Relating Creation Spirituality
to Lutheranism
Doctorial dissertation by Marilyn E. Jackson
I. INTRODUCTION
A World in Crisis~
The world is in more crisis than ever with overpopulation, environmental degradation, war and the threat of nuclear and chemical war. Rather than flailing around to keep afloat or even to change the world, I believe it helpful to try to understand what is going on around us and to see how our actions can be changed to make the world a better place. With the understanding that we can only start by understanding what is immediately around us, I write about something I know quite a bit about from experience and formal education, Lutheranism and Creation Spirituality in relation to education for social change. This theme is within a wider context of changing society’s views on religion and culture in a postmodern western world.
When in trouble, people often look for spiritual guidance. However, in recent decades, the face of religion has been changing in the United States, with differences occurring more and more within families and communities. To deal with some of this change, my paper addresses my journey through a specific dialectic between my family’s religion of Lutheranism and my study of Creation Spirituality, an earthy mystical theme which brings a contemporary approach to Christian spirituality. Often new movements and ideas seem more relevant than traditional answers to today’s problems, but I have tried here to relate some new perspectives to the work and thinking of Lutherans and some of Lutheran tradition.
This paper is written within the larger context of changes of traditional versus popular religion. Through it I seek to dialogue to bring about awareness that leads to wisdom in how to sort out and relate traditional religious practices to popular spiritual movements rather than to ignore or leave out one or the other completely. It is clear that the people of the world need to be able to see beyond religious differences in order to get along, given recent wars between ethnicities. At least as much so, the people in families and local regions and nations also need to have harmony among faiths as it is faith that leads us to action for the ongoing process of building, changing and molding the culture that is Earth.
Faith or lack of faith in God or religion are defining characteristics in the United States and throughout the human world. I grew up participating in a mainstream American faith in a small metropolis. In the process of going to college and moving to a larger metropolis, my faith changed and has continued to be defined as I relate what formed in me as a younger person with what I encounter in the society I participate in. I chose to study Creation Spirituality out of a my own seeking to find meaning as a person caught between old traditions and new trends as well as a desire to live in a conscientious way to address the dilemmas of the world today. My beliefs about the futility of war and ethics for peace were influenced by the peace organizing around the Viet Nam war at church and which my older siblings were involved in and later by a Christian Ethics class in college. My concerns for the environment were mostly fostered in time spent outdoors as a child as well as through science classes in school. During the 1960s and ‘70s, when many young adults explored eastern religions, I remember reading Ram Dass’s book, Be Here Now, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, introduced to me by older siblings, though I was at the younger end of the baby boomers. When I was in my twenties in the 1980s, I was influenced by the women’s spirituality (goddess) as well as Native American spirituality movements, both of which seemed to support women as well as nature, thus capturing my attention.
Creation Spirituality for Modern Times
Why would a PhD student write about Creation Spirituality? Isn’t that what Bible thumping fundamentalists believe in? ...And what do spirituality and religion have to do with social change? Creationism is perhaps the term that is used for an anti-intellectual trend which believes that creation all happened in seven days as it literally states in the Christian Bible’s Old Testament, rather than how the scientists see it. Creation Spirituality on the other hand, sees creation as ongoing and a verb that our Creator expresses through creation and all living beings. Creation Spirituality is a movement within Christian tradition that responds and relates to what many people of recent decades have been seeking in Eastern, New Age and other contemporary spirituality and mystical movements. An exploration of Creation Spirituality deepens the connections between spiritual beliefs from a Christian perspective.
As a young adult I was faced with the increasing environmental destruction on our planet and wanted a way to do something about it. As a young adult I was confronted with the many exploding new beliefs people were following which forced me to wonder about the traditional religion I had been given as a child. Creation Spirituality offered a bridge between my family religion and my interest in other ways of thinking.
The term, Creation Spirituality, was developed by Episcopal (and originally Catholic) priest Matthew Fox who came upon it during his theological studies in Paris. In his discussions of Creation Spirituality, Matthew Fox has responded to centuries of the predominant theme of Original Sin with other themes that are also part of spiritual experience. Original Blessing is another theme based in Biblical tradition in passages about the goodness of God’s Creation and God’s positive outlook on Creation, including humans' role in the world. Fox says that spirituality starts with Original Blessing or what he calls with Latin terminology, the Via Positiva (or the positive way) which is followed by the Via Negativa (negative way). Fox has brought to the attention of a large audience, the teachings of Christian mystics from the middle ages in Europe. While studying one of these, Meister Eckhart, a priest of the 12th century, Fox came up with four spiritual paths. Eckhart’s writings matched ideas Fox had been developing through his own research of spirituality.
Fox feels it is healthier for our psyches to have a balance of four spiritual paths than to have a prime emphasis on just one negative aspect of spirituality, or even two, as in the Yin and the Yang of Eastern tradition. It is much easier to examine difficulty if one has started with a positive outlook, the Via Positiva. The Via Negativa can be different than original sin. The negative quality of letting go can also mean to let go of judgment. In balance with other spiritual paths, the Via Negativa becomes a valued experience and can be defined as a sinking or letting go and not just a time to feel badly.
The first two paths one are followed by the third and fourth paths: Via Creativa and Via Transformativa. The Via Creativa is often begun with a breakthrough to creativity, when something new and positive arises from nothing. Fox once told a story of being at an event where he sat at a large table of indigenous people. Each of them talked about how they had made something they were wearing or had with them. The process and art of making something is one of Fox’s themes of creativity. Creativity isolated from the other four paths, can be used for good or ill, however. In the fourth path, the Via Transformativa or the way of transformation or change, he balances it by defining where creativity is taking us. This transformativa is not just any change. It is characterized by compassion and justice, expressing the will of our Creator.
Creation Spirituality finds common ground for dialogue among spiritual traditions around the world, both with indigenous as well as universal religions. Everyone can relate to these four paths: to good and bad, to the ongoing creativity of the universe and the effort to make the world a better place.
Creation Spirituality and Lutheranism?
This paper has given me a way to directly relate Creation Spirituality to Lutheranism, the tradition I was raised in. There are some Lutherans who relate to the Creationist view or at least read the Bible literally regarding Creation and other matters who are also resistant to many changing views in society. For instance, the gay marriage issue today which seems to be splitting the Episcopal Church, is being tested in Lutheranism also. Public Radio Host, Garrison Keillor, who grew up in a more fundamentalist faith but became Lutheran as an adult, in a recent monologue joked that the Lutherans always had a bigger choir than his church. In his church, there was too much concern for who had the correct belief but the Lutherans allowed a lot of people in who didn’t have the correct belief. Dialogue between ideas, especially different religious beliefs, which this paper is, is where education begins. When we come to an understanding and a vision for how things should be and direction for where things need to go, social change can follow, hopefully for a better solution.
My worldview, though a bit sheltered by family, church and school, developed an orientation toward peace and justice. I was very active in the Campus Church in college and their worship experiences were rich and musical. They like other campus churches did things a little differently and for instance had fresh baked bread for communion (instead of wafers) and reinforced the nourishing message about love and forgiveness of the same Lutheran church institution I had been raised in. Once a friend and I made a connection at Campus church with a local resident about working for a social justice cause, though we didn’t become more involved. The institutional church routinely made statements about various causes which I was generally aware of. The Viet Nam war triggered activist responses and in my early teens I wrote a letter to a legislator protesting the war, after a forum at church. Beyond well-intentioned sermons, social action was usually characterized by appeals such as to feed the hungry, though a new pattern started when churches began to adopt refugee families.
