Swimming in the wisdom of Ghanaian musician Rocky Dawuni’s talk that I shared yesterday, and aware that we are coming to the close of February the month of Black Awareness, I want to continue the meditation about creation spirituality and its rootedness in Africa, humanity’s Mother continent.
One thing I appreciate about the phrase “original blessing” is that it begins where the Bible begins.
“Blessing” is the theological word for “goodness” after all, and Chapter One of Genesis, the first page of the Bible, sings of the goodness of creation. Over and over, it praises creation as good. And with the arrival of humans, believe it or not, it praises the entire circle of creation, humanity included, as “very good.”
Goodness and Very Goodness mark the first page of our—Jewish and Christian—Scriptures. It baffles me how two previous popes condemned me for the phrase, “original blessing.”
Saint Thomas Aquinas writes about “original goodness” and “original freshness,” and Saint Hildegard of Bingen writes and paints pictures of “original wisdom” that we are all born with, describing it as a small tent (because we are so small as babies), and life’s journey is setting up that tent. It’s not an easy journey, as she makes clear.
Aquinas and Hildegard are doctors of the church.
I think the main reason some ecclesiastics are ill at ease with original blessing is that they have fallen into the trap of what Pope Francis rightly called “species narcissism”—they think first about humanity and not about creation.
But humanity is not first—the universe is—13.8 billion years first. Before humanity ever showed up or could show up. It took that long for the universe to birth our galaxy, our sun, our moon, and Earth with its special, “Goldilocks” advantages, which allowed us to be the right distance from our sun, with the right tilt of our moon and the right amount of rocky surface and water that neither evaporates nor freezes all the time, for life to flourish.
If all that is not a blessing, what is? And it ALL is original, i.e., it happened first—long before our species ever came along. Long before sin came along.
Not only is creation good, but it is very good, even with us on board. It is also sacred, as Rocky Dawuni spoke of in yesterday’s DM. It is bigger than us. It birthed us; we did not birth it.
The sacredness of the universe is, as Thomas Berry insists, recoverable when we have lost it, but only if we make the effort.
We will recover our sense of wonder and our sense of the sacred ONLY if we appreciate the universe beyond ourselves as a revelatory experience of that numinous presence whence all things come into being. Indeed, the universe is the primary sacred reality. We become sacred by our participation in this more sublime dimension of the world about us.
He applies this to the number one moral issue of our time: Protecting the planet. It has been said, ‘We will not save what we do not love.’ It is also true that we will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred….Eventually, only our sense of the sacred will save us.
I heard Rocky Dawuni say the same thing in his own words on Sunday morning. It is an ancient teaching.
African-American philosopher Dona Marimba Richards teaches how for Africans, the universe is conceived as a unified spiritual totality….The spiritual is the foundation of all being because the universe is sacred. The universe was created (is continually ‘created’) by a divine act.*
To be continued.
*Dona Marimba Richards, Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora (Red Sea Press, 1992), p. 5. Cited in One River, Many Wells, p. 47.
Banner Image: Radiant creation: sunset over the Amboseli National Park, Kenya.Photo by Evan Jones on Unsplash.
Queries for Contemplation
When you hear the term “original blessing,” do you think of humans first? Or of the universe first? It applies to both, but it is important that humans leave anthropocentrism and species narcissism behind, isn’t it? And that means thinking of the cosmos first.
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing From Global Faiths, p. 47
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen
Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations, p. 361
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation
Wrestling With the Prophets: Creation Spirituality in Everyday Life
Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality
9 thoughts on “The Cosmos and Other Original Blessings: Lessons From Mother Africa”
I’m in full accord here although my take inclines me towards loving “God” first and foremost from which all else follows without any pecking order.
I assume that, as a patent holder for the “original sin,” the name of Augustine may not be welcome in the context of meditations on the “original blessing,” however, as I was reading today’s DM I could not chase from my mind the story (rightly or wrongly associated with Augustine) of the child trying to scoop the ocean into a small hole in the sand. Augustine watched the child for a while and finally asked him what he was doing. The child answered that he would scoop all the water from the sea into the little hole in the sand. “That is impossible, Augustine said, the sea is too large and the hole too small.” “Maybe, said the child, but I will sooner empty all the sea into this hole than you will succeed in penetrating the mystery of the Divine with your mind.” Augustine walked away impressed by this child’s wisdom, and when he looked back the child had disappeared.
