales … the molten lava and the towering snow-capped mountains, the children we give birth to and their children, and theirs, and theirs, and theirs.
“Creation is all space, all time – all things past, present, and future. … [It] leans most in the direction of the present, for the most significant of the times is Now, the “Eternal Now.” By the choices we make now about what we [create], the past presses into the future. … we are co-creators in an ever-unfolding creation.”For Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality is a new and different spiritual path; one which begins with the creation and the cosmos. Later, much later, it gets to the human story. He says, “There can be no anthropology without cosmology. The human does not exist apart from the stars. Human history cannot be divorced from planetary history, galactic history, and creation’s entire unfolding history. The elements of our bodies, the vast and cosmic feelings of grief and sadness we undergo, of ecstasy and joy -–all these are part of the history and the size of the universe. We are of galactic size.”
Fox says that Creation Spirituality empowers us for an ecological era – a time when we learn that the earth is a very special accomplishment of the universe, an awareness which then can open our eyes more clearly to how endangered it is. It is also a time when we no longer look UP for divinity,
but start looking AROUND us.!
Fox spreads before us a PANENTHEISTIC spirituality – a spirituality in which we see -- and this is the literal meaning of the term -- “all things in God and God in all things.” Not a God removed, distant, above, but instead, a God within everything as much as everything is within God.
He says, “our capacity to experience the divine all around is mysticism.” It awakens in us wonder and a need for celebration. To Fox, it is an “awakened mysticism,” an avenue of grace that Creation Spirituality can offers. “People cannot live gracefully or peacefully, joyfully or justly, without celebration in their lives, without awe.”
The backbone of Matthew Fox’s Creation Spirituality tradition is his naming of the spiritual journey in Four Paths. The Four Paths represent a distinct paradigm shift from the way such a journey had been perceived and practiced in the West. In the past the paths were purgation, illumination, and union. Matthew Fox said they left out delight and pleasure, as well as creativity and justice. And, he did not agree that the goal of the journey should be contemplation, but sets, instead, another goal -- that of compassion.
Here are his Four Paths:
To the question, “Where will the experience of the divine be found in our time?” -- Matthew Fox answers:
- in Path One -- the VIA POSITIVIA. In the awe, wonder, and mystery of nature and of all beings; each is a mirror of the whole.
- in Path Two -- the VIA NEGATIVA. In darkness and nothingness, in the silence and emptying, in the letting go and letting be, and in the pain and suffering that constitute an equally real part of our journey.
- in Path Three -- the VIA CREATIVA – In our generativity, when we co-create with God; in our imaginative output, when we trust our images enough to birth them, and rise them into existence.
- and, in Path Four – the VIA TRANSFORMATIVA – when we relieve suffering; when we combat injustice; and in the struggle for homeostasis -- for balance in society and history. It happens by celebration when persons struggling for justice, and trying to live in mutuality, come together in praise and give thanks for the gift of being and being together.
How does this interconnectivity translate into a moral law for humans?
Fox quotes Thomas Merton as saying, “the whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living things which are part of one another and all involved in one another.” As a response to another’s pain and suffering, we recognize it as our own as well, and feel compassion. Compassion leads us to just action.
Fox writes, “Compassion is the essence of Jesus’ teaching, and indeed of the teaching of all great spiritual figures from Mohammed to Isaiah, from Lao Tzu to Chief Seattle. Yet compassion has been sentimentalized and severed from its relationship to justice-making and celebration. Creation Spirituality links the struggle for justice with the yearning for mysticism.”
What Fox believes, here, basically, is that “Mysticism” –- the experience of awe, wonder, delight -- goes hand-in-hand with what he calls “Prophecy” -- the struggle for justice -- to form a common dialectic. They are inseparable, and this goes for justice toward our home, the planet earth, and, equally, in the struggle for human justice.
Matthew Fox’s involvement to help end oppression where he found it got him into trouble.