My beliefs were fostered in the Lutheran Church, which my parents were a big part of, as well as growing up with older siblings who were teenagers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. My parents and I visited an uncle and his family in East Africa while I was in High School. I traveled to Sweden the first year of college. I met people from other backgrounds in school, music groups and work settings. I visited California where a brother lived and my sister joined the Bahai faith. These kinds of experiences, along with a rather open attitude to different ideas, aided me in learning to question over time.
The Lutheran church continued to guide my interaction with new experiences. At the end of my four years at college I gave a mini-sermon at Campus Church. I said that the most important lesson I had been learning there in spite of all my classes was "to love," when the question I had been asking was "What is religion?" I told about a book my father had lent me, Strangers at the Door, by Marcus Bach (Bach 1971), who wrote about the importance of being accepting and listening to people of other faiths around us and to remember the Spirit of love, peace and compassion. Bach’s conclusion was that there is no way to meet the challenge of other faiths unless we proceed beyond "logic to the creative ground of spiritual understanding." In my sermon I wrote that Dante, in The Inferno, had to leave Divine Reason behind in order to learn the reason of Divine Love. You could say I was on a mystic path. I was obviously aware that different viewpoints needed to be listened to and responded to. I didn’t know I would continue this quest in decades to come.
I lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota for awhile and working at a church active in the peace movement. There I learned about the many spiritual movements popular in large metropolises today. I moved to Oakland, California where I attended the Institute for Creation Spirituality and Culture (ICCS) in 1984. ICCS helped to reconcile all of these movements with Christianity for me. Other topics were interwoven into the program, like art and social change. When I had finished my coursework in the one year program, it was unclear how this related to my Lutheran background. I did not know how to relate my new experiences and ideas in a practical sense to any widespread community, especially the one I came from. I found myself returning to church with my parents on home visits but no one there had much idea of what I had been up to.
Now, a few decades later, rejoining a Lutheran church has been a way for me to re-interact with that tradition. Writing this paper gives me a way to dialogue with others like me who listen to the postmodern world yet have similar roots, as in areas like California, where many traditional "mainstream" churches have been struggling or closing and are not necessarily mainstream anymore. This paper engages in that struggle between the old and new ways, with some strategies to move the dialogue forward.
In addition to talking about Creation Spirituality and how this relates to Lutheranism, throughout this paper is the theme of how traditional Christianity relates to many new spirituality movements which have taken off in the postmodern information era. Another theme I develop is how religion and spirituality relates to education for social change, what I consider to be the nonviolent and realistic way to bring spiritual ideals down to earth.
Overview
Throughout this Introduction, Section I, I include a personal cultural, religious and educational history, the sharing of which I believe is a foundational process for developing understanding. I develop the conviction that ethical beliefs influence how we act as human culture, therefore, to change our culture, we must examine our beliefs. Following that I discuss why I want to embrace aspects of Christian tradition in the midst of a complexity of new ideas.
Section II describes how Matthew Fox developed the concept of Creation Spirituality. Section III is an extensive summary of Matthew Fox’ book, Original Blessing, that offers a wealth of information on "creation-centered" Christian spiritual legacies not usually put forward by the mainstream church, and which responds in part to criticisms by many who have left for other faiths. I think of it as Cliff Notes, especially for those who want a shortened introduction to Original Blessing. Section IV is a summary of some of Fox’ work since then.
In Section V, I relate some general themes from Lutheranism to Creation Spirituality. In Section VI, I take each of the four major spiritual paths from Original Blessing, the Via Positiva, Via Negativa, Via Creativa and Via Transformativa, and relate them to Lutheran concepts as well as the work of individual Lutherans who have focused on those themes. In Section VII, I bring up some lingering questions and answers regarding the variety of patterns of faith in this postmodern world. In Section VIII, I interview Lutherans, those currently practicing or those born into the tradition but who no longer belong to a church as well as non-Lutherans, about their thoughts on Creation Spirituality and Lutheranism as well as whatever their current religious and spiritual beliefs are, before concluding with thoughts on where this all is leading in today’s world.
Before the Bibliography is an Addendum and an essay which was published in the book, Community and the World, about the legacy of a Lutheran living in the 1700 and 1800s, N.F.S. Grundtvig, who developed a view on Christianity which I believe fits in important ways with the themes of Creation Spirituality and especially with the concept of Education for Social Change.
What I am struggling with in this paper is how to relate traditional religion to the many new movements of spirituality and religion. Most people don’t try to bring the two together, though this does occur at gatherings of the Parliament of the World Religions, which seems very inclusive. How will Lutherans relate to current trends in religion, given the decline in church membership as a result of openness in society to alternative spiritual movements as well as secularism? In my lifetime I have observed many trends of Lutherans, Protestants and others away from their church-based faith toward Eastern religions and since then toward pre-Christian traditions. Part of their reasons, as I discuss later, have been concern for the environment as well as for a more meaningful and rich spirituality as well as the sense that in a postmodern world, we are free to choose our beliefs.
I hear Lutherans today discussing that they need to be more evangelistic, and find more converts to the faith, but not much discussion about why people are doing other things. I remember going as a teenager with my parents to a talk by a church leader about the Unchurched, presuming all these people had been led astray. The gist of the talk was more that they needed to be brought back to church rather than trying to understand why they left or what they were seeking elsewhere.
My studies of Creation Spirituality before this dissertation have been a way to integrate other movements with Christianity, though relating indirectly to Lutheranism. This dissertation provides basic information about Creation Spirituality, relates that to similar Lutheran themes and then engages in discussion with others who have an interest in dialoguing about their beliefs who are or have been Lutheran as well as some people from other religious backgrounds. The goal is to not only understand about Lutheranism but also some of the larger trends in mainstream Western society, in order to create greater harmony and positive alliances.
Spirituality and Culture in a Postmodern Era
People organize themselves around shared beliefs. Beliefs and ideas can be powerful forces. Therefore, when beliefs change for some but not all, as by today’s postmodern younger generations, confusion and discord can develop within families and communities. Different kinds of cultural beliefs develop which influence the society we live in, hopefully for the better. Religious beliefs are ideologies integral to cultures which heavily influence the rules that are made and that society plays by. The effects of these rules can be sweeping, especially when adhered to by the masses.
The phenomenon of questioning traditionally held beliefs in the United States today has been called postmodernism. In his book, Confessions, Fox writes, "Ecumenism is Postmodern and may even be another word for postdenominationalism…. A postdenominational era will be eager to learn from premodern religions instead of proselytizing to them." (Fox 1996, 251).
In recent decades, I have heard the term "New Age" used more often than postmodern for new trends in spirituality. Though Creation Spirituality was often lumped with New Age ideas, Matthew Fox didn’t claim the spaciness that was associated with that term, but looked forward to the groundedness of ancient prophecy that is implied. In one article where Fox refers to New Age, he wrote:
Divinity co-dwells in the human family and the earth family and the cosmic family. This news saves us from a kind of spacey or rootless New Ageism in which we find ourselves floating aimlessly in the foam of a cosmic root beer. … The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Church in the Modern World claims that as awareness of human interdependence spreads more broadly over the globe, we experience the growth of "a new family, a body which even now is able to give some kind of foreshadowing of the new age" (Fox, Creation 9-10/1986, 9).
