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p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7037928153 #yiv7037928153templateBody .yiv7037928153mcnTextContent, #yiv7037928153 #yiv7037928153templateBody .yiv7037928153mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7037928153 #yiv7037928153templateFooter .yiv7037928153mcnTextContent, #yiv7037928153 #yiv7037928153templateFooter .yiv7037928153mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The Astounding Accomplishments of Julian Norwich | | | | | | Essay by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox October 29 2020 Most people, if they know anything about Julian of Norwich, know two things. First, that she said “all things will be well, every manner of thing will be well,” a testimony to hope or what Mirabai Starr calls “radical optimism” that arises near the end of her book Showings and ought not to be understood as “spiritual bypass” or denial of suffering. Second, people have heard that she talks about the “motherhood of God” quite often. It has been my privilege to know Julian for at least forty years as I was instrumental in publishing her in our series of “Meditations with” books that Bear & Co. published in the 1980’s to get the mystics into everyday peoples’ hands in a straight-forward manner. Her book, Meditations with Julian of Norwich, authored by Brendan Doyle who translated her work very wisely and carefully from the original fourteenth century English (she was, after all, the first woman writer in English), was only our second book in the Meditations with series. And I wrote a Foreword to it. I frequently taught her over the years. What I did not know then and learned this year while writing my new book on Julian, working from both Doyle’s translation and that of Mirabai Starr who translated the entire Showings, is not only what a powerful and creation-centered mystic Julian is, but also what a prophet she was. This helps to explain why her book was not published for 300 years after her death—partly explained by her being a woman—but also by how thoroughly she resisted the zeitgeist of her time and of what transpired in centuries following her death. I am referring to the utter pre-occupation with redemption that dominated the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and that completely imbued the religious invasions and destruction of indigenous peoples in Africa, the Americas, the Pacific islands. All of it charged up by three notorious papal bulls of the fifteenth century that collectively we know as the “Doctrine of Discovery.” In a nutshell, Julian thoroughly represents a creation spirituality. That lineage thoroughly grounded her during the midst of the worst pandemic in European history. The Black Death first struck in England when she was seven years old and then returned in waves throughout her long lifetime. She remained sane and focused even though she surely lost friends and family members all around her as she continued her life work of writing and rewriting her book over a fifty-year period. While she is very much a pilgrim in the lineage of wisdom literature (which formed the roots of the historical Jesus’ spiritual tradition), St. Benedict, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Mechtild of Magdeburg and Meister Eckhart, she is the only one among this rich heritage that practiced and preached creation spirituality during an on-going pandemic. People around her were freaking out—after all, estimates are that between 35% and 50% of Europeans died from this plague and, lacking science, all sorts of causes for the pandemic were put forth, one of them being that it was a punishment for the sins of humanity. Other excuses included scapegoating Jews and outsiders but Julian shows not a hint of anti-Semitism in her work. The punishment-for-sin trope inspired a number of men to take up flagellation, going from village to village (three villages per day was their goal) and beat themselves publicly for their sins. Is there a connection between this sense of guilt and certain politicians today going from town to town gathering hundreds and thousands of people for rallies to gather without masks and risk illness and death in the process? When one considers the context of belief that nature is wrecking its revenge on humankind for its sins, it is all the more remarkable to read Julian’s profound teachings on the goodness of nature and the godliness of nature. One must read her teachings within the matrix of fear and suspicion of nature that was all around her to realize her amazing courage and independent thought and theology. The rupture between nature and humanity was so traumatic in her time that geologian Thomas Berry says it was the Black Death that effectively ended creation spirituality in Western religion. I propose that this rupture between trusting nature and fearing and blaming nature set the stage for 1) the doctrine of discovery and the invasion and destruction of indigenous religions that was to come in the next two centuries (Columbus set sail in 1492, as we all know) and 2) the prominence of redemption over creation in Protestant and then Catholic theology and 3) the rupture of science and religion that I trace back in a special way to the year 1600 when Giordano