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Reflections on my Interactions with Bishop Spong
By Matthew Fox
I first learned of Bishop Spong’s prophetic work and his work with the Jesus seminar over 34 years ago while I was still a Dominican priest working in the Chicago area. To hear of an Episcopal bishop who was approaching the Scriptures with a critical sense of questioning and scholarship and who was supporting gay rights and women’s rights was, needless to say, a breath of fresh air. When Bishop Spong invited me out to Newark to lead a day retreat with his clergy I was pleased to be invited and I recall my opening line to him when I entered his car at the airport: “We heretics need to stick together,” I said. I don’t recall his demurring in any way. Following my day-long presentation (which included circle dancing and I was pleased to see a Bishop participating in such), Bishop Spong said to me: “Usually people leave at lunch time as they are allowed to do but this day was so exciting everyone stayed until the end.”
>From a theological point of view I was inspired by Bishop Spong to pay attention to the Jesus seminar movement and the Biblical insights they have established and I have not regretted that inspiration. Meeting and teaching with and reading the works of Bruce Chilton has been deeply formative for me (we taught at my University of Creation Spirituality a course on “The Historical Jesus and the Cosmic Christ” that was moving to me and many students in our doctor of ministry program and I have often recommended his book Rabbi Jesus). I also participated in a conference at Brad College with Bruce as well as a gathering in Pittsburg on “The Christ Path” along with Andrew Harvey. The works of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have also nurtured me and my theology along the way and thanks to Spong’s influence. Bishop Spong has also been both gracious and generous in offering endorsements to some of my books along the way. He has offered some generous comments such as these that I found supportive of my vocation along the way. “Matt Fox is a pilgrim who seeks a path into the church of tomorrow. Countless numbers will be happy to follow his lead.”
When I was expelled from the Dominican Order after 34 years by then Cardinal Ratzinger who was head of the new inquisition launched by Pope John Paul II–in all humility I have to acknowledge that I was just one of 109 theologians silenced, expelled, or otherwise bullied under Popes JP II and Benedict XVI and I name these 109 theologians in my book, The Pope’s War–I was just minding my own business when I met a group of young Anglicans who flew in from Sheffield, England to attend a workshop I was conducting in Seattle. These twenty-somethings were reinventing forms of worship by bringing Rave into the liturgy. I had just completed my book on The Reinvention of Work and the last chapter was on “Reinventing Ritual” and lo and behold, these people were doing it! With great success they were organizing young people, most of them living in the streets and from broken homes–this was the height of the collapse of coal in England and there was 40% unemployment and therefore lots of abuse by alcoholic and unemployed fathers in their homes who often abused their kids who then took to the streets and found a community in the rave culture. The five persons who flew to Seattle brought newspaper articles about their “Planetary Mass” with them and I was smitten.
Soon I flew to Sheffield to check for myself and was very impressed—all the elements for renewing worship that I had laid out in my Work book were being employed: bringing the body back (dance was at the heart of the practice); using contemporary post-modern art forms such as DJ and VJ and Rap (one young fellow about four feet tall rapped my “original blessing” book during the mass and quite blew my mind), silence and contemplation and more. “How can I help you?” I asked these people and they responded this way. “We are already using your theology—especially that of the Cosmic Christ—but if you were to become and Anglican priest you could run interference for us since you get what we are doing and few clergy get it.” I thought it over and prayed about it and this is what I concluded: “The pope doesn’t need me anymore; he fired me after all. So why not join them and contribute what I can? After all, I have written about a ‘preferential option for the young’ and this might be a healthy opportunity to contribute.” So I went to Bishop William Spong at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and told him I was having temptations to become an Episcopal priest but for one reason only: To work with young people to reinvent forms of worship. His response? “The church is losing young people right and left so I say: Go for it.” With that I took a six session seminar with a retired Episcopal seminary theologian and was accepted into the Episcopal Church as a priest.
Behind it all was an admiration for the Episcopal Church at this time in history being open to theological alternatives as well as liturgical options (something I had learned hands on was not in the offing in the Roman Catholic Church of my generation). This admiration came in no small measure from the work of Bishop Spong. When I taught for four years at a women’s college, Bara College in Lake Forest, Illinois outside Chicago I invited one of the first ordained women priests to celebrate Mass at the school. Everyone was weeping from the deep meaning of the event. (Later Cardinal Cody of Chicago called me in for a dressing down for having sponsored a mass with an “Anglican priestess” and I tell that story in greater detail in my autobiography, Confessions: The Making of a Post-denominational Priest). That the Episcopal Church was dealing with the ordination of women and with issues of homosexuality and left the door open for genuine theological discussion and debate was very inviting to me. I can never underestimate the role of Bishop Spong in showing me this more open face of a critical theological, liturgical and historical tradition.