To label can be a way of not dealing with a phenomenon, but also is the first stage of recognizing it. Fox has picked new terminology to describe his work. Like Martin Luther, he did not try to leave his Catholic roots but wrote, "the Vatican…made me a postdenominational priest in a postdenominational era…. The modern era began with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and extended to the invention of the electronic media in the 1960s." It has been characterized by anthropocentrism and cultural elitism…. Postdenominationalism is about pluralism and ecumenism in religion." It is about stretching our religious boundaries and "setting aside our boxes to the extent that they are neither challenging us nor nourishing us deeply anymore, or to the extent that they are interfering with the pressing earth issues of our time." (1996, 247)
Fox found a home in the Episcopal church to continue his work. The Episcopal church has been struggling with issues that are very current by accepting homosexuals at its highest leadership levels, alienating some of their constituents. However, other constituents would have been alienated if they didn’t. There seems a bit of a divide between what I will label here, the mainline intellectual churches and the Moral Majority, the religious right. My sense of the Lutheran church is that it has accepted some diversity of viewpoint while trying to keep people together. The important thing, it seems, is that everyone worships together. The nature of the worship may not appeal to everyone, but by going through a ritual that brings people together, my experience is that as a result, people relate together more as a family. Family members may have different beliefs but they will always be that family. People in society will always have different beliefs, but often forget they are really related as humans and what it means to relate as a family, even though peoples have been separated and formed different religions over time.
Knowing one’s cultural roots and how they came to be gives people a sense of history and foundation through time. It has often been said that those who don’t know their history are destined to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. The reverse of this would be to say that those who learn the strengths of previous generations may find some traditions worth saving. It is not always easy to maintain a sense of culture in the U.S. where people come from so many backgrounds, including immigrants who left their country of origin seeking a better life as well as indigenous people who have been harassed in their homeland. African Americans and others captured as slaves were forcibly taken from their homes and brought here, making it harder to maintain a conscious connection to their past. For new immigrants today, the maintenance of bilingualism has often been frowned upon in the United States, with the encouragement to become "American," a concept that goes back five centuries, while the concept of human cultural communities based in specific locales goes back thousands of years.
In the current postmodern milieu, many in the U.S., especially baby boomers and their children, have deviated from family traditions, leading to breaking down of traditional barriers and mixing between cultures, including intermarriage. Offspring of European Americans as well as other ethnic traditional communities have become part of the postmodern revolution of questioning and remaking religion in the United States and other countries in the developed world.
By "developed," I mean especially the very urban communities of the world that have adopted and aspire toward a westernized society with a highly developed economic, industrial and technological livelihood and live a consumerist lifestyle. The postmodern movement that questions authority has been greatly influenced by the accessibility of technology and mass media with the quick and extensive spread of information.
In response to western society and in the tradition of being free to think new thoughts, one trend has been to go back to a simpler lifestyle like that of indigenous peoples. Some feel the way of indigenous peoples who still cultivate native ways of livelihood and craftsmanship and community is a more superior and developed lifestyle to what is considered "western," "modern" and "post-modern" today. However, this sudden attitude of support leads many Native Americans to be suspicious when for decades and hundreds of years, they have been losing their culture and land. Immigrant Americans or any not living in the land of their ancestors’ origin, are torn between the desire to follow their dream wherever it leads them, their family traditions and finding community where they happen to live. Environmentalism has become a strong movement to protect the landscape against modern development’s destructive side effects.
Christianity has not emphasized place of origin as much as its core universal concepts regarding the life of Jesus and Jesus’ message. As the ecumenical movement has erased differences, we forget the history of our unique ancestors. A Danish Lutheran scholar and minister, N.F.S. Grundtvig, said we are human (man) first, then Christian. He believed people needed to know their culture and the history of their ancestors in order to be human. Religion applies to the human condition.
When I have talked about my Swedish culture, others have said in so many words that we’re all American. I could talk about the region where I grew up and where most of my relatives live, the northern Mississippi river valley. However, for the past twenty years I have lived in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Having a sense of history as well as a sense of place are both important for being a human being who is based in and responsible to this living world which birthed us and sustains us. Matthew Fox’ teachings in Creation Spirituality don’t deny the afterlife, but focus on the spirit in this life which has not been given as much attention by Christians. Fox’s Original Blessing has a lot of material on how our spiritual belief relates to our life in this world.
A Swedish Lutheran American Perspective on Creation Spirituality
Growing up in a very Lutheran family, I saw the world from Lutheran eyes. My dad, my grandfather, my great grandfather and three uncles were ministers. I was about 13 before I realized that everyone did not go to church on Sundays. Though my parents sent me to a Lutheran college, my high school was integrated with blacks and whites, upper and lower classes. My siblings and I were definitely "in" the world, went to public grammar and high schools, and learned to be "of" it as we grew older and expanded our horizons beyond home and church. It has been very important for my family to be American and to continue to discover what that means, but our Swedish Lutheran heritage will always be a central reference point. We were shaped by other factors too. For instance, now that I think about it, another grandfather was a farmer, as well as three great grandfathers, a few aunts and uncles as well as cousins and second cousins. They were people whose ancestors came from Sweden who found a new home in the northern Mississippi River Valley in the United States.
I was born into the Augustana Synod, the Swedish Lutheran organization of immigrants begun in the late 1800’s. In the 1960’s it merged with other Lutheran cultural groups (German, Norwegian, Danish, etc.) and became the Lutheran Church in America (LCA). Today the largest and latest result of these mergers is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) which I refer to later in this paper. I felt a loss of some of my sense of Swedishness as that was downplayed by a church trying to see everyone as just Lutheran, not as hyphenated Americans, though individual churches have usually retained some of their original cultural identity. Christianity has a history of trying to replace secular culture with purely Christian culture. Some of the Swedes who immigrated did not care to be part of the Lutheran church, and various Scandinavian cultural movements did develop, though some wanted to just put the past behind them and did not join either ethnic religious or cultural groups.
As a young adult living in California, I joined Vasa, an international Swedish fraternal order, which is basically a highly organized cultural and social group. I was seeking a way to connect to Swedish culture, specifically Sankta Lucia, theannual festival of light on December 13th, which I had experienced as a child in the Swedish Lutheran church. Later, my mother showed me a tract her father had passed out when she was young, about how fraternal orders were not Christian and therefore not to be trusted.
For as long as I know, my family has been Lutheran, though less so with the current baby boomer generation. Now that I think about it, one immigrant ancestor of the nineteenth century, I was told, didn’t go to church regularly and was buried in a different part of the country church graveyard than those who did. In the nineteenth century, in Sweden where my ancestors came from, it was the law to attend the State Lutheran church. In the centuries before that, earlier peoples must have had their own religions.
Most people think of the Vikings as the original people of Scandinavia but it is less well known that the Saami (pronounced "saw-me"), commonly and mistakenly called Lapps, have lived there since before the Vikings and those two peoples have been woven together in a way comparable to the Spanish with the indigenous people of Latin America. There are distinct Saami who still retain much of their culture though they have mostly been pushed to the northern end of the country.
A modern day Swede, Alf Brorson, spoke at the summer, 2002 assembly of the Augustana Heritage Gathering, the remnant left of the Swedish Lutheran American church which merged into what is now the ELCA, the largest American Lutheran body. Brorson referred to nature as a popular religion in Sweden. In his book, Sweden and the Swedes, True or False? he says that Swedes are nature lovers, which is close to religion without being so (Brorson 1997, 39).
