This weekend Kurt Johnson and other editors of the two-volume work on Interspirituality: The Heritage and The Future sponsored a very rich Unity Earth Symposium bringing together many of the 200+ authors who contributed to the books.
The Dalai Lama offered an “Opening Message” for the volumes, I wrote a Foreword and Ken Wilber wrote an Afterword. The contributors represent “a dynamic, convergence of the world’s wisdom traditions rounded in shared values of compassion, justice unity, and love.”
I was invited as keynote speaker for the beginning and closing of the three-hour Sunday morning conference. Its theme was “The Future of Interspirituality: From Awareness to Action.” My term for “interspirituality” is of course “deep ecumenism” and I was introduced as being the oldest interspirituality pioneer still around. To me, “Deep Ecumenism,” like “deep ecology,” represents the spiritual dimension to interfaith. “Launch out into the deep,” urges John of the Cross.
Brother Wayne Teasdale, whom I met on several occasions, inspired the term “interspirituality” defining it as forging “a coming ground and actual impetus” toward realizing a “dream of a new civilization based on the heart.” Brother Wayne was close to Father Bede Griffiths who was a good friend and supporter of creation spirituality.
Three organizations were represented in our session: the Bede Griffiths Trust, the Temple of Understanding, and Holomovement & Prosocial Spirituality. Among the eleven persons speaking were scientists, psychologists, activists, and artists. The gathering was so rich that I heartily recommend you watch. Here are two links, the first of which features my talk: HERE and HERE. No doubt the second Sunday and Saturday and opening Friday sessions were equally impactful.
I will share teachings from one speaker from our session, Rocky Dawuni. Rocky is from Ghana and a four-time Grammy-nominee. He moved me with his presentation on what I can only call a creation-centered spiritual consciousness coming from Mother Africa.
He began with a stirring video of his singing a song called “Jerusalem” while walking amidst the neighborhoods and religious history of the holy city.
Then he spoke of how the current reality he sees is the opposite of peace. That we manifest God not through isolation but through “spiritual activism” and emphasizing how all peoples are children of God. While he has visited the Holy Land and played in the Vatican, as a “child of Africa,” he recognizes the first temple or church to be “Nature itself.”
(How often I have heard Native Americans tell me the same thing!)
Our relationship to nature, said Rocky, is fundamental. His culture used to emphasize how trees and rivers were considered sacred and each was assigned a personal name. All this nourished a deep spirituality.
But now corruption rules and economic exploitation of nature is everywhere. People are falling away from our responsibilities and from our “first church.” Experiencing earth as a garden in touch with God as in the Garden of Eden story in Genesis, no longer prevails—”reverence for the earth has eroded.”
“Drill, drill, drill!” is what one hears instead. The message is to subdue the gifts of nature to make money. Acquiring more wealth is key and deception is everywhere. No longer are we being taught “to see God in everything.” The oneness of nature ties us together but the grasping for wealth overshadows it. We need “an Age of Reawakening, prophetic awareness and visions from the Holy Spirit.”
A celebration of the word, of speaking, an epiphany of a worldview that we can share together. How can we manifest this energy, how can we recover the sense of “God walking among us” in the garden, our Earth?
Ghana, he explained, is about 20% Muslim, 70% Christian, and heavily tribal as well.
Banner image: Untitled. Photo by Christian Buehner on Unsplash
Queries for Contemplation
Do you also recognize the first temple or church as Nature itself? What follows from that?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faith Traditions
The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action, by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jennifer Listug
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation, by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox
Wrestling With the Prophets: Creation Spirituality in Everyday Life
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7 thoughts on “A Report from an Interspirituality Symposium”
Thank you Matthew and DM team for today’s DM with valuable spiritual information and resources about interspirituality/deep ecumenism!
Yes, I agree that Nature is our first temple/church because We are All part of Sacred Beautiful Mother Earth/Co-Creation and consequently also part of Our Sacred Living Evolving Cosmos in LOVING DIVERSE ONENESS with-in the Divine Spirit/Flow of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT….
Thank you so much for this morning’s message Matthew. In these dark times it gave me hope.
I do agree that nature is our first temple. In Sacred Earth Sacred Soul, writer and Celtic theologian John Philip Newell calls John Muir “John the Baptist of nature’s sacredness” and “an American Celt.” “Every life-form, [Muir] said, and every rock formation is ‘throbbing’ and ‘pulsing’ with the divine.”
I love that Muir includes rock forms as well as creatures as repositories of the divine. Including geological formations, he says “All these varied forms of matter … are simply portions of God.” They are all of “God essence.”
Living not far from Sedona, Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and other magnificent valleys, I often get to experience sacred, ancient life within the mountains and buttes. As someone said, the rocks are our oldest teachers. John Philip calls them “our parents.”
Muir tells us to return to the mountains to get their glad tidings and be born anew. I wish I could send photos of my partner and I and being resuscitated by these places. The hope for the world, says John Philip, is for us to “come back into true relationship with the earth’s wildness.”
Thank you Michele, reading you comment reminded me of this saying credited to Ibn Arabi and to several others with minor variations since: “God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal and awakens in man.” Sometimes, though, I wonder if he/she did not get tired and fell asleep again…
YES, ditto to your response, Michelle…walking barefoot, touching bark on trees and talking with them, watching deer, beauty of sacred rocks in mountains and the creek in “our” backyard of the senior living campus where we elders live it’s 65 acres, with a mile of woodland path…I am nurtured and revitalized by fresh air, birdsong, dirt paths, trees and breathing slowly! Thanks for articulating so well what’s swireling inn my heart and mind!
Interesting video and song, so few women in the video, and few, if any (did I miss green?) places of Nature, the primal manifestation of Divine Love, where in Jerusalem? I’m unclear when Matthew picked that song. It did little for me to widen perception of interspirituality without nature, animals or plants, only people…
Why is this date, 25th February, the last communication I have received from your daily meditation team?