It seems to me that all the world’s religions put together still amount to that little hole in the sand.
I have not reflected much on original blessing until the question is raised, like in today’s DM.
But I am grateful and have Faith that Our Source~Co-Creator Is a Present Living and Loving Spirit/Force that manifested Cosmos Creation 13.8 billion years ago (according to science), and that humanity and our eternal souls with consciousness are sacred mysterious unique parts of that Loving Diverse Oneness Ongoing Creation along with physical/nonphysical spiritual beings/dimensions and ongoing evolution….
This message is so important and so beautifully written ! My growing gratitude for the earth swelled when my husband and I bought a farm. That was 30 years ago! The land, water and animals are far more necessary than people!
In this USA there has developed a disdain for getting your hands dirty by working!
Perhaps the growing trend to gardening will counter some of that attitude!
When the books of the Bible were written the scriptures say that the earth is flat and disk shaped with a crystal
clear dome over it, called the firmament, wherein the stars (little lights in the sky) and the sun resided. It also says that all of the animals were vegetarian and did not die, and that this was also true for the first humans, until they committed the original sin. The scriptures say God said His creation [without death and suffering] was “very good.”
St. Basil the Great wrote: “It is customary for vultures to feed on corpses, but since there were not yet [before Adam’s sin] corpses, nor yet their stench, so there was not yet such food for vultures. But all animals followed the diet of swans and all grazed the meadows, none of the beasts were carnivores, such was the first creation, and such will be the restoration after this.”
U.S. Catholic Bishops wrote: “The whole Bible is spanned by the narrative of the first creation (Gn 1:3) and the
vision of a restored creation at the end of history” (RV. 21:1-4).
How does the discovery of evolution, including the hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution
before humans came into existence fit with the Bible scriptures and the teaching of the Catholic Church?
In my experience, the only conflict between evolution and the Bible and pronouncements of Popes and other religious leaders comes from taking the Bible literally and accepting that church leaders, Catholic and Protestant, are infallible.
What a great question, Thomas! As I see it, it fits the same way the 1826 “cutting-edge” scientific theories fit today’s evolving scientific world-view: i.e. not well at all when read literally, but the underlying quest for a better understanding of the world and of the human condition is clear when both the Bible and the scientific story are read between and behind the lines. Humanity’s quest for meaning takes place in an evolving universe: Einstein did not see the world as Newton, but both tried their best: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business” [T.S. Eliot].
A central theme in Thomas Berry’s writings is the need to adopt the “New Story” provided by modern science: “Future generations will need to be religious within this context. Traditional scriptures will not be effective in awakening future generations to a sense of the sacred, as they have done in past generations. A radical new adaptation is taking place, a new awakening to the divine not only through the awesome qualities of the universe as experienced immediately but also through the immense story of the universe and its long series of transformations” [Evening Thoughts, p. 20].
The word “dirt” is used with such disdain by many people yet is used to grow what is absolutely necessary to life. The same disdain is used as in “black” people by many. Yet the color black contains all colors. The continent of Africa has been raped,plundered and treated for personal gain for centuries by many countries. Yet is the birthplace of all humanity
Daniel, I love the quote from Berry that you end with, and discoveries like those we are receiving from the James Webb Space Telescope give us this “new awakening to the divine.” They help us to see that God is so much more awesome than we had ever imagined! Discoveries about creatures in the deep sea and the tiniest particles in the bodies of creatures and plants do the same thing.
Writers of the Bible were trying to do the same thing using all kinds of literature. I believe they were doing their best, with what they perceived back then, to awaken us to (and explain) the divine soup in which they swam. It escapes us some times, but it’s good to remember that there are many genres in the Bible: myths, histories, poetry, letters, and other forms of literature. To call some passages mythology is not to denigrate those passages, but to lift them to a higher form of writing–to invite us to look for deep meaning. I believe it is easier to explain deep truths in fiction (including mythology) than it is to explain them in nonfiction–because fiction isn’t muddied by ideas that will pass away as we learn more. The deepest truths are always hidden in mystery. At best language can only point at the divine. No words about God are going to be absolutely true. We need to remember that the Bible is about spirituality, not about cosmology.