My parents sent me to Augustana College, the previous home of the one Swedish Lutheran seminary in the U.S., which has since moved to Chicago, leaving the college in its original home in Rock Island, Illinois, the county I grew up in. In searching for a degree at college, I started out wanting to do something to help the environment but the biology department had a pre-med focus and I didn’t do well in chemistry. I switched to social work, as I thought that it is people who cause environmental problems. I was very interested in the ethics but less in the red tape, and switched to religion with a concentration in psychology. It was also called a Christian Education degree, and included a few classes on that subject. It wasn’t a strong career focus as I didn’t go on to seminary, but as with English majors and other less practical degrees, it has led to an interesting life path.
While working in the college library one summer, I came across the book, The Inner Eye of Love, Mysticism and Religion, which defined mysticism as a journey calling one out of spiritual introspection into the extroverted world, to apply the spiritual principles learned inwardly to the outer world. The author, William Johnston, discussed interfaith dialogue with Buddhism and other world religions, based on the meeting of the mystic minds around the concept of love. My senior thesis was on the concept of the Kingdom of God, how this could mean something that is beginning now and not just waiting until the "end times." Our campus pastor taught a class, The Literature of Walking, which encouraged taking several walks a week. This became a meditative experience that engaged me in the community beyond the college. Earlier I mentioned my mini-sermon on meeting the Strangers at the Door. I realized that dialogue with the wider world was needed to apply Christian principles beyond the church setting.
While in college I visited northern California for a week, where one brother was living. I absorbed some of the questioning climate there and when I returned, stopped by the empty chapel and offered up my questions to the empty room. The answer that came to me was that it is OK to question but I am always welcome to come back. So regardless of what the church doctrine and leaders may say, I have a silent agreement with that chapel, it seems, which allows me to undergo a dialogue such as this paper.
After college in the early 1980’s I moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, a larger urban community, where I encountered more of the world. I was impressed by the large and diverse artistic and cultural communities and the multitude of organizations working for social change. After working several months for a music store, I started working for Grace University Lutheran Church for a year and a half. I had studied pacifism in Christian Ethics in college and was excited about all the groups working for peace and justice and Grace Church was part of that movement. The minister there, Vincent Hawkinson, was a veteran activist and spokesperson for this movement. I had never heard a minister quite so outspoken about international politics. I had heard politics spoken about in church before, in the 1970’s, during the Viet Nam war, when I made a commitment to peace, while worrying and praying for two brothers eligible for the draft.
Grace Church was also involved with Clergy and Laity Concerned, started during the Viet Nam war by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, to make connections between racism, militarism and economic justice. During college I had started dialoguing more about issues of racism and helped organize an event at the very end. Since then I have attended many "unlearning racism" workshops. The San Francisco Bay area has been a very supportive place to try to live in harmony among different races and cultures, though sometimes challenging.
However, I have jumped ahead in time. While in Minneapolis I encountered and began to embrace and explore contemporary movements in spirituality. I attended a slide show presentation on images of ancient goddesses. Seeing the images portrayed, enlarged on a wall, had an impact on me and for the first time I was able to imagine a God who existed in all of the natural world and a female source in which we all exist. It was just like many think about God, but with a more feminine persona. Another time I got this feeling was when I heard a gay men’s chorus in San Francisco. As I began to read the stories of the ancient goddesses I learned how these stories underlie many of the Old Testament scripts and that the words were changed to fit the beliefs of the priests. The discovery that before male Gods, there were goddesses, where women were more revered, was a can of worms to me. I questioned the male centered religion I belonged to. The women’s spirituality movement recovered ancient goddesses and brought up the issue of gender in our deity. They pointed out that in our culture where God is viewed as male, women are second class citizens. In more ancient cultures where the deities were female, women were given more respect. I heard Matthew Fox speak while living in Minneapolis, and his talk brought together all the areas which interested me, religion, psychology, social justice, women’s and indigenous spirituality and more and responded to some of my ambivalence toward Christianity.
Where I grew up as a child in Rock Island County, Illinois, we saw evidence of where Native Americans had lived, but seldom saw any who were alive, except at annual Pow Wows in Black Hawk State Park. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, there were a lot of Native Americans and a reservation right in town. While I lived there, I met some Lutherans doing cross-cultural work with Native Americans and "immigrant" Americans. I had the opportunity to set up a gathering where a Lakota Medicine Man held a "healing ceremony." The center of his altar, I remember was a circle full of sand. He and his helpers used many natural products and symbols to create that event. This, to me, reflected a culture that historically had not harmed the environment anywhere near the dimensions of Christian societies, whose aim is purportedly the afterlife and away from the natural world.
During the week of the healing ceremony I was "laid off" from my job working at the church. The timing of it, in conjunction with the Healing Ceremony, forced me to make decisions about my future and it felt like time to move on. In the midst of my religious crisis, I stopped attending church, realizing that most people didn’t go to church and that maybe I didn’t have to either. I imagined dialoguing with Jesus at the front steps of the church and that he encouraged me to go out into the world and apply my faith there.
A few months later I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, interested in continuing my education as there were many educational organizations whose curriculum included feminist spirituality, much more so than in Minnesota, where people were not as familiar with this movement. My litmus test was whether people knew about goddesses or not. Most people in the Bay Area I met did but in Minnesota, more seemed to not be aware of this movement. Once there, I stayed for some weeks in a couple of shared cooperative homes of people who were peace activists and also very much into the neopagan movement.
You could say this cooperative living movement has been a social change movement. Most people starting them were young adults at the time, who shared values for making a better world, and many of them had rejected traditional religion and were experimenting with new ideas. A lot of work was done with the Movement for a New Society in Philadelphia, from people in the shared living movement, on values of consensus building in groups. The cooperatives in San Francisco were basing their organizations on the values developed by people in the Movement for a New Society. Many used the book which was sometimes called the "Monster Manual," but actually called the Resource Manual for a Living Revolution (Coover 1981), which many relied on in this movement and several other groups adopted it, instead of Roberts Rules of Orders, including Starhawk and the Wiccan movement.
During my first few months in San Francisco I had been introduced to the book, the Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, which features the "goddess" religion usually referenced in the background of the story of King Arthur. Many people were reading this book which was one of many dealing with the goddess religion. In recent years I have read Priestess of Avalon, by Bradley, which carries this theme forward to tell how a Priestess of Avalon was the mother of Constantine. Though the story shows how Constantine forced a new religion to replace an older tradition, it emphasizes more reconciliation than enmity between the old and the new faith. You get the sense that something should be saved, yet that the new way is not altogether wrong either.
I found a way to make a living and a more permanent shared living situation for myself, across the bay in Oakland. The Bay Area is a rich environment to learn about many movements for social change as well as being culturally diverse area and supportive of building multicultural understanding. There I enrolled in the Institute for Culture and Creation Spirituality (ICCS), a one year masters or certificate program directed by Matthew Fox, O.P., at Holy Names College in Oakland, California, where I found Christians and those of other faiths who were exploring Creation Spirituality, and were interested in feminism, indigenous people, art and social justice movements. A large percentage of the students belonged to Catholic religious orders doing continuing education but there was an assortment of people from other backgrounds as well, looking for new ways to understand their spirituality.
