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AUGUST 2000 Science of Mind An Interview with Matthew Fox by Roger Juline Matthew Fox is a postmodern theologian who is well known for reviving the tradition of Creation Spirituality. A priest since 1967, he has provided a voice for ecological and socially progressive causes and is at the forefront of interfaith dialogue. The recipient of numerous honors, including the Courage of Conscience Award, Fox is founder and president of the University of Creation Spirituality and cochair of the Master of Liberal Arts program at Naropa University Oakland Campus. He is the author of twenty-four books, including Original Blessing and The Reinvention of Work. Science of Mind: The theme of your new book is "deep ecumenism” Can you tell us what you mean by that ? Matthew Fox: Yes. I based the book's title, "One River, Many Wells", on Meister Eckhart's idea that God is a great underground river. Many wells draw from this river, representing our many traditions: Buddhist, Sufi, Christian, Native American, Jewish, Goddess, Islamic, Celtic, and even science. If we go deep enough into the wells, we will find the treasure that is the common water. It is time in humanity's evolution to do that. We need to quit bickering around the top of the well about superficial differences and get down to the common water. The term "deep ecumenism" is in some ways a synonym for universal spirituality. If we just live at the level of dogmas, history, and theological arguments, then we're living at the surface. We need to go down to the depths, where we experience things in common. How does deep ecumenism relate to the new cosmology? Cosmology, the story of our universal origins, is the hub of the wheel, and our various traditions are the spokes. When we realize that we have a cosmology in common, the egos of our various traditions and institutions find their place in the universe and they are humbled, or ought to be, because the universe is 15 billion years old and the oldest traditions are only tens of thousands of years old, and the ones with any written traditions, like Hinduism, are only 3500 years old. So cosmology suggests that we have much to learn from nature? Yes. Thomas Aquinas said in the thirteenth century that revelation came in two volumes: the Bible and nature. That was taken for granted until the printing press and the modern age came along. Eckhart and other premoderns said that every creature is a book about God. We really need to listen, to open our hearts. Trees reveal something of God to us, just as animals, plants, and seasons, which all tell us something about God. There is no end to revelation. To think it is all in one book is ridiculous. It's like thinking we can carry revelation around in our hip pocket. The people who devised the Hebrew Bible, for example, were mostly illiterate. They relied on storytelling. Abraham Heschel said that the Bible is not a book, it is a drama. So, we have to "de-idolatrize" our relationship to the written word to recover the sense that every creature is a word of God. In addition to learning about the revelation in nature, don't we also have a responsibility to care for it? That's right. And we do that by calling on our creativity. We have been naive about our creative power for the last few centuries. We have been naive about how creativity connected to greed can destroy so much. Now we are beyond innocence, we are beyond naivete. There really is no excuse anymore. We have to rope in the forces that are excessively greedy, and we have to take our creativity and use it not for exploiting the earth, but for saving it. To me, our real power is our creativity. Theologically, when we are cocreators, this is God at work. So deep ecumenism is a call to express our creativity morefully? Exactly. Deep ecumenism goes beyond interfaith dialogues or theological position papers. It is about getting down to the depths. That is why I talk about the underground river and the wells that tap into it. Deep ecumenism is about shared prayer and shared celebration and shared social action and compassion. Our species can't survive without this. I don't think governments will save us, nor will academia, nor will churches in our usual understanding. We have to go deeply into our spiritual traditions, stir and mix them up, and get creative about them. We have to get moving and simplify them. That is why I honor people like the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. He is really boiling down the heart of his tradition and distilling it for all of us laypeople. And that is what we all should be doing in our various traditions. Debates like "Why my god is better than your god" are useless. It does seem as if religion in the past has been divisive. Yes, it has, and we need to grow up. Tribalism is the negative side of the basic instinct to survive, and it is related to racism and sexism. The antidote to that is a healthy cosmology. Tribes are about parts and cosmology is about the whole. If we had a healthy cosmology we would realize that there is room for all the parts. But none of the parts should be confused with the whole and that is what we have been doing in terms of religious one? upmanship for the past many centuries. I think we have to go deeper. In what way are meditation and art expressions of deep ecumenism? Meditation calms our mind and gets us to see things more as a whole, to reconnect heart and mind, and to stir healthy energy. Music, painting, and dance also involve an encounter with the divine. But in our culture we have cut off art from its spiritual base. We have made it into an ego thing, an investment thing. It's been capitalized. Art is too sacred for that. Art is for the community, not for the ego. Recently I met a young