Living Creation Spirituality: An Introduction to the Personhood of CS
Creation Spirituality is an embodied spiritual practice that makes it different from many of its siblings. It points us outside of ourselves, focusing us on our relationships with the cosmos and all of its inhabitants. We live these ideas out and experience them in our bodies in its interactions and relationships. While I wouldn’t say that it has no beliefs, every philosophy does, what makes it different is its insistence that these beliefs only matter if they are lived and practiced in our lives. Belief should be enacted.
These embodied beliefs are not taken up all together, but integrated into our lives as our journey into Creation Spirituality deepens. This is not a to do list, or a checklist to see who practices Creation Spirituality better than others. It is a buffet of spiritual practices, some of which will become staples in our lives, while others are picked up in times of need to help us through the various circumstances of life.
The Way of Creation Spirituality presented here draws on the principles and teachings of Matthew Fox in his books Original Blessing, Creation Spirituality, and Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh. My goal with this is not to proclaim the only way to practice Creation Spirituality, but to show ways it can be practiced in daily life. Each principle is presented as a discipline wherein people can find personal practices to bring fullness into their lives.
It is my hope that these disciplines present Creation Spirituality in a clear way as a lived and embodied practice. I hope this provides you with a guide, but it is not an exhaustive list of all the ways to practice. May it inspire you to play in the field described by each discipline and develop practices that are meaningful to you and that fit in your life.
Disciplines
Original Blessing
We behold, experience, and live in a cosmos created in Original Blessing, fundamentally good, sacred, and blessed from the beginning, and this guides our beliefs, decisions, and actions.
Dialectical Thinking
We seek wisdom in all things, having the ability to hold even two opposing ideas before us so we may discern any truth that they may contain in order to seek a deeper understanding than we could by choosing one and disregarding the other.
Cosmic Christ
We adore and follow the Cosmic Christ, which permeates all creation, who is the sacred present throughout the cosmos. This connects us to each other, nature, and the other-than-human persons in the Divine Life, and joins us in the holy work of sustaining, maintaining, and holding all things together.
Salvation
We live out our salvation through the healing and liberation of ourselves, our people, all living, the whole other-than-human world and the cosmos while we become fully alive in God.
Mysticism
We are all mystics, people who directly experience the presence of the Divine as we awaken to this sacred presence within and around ourselves, in those we encounter, in nature, and the entire cosmos, as we savor the blessings of life, and let go in the shadowed places of life.
Via Positiva
We find God “In the Via Positiva. In awe, wonder, and mystery of nature and all beings, each of whom is a ‘Word of God,’ a ‘mirror of God that glistens and glitters,’ as Hildegard of Bingen put it. This is Path One (Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality, 18).”
Dabhar
We speak the Living, Creative Word of God into the cosmos which brings forth and fosters life, creation, and transformation as the awe, beauty, and wonder in the cosmos inspires us.
Savoring
We savor the bliss, wonder, and joy we find in the cosmos through the five senses of taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound, as well as the relationships we have with the human and other-than-human world.
Humility
We walk in humility as we embrace our earthiness, that we are animals who arose through evolution made of the dust of the earth, star dust, and water, taking up only the space required for the task at hand.
Cosmic Universalism
We live in an interconnected world that is sacred, participating in the cosmic energies of harmony, beauty, and justice as we embrace the whole cosmos with all its peoples, including the other-than-human peoples.
Cosmic Hospitality
We welcome and honor all beings as one interconnected and sacred creation because the Divine is in all things and all things are in the Divine, and this is true holiness.
Panentheism
We experience God in all things and that all things are in God, which awakens us to the need to care for the God in all like our child as God cares for us as a parent.
Correspondence
We live in the cosmos and a cosmos lives within us, a microcosm in the macrocosm, reflecting the larger patterns of the cosmos within us.
Kin-dom
We savor our royal personhood as we live in the Kin-dom of God which is all around us, though many do not see it, practicing mutual aid, care, and support of all life.
Via Negativa
We find God “ In the Via Negativa. In darkness and nothingness, in the silence and emptying, in the letting go and letting be, and in the pain and suffering that constitute an equally real part of our spiritual journey. This is Path Two (Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality, 18).”
Emptiness
We release the images that bind us, and the words that cages us in so that silence may be silence as we empty ourselves with open hands so we do not hold onto what must fall away.