In trying to make sense of all these new ideas about spirituality, I have developed a both-and perspective. As human society moves forward through time, it seems important for generations to connect with each other. Passing the mantle has been a ritualistic cultural rite of passage where cultural traditional practices are passed from one generation to the next. Passing the torch is another way of saying it. With changes in modern as well as postmodern society, traditional customs are frequently left behind and the mantle has not been passed on because the younger generations have had different ideas and needs. We live in a society where science, technology and industry have changed the way many of us live and the way we think about our choices for lifestyle.
In less developed cultures, over the past several centuries, Christianity has been introduced as a replacement for much of the religious tradition which indigenous cultures carried forward with every generation. When those mantles were no longer passed along, those old cultures and their traditional understandings for how to live died out.
Christianity has, in many ways, been built on some remnants of older ways of viewing our world. Several major holy days have been placed around the times of the year traditionally observed as natural ritual phenomena, such as Christmas, at the winter solstice. Catholics retain a strong emphasis on a female close to God, Mary, reminiscent of goddess beliefs of times long ago in pre-Christian religions.
Hebrew scripture can be compared to religious writings of earlier pre-Christian sayings attributed to goddesses. In feminist literature such as The Feminine Dimension of the Divine, Joan Chamberlain Engelsman, shows how ancient female goddesses such as Isis and Sophia, came to have their names changed or omitted as the gender of the gods changed from female to male over centuries. Sections of the Old Testament in the Bible such as Wisdom literature, Proverbs and Solomon, for example, can be attributed to ancient goddess sayings, according to Engelsman.
Christian churches are losing members in areas like the San Francisco Bay Area where many people are at the cutting edge of new and postmodern ideas. There isn’t always a younger generation ready and willing to pass the tradition along to. The younger generation that has learned to question often no longer finds traditions relevant and point out the historic abuses of organized religion. It is hard to change for those who have done things the same way over a long period of time and who have inherited traditions from their parents. There may be some value in those traditions, if nothing more than the connection to our ancestors. I suspect there also may be wisdom in how human society has functioned well over centuries, even though often these traditions probably need to be questioned.
Many of these Christian mantles of tradition became neglected as younger generations began to seek spirituality elsewhere. In the 1960’s, Eastern religions were very popular. In the following decades the neo-pagans gained popularity. New Age became the arena to put together beliefs grabbed from a variety of traditional religions plus some new ideas.
I think all can agree that things are not necessarily good, just because they are new or because they are old. I think it is fundamentally good, however, to know our unique histories, even though a postmodern perspective questions what has been done in the past. It is hard to prevent new ideas and ways of doing things which can fundamentally change our lives for the better, however they can create new problems as well. The failings of modern culture have driven young people in recent decades to reacquaint themselves with pre-modern and pre-Christian traditions. We must think critically about what is good and bad about our traditions as well as what are presented to us as new and supposedly the answers to all our old problems.
Going Back, Looking Up, Down, & Forward: Robert Bly and The Sibling Society
Poet and author Robert Bly’s critiques the postmodern trend to cast off the traditions of elders, leaving siblings to fight it out, who he says are not that interested in raising their young either. This is food for thought, though Bly himself has been a part of the movements of the times, including feminism and eastern spirituality, before becoming better known with the men’s movement. He feels that postmodern siblings are no longer concerned about their parents’ traditions and compete with peers from other cultural backgrounds for the right to create the society they live in. In traditional cultures, coming of age used to mean going through a rite of passage to become an adult. Now, coming of age may mean ceasing to carry on the traditions of the elders and embracing the latest technological advances and ways of thinking.
Bly writes that many Americans in the 1950’s "saw so many lives destroyed by repression, by fear, by internalized superintendents, by shaming, by workaholism. By 1969, it felt as if human beings were able for the first time in history to choose their own roads, choose what to do with their own bodies, choose the visionary possibilities formerly shut off by that "’control system’" (Bly 1996, 4). He labels this control system the "Indo-European, Islamic, Hebraic impulse-control system" (1996, 3-4). Bly notes that the first Woodstock concert signaled a change in American culture. "Some unjust severity had been overcome or bypassed. Fundamentalist harshness, Marxist rigidity, the stiff ethic of high school superintendents, had passed away. People greeted each other, clothed or naked, in delight, feeling that a victory of humanness had taken place" (1996, 3).
Bly quotes an Englishman who visited the U.S. since this phenomenon, who commented that people in the U.S. seemed to want to be loved more than to love in return. Bly noticed that some fathers and mothers, wanting to be loved, gave up on enforcing with their young, some of that control system of asceticism which entailed postponement of pleasure, hard work and "no fooling around.... How could one be more clearly worthy of love than to agree to whatever your children want (1996, 5)?"
Bly writes that in the late 1950’s, many fathers gave up their traditional setting of limits and in return asked for new sorts of love from their children, though at a price. "As divorce became more common and custody remained with the mothers, the children’s power increased." Bly writes that some schoolteachers have testified that students are able to run things in high schools by being able to refuse to do more schoolwork than they want to.
Bly thinks something has gone wrong. He wonders, how did we move from the "optimistic, companionable, food-passing youngsters at Woodstock to the self-doubting, dark-hearted, turned-in, death-praising, indifferent, wised-up, deconstructionist audience that now attends grunge music concerts?" (1996, 7).
It is hard to capture in a few paragraphs, all that is said in The Sibling Society. It is written with a lot of metaphor and storytelling, but basically, Robert Bly feels things have gone too far in a lateral (sibling) sense and that we need to get back some of that longitudinal/vertical part of society marked by a world where elders are given more respect and people who act out with uninhibited sibling behavior aren’t in charge of everything. It may be hard to swallow some of his challenges to new ways of doing things that have been consciously changed because of repressive traditions. It is probably worth a glance backward to see if things are going too far in the other direction or not. The prevalence today of mass media entertainment with less time for family and community may contribute toward the lack of family and community values and lack of boundaries of respect, not to mention the faster pace in Westernized society.
Bly writes that whether we believe in capitalism or communism or something in between, "we have to grieve that we have left contemporary students with their power of admiration basically in ruins.... If Generation X is passive or uninventive, it is because their ability to admire has been taken away." Now it is taught that "European kings were major criminals who dressed well… the feudalism of the Middle Ages was a transparent failure, and the Renaissance amounted to a triumph of false consciousness..." However, "The cultural Left does not mention that, given the brutal chaos of fourteenth-century Europe, feudalism was an ingenious effort to prevent further descent into human disintegration; nor that the Renaissance amounted to a combined effort by Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers to form a common religion," and so on. (1996, 162-263).
It is either-or thinking that leads to new social movements. The tension between two extremes is probably a healthier dynamic in society than complete agreement. Using Bly’s terms, the vertical perspective should be balanced with horizontal thinking. This concept of vertical thought can be illustrated by the Native American idea of making decisions while keeping in mind what effect they will have seven generations later.
Vertical attention implies the ability, or at least the longing, to look downward; or the ability to look upward, at the stars, at the energies beyond the stars, at angels. One problem with the sibling society is that, in its intense desire to get away from hierarchy, it unintentionally avoids all vertical longing.... (1996, 213).