man in his thirties of Native American ancestry who is an amazing artist. At seventeen, he was producing beautiful pieces. Art dealers were creating an empire with it. He got fed up with all that and just stopped painting. Now he gives his art away to people. He doesn't want to make money from his art, because when he does his art he feels that something bigger is working through him. Spirit is working through him. He doesn't want to make his art into a commodity. I find a purity in that. It is an ancient insight, premodern. Look at a medieval cathedral. Artists didn't sign their name on the stained glass or on the statues. That is a very modern thing to do. We need to get back to the idea that art is for the community and that the community uses it for healing and celebrating. Ritual is the ultimate art form. It is where the community comes together to do its praising and grieving and healing, So I feel very strongly that we have to reinvent art, farming, and everything else. You have reinvented ritual with your Techno Cosmic Masses. Isn't that an example of ritual being used to deepen one's sense of spirituality? Yes. With the Techno Cosmic Mass we are deconstructing the liturgical tradition of the West. We're not throwing the mass out with the bathwater; we're deconstructing it and putting it back together with today's language of trance dance, rap, multimedia, live music, and indigenous drumming. The results are very powerful. The Techno Cosmic Masses attract people of many generations and many traditions. Not long ago a man of twenty came up to me after a mass and told me that it was the first one he had attended. He said: "Finally, religion 2000! All my life I was waiting for religion to catch up with culture. The moment in the mass when I saw a Muslim woman, an African man, a rabbi, and a Catholic priest praying together, that's when I said to myself, religion 2000." Now, that's ecumenism! We're praying together, not in our separate little ghettos, not in our separate little churches, synagogues, or temples, but together. We're finding forms that are traditional enough to hold the ancestral energy, but flexible enough to encompass the new cosmology and the new art forms of technomusic and multimedia. Malidoma Soma says, "There is no community without ritual." Ritual builds interdependence and community. We have had enough experience after three years with the Techno Cosmic Mass to know that we are on to something here. People are starving for ritual that is not just rote. I was in England recently and was talking to some Quakers, who are minimalist when it comes to ritual. They quoted George Fox: "Beware of form without power." That is a marvelous statement for our day. The forms that we have in religion today lack power. If they are lacking power, then it is idolatry to give them our time. When I told the Quakers of the technocosmic mass, they were excited that we have gotten people up and out of the pews and moving. Here might be a form with power so Quakers could participate fully! When everyone dances, everyone is a priest. Everyone is responsible for their own breath, which is spirit, and no one is waiting for someone at the front to do it for them. The very heart of our revolution is to replace sitting with dancing. Dancing is a very ancient way of praying. Every indigenous tribe?African, Native American, Celtic has dancing as the key to prayer, not just holding a book in your hand. Another main idea of deep ecumenism is service and compassion, taking what one has received and canying it out into the world.. Definitely. This is something all the traditions have in common. Compassion is the essential name for God, according to the Jewish tradition. Jesus said: "Be you compassionate, even as your creator is compassionate." So the whole idea is that our divinity comes through in our compassion. Compassion is about our interdependence. It is about celebrating together by means of the fitual we have been talking about. It is also about living each other's pain and suffering and working for justice. Compassion carries both of these energies. All traditions talk about compassion in their own way. This is why Buddha came, why Jesus came, why Moses came, why Black Elk came, why Chief Seattle came. Compassion is a rare commodity and we have sentimentalized it. We've misunderstood it. As Meister Eckhart says, "Compassion means justice." Compassion is about working from our common humanity and making equality happen. Compassion is about being a spiritual warrior. What we have to do as a species, and as individuals today, will require strong hearts. We have turned warriorhood over to the Pentagon and the military and then the rest of us watch television. So, we need to move from "couch-potato-itis" to being prophets. We all need to be part of the energy of the warrior. What the warrior does that the soldier doesn't do is inner work. We need to work on ourselves and not just the enemy outside. That takes us back to the theme of spiritual discipline and meditation. Being a warrior means keeping the heart centered and clear and knowing what the real issues are. It means opening up the doors of creativity so that we can contribute the best of what we have. Using our creativity to correct things that are wrong today really does seem to be what the Divine is asking of us right now. Right. And that takes courage. I like the example of Julia Butterfly. She lived in the redwood trees for two years to hold off the loggers and has just written a book about her experience, which was much more difficult than I had imagined. The wind and weather were horrible, and so were attacks by the loggers. Her plan was to live in the redwood trees for two weeks, but it turned out to be two years. She went up there with a young