Original blessing, not original sin - Matthew Fox and creation spirituality
Sam Keen 
Original Blessing Not Original Sin On December 15, 1988, theologian Matthew Fox joined the controversial brotherhood of thinkers who are currently troubling the conscience and testing the catholicity of the roman Catholid Church. Although not every voice has been officially silenced, all have run afoul of the Vatican for one reason or another: some, for instance, because their brand of liberation theology is influenced too much by Marxism (Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga and Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff); other because of their unorthodox views on sexual ethics (theologian Charles Curran and Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen).
Fox, who holds a doctorate from the Institut Catholique in Paris, is the founding director of the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality in Oakland, CA, and the author of a dozen books. His best-known work, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality, present a manifesto for a more mystical and ecologically based theology witth far less emphasis on the traditional themes of sin and redemption than on the themes of blessing and creativity.
It is too early to forecast how the dramatic confrontation between this mystic and prophet of an earthy cosmic faith and those who regard themselves as the keepers of orthodoxy will end. It is instructive to remember that the rising power of nationalism and individualism made Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation inevitable. Perhaps the recent emergence of an ecological perspective will make something like creation spirituality historically inevitable, too.
Sam: The Vatican's guardians of orthodoxy say you are "dangerous and deviant." You have been officially silenced, forbidden to teach, preach or lecture. In just what ways are you dangerous and deviant?
Matt: It is not exactly clear. I have never been permitted to face my accusers. But the charges against me are that I am an ardent feminist, that I call God both Mother and Child as well as Father, that I do not condemn homosexuals, that I hired a self-described witch to teach about the Wicca, a pre-Christian folk religion practiced by European peasant women, and that I emphasize original blessing over original sin. But the real issue is not these theological charges, which I do not deny, but the political threat the Vatican feels from creation spirituality.
Sam: What is creation spirituality?
Matt: For starters, let's say that it's liberation theology for the First World, for the overdeveloped peoples. Unlike that of Third World peoples, our poverty is not so much material as it is spiritual and psychological. Our addictions to alcohol, drugs, sports, entertainment and work spring from our alienation from the earth and God and our effort to cover up both our pain and our joy. The mystical tradition that I am seeking to revive has a lot to say about freeing ourselves from addiction, getting high on the beauty of the created world and recreating our society.
Sam: How does creation spirituality differ from the garden varieties of Christian theology?
Matt: It is the opposite of fundamentalism. It's about trust: trusting nature, including our own human nature, our dreams, our bodies and our imaginations. It believes that passion, Eros and ecstasy are blessings and not curses. It emphasizes creativity rather than obedience, the aesthetic rather than the ascetic. And, above all, it is about cosmology, about resetting the human agenda within the context of the cosmos rather than in the man-made world we've been living in since the Enlightenment.
Sam: It sounds a lot like pantheism, romanticism, nature mysticism, or the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau.
Matt: There is an important difference. There arre basically only four ways that we can think about our relation to divinity. Theism means there is a God who is up there in the sky behind the universe with an oil can, keeping things running. As Jung once said, when we believe in this kind of God we lose our own souls.
A second way is atheism, which is a reaction to and rejection of theism. It says "No, thank you" to theism. And frankly, if the distant god of theism was the only one I was offered I would probably be an atheist, too.
The third option is pantheism, which says that everything is God and God is everything. The church has always rejected this because it leaves out the transcendence, or the surprise, of God.
And the fourth option, the one I choose, is panentheism, which says the image of God or divinity is immanent in all things but that God transcends the created order. This doesn't lock God into what already is. Creation spirituality is about the end of theism and the reemergence of panentheism.
Sam: Is creation spirituality a kind of religious Esperanto, a homogenized New Age mysticism? Or is it specifically Christian?
Matt: I would argue that creation spirituality is the oldest tradition in the Bible. All of the prophets as well as Jesus were creation-centered in what they preached. It is also at the heart of the mystical tradition of both the East and the West, as well as being the essence of what native peoples on this continent lived for thousands of years before Christianity arrived. As Meister Eckhart said, "God is a great underground river," and the wisdom in all religions taps into this one source.
Sam: I'm beginning to get a sense of why you trouble the guardians of orthodoxy. Are you taking the X out of Xmas? What part does Christ play in your scheme of things?