Bly goes on to say that vertical longing is different from hierarchy in that it has to do with feeling and hierarchy has to do with power. The Catholic Church in Europe adopted and institutionalized the power hierarchies of the Roman Empire and the values of longing and hierarchy have been confused since then, Bly writes. There is a Buddhist saying that "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Symbolically, that would prevent anyone who portrays themselves as the Buddha or other spiritual manifestation, from having hierarchical power over you. Extreme communists have had disregard for religion and art, thus they did not look upward or downward in admiration or disgust (1996, 213-214).
The hierarchical Catholic Church in the Dark Ages stamped out secular art and cultural knowledge from ancient Greece as well. In Western Europe after "the barbarian invasions of the 5th century,"
The rise of the Church and the decline of the secular school took place in a culture which had little respect for the written word and the fine arts. These are the Dark Ages, at the end of which Latin was the lingua franca, secular literature was not longer studied, and Greek was a dead language (Stewart 1962, 906).
The communist phrase that religion is the opium of the people led to a disdain for religion which led to greater secularism in society. While this may have freed people from state control of religion, most people experience a spiritual side of life and religious traditions have inspired and fostered the development of human values for centuries. The Christian mystical tradition of seeing the equal importance of everyone, it could be argued, has laid the groundwork for egalitarian, if nonreligious, civic values.
Another malaise Bly talks about in the sibling society is a lack of parenting. I see this as being related to more women leaving home to work. When I was a child, many women I interacted with were mothers and housewives. Nowadays, most women in developed countries expect to and are expected to try to work equally with men. That is a change. The issue and concern of having a parent present to raise children is doubled with both parents working away from the home in numerous families. Gender roles for men and women are challenged more than ever.
Towards the end of the book, Bly writes that "the fading of the father as a provider in American culture" was a change. He "had assumed that anger against the patriarchal family, some of it justified, was the primary cause." Now he thinks other forces have been at work, including "those devoted to the bottom line," who have poised themselves between the father and the family. "The more the parents’ dignity and strength are damaged, the more open children are to persuasion." He writes that
the forces which destroyed the father will not be satisfied, and are moving toward the mother....When mothers and fathers are both dismembered, we will have a society of orphans, or, more exactly, a culture of adolescent orphans...Adolescents living in an actual family do not pay much attention to the ones "above" them, nor the little ones beneath them (1996, 230).
This evilness of only "flatness" is described in this poem by a Swedish poet, Harry Martinson,
When Euclid started out to measure Hades,
he found it had neither depth nor height.
Demons flatter than stingrays
swept above the plains of death....
There were only waves, no hills, no chasms or valleys.
Only lines, parallel happenings, angles lying prone.
Demons shot along like elliptical plates;
they covered an endless field in Hades as though with moving dragonscales.
...victims of flat evil
with no comfort from a high place
or support from a low place (1996, 231).
Bly continues, "Cultures with depth have firm codes. One can feel the codes in old movies; promises must be kept, pleasure comes after relationships, you talk in a polite way to grandparents, there is something more important than money, and so on" (1996, 231-232). Flatness, on the other hand, lies in "saying yes to everything." "In a sense, we say yes...to everything but adult human beings." He talks about the neglect of children, as a prime example of this (1996, 232).
As I try to understand Bly’s point, I think about my own values for the concept of democracy. Democracy in my opinion has been a positive force which protects the individual by giving them say in the governing procedure. According to Bly, democracy has been a leveling process which has been going on since the French Revolution. Bly feels that too much democracy, especially in a competitive capitalistic system, leads to a lack of concern for community (1996, 233).
Another problem with the "horizontal gaze," is that we make mirrors of other people and expect and want them to be just like us. As we only pay attention to how they are like us, they reflect back our own image. We don’t see that they might be different. This mirror, being an inexact image, floods our receptors so that we don’t know who we are and have no new information for making choices. Now no one is allowed to get as big as a Caesar or a Queen or King. If we only see our group,
one doesn’t decide to go anywhere. One can’t take any passionate steps, nor feel admiration for Beethoven or Mother Teresa or Freud or one’s own marital partner, because—by being hobbled, cut off from the horizon by the hundreds of mirrors on all sides—we have nowhere to rest but in envy. The look associated with gratitude—upward—breaks our contact with the mirrors (Bly, 234).
Again, Bly’s perspective is meant to critique the current era and to remind us that not everything old is useless and outdated. A sense of reverence for elders may need to be reinstated in some fashion. I have often thought, the value and praxis of multiculturalism, for instance, is not necessarily an equal playing field. We are not just equal sibling cultures. The fact is that the African Americans brought to the Americas as slaves, got an unequal start. Native Americans who suffered genocide and loss of homeland, did not have an equal opportunity to start with. They have something different, however, a much greater sense of history relating to the land that the Americas are built on. Their ancestors lived and were buried here for centuries before the European invasion/immigration. The white European immigrants who got land and came here with the view toward a positive future had the best start and are doing the best financially today. A vertical view would look at the differences in history and see that sorrow and responsibility are part of the picture of diversity, not just learning to be color-blind.
I don’t know how Bly applies these own concepts in his own life, other than what I have heard for the men’s movement. I don’t know, for instance, if he endeavors to know the traditions of Norwegian Lutherans, though he seems to have a very spiritual focus. When I have heard him recite poems he often accompanies them with music and often recites them twice, to make sure they sink in. I do know he has translated Norwegian and other Scandinavian literature into English as well as works from other languages. I think much of his backward gazing has been to preChristian rituals and literature that does not have a conscious Christian connection. If it did, or if he made more of his Norwegian roots, I suspect he would have a very different audience which would possibly be less mainstream and his concepts would be taken as less applicable to all cultures.
The Sibling Society gives those of us who have adopted the postmodern way of questioning everything, a reason to pause and look back. Robert Bly is a poet and a prophet, though what he says doesn’t mean we need to just turn the clock backwards. His work is a fresh reminder to look back with thanks, admiration and longing. Starting with looking back, perhaps we can learn how to decide for the future.
For me, this theme reinforces the importance of knowing one’s own cultural history. The Creation Spirituality movement pointed toward the European mystics as a way to revive Christianity. However, each ethnic tradition has its own history and view of things. There are many Christian traditions. Most people at Fox’s institute were Catholic. There are other Christian traditions, obviously, though even for Catholic’s there are different histories in each order as well as regions. The Eastern Orthodox Christians have their version which I suspect most Americans are less familiar with than other Christian denominations. Later in this paper I draw connections between Creation Spirituality and various Lutheran traditions, including German, Swedish and Danish Lutheran legacies.
Reconsidering Christianity in a Context of Education for Social Change
I study these dynamics of changing religious beliefs and their effect on our society out of a desire to strengthen our culture by grappling with issues and engaging in dialogue with myself and others. To do this one must hold values from one point of view while visiting another point of view, whole respecting the humanity of both and looking for commonalities. This perspective is crucial to more than religion but to mainstream society as well, since though we try to maintain a separation of church and state, many religions make known their opinions on many topics. Since the current U.S. president has the support of the Moral Majority, it is important for those who are not the Moral Majority (or Minority) to think about what their beliefs stand for and who they can align with to apply their faith to life.
To create a more functional society, we need to first identify crises in order to address them. Then we can work through differences to agree on plans which can deal more effectively with the big crisis of violence, overpopulation and environmental pollution, to name only a few. My paper on the Danish folk school movement (attached as an addendum) gives some hope that this process of dialogue and popular education, based on pride of heritage and place with intrinsic respect of the heritage and lands of others can have the effect of uniting people to make a better world.
