Creation Spirituality for the Solitary Practitioner

The original title for this work was Creation Spirituality for the Solitary Practitioner. Yes, that is a wink and a nod to Scott Cunningham’s book, Wicca: a guide for the solitary practitioner. My goal was not to recreate or co-opt Wicca into my own Creation Spirituality practice. As I collected my notes and journals to put this work together, I noticed a resemblance between my practice and the way Wicca has developed and is taught. 

The difference between my practice and Wicca involves more than just the words used or the pantheon invoked. While I am not interested in spending a lot of time focusing on the differences, I do want to highlight a few of the similarities in order to foster a kinship between these two spiritual paths.

Magic and Faith

Celtic Spirituality heavily influenced my spirituality, so I have a deep connection to the holidays, the moon, and the many saints and spirits associated with my heritage. This was also one of the major streams of influence for early and some modern Wicca.

I have also practiced Magic since I was a teenager. As much as I disagree with both Aleister Crowley and Peter Carroll on a great many things, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge their influence on all esoteric theory and practice. The connection between Gerald Gardner and Crowley is well known and documented. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to remove their influence from modern magic, and it brings a certain level of similarity into all esoteric practices. 

I have mentioned esoterism and magic and will go into more detail in future chapters, but for now, I need to give you a basic definition for these terms. 

Esotericism

Esotericism is the collected insight and wisdom of a select in-group that is not historically shared with the general populous. 

Magic

Magic is the participation with and manipulation of the subtle energies of a system to achieve, support, or prevent a predetermined outcome.

There is a lot more to be said on these topics, but those are good working definitions for now. 

I suppose I should explain a bit about myself and how we got to this point. 

My Life

Hi. My name is Charlie, and I am a non binary speculative fiction writer and a member of the board for Creation Spirituality Communities, but the path which led me here had a lot of twists and turns over the years. 

I was raised in a Baptist family. My paternal grandfather was a Missionary Baptist preacher and my great grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher. I came to Jesus and was baptized when I was in second grade. After we moved to Maryland the summer between fourth and fifth grade, we started attended a nondenominational church and there I was exposed to American Evangelicalism for the first time. This was also when I first started noticing that I was different.

The more I recognized what at the time appeared to be sane gender attraction and my gender nonconformity, the more I rooted myself in the conservative movement. I also started living a triple life: 

• I was a cisgender, heterosexual Evangelical Christian. 

• I was a gender no conforming homosexual 

• I was an esoteric seeker, desperate for answers. 

That last one led me to buy, read, and adopt the practices I found in DJ Conway’s book, Celtic Magic, which I bought while I was in middle school.

This caused me to develop a strange set of friends who were conservative evangelical Christians, liberal pagans, and other queer youth who were just as confused as I was about life, the universe, and everything.

My life spiraled out of controlled as I code switched constantly between the three worlds. 

Through this period, I read the work of Dion Fortune, Gareth Knight, and Israel Regardie. More of my person philosophy and practice arose from these esoteric sources. 

I will not go into a lot of detail about this period, but in a moment of existential crisis, I started praying the rosary and which led to my eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism. This freedom from American Evangelicalism relieved more of my inner turmoil, but not all of it. 

As everything came to a head, a friend of mine introduced me to his Rabbi, and my conversations with him saved and changed my life. 

Skipping ahead a bit, eventually I fell in love and was hand-fasted in a pagan ceremony with the man I am still with to this day. He is also an esotericist. Through a series of misadventures, we moved to California, and this is where everything changed for me and where the path I am talking abut here took shape. 

Creation Spirituality and Minyan

In the summer of 2001, I read Prayer by Matthew Fox and Minyan by Rabbi Rami Shapiro. Both of these books changed my practice and pointed me down the path I walk to this day. 

At the time, I rooted my daily practice in Buddhism, heavily influenced by the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Sylvia Boorstein, Lama Surya Das, and so many others I want to mention, but I don’t want this preface to just be a list of names. 

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, my hodgepodged faith and practice did not help me navigate the world I lived in and struggled to understand.

So I wrote to Rabbi Shapiro to ask if it was appropriate for a gentile Christian like me to adopt and adapt the practices and ideas I found in Minyan into my practice. He gave me a green light to proceed. 

I also devoured the works of Matthew Fox, whose writing forms the basis of everything that followed. 

The biggest problem I had over the years was that I lacked the funds to go to college and study these ideas in a more academic environment, so I read a lot and tested these ideas through trial and error. Authors like Gershom Scholem, Aryeh Kaplan, Rabbi David A Cooper, and The Classics of Western Spirituality became my study and practice guides.

A Practical Spirituality

My focus was on finding practical ways to explore these spiritual, mystical, and magical ideas and practices. If it didn’t improve our lives, we tossed it to the side and tried something new. 

For decades, we incubated these ideas and practices, only sharing them with a few people over the years. In fact, the idea of sharing these ideas with others is terrifying. 

Recently, I have become more involved with the Creation Spirituality Communities and l’ve realized that all these years of isolated incubation have caused our understanding and practice of Creation Spirituality to differ from so many others. Not better, or worse, but very different from how other people in the movement understand and practice. 

So, this is why l’ve chosen to call my variant of Creation Spirituality, Creation’s Paths. The tradition, as put forward by Matthew Fox, is a generalized philosophy that like essential Buddhism can be adopted as a part of or as an adjunct to the faith and practice one already is a part of. 

My husband and I needed something different. We desired a faith and practice that was Creation Spirituality all the way down. 

What we ended up doing was root our faith and practice in Creation Spirituality. We also created and adapted several core practices in order to connect with and experience these themes first hand. 

I am not saying what we did was better than anything anyone else has done, but it is different. 

