Awakening the Divine Human

The consciousness of mysticism is on the rise. Mysticism is about our experiential union with the Divine. The rediscovery in the West of the role that the wisdom tradition played in the life of the historical Jesus, and the rediscovery of the Creation Spirituality tradition and its great Earth-based mystics, bring back to life theological terms like Deification, Divinization, Panentheism, Mysticism, Godhead — all terms that are kosher and orthodox but were practically banished or, even worse, wrongly understood for centuries.

The above quote from Matthew Fox’s The Hidden Spirituality of Men — a book that, in reality, is relevant to everybody — is a perfect synthesis of the intense work in which a group of 45 people engaged for a whole week on the island of Sardinia. I was privileged to lead the group and the staff of six who facilitated the experience.

Leading people toward their experiential union with the Divine is, of course, something that would make anyone tremble who does not have a bloated ego. But the awareness of being just a channel and nothing else helped me a lot during the week. After all, I don’t have a special wisdom to impart, but my role is that of creating the right environment for people to contact their depths. This has always been my way of being a priest.

The highlights of the week for me were many: how participants responded to our prompts with grace and depth, how each of the staff people were exceptionally good in leading their workshops, how well the venue we chose suited our needs. But one theme in particular emerged over everything else: how well Creation Spirituality fits with the sacred Neolithic and Bronze Age sites that we visited.

I still need time to find the right words, but it was clear to everybody in their guts that the sites we visited were exuding sacred power. You may invoke the concept of “morphic field” pioneered by Rupert Sheldrake, but whatever explanation you choose, the feeling was there. We were looking for a connection with the ancestors of our modern cultures, people of our own species who were however deeply connected in turn with what we now call “nature,” and we found such a connection. Again, in the depth of feeling more than in anything else.

In the online Q/A time with Matthew Fox, we discussed how Creation Spirituality, as proposed by Matthew, is unique because it is not just about theorizing and maybe convincing the mind that certain dogmas are wrong. It is about helping the brain, through the body, to rewrite and build anew certain neurological paths. Several people, including one who studied these mechanisms as a neuroscientist, said that what happens at a Cosmic Mass, judging from Matthew’s description, is exactly such kind of a rewiring of the brain. In our retreat, and especially in the closing ritual, we experienced the same on a smaller scale.

The main problem in spirituality today is that it is still very much an intellectual pursuit. Not that there is anything wrong with the intellect: reading, reflecting, reasoning, and writing are in themselves spiritual activities. But we tend to repeat the same thoughts and the same actions, even the most harmful ones, precisely because our brain is trained to repeat, for survival purposes. At times, however, we invent new names for the same things and we think we made some important changes, when in fact absolutely nothing has changed. This becomes clear if we look at how the synaptic links in the brain work, and this is why many announced “revolutions” are just a change in name.

It is important, therefore — but unfortunately rare — to engage in symbolic and bodily activities which trick the mind and create a new reality for the practitioner. The basic example is that you may convince yourself of the value and worth of your body, but until the body moves and discovers its freedom in the space through dance, the belief is not really integrated yet (Via Positiva).

The same holds true for communal rituals of grief in which we let go and express our real sorrow; without rituals of this kind, deep pain is not really cleansed (Via Negativa). Creating images, connecting shapes and colors, not being directed by the intellect but only led by intuition — what Matthew Fox has called Art as Meditation — is also an activity that until you do it, you can’t appreciate how it opens you up and boisters your vitality (Via Creativa).

Finally, the Via Transformative leads one to discover how thinking is listening and not repeating what you already know; to experience how a change of mind, through a new compassionate connection, is sacred; to understand how all true thinking is directed toward action and compassion.

In our Sardinian exploration we combined workshops with pilgrimages to sacred places. We descended, one by one or in couples, into the Sacred Well of St. Christina — as it is called now — and we were wrapped in death bands in the tombs of Anghelu Ruju — the Red Angel — and we ascended the steps of the sanctuary of Monte d’Accoddi. All Neolithic sites, of which Sardinia is richer than any other land. All monuments built by humans, and used by them for ritual purposes,  roughly between 4,000 and 7,000 years ago. These ritual experiences, combined with the closing ritual of our retreat, were too intense to be described by words. But I can tell you the immediate outcomes: a sense of ineffable joy, a touching of the most painful depths, a feeling of cosmic compassion.

As for the long-term outcomes, I don’t know. But I think that one needs to repeat similar activities many times, on a smaller scale perhaps, until the neural paths leave space to novelty. We came out of the retreat convinced that much has been lost for our species since the Neolithic era, in spite of the modern consensus to the contrary. Yet none of us decried the technological advancements as such. We felt that perhaps this is the era in which, through the enormous amount of chaos that is being released, our species will be able to leap forward by drinking deeply at the sources of the ancient wisdom of our species.

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Banner Image: Inside a Domus de Janas (“House of the Fairies”): a rock-cut Neolithic tomb at the Anghelu Ruju Necropolis. Resembling homes of the time, these tombs were used for burials and rituals between 3400 and 1600 BC. Photo by Gianluigi Gugliermetto, used with permission.

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Queries for Contemplation

Do you have an experience of ritual as transformative of your mental habits?

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Related Readings by Matthew Fox

The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine

Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality

Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality

One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

WHEE! We, wee All the Way Home: A Guide to Sensual Prophetic Spirituality

Wrestling with the Prophets: Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life 

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