This weekend Kurt Johnson and different editors of the two-volume work on Interspirituality: The Heritage and The Future sponsored a really wealthy Unity Earth Symposium bringing collectively lots of the 200+ authors who contributed to the books.
The Dalai Lama provided an “Opening Message” for the volumes, I wrote a Foreword and Ken Wilber wrote an Afterword. The contributors characterize “a dynamic, convergence of the world’s knowledge traditions rounded in shared values of compassion, justice unity, and love.”
I used to be invited as keynote speaker for the start and shutting of the three-hour Sunday morning convention. Its theme was “The Way forward for Interspirituality: From Consciousness to Motion.” My time period for “interspirituality” is after all “deep ecumenism” and I used to be launched as being the oldest interspirituality pioneer nonetheless round. To me, “Deep Ecumenism,” like “deep ecology,” represents the religious dimension to interfaith. “Launch out into the deep,” urges John of the Cross.
Brother Wayne Teasdale, whom I met on a number of events, impressed the time period “interspirituality” defining it as forging “a coming floor and precise impetus” towards realizing a “dream of a brand new civilization based mostly on the guts.” Brother Wayne was near Father Bede Griffiths who was pal and supporter of creation spirituality.
Three organizations had been represented in our session: the Bede Griffiths Belief, the Temple of Understanding, and Holomovement & Prosocial Spirituality. Among the many eleven individuals talking had been scientists, psychologists, activists, and artists. The gathering was so wealthy that I heartily suggest you watch. Listed below are two hyperlinks, the primary of which options my speak: HERE and HERE. Little doubt the second Sunday and Saturday and opening Friday periods had been equally impactful.
I’ll share teachings from one speaker from our session, Rocky Dawuni. Rocky is from Ghana and a four-time Grammy-nominee. He moved me along with his presentation on what I can solely name a creation-centered religious consciousness coming from Mom Africa.
He started with a stirring video of his singing a tune known as “Jerusalem” whereas strolling amidst the neighborhoods and non secular historical past of the holy metropolis.
Then he spoke of how the present actuality he sees is the alternative of peace. That we manifest God not by isolation however by “religious activism” and emphasizing how all peoples are kids of God. Whereas he has visited the Holy Land and performed within the Vatican, as a “little one of Africa,” he acknowledges the primary temple or church to be “Nature itself.”
(How usually I’ve heard Native People inform me the identical factor!)
Our relationship to nature, stated Rocky, is prime. His tradition used to emphasise how timber and rivers had been thought-about sacred and every was assigned a private title. All this nourished a deep spirituality.
However now corruption guidelines and financial exploitation of nature is all over the place. Individuals are falling away from our obligations and from our “first church.” Experiencing earth as a backyard in contact with God as within the Backyard of Eden story in Genesis, not prevails—”reverence for the earth has eroded.”
“Drill, drill, drill!” is what one hears as an alternative. The message is to subdue the presents of nature to earn cash. Buying extra wealth is vital and deception is all over the place. Not are we being taught “to see God in every thing.” The oneness of nature ties us collectively however the greedy for wealth overshadows it. We want “an Age of Reawakening, prophetic consciousness and visions from the Holy Spirit.”
A celebration of the phrase, of talking, an epiphany of a worldview that we are able to share collectively. How can we manifest this vitality, how can we get well the sense of “God strolling amongst us” within the backyard, our Earth?
Ghana, he defined, is about 20% Muslim, 70% Christian, and closely tribal as properly.
Banner picture: Untitled. Photograph by Christian Buehner on Unsplash
Queries for Contemplation
Do you additionally acknowledge the primary temple or church as Nature itself? What follows from that?
Associated Readings by Matthew Fox
One River, Many Wells: Knowledge Springing from International Religion Traditions
The Reinvention of Work: A New Imaginative and prescient of Livelihood For Our Time
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
Authentic Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Imaginative and prescient of Love and Motion, by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jennifer Listug
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Items for the Peoples of the Earth
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Imaginative and prescient for a New Technology, by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox
Wrestling With the Prophets: Creation Spirituality in On a regular basis Life
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