The Cosmic Mass and the Renewal of Ritual

Dear Friends,

This weekend we mark the 18-month anniversary of our Daily Meditations with deep gratitude to all of you who read and respond. We are encouraged by your enthusiasm and your sharing the DMs with with your friends and family....and we invite you to look below for additional ways in which you can support our efforts.

We continue our meditations on Ritual and Ceremony…

Of the six principles I laid out in yesterday’s DM, for reawakening ritual, one is participation.  Another term for participation might be what is called “observer-created reality.”  Leonard Shlain proposes such participation or observer-created-reality as a healthy counterpoint to modern consciousness. 

For example, he describes how classical music listeners seating in neat rows resemble the “repetitive lines of type on a printing press.”  It follows that

…the rules of etiquette increasingly demanded that audience members of a musical concert sit passively and not tap their feet, sing, move, or even cough.

This relates to understanding rituals and church liturgies also where churches, the classic “citadels of ritual,” often bore people.  Ritual is nothing if it is not participatory, as were the ancient rituals of the primal peoples.  Including the body guarantees participation.  No one can dance vicariously.

Shlain believes new technology displaces sitting passively to hear music.  Now

…music lovers can recreate more music as their whim than all the orchestras that existed in the nineteenth century put together….Now the audience can actively participate in the phenomenon of music which, of course, is identical to the core principle found in the world of the atom: observer-created reality. 

Ritual is nothing if it not participatory art, as it was among ancient tribes.

As for the Cosmic Mass, each one incorporates the six principles I laid down in yesterday’s DM discussion with Adam Bucko.  Each of the Masses has a specifically chosen theme.  For example, at the World Parliament of Religions held in Toronto a few years ago, our theme was “Our Sacred Earth.”  About 500 people attended and from all traditions including several Buddhist monks in their robes.  The response was very dynamic and positive.  One person told me it was “the most powerful religious experience of her life.”

We choose themes that are universal, archetypal, and that appeal to the spiritual needs of all human beings today.  One Mass themed “Mass of the Angels” held at a big hotel in San Francisco during an Earth/Body conference, had 1,300 people in attendance. 

Afterward, three young men in their late teens came up, and one of them said, “I’ve been going to raves every weekend for five years.  What I look for in raves, I found here tonight.  I look for deep prayer, I look for community, and what you had here tonight that we don’t have in rave is you had multiple generations.  In rave it’s one generation.”  He added, “this is what I’ve been looking for.” 

Imagine five years of raves–that’s 250 raves–but he found something in that Mass that he’d been looking for all that time.  And he was able to find it without drugs.

After a Cosmic Mass we celebrated at an Agape annual gathering in a large hotel in Los Angeles a number of years ago, a young African American man came up to me, about 26 years old, and said: “This would be worth committing one’s life to.”

See Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation, pp. 139f. 

Adapted also from Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work, p. 261.

Banner Image: Matthew Fox joins with ministers across traditions in celebrating the Eucharist at a Cosmic Mass.

Correction: the final photo in the 11/13 DM, incorrectly identified as Rev. Dr. Gail Ransom, depicted Ellen Kennedy and Rev. Jean Ando leading body prayer at a Matthew Fox /Susan Coppage Evans retreat On Via Positiva in the basement labyrinth of a church in Boulder CO. Ellen Kennedy is wearing cuffed jeans. Our apologies.

Does this discussion on rituals support your own efforts at moving beyond a modern consciousness to a post-modern (and therefore pre-modern) one? 

Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation

Authors Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox encourage us to use our talents in service of compassion and justice and to move beyond our broken systems–economic, political, educational, and religious–discovering a spirituality that not only helps us to get along, but also encourages us to reevaluate our traditions, transforming them and in the process building a more sacred and just world. Incorporating the words of young activist leaders culled from interviews and surveys, the book provides a framework that is deliberately interfaith and speaks to our profound yearning for a life with spiritual purpose and for a better world.
“Occupy Spirituality is a powerful, inspiring, and vital call to embodied awareness and enlightened actions.”
~~ Julia Butterfly Hill, environmental activist and author of The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods

Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science 
by Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake

Natural Grace, a 208 page inspired dialogue between theologian Matthew Fox and scientist Rupert Sheldrake, unites wisdom and knowledge from unconventional angles. Considering themselves heretics in their own fields, Matthew and Rupert engage the conversation from postmodern and post-postmodern perspectives, deconstructing both religion and science—while setting the foundation for a new emerging worldview. Having outgrown the paradigms in which they were raised, both Fox and Sheldrake see it as part of their life missions to share the natural synthesis of spirituality and science rooted in a paradigm of evolutionary cosmology.

Upcoming Events