Matt: Fundamentalists and liberal theologians have one thing in common. I call it Jesus-olatry. They concentrate so much on Jesus that they miss the cosmic Christ and the divinity within creation. And, what is even stranger, they even miss the message of the gospels.
The gospel writers weren't looking for the historical Jesus; they had encountered him. They were developing cosmic hymns to the cosmic Christ. The gospel of Mark, for instance, begins with the baptism of Jesus in which the whole sky opened up. That's a cosmic event. Then Jesus is driven out into the wilderness and he wrestled with Satan--the dark force--and wild beats and angels came to succor him. That's cosmology. The story of the crucifixion is also set in a cosmic context-an eclipse of the sun, and the death of the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
The Gospel of John begins with the assertion that Christ is the Word, the Logos, the indwelling divine reason within things. The cosmic Christ is in the soil, in the rain forest, in the body and in the pain of the world. This Christ is there wherever anyone encounters the prisoner, the hungry, the homeless. Far from underplaying the part of Jesus, I frankly think we're recovering the cosmic Christ that was at the center of the New Testament tradition. The cosmic Christ is a wonderful archetype for our time because it can move us into an era of mystical politics, if you will, of re-relating to the earth with reverence and respect.
Sam: Let's turn to sin. Are you for or against it? Do you deny original sin as your critics say?
Matt: I don't deny original sin, but I insist that we start with original blessing. We have to begin thinking about our condition with the fact that we inherited an earth that is hospitable toward us, with the right levels of ozone, oxygen and water, and healthy DNA in our bodies and reproductive systems. There were 19 billion years or so of history and God's creative activity before human beings appeared on the scene and invented sin.
I also object to original sin as the starting point of religion because of the tremendous psychic damage it has done. People are already terribly vulnerable to self-doubt and guilt, especially members of minority groups -- women, blacks, Native Americans, homosexuals. The whole ideology of original sin increases one's alienation and feeds the sado-masochistic energies in the culture -- the sense that one is not worthy.
If you start with the notion that you ere born a blotch on existence, you will never be empowered to do something about the brokenness of life. In creation spirituality, we begin with the idea that each of us is born a unique expression of divinity, an image of God. Teaching our children this is the only way to build the pride an security our culture needs so desperately.
Sam: Paul Tillich, the great theologian, once said that any successful theology or world-view had to provide answers to three fundamental questions: What's wrong with us? What would we be like if we were whole? What path leads us toward wholeness? How would you answer these questions?
Matt: What's wrong with people? Here is where I agree with the traditional idea of sin. What's incorrect, though, is our penchant to create dualism -- between self and others, self and nature, self and God. Taken a sin -- rape, murder, ripping off the soil. They all involve treating the other as an object. This creates a situation in which we are all cut off from our own power, our own divinity, and that throws us into despair. Our whole care is in despair. We're all depressed.
I love Alice Miller's point that the opposite of depression is not gaiety or lack or pain; it's vitality. Look around. Education lacks vitality. Politics lacks vitality; only 50% of the people bothered to vote in the recent election. Worship lacks vitality. What do you expect? For the last 400 years religion hasn't taught us about our divinity. So we don't feel what Eckhart felt, that the whole universe stood up and shouted when he came into the world, "Behold, here is God."
Sam: What would we look like if we were healed?
Matt: The key is imagination and creativity. We would be flowing instead of constipated. We would have rituals that delight us and help us find our place in the universe in playful ways, and therefore bring out the child in the adult and bring the young and the old together in new ways. This is what prayer and authentic rituals are about -- opening the heart both to the pain we are so busily covering up in our psyches and our cultures and to the awe, the wonder, the mystery and the glory. If we were healed we would stop living in our tiny world of "dos and don'ts" where we are saved and no one else is, and we would start living in a universe that had a hundred billion galaxies.
Let me give you an example. I think alcoholism is liquid cosmology, liquid mysticism, and drugs are an effort to get cosmology by needle. It occurred to me when I was lecturing in Ireland that two of the world's peoples most prone to alcoholism -- the Celtic Irish and the Native American -- were those that had the richest cosmology ripped away by colonialism. I think that in these peoples there is a memory of living in the universe and they drink to try to drown that memory. If we had really challenging rituals, like Indian sweat lodges, that opened up people's hearts and located them in the cosmos, we wouldn't feel the need to turn to drugs.
