[Dialogue] 923/2021, Progressing Spirit, Skylar Wilson,: Water~Spirit~Activism; Spong revisited

[Ellie Stock]

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Water~Spirit~Activism 
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|  Essay by Skylar Wilson
September 23, 2021
Water is life. Without it, the vast majority (if not all) of life on Earth would not exist. The story of water begins with the birth of the Cosmos, when Hydrogen gas was created. A little later (about two hundred and fifty million years), the pregnant bellies of mother stars grew Helium from Hydrogen while creating Oxygen and Carbon. These new elemental babies were then released out into the universe as their creators exhaled their final breaths. 
 
The first water molecules formed in space about 4.5 billion years later when Hydrogen and Oxygen found each other, around the same time that Earth came into form, barren and lifeless at first, until water found its way home in its constituent elements on meteors. And then came life. Water is therefore aptly associated with birth, fertility, and renewal; it is a way back to our Source. It is our Origin Story. It is the voice of Spirit and a map by which to orient ourselves here and now from the most ancient star ancestors to the creeks gurgling down the mountains behind my home. 
 
In part, I am reflecting on renewal both because as I am writing this it is the beginning of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and because of all of the devastating floods and hurricanes that have wreaked havoc on so many places around the world over the past month. Water can obviously be as destructive and deadly as it is life giving. 
 
Earth is 71% water. When we humans are born, we are made of approximately this same percentage. We are made in Earth’s image; created within Earth’s watery imagination. Born into life through a series of cosmic processes of explosive passion and grace. 
 
As we age however, the amount of water within our bodies decreases, eventually dropping to as low as 39% (1). As fat grows in our bodies, water decreases and we often can become less connected to our cosmic source.  As many of us continue to dry out and become distracted and overworked, our superficial identities and roles solidify. It is so easy to forget our watery beginnings and therefore lose touch with the cosmic and earthly powers that flow through us.
 
As one of the four elements essential to our understanding of life (in science as well as in all of the traditional philosophies, from east to west and north to south), water carries the most gravitas. The creation of aqueducts in ancient Greece and Rome contributed to improvements in agriculture and the emergence of the Western mind. 
 
In the United States, the average family uses 300 gallons of water per day. Every year trillions of gallons are lost because of pipe leaks (2). It’s well documented that the Incas of Peru engineered complex and efficient water systems that allowed for their empire to grow through peaceful assimilation. A new study published in Nature Sustainability shows how a 1,400 year-old method of diverting water can sustainably provide more water to Lima (approximately 40,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water per year) than the modern methods being used today (3). 
 
As we look for ways to sustain free access to the cosmic gift of water, a relatively small group of greedy and powerful people with corporate shields are buying up water rights to control and starve entire nations. In May, 2000, Fortune magazine wrote, “Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations”(4).
 
This crass commodification of water tells me that we are no longer present to this precious resource in the ways that Water, and we, deserve. At the current rate of consumption, waste, pollution, and corporatization, the life that we know and love will not exist much longer.  
 
The only way to pull back the seat of our attention toward the inner waters will be the Great Shift in consciousness. A move from materialism toward connection where we can access our feelings, our power, our emotions, our moods, intuitions and dreams in more visceral ways that can guide us toward fluid, effective and creative activism.
 
To facilitate this comprehensive shift in consciousness, we can integrate some of the ancient healing modalities. In the Ayurvedic system of India, water is seen as cohesive, cooling, soothing, and lubricating, that can balance body, heart, mind and soul when used intentionally. Similarly, in Chinese medicine, water is the element that holds and cleanses one’s vital essence. In the body, this process occurs primarily through the kidneys as they maintain the balance of water while filtering out waste and toxins. They therefore have a yin-like receptive quality as they produce, store, and regulate fundamental substances such as qi (vital energy), blood, and bodily fluids, and transform them. Can we humans become the kidneys of the planet and clean and restore the watersheds and wetlands that are our larger body? 
 
In a Christian context, water plays a pivotal symbolic role. Contemplate for example this quote from the Gospel of John, “He who believes in Me...From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water (John 7:38). And: “...whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.” (John 4:14). 
 
