The following description is drawn in substance from the work of Matthew Fox found at http://www.creationspirituality.com/. The Universe Spirit movement as found at Integrative Spirituality has borrowed some of its ideas from Creation Spirituality and acknowledges the usefulness of many of the ideas of Creation Spirituality.
Creation Spirituality is a movement and not an organizational affiliation. Creation Spirituality honors all of creation as an original blessing. It draws on ancient spiritual traditions and contemporary science to awaken authentic mysticism, and the revitalization of religion and culture, the honoring of women's wisdom, the celebration of hope in today's youth, and the promotion of social and ecological justice. It also seeks to integrate the wisdom of western spirituality and global indigenous cultures with the emerging scientific understanding of the universe and the passionate creativity of art.
Creation Spirituality teaches that God permeates all things and that humanity is created blessed, not tainted by original sin. In this paradigm, we embody God's love and become the Creation that God intends.
Creation Spirituality is about the end of theism and the reemergence of panentheism, which says the image of God or divinity is immanent in all things but that God transcends the created order
Matthew Fox contends that Creation Spirituality is not a new religion, but is concerned with renewing theologies and practices within religion and culture that promote personal wholeness, planetary survival, and universal interdependence. We must start 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.
Ten principles of Creation Spirituality:
- The universe is basically a blessing, that is, something we experience as good.
- We can and do relate to the universe as a whole since we are a microcosm of that macrocosm and that this relationship "intoxicates" us. (Aquinas)
- Everyone is a mystic (i.e., born full of wonder and capable of recovering it at any age; of not taking the awe and wonder of existence for granted.)
- Everyone is a prophet, i.e., a "mystic in action" (Hocking) who is called to "interfere" (Heschel) with what interrupts authentic life.
- That humans have to dig and work at finding their deep self, their true self, their spirit self; thus the role of spiritual praxis and meditation and community confrontation which can itself be a yoga. If we do not undergo such praxis we live superficially out of fear or greed or addiction or someone else's expectations of us. That salvation is best understood as "preserving the good." (Aquinas).
- That the journey that marks that digging can be named as a four-fold journey:
- Via Positiva: delight, awe, wonder, revelry
- Via Negativa: darkness, silence, suffering, letting go
- Via Creativa: birthing, creativity
- Via Transformativa: compassion, justice healing, celebration - Everyone is an artist in some way and art as meditation is a primary form of prayer for releasing our images and empowering the community and each of us. Art finds its fulfillment in ritual, the community's art.
- We are all sons and daughters of God; therefore, we have divine blood in our vein, the divine breath in our lungs; and the basic work of God is: Compassion.
- Divinity is as much Mother as Father, as much Child as Parent, as much Godhead (mystery) as God (history) as much beyond all beings as in all beings.
- That we experience that the Divine is in all things and all things are in the Divine (Panentheism) and that this mystical intuition supplants theism (and its child, atheism) as an appropriate way to name our relation to the Divine and experience the Sacred.
Recommended Books
- Original Blessing: A primer in creation spirituality : presented in four paths, twenty-six themes, and two questions by Matthew Fox
- Creation Spirituality : Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth by Matthew Fox
- Sheer Joy: Conversations With Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality by Rupert Sheldrake (Foreword), Matthew Fox
Recommended Links