Sam: Your criticism of traditional religion, that it is too interior, private, anthropocentric, would seem to apply equally to the practice of psychotherapy. Isn't being exiled within one's psyche, even if it is a fully analyzed psyche, still pathological or, in religious language, sinful? Is psychology also part of the sickness for which it claims to be the cure?
Matt: To the extent that it lacks a cosmos, yes. Otto Rank once said that psychology is man's last effort to control nature--his own nature. But people such as Rank, Jung and lately the transpersonal psychologists tried to reconnect psyche and cosmos and move in a more spiritual direction. This is crucial because suffering is cosmic in size. What's ultimately wounded in us and needs to be healed is the divine child, the true self.
I think psychology is in danger of making a mistake similar to the one made by the church when it focuses on the question: What is your problem? It should ask: What is your power?
Sam: And the third of Tillich's questions: What's the healing path toward wholeness?
Matt: This issue is without doubt the backbone of my work. At least since the fifth century, under the influence of Neoplatonism, we have identified the mystical journey as a process that begins with an acute awareness of sin, the necessity for redemption, repentance and purgation. Supposedly it is only after this plunge that we experience something like illumination, light and a vision of the divine. Then, finally we move toward some kind of union with the divine or betrothal to God. I deliberately reject this tradition. It is patriarchal pessimism. And it leaves out delight, creativity and justice.
We should begin with a positive accent, the spirit of wonder, awe or radical amazement we have when we first attend to the original blessing, to the beauty that is around and within us. Only then do we enter into the darkness, what the mystics called the nothingness and Jung called the shadow -- the awareness of evil, suffering and death. We must confront our wounds, but not without the empowerment that comes from the awe and wonder of the universe. You don't go into a mine without a lantern.
This is a major difference between worship in white churches and worship among blacks and native peoples. The white idea is that you go to worship clean, smelling of deodorants, well dressed and behaving politely. With blacks, the pain and lament are present, especially in the spirituals and other music. The Native American idea of worship involves taking your clothes off and sweating out the toxins and sickness inside you. It is empowering to name the pain and give it a voice. Worship, especially in a culture as antiseptic as ours, can be, should be, an oasis not only of play but also of wailing and letting the pain come out.
Sam: It seems to me that psychoterapy, like religion, is concerned with healing and that it has the virtue of providing a time and place for remembering our individual wounds and for private lamentation. But don't both fail to lead us beyond our private suffering and into the wounds of the body politic?
Matt: Both therapists and politicians should join the mystics in leading us, gently but surely, into the wounds of our times, because if we did not live in such denial we could develop the collective imagination necessary to deal with our problems. But we are afraid to face the nothingness. The mystics tell us that from the encounter with nothingness comes a breakthrough into imagination and creativity -- the next step in the journey. Once you experience the awe and face the darkness, creativity is unleashed. It's not something you have to manufacture. Creativity is utterly natural in us. It's our divine power.
In the final stage of the journey, creativity gives us the impulse and power to transform ourselves and our society. I think of the transformative way as the practice of compassion, the struggle for healing, for justice, for bringing the balance back into our bodies, our psyches and our communities.
Sam: What now? Will you have to choose between remaining silent or being forced out of the church?
Matt: I don't know. I have to listen to my conscience and guard my integrity. I have been trying to work not by confrontation but by education and creation of alternative models of spirituality and living. The Vatican has forced a confrontation and is in fact throwing gasoline on the fire.
I will not give up my work with creation spirituality in order to remain a priest in good standing. I don't want to leave, because even if the church is a dysfunctional family, it's may family and I would rather see it healed than abandon it. For all its sins it has still, in our time, turned out people such as Pope John XXIII, Dorthy Day, the Berrigan brothers and Thomas Merton. And it is still involved with a lot of poor people, especially in the Philippines, Latin America and Africa.
But because of the ecological crisis, the issue is pressing and time is short. We have to choose between suicide and worship, reworshiping nature in the best sense. I can't predict my fate in all this. I've put the paint to the canvas. It's a creative act. And I don't know the result.
COPYRIGHT 1989 Sussex Publishers, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group