He wrote: “I spent considerable time talking to gay and lesbian groups in the Chicago area…” And, a paper that he published about the Spiritual Journey of the Homosexual was the beginning of his trouble with Rome.
He referred to “a gang of disgruntled Catholics (Catholics United for the Faith, or CUFF) who kept track of [such things] and mailed a thick batch of materials about me to Rome… I was then on Rome’s hit list. CUFF is an ideological group of thugs who attack by lies and innuendo anyone to the left of Attila [the Hun].”
But, that was not all. His 1983 best-selling book, “Original Blessing; A Primer in Creation Spirituality,” along with reports of what was being taught at the Creation Spirituality school he founded, generated great angst in the Catholic hierarchy.
Here is part of a letter to his Superiors in the Dominican Order:
“September 17, 1987
Dear Father General,
… Given the circumstances, then, this Congregation would be grateful if you would personally use your good offices to assure that Fr. Fox’s present assignment as Director of t he Institute for Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College, Oakland, CA, USA, be terminated and that he be instructed to cease from further dissemination of the central thesis of his book, Original Blessing, wither in writing or in the form of speeches or workshops, etc. It appears also necessary that he disassociate himself from “wicca,” the ideology of “Starhawk,” a self-styled witch.
[signed] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Included with the letter was a document about Fox’s book, Original Blessing:
Cardinal Ratzinger called it: “an altogether personal, gratuitous and subjective interpretation of Christian spirituality, of its theological foundations, and of the history and thought of the spiritual writers he himself mentions …. His treatment of homosexuality … is neither inspired by the Scriptures, nor by the Doctrine of the Church.
Regarding spirituality, he contrasts the traditional three ways (pergative, illuminative, unitive) with four (the positive, the negative, the creative, and with several aspects which have to be a cause of concern especially the figure of God as Mother, Child, and ourselves as Mother of God).
In short, the book has to be considered dangerous and deviant. It is not in touch with authentic Christian spirituality as so it is far from the doctrine of the Magisterium.”
So much of what Matthew Fox has visioned for the revitalization of religion, and his observation of a growing interest and need for spiritual expression, is familiar to us in our own Unitarian Universalist Association. We have evolved in the past 20 –30 years, much the same way as Matthew Fox and the Creation Spirituality movement has!
- A Spirituality with mystical leanings toward wonder and awe has entered our doors. UUs have been searching for a Spirituality that is compatible with their liberal leanings and free thinking faith!
- We have been pondering the interface of science and religion for some time now – ever since Fritjof Capra’s book, The Tao of Physics, hit our consciousness some twenty years ago.
- Our Seventh Unitarian Universalist Principle, “affirming and promoting the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part,” was added to the new statement of basic Unitarian Universalist values in the mid-80’s.
- And through a deepening understanding of interdependence and interconnectedness, we are growing in the feelings of an ethic of compassion that impel us into the social justice arena.
We realize more and more how developing a strong earth-and-human-centered spirituality under-girds and influences creative and dedicated action in the world.
Matthew Fox’s sense of “God in all and all in God” shares some distinct similarities to our own Transcendentalist movement of the late nineteenth century. God was also taken down from heaven by the likes of Unitarians, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and made immanent.
Fox, also, cannot conceive of the Creator separated from Creation, nor can he conceive of himself and his Creator as separate entities. His idea of being a co-creator with an unfolding Creation is exactly what brought me to our faith. Along with Matthew Fox, I perceive that there is mystery in us, that we are an intrinsic part of it, and we help shape and change the present and the future.
We are truly of galactic size!
Benediction
Our Benediction was taken from a larger litany used at the Nairobi Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1975.
As the earth keeps turning, hurtling through space;
and night falls and day breaks from land to land;
Let us remember people – waking, sleeping, being born and dying –
of one world and of one humanity. Let us go from here in peace.
Amen, Shalom, and Blessed Be!
