This week we will be exploring the Via Creativa by looking at certain key quotations where Matthew has expressed his views on this path. In the book, Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality, he writes:
All four paths of creation spirituality find their apex in Path Three, the Via Creativa. Paths One and Two lead up to it (we create out of what we have beheld of light and darkness) and Path Four flows out of the Via Creativa, since we put our moral imaginations and creativity to service and compassion.
God is experienced through acts of creativity and co-creation (Via Creativa).
It is our creativity which is the full meaning of humanity’s being an “image of God.”
Until art is allowed its full and proper place in spiritual meditation, meditation itself will remain elitist, a complex and convoluted exercise for an elite minority of professional pray-ers.
Liturgy means “the work of the people.”
Art is the basic form of meditation in the creation-centered tradition.
We are to be mothers of God.
CREATION SPIRITUALITY AND ASCETiCISM
The creation tradition criticizes asceticism as not being the correct way to carry on God’s creative energy, for what evidence do we possess, after all, that God is herself ascetic? Rather the evidence we have from creation’s beauty and richness, is that our God is a God in love with beauty, with delight and the sharing of it.
See Matthew Fox, Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality, pp. 57-58.
See also Fox, A New Reformation, p. 86.
And Fox, Original Blessing, pp. 175, 191, 192, 198, 225, and 205.
Banner Image: A quilt on display inside Quilting Studio, a quilter’s supply shop in the San Angel neighborhood of Mexico City. Quilting is a time-honored method of expressing religious devotion, in both representative and symbolic images. Photo by Thelmadatter. Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
Where in your life do you express the Via Creativa most clearly?
Recommended Reading
Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality
Selected with an Introduction by Charles Burack
To encapsulate the life and work of Matthew Fox would be a daunting task for any save his colleague Dr. Charles Burack, who had the full cooperation of his subject. Fox has devoted 50 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship. His more than 40 books, translated into 78 languages, are inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and have awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. Essential Writings begins by exploring the influences on Fox’s life and spirituality, then presents selections from all Fox’s major works in 10 sections.
“The critical insights, the creative connections, the centrality of Matthew Fox’s writings and teaching are second to none for the radical renewal of Christianity.” ~~ Richard Rohr, OFM.
A New Reformation: Creation Spirituality & The Transformation of Christianity
A modern-day theologian’s call for the radical transformation of Christianity that will allow us to move once again from the hollow trappings of organized religion to genuine spirituality. A New Reformation echoes the Reformation initiated by Martin Luther in 1517 and offers a new vision of Christianity that values the Earth, honors the feminine, and respects science and deep ecumenism.
“This is a deep and forceful book….With prophetic insight, Matthew Fox reveals what has corrupted religion in the West and the therapy for its healing.” ~Bruce Chilton, author of Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way.
“Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story
3 thoughts on “Welcome to the Via Creativa !!!”
All four paths are intimately related in the daily cycles of our spiritual journeys not only in linear time, but within our eternal sacred time of the PRESENT MOMENT… I try to be open in my heart~Soul to the ongoing ever-new Creative Sacred Present Moment of Loving Beautiful Diverse ONENESS compassionately LIVING within, through, and among Us in our physical and non-physical multidimensional-multiverse Evolving LOVING COSMOS….
I express the via Creativa most, through my sacred journaling and through my art, while emersed in the beauty of nature. Nature inspires me to create. Right now I’m in Batchawana Bay, traversing the rugged shorelines of Lake Superior, listening to the stories that the waves, wind, clouds, rocks and trees have to tell. Synchronistically I was blessed with a beautiful 10 inch long Canadian Goose feather, symbolic of one who writes giving voice to ones own inner wisdom intuited… amongst other things.
I placed
a gathered leaf
just so
next to my teacup
and enjoyed
the artwork
of the moment.