Also I am moved by Bishop Spong’s courage—he has dared to speak out candidly on the most controversial issues of our day from Biblical fundamentalism to women and gay rights and he has done so in an open manner that is rare in ecclesial circles. As a spiritual theologian I have often maintained that the first sign of spirit is Courage. Without courage nothing great can happen, surely justice cannot come about. Martin Luther King Jr. had courage, Gandhi had courage, Jesus had courage, Dorothy Day had courage. So too does Bishop Spong. To stand up to the idols of religion from within the religious system takes courage and many people, consciously or unconsciously, admire Bishop Spong not only for his leadership but for the courage and therefore depth of spirituality that lies behind it.
I will confess that while I read some of Spong’s books along the way of my own path and struggles I did not cite him a lot in my works. I suspect this is because I was busy going in my direction and needed to carve my own path. But today, as I look back on his and my theological journeys, I find an immense amount of compatibility in the questions we have been asking and the responses we have come up with. That is one reason I rejoice at this invitation to write this six week series with his spirit and vision in mind, a spirit of a New Reformation, a pressing topic that we have both addressed in some depth, he by posting his 12 theses at Mansfield College in Oxford and I by posting my 95 theses at Wittenburg at Pentecost time the year Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI and; again at Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome in protest to Cardinal Law who presided there having escaped from his Boston diocese when state officials were pursuing him about his cover-up of pedophile priests.
I look forward to the intellectual give and take that will follow flowing out of Bishop Spong’s call for a New Reformation.
~ Matthew Fox
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About the Author
Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 32 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 60 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. 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 Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the FleshTransforming Evil in Soul and Society, The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved and Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest
Question & Answer
Judy McGowan from the Internet, writes:
Question:
Kevin, congratulations on stepping up and stepping in to this amazing format.
My question after being acquainted with Jack Spong and his work, and also you and yours to a degree, is why, if the leaders of the Episcopal Church reject your work, do you continue in this organization? Why not go somewhere where your efforts are encouraged and appreciated, somewhere where there is a greater openness to your messages? Unity, for instance, is such an organization, a spiritual organization made up of people who have listened to their intuition, rejected tradition for its own sake, yet would thrive on the scholarship which you two could bring to augment that on which it was founded.
I guess my question is, where do you feel you can do the greatest service and why?
Answer: By Kevin G. Thew Forrester
Dear Judy,
I relish and receive the beauty embodied in the members and communities of Unity. I, myself, am someone whose spiritual journey continues to be shaped by Buddhism, Sufism, the Enneagram community, and especially the Diamond Approach. Throughout it all, my heart remains continually drawn to re-explore the ancient Jewish and Christian practices, texts, and spirituality that formed me as a youth.
Back in the 1970’s there was a vigorous dialogue, we might say, between the psychotherapists Roy Schafer and Hans Loewald, about the language of psychoanalysis. Schafer, as Stephen Mitchell observes, had given up on the classical Freudian terminology, finding it too “saturated with misleading and erroneous meanings.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Loewald saw things differently: “what psychoanalysis needs might not be a ‘new language’ but a less inhibited, less pedantic and narrow understanding and interpretation of its current language leading to elaborations and transformations of the meanings of concepts, theoretical formulations, or definitions that may or may not have been envisaged by Freud.”
I find within the Episcopal expression of the varied Christian tradition incredible experience, mystery, and wisdom; all too often it remains imprisoned in expression that is pedantic and narrow; even more, the entire enterprise is buttressed by fearful authorities. And yet --- this ancient language, expressive of the most profound experiences of our species, has the capacity to flourish again, because it can connect with the deepest aspirations of the human heart. In my writing and teaching and preaching I endeavor to be much less inhibited, exploring elaborations and transformations of such concepts of sin, grace, transfiguration, Christic nature, and so much more. I believe I can do the greatest service here, not because I’m trying to serve, but because I love this soulful work. I find that it matters to me and to so many others, seeking to be free from an arid and dying form of Christianity.
I am a student of the soul and her journey. My ultimate allegiance, if I may call it that, is to the truth of experience as we each experience it; drawing upon all the critical tools at my disposal (especially those of psychology and phenomenology) – truth not as proposition but as dynamic language embodying personal experience. The purpose of any authentic spiritual community is to nurture this exploration of truth.
~Kevin G. Thew Forrester
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About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including “I Have Called You Friends“, “Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms“, and “My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You” and “Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland“.
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