man who left after three days because he got angry at the loggers. She said she could see in his face that anger was taking him over. This is a perfect example of the difference between a soldier and a warrior. He was a soldier and he was there to fight. He didn't do his inner work. Butterfly, however, was raised in a preacher's family and she knew how to pray. She said prayer helped her to recycle her anger. She actually got to the point of building relationships with loggers who initially were her enemies. She would call out: "Do you have kids? Why are you doing this?" When they told her they needed jobs, she said: "But if you tear the trees down, your kids won't have any jobs, will they? So why don't we find something else to do?" She was building a relationship with them and to me that is the marvelous difference between a soldier and a warrior. A warrior is more supple and more relational. Interestingly, in that situa- tion both a male and a female were involved. Julia Butterfly had something in her that turned her into a warrior. The man didn't and unfortunately this is true of many males in our culture. Males can become turned off to their feelings at a very early stage and lock them inside. We all know about soldierhood. We know how to beat up people in team sports. We know how to make money. But that is not what I mean by warriorhood, which involves bringing compassion and creativity to the situation. Do you think churches and religion can Play a role in deep ecumenism? And what role can new types of spiritual communities play? Many of the traditional churches need reinventing, just like farming and education and so many other areas of life. Efforts to do that are going on right now. I don't want to count the churches out. But I am not going to sit around and wait to be led by them either. Many of these churches are in a quagmire. They are still putting people in pews and telling them what to do. Meanwhile, the young people have exited. But there is a tremendous interest in spirituality today. Many new communities are emerging. Some of them are pretty far out, so we have to keep our wits about us. I think it is time to study our spiritual traditions, both intellectually and in practice. That is what we try to do here at the University of Creation Spirituality. We need both heart and head. On the one hand, there are groups that are so into bliss and feel good that they ignore the shadow, they ignore the justice issues, and they are anti-intellectual. They just want to emote and float. And that is not enough. The heart is not enough. Certainly it is the center, but we have an intellect, too. So, I don't want to count any tradition out and I don't want to count any new effort out. I am for tradition, as long as we spell it with a small "t" and not make it an idol and an orthodoxy. The image I use in one of my books is that the church is a burning building and we must run in there and seize what is most valuable and useful, then let the rest go. After all, Jesus got along without a lot of what we now call religion. He didn't need it. We all have to travel a lot lighter into this new millennium. We need to lighten our own spiritual loads and then we can appreciate others more. Vhere do we go from here? I think that as we enter this new century and this new millennium we need some appropriate myths that can ennoble and inspire us. I learned that the eighteen themes I write about in One,ffiver, Many Wells are actually myths. For example, that community is possible is a myth. It is also a myth that we are capable of compassion. What really got Christianity going was a new myth plus a social revolution. That combination was unbeatablethe right myth at the right time. So, if we can gather around these eighteen myths and there may be others we don't know what might happen. We could create some kind of incandescent fever to light up our species. Most people think of myth as make?believe, as some kind of fanciful story. In what sense do you mean myth? Actually the Greek myths were very profound stories about our psychological makeup and about salvation and healing. The great stories, the great works of literature, are myths. They are about that which unites us. These ideas are so big they had to come out as stories rather than scientific facts. The point is that humanity cannot be inspired by facts. If we could be inspired by facts alone, we would have solved the ecological crisis years ago because the facts are there. No, we need myths, because myths contain energy, hope, vision, and imagination. Myths turn us on. They inspire the artist to create theater and ritual and new forms of society to stir things up. So, I think the word myth needs redeeming for the post-modern age. We don't have an equivalent word for it. It really means collective imagination. Isn't the great myth, the great story for our time, the story of cosmology? That's right. The new universe story is very important in these postmodern times, as are our stories as individuals and as a people. The African?American story, the Celtic story, the Native American story, the Jewish story, and our ancestral stories. Each of these myths are stories of compassion, stories that say suffering is real but it can be lived through without going into denial. The postmodern political movements are the result of stories. The women's movement came about because women got together and told one another their stories. The same is also true for the men's movement and for Alcoholics Anonymous. Stories tell us that we are not alone, we have allies, we have support, we have community. Storytelling empowers us and redeems all of us. It tells us that we all drink from the same river. AUGUST 2000 Science of Mind |
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