Kenosis
We live through inter-being because we have no true fixed or permanent self since everything including us arise through relationship and interdependence, emptying ourselves of self-centeredness, not clinging to control in order to open to God, compassion, and a deeper communion with creation.
Nothingness
We enter nothingness through letting go to open up to the deep mystery, God, and transformation because they are beyond the limits of words and images and cannot be contained.
Via Creativa
We find God “In the Via Creativa. In our generativity we co-create with God; in our imaginative output, we trust our images enough to birth them and ride them into existence. This is Path Three (Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality, p 18).”
Faith is trust
We trust in images to reveal the wisdom that shines through them because all faith is trust and not blind obedience as we seek to prove all things and hold to that which is true.
Artists
We co-create art into the world through our lives, creativity, and work to embrace self-affirmation, comfort, and joy in the body as we birth our creativity into the world and act as spiritual midwifes for the creativity of others.
Sublimation
We transmute destructive energies into creative energies because beauty guides our path ever seeking creative expressions of our raw emotions so we may ride them fully formed into the world.
Faith is in Imagination
We trust in creativity and imagination as a spiritual gift which opens us up to envision new possibilities, encounter the Divine, and transform ourselves and our world through practicing this gift.
Art as Meditation
We practice art as meditation as a way to look out into the cosmos and not just into ourselves so we can encounter the Divine through imagination, beauty, and creation.
Divine Maternity
We care for God as our Child with the tender love we experience of God as Mother, as we birth God into the world, seeing the Divine in everyone and everything we encounter.
Via Transformativa
We find God “In the Via Transformativa. In the relief of suffering, in the combating of injustice, in the struggle for homeostasis, for balance in society and history, and in the celebration that happens when persons struggling for justice and trying to live in mutuality come together to praise and give thanks for the gift of being and being together. This is Path Four (Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality, p 18).”
God in Motion
We relate to God through our relationships with others as we live in the kin-dom to build a compassionate, just, and harmonious world that brings everyone together for the healing of ourselves, our cultures, and our world.
Hope
We hope as a form a resistance, reaching toward a better tomorrow despite the conditions we live in today, proclaiming a prophetic vision of a better life to live into moment by moment, day by day, and year by year.
Compassion
We do to and for others as we would have them do to and for us because compassion is the guiding light through the darkest night into the breaking dawn of the new day.
Thanks and Praise
We praise beauty, compassion, and justice, because it is the language of our aspirations, and give thanks for even the smallest joy, because living in praise opens our eyes to light.
Spirituality of the Anawim
We open our eyes to see the anawim, those who have been cast aside and crushed under foot, opening our hearts to their suffering, and humbly working to relieve their suffering, end their oppression, and liberate them.
Prophet
We speak and act as prophets, interfering with injustice and making justice in our lives, communities, cultures, and worlds so that we can bring healing, joy, and celebration to all.
Joy and Celebration
We celebrate life, in good times and bad, expressing joy together in victories big and small, because joy is the beating heart of the community and celebration refills the soul.
The Seven Chakra Disciplines
Cosmology
We study cosmology to develop cosmic belonging and authentic pride so we may rid ourselves of the acedia and arrogance which weigh down the spirit and prevent the body from taking right action.
Non Dualistic Philosophy
We do not ‘other’ people but passionately generate mutual delight to liberate from control, addiction, and lust that seeks to dominate and possess, because mutual delight breaks all chains.
Liberation Theology
We stand up to injustice to end and heal victimization, anger, and violence, because the liberated person is freed from poverty, oppression, and injustice, and this is the Good News we proclaim.
Compassion
We practice compassion to liberate from fear, avarice, and resentment which tether the heart and hold us back from the mutual aid, care, and support we need and should offer to the world.
Prophecy
We tell the truth and give birth to wisdom to combat the gluttony and consumerism built into the culture and economics of the world, both spiritual and material gluttony and consumerism endanger life.
Creativity
We balance our rational and intuitive natures to discern the relationships that offer us wisdom and knowledge to guard from the traps of rationalism, reductionism, and pessimism.
Community Building
We build communities to send light out into the world rooted in right relationship to push back on envy and resentment that arise through broken, dominating, and oppressive relationships.
For more on and an embodied guide to Creation Spirituality, Original Blessing, and the four paths. Creation’s Paths: A Creation Spirituality Primer is a further reading primer for the living path.
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