These concepts of “living water” and “a well of water springing up to eternal life” coming from the “innermost being,” represents an immediate connection to a living Cosmos, a living Earth, and a connected humanity. 
 
This understanding is also apparent in the Book of Revelation: “Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life...and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1-2). Is this revelation something that we can use to transform how we see and participate with “the river of the water of life” to heal our connection with the water cycles, the living world and our humanity? Lao Tzu puts forth in the Tao Te Ching that water is the ultimate metaphor for this process; water is soft and flexible, and yet powerful enough to erode metal, stone, and mountain ranges. Flowing water symbolizes change, the only constant in the Universe. 
 
Matthew Fox describes this process as “a mystical awakening” and “a global religious awakening” in his book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: “The mystical awakening, an awakening to a living cosmology, to a Cosmic Christ alive and vital in all creatures and in all humans…This new birth will cut through all cultures and all religions and indeed will draw forth the wisdom common to all vital mystical traditions in a global religious awakening...” (5). 
 
All of humanity and all mystical traditions rely on water as their fundamental and unifying thread. The coming of the Cosmic Christ, the Tao, Buddha Nature, and you and I are involved in a process of opening fully to water and protecting it for all humans and for our plant and animal relatives. Our relationship with water is our common touchpoint to a living cosmology. Water is  our gift from the stars. It is the catalyst for our collective awakening. Billions of humans have been baptized with water, channeling the Spirit of our cosmic origins. 
 
What does it mean to become like water? Perhaps it has to do with holding space for cleansing,  for what we’re being asked to dissolve within ourselves and our communities. To be with the pain of loss. As we let go, we are held within water’s flow again. 
 
This practice of becoming like water may involve wallowing in puddles, sipping water slowly with gratitude, listening to rivers, prancing through the rain at midnight, or surfing the waves of the ocean with dolphins. It could mean moving to higher ground and to moist landscapes where there’s protection from fires and floods. It could mean joining with the Order of the Sacred Earth community and its network of Earth activists (6) and holding circles and councils that foster deep listening, receptivity, trust, a space to grieve and to find connection. It could mean committing your life to the outpouring of love and service (7). It could mean calling and writing mayors and senators, or supporting the righteous efforts of the indigenous Water Protectors battling Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline. Or better yet, finding out how your water is being managed in your local watershed. But whatever you do, let your own inner waters guide you.
 
Water represents the connection between an individual soul, our communities, the Tree of Life, and a collective ecological consciousness born of our Cosmic origins. It’s the Spirit of the Universe as it flows through us.
 
Are we learning to swim through the birth canal of this new and ancient understanding in a felt way that’s messy and terrifying, exhilarating and purifying? Are we learning to quench our soul’s most essential organizing instincts by becoming flexible and receptive, like water? Is water guiding us through a rite of passage into the deepest connections with the Universe? I think so, and it’s time to get wet! 
 

~ Skylar Wilson


Read online here

About the Author
Skylar Wilson, MA is the founder of Wild Awakenings, a conscious community of change-makers dedicated to the thriving of Earth, life, and humanity. He has led wilderness rites of passage journeys as well as ecological restoration teams for 18 years, specializing in creating sacred wilderness immersion experiences and interfaith ceremonies. Skylar is the cofounder and co-director of the Order of the Sacred Earth, a network of mystic warriors and activists dedicated to being the best lovers and defenders of the Earth that we can be. Skylar is the coauthor of the book by the same title as well as the co-host, with Jennifer Berit, of the podcast: "Our Sacred Earth" on Unity online radio. Skylar works closely with schools and organizations including the Stepping Stones Project in Berkeley, CA over the last 8 years while guiding organization-wide retreats, mentoring youth, group leaders, parents and elders. He also produces transformational events for thousands of people around the country including the Cosmic Mass, an intercultural healing ritual that builds community through dancing and the arts.
 