Bruno, an ex-Dominican, was tortured (his tongue was cut out among other things) and burned at the stake by Cardinal Bellarmine and the Inquisition for trying to bring Copernicus into the faith (as his brother Aquinas had tried to do with Aristotle in the thirteenth century). Soon after came the Galileo attacks. How might history have been changed—the history of slavery and the stealing of Africans to work plantations in the Americas; the history of indigenous genocides in the Americas and the Pacific islands; the dominance of patriarchal ideology and control fetishes and misogyny; the divorce between science and religion; even the eco-destruction and extinction spasm we are currently undergoing because nature is no longer considered sacred—if Julian’s theology has prevailed? Let us now consider some of Julian’s teachings. On the sacredness of nature “The first good thing is the goodness of nature.” “God is the same thing as nature” and God is “the very essence of nature.” “The goodness in nature is God.” “To behold God in all things is to live in complete joy.” One sees here not only a theology of original blessing and “original goodness” (Aquinas’s term) but a veritable metaphysic of goodness. Julian is urging us to stay focused on goodness—even in and especially in dire times. On Oneing of God and Nature, God and Us There is a oneing (Julian invented this word just as she also invented the word enjoy) between God nature, God and us. “Nature and Grace are in harmony with each other…Neither works without the other.” “God is the Ground, the Substance, the same thing as Naturehood.” “God is the true Father and Mother of Nature.” Faith is “trusting that we are in God and God whom we do not see is in us.” Here she is identifying faith itself both with trust and with trust in pantheism. “The sky and the earth failed at the time of Christ’s dying because he too was part of nature.” A deep cosmic Christ awareness is revealed in this understanding of the crucifixion—it was a cosmic event. On the Motherhood of God “God feels great delight to be our Father and God feels great delight to be our Mother.” “A Mother’s service is nearest, readiest and surest.” “Compassion belongs to the motherhood in tender grace” and “protects, increases our sensitivity, gives life and heals.” “Jesus is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly carried and out of whom we will never come.” Julian does much more theologically speaking than praise God as mother. She applies that concept not only to God the Creator but also to God the Liberator or Savior (developing Christ as Mother) and also to God the Holy Spirit and to the Trinity as a whole. This is a complete deconstruction of the all-patriarchal God—and she is blunt about the implications. “I saw no wrath or vengeance in God” (q.v.). She displaces a hierarchical Deity and a punitive Father God with a motherly and compassionate Deity. Wrath and vengeance come from humans, not from God. Julian doesn’t just deconstruct Divinity but reconstructs it in terms of motherly characteristics which she names explicitly as: compassion, justice, caring, inner strength, service that is “nearest, readiest and surest.” Julian is not just speaking of God as Mother. On non-dualism Julian also deconstructs Patriarchy by insisting on non-dualism. Rosemary Reuther and many other feminist theologians identify dualism as lying at the heart of patriarchal consciousness. Says Julian: There exists a ‘true oneing between the divine and the human.” “In our creation we were knit and oned to God.” It is a “precious oneing.” A “beautiful oneing was made by God between the body and the soul.” “God has forged a glorious union between the soul and the body.” “God willed that we have a twofold nature: sensual and spiritual.” “God is the means whereby our Substance and our Sensuality are kept together so as never to be apart.” “God is in our sensuality.” This brief introduction to Julian’s genius helps explain why she was essentially ignored for 700 years but also why we are ready for her earthy mysticism and feminism and prophetic teachings today. “It is in our nature to reject evil,” she says. She offers us real medicine to stand up to the evils of Misogyny, Matricide (killing of mother earth) and Patriarchy with the “fatalistic self-hatred” (Adrienne Rich) that accompanies it. Clearly, she is a mystic-prophet for our times. ~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox Read 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 started Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox. Matthew Fox's upcoming book: Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic – and Beyond along with his book: The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times are the basis of his Virtual Retreat and Teach-In 10/30/20 - 10/31/20 - see details below. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By A Reader With the restrictions of gathering because of COVID-19 what are your thoughts on other ways to worship? Can you experience the same benefits by attending an online service or in an outdoor service where everyone is spread out safely? A: By Rev. Matthew Syrdal Dear Reader, I believe COVID-19 will prove to bring many ‘disruptive innovations’ to the church and culture in general. As a pastor, it really overturns and clarifies the usual malaise and lack of imagination (my own included) regarding worship, liturgy and preaching. For one thing it creates space and opportunity to push us beyond our walls into the online social space. The ‘message’ can no longer be for insiders only but outsiders to the theological rubric and habits of a closed loop, insular, church culture. Most religious leaders I know have experimented with shorter, punchier, more meaningful music and messages. I wonder if more religious and spiritual leaders are feeling more emboldened in this liminal, pandemic time, to speak truth to power, to confront issues of systemic racism, and ecological devastation, regardless of the consequences, and if technology can assist that courage? Hybrid forms of online and in-person are pushing us to experiment, innovate, and build our tolerance and learning for creative failures. Online groups and practices can still have a powerful effect, but the flatness of the technology makes it more challenging than in-person community, in my opinion. We have worshiped outdoors all summer in a park and community garden space we developed a couple years ago. Worship went immediately from a private experience with people ‘like us’ to a visible and public experience, right in the middle of our neighborhood witnessed by people of all sorts of different backgrounds, beliefs, and socioeconomic factors. Our first Sunday outdoors, early this summer, I got angry calls from neighbors who said we were too loud. A week later we had neighbors walk across the street to thank us and give us pastries. Some neighbors started attending worship with us because of the need for human connection, belonging in the neighborhood, and a desire for justice and to be meaningfully involved during this pandemic. I have a smaller wilder gathering called Church of Lost Walls, which is affiliated with the Wild Church Network that has been working on an alternative vision for spirituality and community for a number of years before the pandemic. Our gathering is designed for greenspaces, open spaces, parks, and wilder places. Opportunities for more immersive experiences in nature can help people reconnect with a life and world deeper than our frenzied, unraveling human culture. Time outdoors, particularly immersed in wildish places, even if it is a well-touristed State Park or greenspace can help cultivate a certain level of psychological healing and spiritual wholeness in these pathological times. ~ Rev. Matthew Syrdal Read and share online here About the Author Rev. Matthew Syrdal, MDiv. lives in the front range of Colorado with his beautiful family. Matt is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian church (USA), founder and lead guide of WilderSoul and Church of Lost Walls and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Matt has been coaching, and guiding since becoming a certified Wild Mind nature-based human development guide through the Animas Valley Institute and is currently training to become a soul initiation guide through the SAIP program. | | | | | | | | Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community - join us on Facebook! | | | | | | | | | | | The power to improve the lives of others is to many a sacred privilege and one we take seriously at ProgressiveChristianity.org and Progressing Spirit. For well over two decades we have provided an alternative perspective to what much of Christianity has become. Modern Christianity has become more about judging your neighbor and less about loving your neighbor. That reality makes us an essential resource that points back to, and is inspired by, the actual teachings of Jesus. Our resources enrich the spiritual journeys of countless people, provide theologically sound liturgical materials for progressive churches, and broaden the spiritual outlook of 100s of thousands of people. Help us to continue our work by becoming a supporter - donate today! | | | | | | | | | | | | This Week's Featured Author The Church Is Like A Swimming Pool… T’s & Sweats & Hoodies & Tote Bags Want to support the work of our organization while also wearing some great progressive Christian gear? Check out this quote by Bishop John Shelby Spong: The Church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end. * Another way to support us is to leave a bequest in your Will and/or Trust designating us a beneficiary. | | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Origins of the New Testament, Part XIV: What Does Salvation Mean to Paul? Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong February 4, 2010 Paul was a person who discovered in his Christ experience new dimension of life unknown to him before. In that sense he was a classic mystic. Every human experience, however, in order to be shared must pass through the medium of words. There is no other means of communicating content to another. In that process the wordless experience inevitably takes on the dimensions of the human mind with all its limitations. Human beings always reflect the presuppositions of the cultural wisdom of the day. They reflect the level of knowledge that the speaker has achieved. Inevitably they become limited and warped by that transition and are rendered finite and mortal. An experience of God may well be eternal, but no human explanation of that experience will ever be. That is a fact that religious believers in all traditions constantly forget. All sacred scriptures, developed creeds and complex theological doctrines cannot help but compromise truth because nothing about the time-bound words they have to employ can ever be eternal. In a similar way God is by definition beyond the scope of the human mind, which is always captured in time and space. Since a horse cannot escape the limit of its “horseness” to describe what it means to be human, neither can a human being escape the limits of humanity in order to describe who or what God is. Paul wrestles with this reality constantly. Paul talks about his experience of encountering the Christ as that which enabled him to transcend all of his limits and to cross all of those boundaries that separate him from others. In this newfound sense of an expanded humanity he came to a new sense of oneness. Because he was quite sure that this new wholeness resulted from his encounter with the risen Christ, he desperately needed to find the words to explain just how that worked. He was a Greek-speaking Jewish man living in the Mediterranean world of the first century of the Common Era and had no other categories of thought to use except the ones that his world provided. Our task in this column is to search through the time-bound words that he used in order to find a way to separate the eternal experience, which was so obviously real to him, from the pre-suppositions of his time and place in history that he used to explain his Christ experience, most of which have been dismissed by modern knowledge as no longer believable inside our world view. That means that, as students of the New Testament, we must always be engaged in an activity that is not unlike delicate surgery and we will find it a never-ending task. The world does not slow down to give any of us time to adjust. We begin with an analysis of Paul’s view of human life. Paul’s writing reveals a person who is very much aware that something is wrong with humanity in general and with his own humanity in particular. He is quite sure that whatever this distortion is, all human life somehow shares in it. Paul expressed this in his ever-present sense that he was alienated from God, from all others and even from himself. There was indeed a war, he said, that is going on in his members. His Jewish tradition affirmed this sense that human life is somehow separated from God. The Jews, over their long history, had developed an annual fast day, which they observed with great solemnity and which they believed enabled them to acknowledge liturgically what their human reality was. They called this day “Yom Kippur” or “The Day of Atonement.” The observance of “Yom Kippur” involved the slaughter of a carefully chosen sacrificial lamb, the blood from which they then smeared on the mercy seat in that part of the Temple called the Holy of Holies, which they believed was God’s earthly dwelling place. A second Yom Kippur ritual occurred when they symbolically piled their sins on the back of a goat, known as the “scapegoat,” and then drove this sin-bearing creature out into the wilderness, thus leaving them purified and newly at one with God. Similar doctrines of atonement are found in almost every religious tradition the world over because there is a universal human sense of being separate and alone that I believe is born in the emergence of self-consciousness, which only human beings possess. It manifests itself in the idea that none of us is what God intended us to be. The content of that statement varies widely, but the experience is part of what it means to be human. The Jewish version of it was based on the idea that God was the creator of all things and that nothing God made could itself be defined as evil. They had, therefore, to find a way to account for this human definition without blaming God. The ancient creation story in the beginning of the book of Genesis served this purpose well. In that story the goodness of God was upheld by the assertion that God looked out upon all that God had made and pronounced it good. The problem of human alienation and its resultant human evil, therefore, had to be something that human life brought upon itself. In that ancient Jewish story the perfection of God’s creation had been broken by the disobedience of Adam and Eve. As a direct consequence, Adam and Eve, and through them all future human beings, were condemned to live not in “Eden” but “East of Eden,” to borrow a phrase from John Steinbeck. Human beings, this story asserted, were not so distorted that they did not remember their original glory, so they still possessed a yearning to return to the mythical garden where before being expelled they had once lived in the oneness of God. The story asserted, however, that the gates to that garden were forever locked and were now even guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. Human life, the story suggested, could never return to its original status. So in this world of imperfection Cain killed Abel, Jacob cheated Esau out of his birthright, Joseph’s brothers sold him into Egyptian slavery, the Jews escaped starvation by moving to Egypt only to be cruelly