I wanted a systematic theology and practice that synthesized my many streams of influence into a cohesive whole. Its mysticism and spirituality needed to be practical, making a significant improvement to my life and that of my husband. Most of all, it needed to incorporate the enchanted world I knew. 

I am not a materialist, and I see no evidence at all that we live in a world constructed from nothing but dead matter and blind mechanistic processes. I understand how people conclude this, but I don’t believe the evidence is there. 

The world I live in is vibrant and alive.

Anthropocentrism

Granted, so much religion and spirituality is born from such an anthropocentric perspective the sheer scale of the cosmos makes them laughable, I would argue the same problem exists for many atheist systems that root themselves in the problem of evil. 

Good and evil are moral and ethical notions that highly depend on context. They are far too often applied to things that have no moral or ethical agency, Floods, for example, are dangerous and traumatizing events to live through, but neither the cloud nor the water can act out of malice. 

I understand the desire for justice which motivates us to mitigate or end the suffering of others. It is a terrible thing when a being suffers because of a natural process. The problem is that I have never seen an argument for a world free of these events that does not have dire consequences for nature or free will, and we do have free will. Just because we cannot imagine a better world, does not mean that our world is good, but it shows an issue with applying a moral lens to this practice.

Natural and Supernatural

There is also an issue with the false dichotomy between the natural and what is termed supernatural. This distinction is born out of an erroneous notion that spirit is higher than matter. If there is a God who created nature, that God is natural whether or not they rule over that world. Angels, spirits, souls, and all other objects of spiritual speculation would also be natural since they are entities and energies that exist in nature.

It does not follow that anything that science cannot measure or that it does not know about does not exist. Gravity, dark matter, and dark energy existed before science existed and discovered then. 

I know what I am about to say may sound more controversial than it actually is. I am not a science denier, simply a realist. 

Science does not and cannot describe reality. It can only describe and interpret the data gathered through measurement. If it cannot be measured, it cannot be described by science. This is why dark matter and dark energy are called dark. Their existence can be inferred from certain measurements, but they cannot as I am writing this be directly detected 

This understanding can be misused by charlatans to sell a lot of woo. The truth is, science is probabilistic knowledge we should trust. Medical science gives us the best understanding we have to survive the many perils of this world. Ignoring science is dangerous and how we brought ourself to the current state of climate crisis. So, yes, listen to science, but science cannot help us learn how to live.

What I am trying to say is if something can be measured by science, we should listen to and follow the science, but we acknowledge that there are some things science cannot measure, and for those things we should listen to the Apostle Paul and, “Test all things, and hold firmly that which is good (I Thes 5:21).”

Experience is not the best way to measure reality because it can be mistaken or misunderstood, but sometimes it is the best we have to go on.

We shouldn’t substitute our beliefs for verified science, but as long as we are safe and honest about it, we can improve our lives through spiritual practice and community.

Spirituality

Spirituality, like all traditions, exists to improve our lives, and like all things must change and develop over time or they will die. Tradition should connect us to our past and our community and must never be allowed to control, dominate, or harm our lives. 

This work will offer the insights and practices we have developed over the last two decades and is not intended to tell anyone what they are doing or believing is wrong. I hope it brings more light and love into your life. 

I am sure you can see my trepidation in sharing these thoughts. As someone who grew up in several authoritarian religious movements, I don’t want to even appear to be imposing my ideas on others. 

Enter Judaism without Tribalism

The biggest change in my life and spirituality has been my initiation into Druidry and Rabbi Rami Shapiro's Judaism without Tribalism. Druidry has not changed much of my life since my faith and practice incorporated these ideas a long time ago, but Judaism without Tribalism has caused me to rethink a lot of beliefs and practices.

My daily practice has been rooted in Minyan by Rabbi Rami Shapiro. In many ways, Judaism without Tribalism is an evolution of those ideas. It has made me not only question, but confront so many questions about my identity.

In Chapter 4 of Judaism without Tribalism, Shapiro asks the question, who is a Jew?

A Jew is a person who claims to be a Jew.

This is not the official definition of who is a Jew—indeed, there is no one official definition, only definitions held by different groups of Jews—but it is the only definition that is free of tribalism and crazymaking.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro. Judaism Without Tribalism (p. 40)

I have practiced a Jewish life for decades through the ten practices of Minyan. Most of my fundamental ideas of faith, spirituality, and life originate from Judaism. As you will see, most of the root words underpinning my faith are in Hebrew. Am I Jewish?

For decades, friends have called me a chasidic quaker, a phrase that always makes me laugh. I do not call myself a jew because I believe Jesus is the Messiah and I am not a member of a congregation. I don't want anyone to believe that I am claiming to be something I am not.

Christianity originated as a Jewish Sect, and I believe a lot of its issues were born from its separation from and hostility towards its roots. My initial project in the early 2000s was to reconstruct my version of the early Wayist movement from which Christianity was born. That required this deep dive into Judaism.

There is no word for “religion” in Judaism. The term we use is da’at, which means knowledge. A religious person is called a da’ati, “one who knows.” What one knows is YHVH manifesting all Reality.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro. Judaism Without Tribalism (p. 68).

By that definition, I gladly call myself da'ati. Judaism is one of the wells of faith I draw from, and is the most fundamental one, but I do not speak for Jews or Judaism. Judaism without Tribalism has augmented my practice of Minyan and has become foundational to my faith and practice, or da'at. It also provides the basic outline for this work. I have adopted its revolution, iconoclasm, pedagogy, and tools.

The Fear

I am sure by now my fear in sharing all this is clear to see. I don't want to talk over anyone or appropriate anything. The purpose of this work is to share the life my husband and I have built for ourselves over the last two decades.

Peace and blessings in the Light,

Charlie