 References:
   
   - https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/what-percentage-of-the-human-body-is-water
   - https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water
   - https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/ancient-water-system-in-peru-could-fix-water-shortages/4982225.html
   - http://www.pauldonahue.net/who_owns_earths_water.html
   - Fox, Matthew. The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: the Healing of Mother Earth and the birth of a Global Renaissance. Pg. 5. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.
   - http://www.orderofthesacredearth.org
   - Fox, Matthew. The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: the Healing of Mother Earth and the birth of a Global Renaissance. Pg. 5. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.
   - http://www.orderofthesacredearth.org 
   - Wilson, Listug, Fox. Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action. New York: Monkfish Books, 2017. 
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Question & Answer

 

Q: By A Reader

How can Christians get a firm foundation with scripture that has been influenced by the spirit of political influence by Kings and Popes and transcriptionists who were influenced by governments? A bit of a crisis of faith here. Can there still be a Divine Jesus without true historical knowledge of Him?

A: By Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox

Dear Reader,

I would substitute for your words “without true historical knowledge of Him” the words “with only partial historical knowledge of him.”  What we know historically about Jesus is not nothing.  Indeed, in our lifetimes many Biblical scholars (along with anthropologists and others) have worked hard to separate the words and teachings we can be certain about from Jesus’ mouth from those that seem to have been added after he died.  The gospel writers did not hesitate to put words into his mouth but that is not entirely a negative thing.  It tells us what he triggered in his followers and it tells us how he lit a fire in them that resulted in a lot of creativity.  Isn’t this how history works even in our day?  A speaker excites people and they tell others about it and invariably misquote and make up things and project their feelings and stories into the picture they are relaying to another?  As a teacher, that is very much my experience.  Often people will quote me but misquote me; or cite someone I cited and get it wrong. But enthusiasm is not always a bad thing.  In fact, it’s a good thing—a sign of life and spirit therefore.  But exactness is not always part of the big picture.

What all this tells me is the truth of what we call the incarnation of divinity in Jesus.  That he was a full and real-life human being with all that entails in terms of limits and making of friends and betrayal by friends and making of enemies and being misquoted while he lived and afterwards.  All these imperfect realities match our life experiences also, they are all part and parcel of the vulnerability Jesus represents: Not only did God become human--God became vulnerable to an imperfect world.  Like us.

So the fact that Scripture is “influenced by Kings and popes and transcriptionists and translators and imperfect and mistaken human beings” is an invitation to look deeper than the literal to the stories and teachings that instruct us in how to live and why. 

It is also an invitation to look at some of the contemporary Biblical scholars that are discovering many dimensions to the background surrounding the Scriptures.  For example, just this week I received a new book by New Testament scholar Bruce Chilton on a fellow and dynasty that played a big role in the life and death of Jesus.  The book is called The Herods: Murder, Politics, and the Art of Succession.  As one commentator puts it, “the Herodian policies and intrigue shaped the worlds of early Judaism and Christianity.”  And another, “the relevance for Jesus and the origins of the Christian Church can hardly be exaggerated.” 

Keep studying; keep asking good questions; learn to hunt and gather for meaningful answers and interpretations and trustworthy scholars and mentors and ever deeper questions. 

~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 35 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 74 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship (called The Cosmic Mass). His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas. Among his books are A Way To God: Thomas Merton's Creation Spirituality Journey; Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times; Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; Order of the Sacred Earth; The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times; and Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic – And Beyond. To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox.
 
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|  This Week's Featured Author
 Remembering Bishop Spong
June 16, 1931 - September 12, 2021

Read a few of the tributes that have been written on the death of Bishop John Shelby Spong.    Read More ...  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited


Examining the Story of the Cross, Part VII:
What Judas Iscariot Meant in the Eighth,
Ninth & Tenth Decades of Christian Development

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
April 21, 2011
Last week we began a biblical analysis of Judas Iscariot.  First, we noted that Paul, who wrote and died before any gospel had been written, was totally unaware of the tradition that one of the “twelve” played the role of the traitor.  Not only is there no mention of this when Paul wrote the account of Jesus being “handed over,” but also when Paul described the experience of resurrection on “the third day,” he said that Jesus was seen by the “twelve.”  Judas is still among them, a fact that would have been inconceivable if he had been the traitor.  Next we looked at how the Judas story, introduced into the Christian narrative by Mark, the first gospel writer somewhere between the years 70-72, grew and developed as new details were added when each successive gospel was written, until the Fourth gospel completed the New Testament’ Judas  portrait somewhere between the years 95-100.  Finally, we took those developing gospel details and, guided by them, began a search of the Hebrew Scriptures for other tales of traitors to see if in those Jewish sources any of the things said later about Judas were present.  We discovered that every single detail in the New Testament’s account of Judas could be accounted for in this manner.  This suggests that the story of Judas is not that of a person of history, but of a mythological creation.