More than sibling relationships, having connections with our elders and historical background is beneficial for nurturing a sense of community and connection between people. To do this, there is a need for everyone to get along and to understand and respect each others’ beliefs. Mainstream educational processes often emphasize grades and degrees more than content and real learning to solve actual social problems. As a student of Higher Education and Social Change, I have an interest in alternative educational movements, which are not dogmatic or punitive but make it more possible to find answers to social problems the dominant western society has up until now almost ignored. Often, alternative progressive movements use the tools of mainstream society and want to deliver the truth, expecting people to swallow it. Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, called that the "banking" method. He taught that common people should be encouraged to develop their own beliefs and their leaders should be encouraged to shape society (Freire 1984).
The context of writing this is during the early years of a new millennium. As we turn this corner of time, our world is in many ways just the same but it continues to change rapidly as well. New technology presents itself in the USA and other developed countries, practically every time we turn around. Most learning and study seem to support the development of new technology, supposedly for a better world. Social trends affect how people’s behavior becomes organized and this determines how knowledge is used to shape the world we live in. By learning from past and present social, religious and alternative educational movements, we can develop new understandings of spirituality and culture. As people become enlightened through education, they can find solutions to problems which will create positive social change.
The term, "social change," was developed by movements of people who wanted to make the world a better place for everybody regardless of personal gain, though technically, that phrase can also mean change for the worse. Religious concern that understands that there is common value and spirit present in all, directs spiritual people to be deeply concerned about changing human behavior to develop human community that cares about everyone. The concept that we should care about the natural environment as well as people has received less emphasis by most of Christianity though in recent years this idea seems to have begun to spread.
Many people today question whether merely carrying forward mantles of tradition will make a difference to the serious problems we now face in modern technological society and feel that something different needs to be done in terms of our beliefs as well as actions. Technology has solved some social problems but created new ones as well. Old stubborn problems, for instance, human violence, remain and are linked to new problems such as improved weaponry, as well as nuclear waste.
For many social change activists, to take time to focus on religion may seem irrelevant, but religious philosophy is an old, traditional, central and cultural starting place to guide us in figuring out how to move forward. The traditional Left, arising from the communist movement, followed the motto that Religion is the opiate of the people. However, the discipline of popular education teaches that for learning to occur that is going to really involve people, we need to start with where people are in their real life experiences. Religious tradition is a commonality we can start from to create our collective dialogue. The results will in large part depend on the people who go through this process and those who lead them.
More needs to be done, of course and a lot of social change work is carried out in the secular sphere. Secular humanism has been criticized by traditional Christians as lacking a religious base. However, the beliefs and actions of humanists frequently match the beliefs and actions of well-meaning Christians. Theologians are apparently aware, at some level, of the secularization of society as they see their church membership dwindling. Dr. Louis Almén writes in the essay, "The Augustana Heritage In the Role of the Church in Society," that diminishment of the church followed the counter-culture movement of the 1960’s, brought on by growing pluralism in America and increasing secularism among other factors (Hultgren 1999, 150). By pluralism, I believe he means the presence and acceptance of many new religious movements as well as those brought to the U.S. by immigrants.
It may be that pragmatic communist and socialist views influenced this and saw no need for religion if government just did its job of taking care of people. One might argue that secular humanism is a sign that Christianity and other religions have worked themselves out of a job and people no longer feel a need for them. Or is it that they are not relevant to where people are at? Mainstream religions themselves are well known to state that people are not where they need to be and offer the answers right and left. Mainstream churches with liberal and social justice oriented theologies seem to be shrinking, while fundamentalist and Catholic churches that offer more concrete answers to personal morality, seem to swell in numbers. It may be that their members become more secular as they integrate spiritual values into their life. Religions may be fading but the spirituality beyond a specific religion seems to be on the upsurge.
Spiritual traditions usually have some equivalent to the golden rule, promoting fairness and the common good. For many postmodern critics such as Matthew Fox and other proponents of Creation Spirituality, fundamentalist Christianity has focused too much attention on life after death and has reinforced patriarchal culture which makes secondary citizens of women and various other groups based on class and ethnicity. Not all Christians can be lumped into one category and there are different takes on the meaning and value of religious salvation. Creation Spirituality doesn’t deny that the afterlife is a concern but puts an emphasis on this life. Many religious traditions would agree that how we live this life may affect the afterlife. The theology around the belief that the Kingdom of God is gradually manifesting itself in our time, fits with this philosophy. Realized Eschatology, the idea that the end times are gradually coming upon us, though never fully arrive, is found in Fox’s discussions of Creation Spirituality in Path Eight in his book, Original Blessing, which I describe at length, later in this paper.
There is a feminist perspective to Christianity as well as Judaism, from which it originated. Christianity was based on many aspects of Jewish rules and morality which came from a particular time and place. Strict sexual mores restricted women but protected them at the same time. Many have interpreted marriage codes as a patriarchal controlling factor and where women are considered like property, I think a case could be made. However, where they promoted values of commitment, which recognize the value of relationship in intimacy, they had spiritual applications. The stories about Jesus speaking to women as friends and students illustrated a sexually neutral love that was freeing for women in their relationships with men, though this too was a Jewish tradition, which most Christians probably don’t realize. According to Marianne Grohmann, "as in Christianity, there never was and there is not now the one status of the woman but very different kinds of self-images of women in Judaism" (Grohmann 1998). This movement to respect women in Christianity and Judaism from within patriarchal cultures has helped women to be valued as equal in the eyes of God, not just sexual objects or property.
Most Christians don’t think of Jesus as being Jewish and think of Jewish tradition as just what they read in the Old Testament. However, most Christians do not really know how Judaism is practiced, although the earliest Christians did.
A Jewish scholar, Judith Antonelli, also has a perspective on the idea that things were 100% better before patriarchy. She feels that the goddess nostalgia whitewashes male supremacy and militarism in ancient paganism. She writes that the genderless God of Abraham and Sarah must have been a welcome relief from pagan gods made in the image of abusive men (Antonelli 1997).
These areas of discussion on traditional vs. new movements in women’s spirituality would make an interesting dissertation. I think the point is to find middle ground and a balance. The Danish Lutheran theologian and man of many trades (politician, author, translator, song writer, poet—see addendum), N.F.S. Grundtvig’s advice applies here. He wrote that people need to know the culture and religion of their ancestors and that Christianity augments our identity as human beings. Judaism has always maintained it cultural connection. Christianity has been a universal religion and people have been taught that their connection to place and people is less important.
There are deep divisions in the United States today as always, with right wing fundamentalists influencing the political scene in various ways on one hand and left wing religious as well as nonreligious people on the other. In the 2000 election, "exit polls showed Bush as the champion of people who go to church at least once a week" (The Observer 2000). Clearly political differences can relate to religious ones.
For a democracy to function, however, somehow all need to be able to work together. It can be difficult to bring "New Agers" and postmodernists who have questioned everything together with those who continue in their traditions with little questioning. As those of us who keep up with the times try to do the right thing, by not acknowledging those who do not believe as we do, we separate ourselves, which is a natural impulse. However, a deeper spiritual reality must unite all of us which guides all ecumenical and inter-faith dialogue. We ought to at least try to understand and figure out how to get along with everyone. At the same time, the environmental facts compel us to cherish creation and use it responsibly rather than continuing to greedily consume resources for what will only be short term gain and long term loss. The rift between the right and the left in the political sphere is perhaps one of the biggest problems, but perhaps the more we push and pull we will deal with and not ignore the issues that must be resolved for the "kingdom to come."
