Uncovering the Creation Spirituality Tradition: Chenu and Fox

Copyright 1995 by John R. Mabry

*This article previously appeared in an issue of _Creation Spirituality_ magazine.*

"Creation Spirituality honors what is. What was created by God is sacred. Spirit lies in understanding the deepest workings of nature."

The Twentieth century has ushered in more changes than the planet has ever known in a mere hundred years. It has also been pervaded by a feeling that something is very wrong, here. This intuition started as the vague and restless disillusionment of "the lost generation" in the wake of the Great War and has snowballed into a culturally pervasive anxiety that is ever increasing in its clarity and urgency. Our world is literally falling apart, physically and ideologically. The environmental cataclysm looms closer each year, with many projecting a mere twenty year window of time in which we must choose if our grandchildren will live or die. Our inherited worldview is already discredited, if not dead. The lie of European cultural superiority has left us a legacy of genocide, colonialism and imperialism. The authoritarian paternalism of our religious systems has robbed us of our self-trust, and has so convinced us of our spiritual poverty that we have become discouraged and immobilized. In our scrutiny of the parts, the Cartesian model of the Universe blinded us to the whole, allowing us to perpetuate the fragmentation of our society, our psyches and our souls. There is a whole in the soul of our civilization which we have cumpulsively tried to fill with a host of addictions. Our religious structures have become political structures with their own myopic agendas and do not feed our spirits. For many, the old ways have brought us to the brink of destruction, and we are waking up to the knowledge that we must change or die.

It is into this milieu that Creation Spirituality has arrived, bringing for many hope for the future and empowerment to enact necessary changes in our personal and cultural lives. Creation Spirituality recognizes the primacy of our relationship with the Earth, and honors the interconnectivity of all living things. In it we recognize the intuitive wisdom of native peoples who honored such interconnectivity, and are enabled to set aside our cultural prejudices and learn from those whom we thought of as children not so very long ago. In it we rediscover what is valuable in our cultural and religious traditions. It allows us to name those ideas and structures which are destructive and abusive, and engenders the creativity necessary to generate alternatives, and to liberate the oppressed and discouraged. Creation Spirituality is about honoring in every facet of our lives. We honor the Earth, we honor her peoples. We honor our own stories, our pain and our intuition. We honor our intellectual and scientific heritage, our spiritual traditions, and the traditions of others.

But Creation Spirituality is not about easy answers. In our quest to honor all, we are required to hold what often seem to be opposites in tension, affirming the value and holiness of each. The black and white thinking that has so long pervaded our culture is set aside for a spirit of openness that honors ambiguity and which makes a place for mystery in our midst. Creation Spirituality often raises more questions than it answers, but it also enables us to learn to feel at home with our questions, hoping, as Rilke says, we may eventually grow into our answers. We do not throw out the philosophies of the enlightenment or the discoveries of science, but nor do we grant to them the status of inerrant scripture. We do not swallow whole the ideologies or dogmas of any alleged "authority", spiritual or political, but listen to the whispering of the Spirit in our experience, the extraordinary ordinariness where we find our lives.

The naming of Creation Spirituality begins with a French Roman Catholic theologian M.D. Chenu, who died at the age of 86 in 1990. It was he who identified the thread of a creation-centered spiritual tradition running through the history of the church that was antithetical to the dominant theology that originated in and revolved around sin and redemption. Again and again this tradition was suppressed and denied by the Church at large, yet it has never been lost. Wherever one finds awe and wonder in the world, as in Francis of Assissi, wherever one finds artistry and the creative impulse, as in the cathedral builders of the middle ages, wherever one finds quietude enough to sink into the depths of the soul, as in the desert fathers or the Rheinland mystics, wherever one finds the courage to speak the truth about injustice regardless of the consequences, as in Jesus of Nazereth, there Chenu found the thin but long thread of the creation-centered spiritual tradition.

But it was Chenu's student, American priest and scholar Matthew Fox, who took up the torch and brought it to the world. Shunning the academic protocol of interminable and unreadable theological treatises, Fox wrote for the masses. In his first trilogy of books, On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear, We, Whee, We, All the Way Home, and A Spirituality of Compassion, Fox began to explore the nature of this tradition he had uncovered, how it relates to a spirituality that is vibrant, sensual, creative, and most of all, alive. But it is in his next trilogy that Creation Spirituality emerged as a consistent and definable tradition. Original Blessing, which he calls a primer in Creation Spirituality is an exploration of the Four Paths, a guide to spiritual growth discovered in the writings of Meister Eckhart. The Coming of the Cosmic Christ reveals the divinity at the heart of all things, and discusses issues of justice and the renewal of public worship, while in Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth, Fox attempts to sum up the tradition, and winds up writing a liberation theology for First World peoples. In a third trilogy, Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality in New Translation, Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen, and Sheer Joy: Conversations on Creation Spirituality with Thomas Aquinas, Fox plumbs the depths of medieval scholarship to bring the roots of the creation-centered tradition to light, and to secure a place for Creation Spirituality in serious theological discourse. Through his magazine Creation Spirituality, and his accredited master's degree program, the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, Matthew Fox has sought to make the gifts of this rich tradition available to all to study and explore in depth.

But Matt Fox is not the guru of Creation Spirituality. He and Chenu have discovered a precious path obscured by centuries of neglect and poisonous spiritual direction. They have cleared the way and given it a name. Most of us who come this way have stumbled upon it by ourselves of necessity. I remember when I first read Matthew Fox's Original Blessing. A friend at church offered to buy me the book if I promised to read it. I found Original Blessing to be a landmark book, but not until I first came through a brief period of frustration and anger at its very existence. "I've worked for years to come to these conclusions!" I raged, "And here they are neatly laid out in this stupid book!" Once my anger abated, however, I realized what a gift it was. My path had been named, and I discovered that I was not alone on the journey.

Matthew Fox defined Creation Spirituality, but its limits are delineated only by the lived experience of those who have made the path their own. Ultimately, there is no dogma, no authority in Creation Spirituality. There is no one to say "This is Creation Spirituality, this is not." What Creation Spirituality is for each person must come as a result of his or her own process of faith, struggle, awe, and creativity. Creation Spirituality, therefore, is wherever we find it, when we are looking with true compassion, solidarity, and sincerity. The best gauge for whether or not something can be regarded as Creation Spirituality is found in the following questions: "Does it honor what is?" and "Is it welcoming to all?"