treated by their Egyptian overlords and ultimately God was said to have intervened in history to bring these Jews to freedom. That is the way the biblical story unfolded. That story, with that understanding of human life, shaped the liturgical life of the Jewish people. That is what created Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, to provide an annual occasion for the Jews to recall the glory of their creation and to face liturgically the fact of their alienation from that original goodness. The perfection of the sacrificial lamb, both physically, in that it could have no blemishes or broken bones, and morally, in that it did not have the power to choose to do evil, represented to them what human life was created to be. So the perfect lamb was offered to God as a substitute for the human life, which was not worthy to be that offering. Human beings, out of their sense of alienation had to come to God only when they had been cleansed by “the blood of the perfect lamb of God.” Paul, shaped by this Yom Kippur understanding, interpreted Jesus under the symbol of Yom Kippur’s the “Lamb of God” who had the power to “take away the sins of the world.” He saw the death of Jesus on the cross to be analogous to the slaughter of the lamb on Yom Kippur. It offered a doorway back to God for all people. This is not only what salvation was all about to Paul, but that is also what Paul believed he experienced in the person of Christ. He accepted this gracious gift, undeserved and freely given, as that which had rescued him from “the bondage of sin.” Thus he climaxed his theological argument in Romans by proclaiming that now “nothing in all creation can separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.” To offer this compelling gift to the world was what fueled his missionary fervor. We live today, however, on the other side of Charles Darwin, whose thought has destroyed most of Paul’s presuppositions. For Darwin there never was a perfect creation. Life rather evolved over billions of years from a single cell into self-conscious complexity. Without original perfection there could have been no human fall into sin. If there was no human fall, there was no need for a divine rescue. No one can be rescued from a fall that never happened or be restored to a status one has never possessed. So the basis upon which Paul has constructed his concept of salvation has become inoperative. The universal experience that Paul sought to address may well still be real, but his explanation has been destroyed by the march of time. Students of the life sciences have identified the drive to survive as a universal characteristic present in all living things. Survival drives adaptability. It is seen when plants gravitate to the sun, when vines snake across the forest floor in search of the tallest trees to which they then attach themselves, when desert cacti develop a capacity to store water, when fresh water plants develop elaborate systems to filter salt in tidal rivers and when wasps and ants in the jungle develop mutual defense alliances. This drive for survival is instinctual, not conscious in plant or animal life. In self-conscious human life, however, this drive to survive rises to our awareness and is installed as the highest human value, making us the world’s first self-conscious, survival-oriented creatures. Everything in human life is bent to the service of our survival and that in turn inevitably makes human beings self-centered. This is not the result of some prehistoric or mythological fall, this is in the nature of our biology. Out of this survival mentality all of our fears about “others,” our xenophobia and our prejudices arise. It is out of our survival needs that we fight wars, enslave and segregate those who are different, denigrate women, abuse homosexuals. That behavior religion has dubbed “sin,” the result of “the fall.” Can one find salvation by being rescued from this, as Paul seemed to believe? I do not think so. We can, however, find wholeness in the experience of being lifted beyond these boundaries. I am now convinced that this was the heart of what the Jesus experience was. Next week, in our final column on Romans, we will seek to tell the Christ story as Paul experienced it, but against the background of this analysis of what it means to be human. It still rings for me at least with authenticity and integrity. ~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements There is still time to sign up! Aquinas and Julian of Norwich: Applying Creation Spirituality to Politics, Pandemics and Preserving the Earth 2020 Teach-In and Virtual Retreat with Matthew Fox and Friends Friday Evening Oct 30th - Saturday Oct 31st, 2020 Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers to a Teach-in and Virtual Retreat with Matthew Fox and Friends: Three Lectures, Q and A with Matthew Fox 1. Politics and Spirituality: Thomas Aquinas on the Common Good (Fri eve) 2. Julian of Norwich: Deepening Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic (Sat) 3. Julian and Aquinas on the Future of Mother Earth and the Human Species (Sat) Purchase the book here. Register for the event here. When you register you also receive a recording of the entire event. 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