One other detail that needs to be noted is that while Judas, the symbol of the Jewish nation, grows darker and more sinister as each successive gospel is composed, Pontius Pilate, the symbol of the Roman authorities, grows more and more benevolent. Pilate is portrayed as struggling to have Jesus released, offering Barabbas in exchange, washing his hands publicly and announcing that “I find no fault in him.”  Keep in mind that the gospels were written 40-70 years after the crucifixion.  They are not eye witness accounts, but interpretive portraits and we must not pretend that they are describing things that actually happened; they are seeking to interpret what the death of Jesus meant and to find in it the salvation purpose that they assumed his death accomplished.  With that in mind, it is also essential to be cognizant of the history of that time and to embrace the context in which the gospels were composed and how the story of a traitor named Judas might have emerged.

The Jewish people were conquered by the Roman Empire about 65 years before the birth of Jesus, thus breaking the oppression of the Syrians and beginning the period of oppression at the hands of the Romans.  As a conquered people the Jews displayed the entire gamut of responses that subjugated people always display: some sought to cooperate with their conquerors, some endured this oppression passively and some resisted in every way they could.  The general population of Jews admired these resisters calling them “freedom fighters.”  The Romans on the other hand regarded them as “terrorists.”  In fact these rebellious Jews tended to organize themselves as guerrilla warriors and set up camp in the natural hideouts of the hills of Galilee to harass their conquerors with a series of hit and run attacks. From these hiding places they would swoop out on small contingents of Roman soldiers, destroy them and then fade back into those hills.  They were a nuisance to the Romans, but a costly nuisance.

Emboldened by their guerrilla successes, these “patriots,” who were also known as “the Zealots,” decided in 66 AD that they were sufficiently strong to attack the Romans directly and to drive them out, thus securing Jewish freedom once again. So they began activities that looked more and more like general warfare and less and less and less like sporadic guerrilla tactics.  It was a military gamble that in retrospect proved to be quite foolish.  The Romans responded with maximum force and began to neutralize the Galilean hills, but they were unable to destroy the guerrilla bands since moving a heavily-armed Roman force into those hills was all but impossible.  When the hostilities escalated, however, the Romans under a commander named Vespasian decided that they had to attack and destroy the heart of the Jewish nation.  The Galilean guerrillas could not continue without support from Judea and Jerusalem.  So invading Judea with a powerful military force, the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem and in the year 70 CE, breached the walls, cracked the defense perimeter and moved into the Jewish capital city.  The Romans went through Jerusalem in that year like the Russians went through Berlin in 1945.  Not one stone was left on another.  When the smoke of battle cleared, the nation of Judea no longer existed, the city of Jerusalem had been destroyed and the Temple had been razed to the ground as all Jewish resistance was crushed.  Those who managed to escape retreated into the desert to a fortress named Masada, where they held out until the year 73 when they too were finally destroyed.  Josephus, a Jewish historian, tells us that the defenders at Masada, knowing that if they were captured alive death by crucifixion awaited them, engaged in an act of mass suicide until not a Jewish soldier was still alive when the Romans finally entered the fort.