In the global community, the violence of terrorists forces us to explore more dimensions of the human fabric. Fundamentalists of other religions need to be dialogued with in an ecumenical and inter-faith context as well as with the strategies of popular education, with tools of listening and dialogue.
For me, Creation Spirituality helped make sense of Christianity by relating to current spiritual movements in the United States. Matthew Fox has articulated and catalyzed the creation spirituality movement in recent decades. It is a mystical movement which takes mysticism spiritual experience out of the inward realm it is known for and applies it to the world. As I stated earlier, to many this sounds like creationism, the belief that God created the world in seven days like it says in the Bible, but it is not a literal interpretation. It is very much in touch with scientific theory and believes the earth has been created in an ongoing process of spirit-inspired creativity.
Fox developed the idea of Creation Spirituality at the time when many his age were turning to Eastern religions in the 1960’s. Matthew Fox has written and given many talks about European Catholic "mystics" from past centuries who were known for their spiritual teachings. These mystics applied their spiritual experiences to concerns of everyday life and not just the after life. They were concerned not just about meditation but about social harmony and justice. Fox has emphasized that we need not just look to the east for spirituality but that westerners can find valuable knowledge from the western hemisphere’s traditions. At the same time, he has developed many programs involving people from just about every tradition one can think of—eastern, western, indigenous, prepatriarchal feminine spirituality, as well as the spirituality of scientists.
At ICCS, Matthew Fox frequently told of the story by Meister Eckhart of a person working in a stable who has a "Breakthrough" and then goes back to working in the stable. (Fox 1983, 91). After finishing ICCS, many felt spoiled, that they couldn’t go back to church. But later some Catholic women my age told me they were going back to their Catholic churches. I was surprised and began to think that perhaps I could do that as well. This opened up the possibility that I could integrate new ways of thinking with the tradition I had come from.
I was the only Lutheran in my class at ICCS at Holy Names college which was a very Catholic institution. I don’t remember a lot of talk about integrating Creation spirituality with other denominations than Catholic. I began to realize a need to connect my searching with other Lutherans, even though I could never go back in the same way to the Lutheran church. I hesitated to do that after having been immersed in a very creative interpretation of religion and spirituality. However, it can be meaningful to try to reconcile differing beliefs and challenging to apply new ideas to real life situations. A practical reason was that when I went to visit my parents across the country from California in the Midwest, I would go to church with them. I discovered that by going to church occasionally in California I felt homesick less often. Contemporary movements for traditional pre-Christian spirituality talk about reverence of ancestors. I know that a lot of my ancestors of recent centuries were devout Lutherans. I can’t just forget about them in search of new ideas.
With Robert Bly’s perspectives in mind, I have thought that perhaps the right thing for postmodernists to do would be to attempt to build some bridges between new experiences and to take a second look at older traditions, that fewer and fewer young people seem to keep. Rather than be isolated apart from most elders, within newfound spiritual beliefs, like the mystic experience of leaving the cave I read about in The Inner Eye of Love, I feel instructed to leave the spiritual mountain for the plains. Depending on one’s perspective, the mountains in this metaphor could be interpreted to mean new found spiritualities or the traditions of one’s elders. The point is to balance different extremes and relate them together. For me that is the symbol of the equi-distant cross + which easily fits inside a circle, forming an ancient mandala symbol. This Celtic Cross is very intricate but is based on this symbol.
Using Robert Bly’s perspective, when going back to the plains, one should remember the mountaintop experience and also our origins. The Danish theologian and educator, Grundtvig would probably concur. He encouraged that everyone should know their Mother Tongue and the history of their Father Land. Or again, like Eckhart would say, after the breakthrough, the spiritual person should go back to work in the barn. Running away to be free and to escape turmoil is a different experience and option from taking on a mantle and facing tradition with a new outlook.
I recently heard a Saami woman say that once you know the tradition, you can change it, as long as you understand what you are doing. This was not a woman who advocated changing traditions, but she was perhaps admitting that if you intended to change it, you needed to take responsibility for it and know just what you were doing. I think the baby boomer generation has gone its own ways because times have been changing so fast. Their elders of this century had already made changes and it is logical to continue to seek better answers to old problems. Perhaps changing has become the American (U.S.) way of life.
The idea of not forgetting the past, as the references to Bly, Eckhart and Grundtvig direct, is a provoking reminder of how society has functioned over time, by making the new from the old. How this idea can be lived out in each person’s life is up to them. Living in a big city, it is hard to find authenticity of culture. It is a discipline one can choose, to weave what one has learned into one’s life; to go back into mainstream society with new nonmainstream beliefs. However, it is not a choice for everyone, depending on how economically well off they are or dependent on their family, culture and class. It is a reality check to understand that our family and peers may not just follow whatever new ideas we happen to come up with.
I find that the Christian faith has developed some extensive ethical theories, whereas the neopagans I encountered claimed to have only one law, "harm no one." I have a cousin who has lived in or near big cities who once told me his personal commitment to helping the world is to just try not to make things any worse and I agree, this is hard enough to accomplish. It is hard enough to never harm anyone, let alone just the environment. Though Christians have been accused of overstepping their boundaries by helping others too much, and being paternalistic, they have developed a sophisticated concern for ethics which has launched many social change movements, one in particular being the movement to free the slaves in the U.S. I have read that Christianity was a strong influence in eliminating the slave class in Sweden in the 1300’s as well (Moberg 1970, 21)
Starhawk, a leader in a feminist "neopagan" group called Reclaiming, grew up in a Jewish tradition and may have incorporated some of that tradition’s concern for justice with her new beliefs. Reclaiming is a movement of women and men who call themselves pagans and often, witches, who are reclaiming ancient religions that pray to goddesses and revere nature. They have been involved in the peace and environmental movements, among others. I remember a statement by a participant at a class in the masters program on Creation Spirituality I attended at ICCS, led by Starhawk. This student said she did not want to tell her pagan friends how much Christian baggage she carried around inside her.
Since learning about the neopagan movement and the importance of understanding God as feminine (to augment a lifetime of thinking of God as male), I wanted at one time to buy a T-shirt saying "Born Again Pagan." It is a birthing again to realize one’s love for the earth and to be able to imagine a female being representing the highest spiritual force attributed to God. I have also come to realize that my differing beliefs can work together and need not be totally contradictory, except among people who believe they are. Studying at the Institute for Culture and Creation Spirituality helped me bring together my Christian roots with my spiritual connection with the earth.
However, many people haven’t heard of creation spirituality, so following is an introduction to how Matthew Fox came up with it. Following that is an extensive summary I have written of the book, Original Blessing, which I consider to be a manual on how Matthew Fox articulates Creation Spirituality. I follow that up with a description of some of Matthew Fox’ work since then. I have written about Fox and Creation spirituality in the hopes that a summary will benefit those who have not studied this work, to understand it more quickly and find what may interest them the most to pursue further. Following that I relate Lutheran themes to Creation Spirituality in the hopes that Lutherans can own their own tradition and at the same time benefit from Creation Spirituality. Finally I interview Lutherans and other on this topic as well as dialogue about popular spirituality versus traditional Christianity and other established beliefs.