Creation Spirituality: What is it?
The fifteen books published under my pen-name, William John Fitzgerald, are based in one way or another on Creation Spirituality.
It is the Spirituality (way of looking and praying) deeper into life on planet earth and ourselves as earth dwellers. It is a spirituality of Original Blessings, based on what evolution now reveals: that for billions and millions of years on this earth there was no sin. The planet itself evolved and out of the original blessing of creation, plants and flowers developed, birds began to fly, and all around was beauty. In the grand scheme of creation, sin is a very recent offense.
And yet, I would wager if you stood at most church doors this Sunday and asked church goers: “Have you heard of “original sin?” most would say “Of course!”
And then if you followed with this question: “And how about original blessings?”
“Eh? What? What do you mean, Original Blessings?”
What we mean is that depending on where your basic ideas start, they can lead in either a positive or a pessimistic direction.
Saint Augustine hundreds of years after Christ was the first to define original sin. If you start there, your direction may be pessimistic, and gloomy. (Martin Luther was an Augustinian and it was he who once said: “The human being is just a pile of s…, whose misery is covered over by Christ’s grace.”
Others in the history of spirituality have started with blessings and the more one walks their direction it is toward awe, wonder, and gratitude, creativity and joy.
Examples:
“God is good and all things which proceed from God are good.”
— Saint Hildegard of Bingen
"Just to be is a blessing.
Just to live is holy."
— Rabbi Abraham Heschel
“I know full well that heaven and earth and all creation are great, generous, and beautiful and good.”
— Julian of Norwich
"The creation tradition is essentially non-clerical because it recognizes existence, life itself, as the primary sacrament. This sacrament requires awareness and wakefulness, not ordination to bring about its proper redistribution and to elicit the sacrament from children and adults, workers, artists, lovers, citizens. Once the sacrament that creation is, are well founded, then other sacraments, the seven stages of maturation and unfolding — take on their deeper meaning.
Creation Spirituality is a lay spirituality because it cares profoundly about work which is after all, what most adults do with their lives. It cares about pleasure and its wise and celebrative possibilities. It cares about sexuality and sensuality
It cares about nature, science, economics, and politics that are about people being in the world as agents of transformation. It cares about all of nature and history are sources of Revelation.”
—Matthew Fox, Original Blessing
“We must summon and harness the power of love—the powers of an all transforming energy as we have harnessed the wind, water, of atoms and genes…the dimensions of the Spirit are dimensions of the universe itself…and coextensive with the very evolution of the earth.”
— Teilhard
Bless to me, O God:
Each taste that goes to my mouth.
Each note that goes to my song,
Each ray that goes my way,
Each thing that I pursue.
Each lure that tempts my will,
The zeal that seeks my living soul...
— Carmina Gadelica, from the Gaelic
I arise today
Through the strength of heaven:
Light of Sun,
Radiance of Moon,
Splendor of Fire,
Speed of Lightning,
Swiftness of Wind,
Depth of Sea,
Stability of Earth,
Firmness of rock.
— Saint Patrick
To learn more about Creation Spirituality:
Read: Original Blessing by Matthew Fox
Read: The Universe is a Green Dragon by Brian Swimme
Read: The Universe Story by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme
Or visit these sites:
Thomas Berry
Meister Eckhart
St. Francis of Assisi
St. Hildegard of Bingen
Joyce Rupp
Teihard de Chardin
Jean Houston
Sophia Institute, Oakland CA
Dualism (a way of dividing up into opposites which is not based on Creation Spirituality.)
Check out Richard Rohr OFM for more on Dualism)