This war unleashed enormous hostility on the part of the Romans toward all Jews for having brought this war upon themselves and upon Rome.  Within the Jewish community the members of the Orthodox party, who controlled the worship of the Temple and who had in fact supported the guerrilla fighters, were held particularly responsible for bringing this disaster upon the Jewish nation. The Roman authorities, however, did not distinguish one Jew from another. Revisionist Jews, a category that at that time included the disciples of Jesus who were called not Christians but the “Followers of the Way,” sought to find a way to separate themselves from the Orthodox Party for the sake of their own survival, lest they be tarred with the same brush with which all Jews were being tarred by the Romans.  How better to do that than to make the villain of the Jesus story someone who bore the name of the Jewish nation by shifting the responsibility for the death of Jesus away from the Roman officials, who alone had the power to execute, and to portray the Romans as crucifying Jesus, but only under pressure from the Orthodox Party of the High Priest and Sadducees.  This meant that the same people who had been responsible for the war against Rome were now said to have been also responsible for the death of the founder of their own movement.

They would thus portray Jesus not as a revolutionary – “My kingdom is not of this world,” – and at the same time portray Pilate, the Roman governor, in increasingly benevolent terms seeking to set Jesus free.  The principle these “Followers of the Way” were trying to establish was that “if your enemy is also my enemy then we should be friends.”  To frame the Jesus story as an act of betrayal by the Orthodox party of the Jews accomplished these goals.  So Matthew’s gospel can portray Pilate as seeking Jesus’ release but being thwarted seeking to remove his guilt by announcing: “I am innocent of the blood of this just man.” At the same time characterizing the Jews as a “mob” at the foot of the cross, saying words that would fuel anti-Semitism through the centuries: “His blood be upon us and upon our children.”  This group thus began a process of separating the followers of Jesus from the Jews that ultimately resulted in the “Followers of the Way” being excommunicated from the synagogues around the year 88 CE and pushing Christianity rapidly into becoming a Gentile movement. Ultimately they sought to deny the Jewish womb that had given them birth.

Soon fierce hostility toward the Jews became a primary mark of Christianity and its intensity grew in the first centuries of Christian history.  The Church Fathers, Polycarp, Irenaeus, John Chrysostom and Jerome, among many others, filled their writings with a blood-curdling anti-Semitism.  To them the Jews were “vermin unfit for life” and “Christ-Killers.”  Forced conversions, the kidnapping and subsequent baptizing of Jewish babies enabled them to use a law prohibiting a Christian child from being raised by “infidels,” to make legal the separation of Jewish children from their parents.  Good Friday became a day of peril for Jews as Christian emerged from their churches and cathedrals filled with wrath for what “the Jews had done to Jesus” and seeking revenge by beating Jews, destroying Jewish property and sometimes killing Jews.  The Crusades were filled with anti-Semitism – so was the Inquisition – Martin Luther added fuel to the fires of hatred with his diatribes against Jews and his call for the burning of synagogues.  The Holocaust was the final incredible explosion of the anti-Semitism poured into the blood stream of Western civilization by Christian people.  It all began I now believe when out of their need to survive the hostility of the Romans following the Jewish-Roman war the Christians created the character of Judas making him the quintessential Jew and using him to shift the blame for the death of Jesus away from the Romans, where it surely belonged, and onto the Jews, which allowed Christians to justify their anti-Semitism for centuries.

The stereotype of a Jew from the character of Shylock in Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” to the images of Jewish people as money grubbing bankers is all derived from the portrait of Judas who would do anything for money.  Because Jews were not allowed in Christian Europe to own any land, they became bankers and jewelers and in the process this anything-for-money reputation was enhanced.

The facts are that Jesus was put to death by the Romans, but his death was blamed on the Jews for political reasons.  Judas was the vehicle for accomplishing this.  It is never too late to roll the prejudices of ages back.  It is never too late for Christians to bow in apology before our Jewish brothers and sisters and to beg forgiveness.  It is never too late to be vigilant against anti-Semitism whenever it lifts its ugly head.  As we come to observe Good Friday this year in the name of the Jewish Jesus, I invite my fellow Christians to join me in doing just that.

~  John Shelby Spong
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Announcements
 
“Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us Into the Sacred”   Free/Online October 7th
Victoria Loorz, Cofounder of Seminary of the Wild & The Wild Church Network will invite participants to uncover the wild roots of their faith and encourage a deepened commitment to a suffering Earth by falling in love with it — and calling it church. Read On...  |

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