BEYOND THEOLOGY

“A Spiritual ity of Co-Creation” (#107)

Host: Have you ever heard the term “co-creation”? Have any idea what it means? Stay tuned and you’ll find out. Announcer: Production funding for this program has been provided in part by the Shumaker Family Foundation – promoting social and environmental justice, education, spirituality and the arts. Host: Most Americans are familiar with the biblical account of creation found in the book of Genesis -- God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. That’s the traditional Christian story of creation. Other religious traditions and cultures have their own creation stories. Many of those we’ve encountered in the production of this series express the sense that a new mythology is taking shape … one that revolves around the image of co-creation. Sister Joan Chittister is one of those helping give birth to this new concept. A member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania, she speaks of the need for a new approach to spirituality and a new way to conceive of humanity’s role in the evolving process of life on Earth.

(Program title) Joan Chittister (Benedictine Sisters of Erie): I have talked for the last several years about the need for a new spirituality in our time -- not simply an intellectual spirituality, not simply a relational spirituality, not simply a contemplative spirituality, but a spirituality that emerges out of the concept of the responsibility to co-creation – meaning: God did not create this world finished; God left the world unfinished for us to do, to complete. That’s how we understand the whole function of human science, human education, human charity, human spirituality.

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Narrator: In her conceptualization of God, Sister Joan Chittister sees an integration of male and female qualities, although the transcendent reality called God is itself neither male nor female. She believes that Christianity, as well as other religions, is being transformed by a spirituality of co-creation, which some may view as a process of feminization. Joan Chittister: Well, I’m not sure that it is a feminization process, but I do think it’s an equalization process, and the implications are for all religions is that we will begin to see the feminine face of God emerge in all of us -- men as well as women. We’ve lived a very masculine spirituality for a long, long time … for thousands of years. We’ll see now, for instance, in things as simple as women’s interpretation of the scriptures. If you look for instance at the Beatitudes -- Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount -- you see a very feminine approach to the world. When you hear “Peter, put away your sword”; when you hear “Father, forgive them” -- those are not the words or the voice of the great patriarchal power-mongers of the world. A whole part of Jesus has been lost in the masculinization of religion. John Shelby Spong (Retired Episcopal Bishop): And I think we’ve got to talk the Christian church in to a whole new approach. Narrator: Sister Joan isn’t the only one who’s advocating a creative, new approach within the Christian faith. John Shelby Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop, also calls for the reformulation of basic notions about spirituality and human nature. John Shelby Spong: I’m tired of having the Christian church be perceived as articulating negativity. When you come to church, we sort of theologically abuse you. We tell you what a wretched, miserable sinner you are. We sing “Amazing Grace,” and the only reason God’s grace is amazing is that it saved a wretch like you. We’re constantly insulting our humanity. We talk about children being born in sin. We talk about there is no health in us. We are not worthy to gather up the crumbs under God’s table. We insult people’s humanity over and over and over again. I don’t think that’s helpful. I’ve never known anybody to be helped by being told how wretched they are. It just doesn’t work. We all know that as parents … we know we don’t raise good children by every day reminding them what wretches they are … how they were born in sin. You hold them up; you love them into life; you treat them like sunshine on a flower. If you’ve ever watched a flower turn, drawn by photosynthesis to the sun; and when the sun touches it, it just blooms. That’s an analogy for what the love of God does with human life. So I think we’ve got to have a whole different approach. Narrator: The senior minister emeritus at Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. James Forbes, Jr., also speaks about the need for revising our notions about God in order to highlight the manner in which human beings may be seen to participate in a co-creative process.

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Dr. James Forbes, Jr. (Senior Minister Emeritus, Riverside Church, New York City): The term co-creation has come late. Earlier, it was that God created all of the building blocks but that we participate in determining what will happen with what is. So my early understanding of creation had to do with creation ex-nihilo -- God creating out of nothing, giving us the building blocks of reality, and then we are invited to be creative stewards of it and also artists in helping to shape and frame it. In a new sense, co-creation, particularly as I think of it after the order of Bishop Spong, suggesting that if we want to talk about the elemental building blocks of reality as having been given by God and therefore the original creator, we need also to suggest that the nature of the evolution of things in to what they are becoming that that has been something that was not just God, but that God in love invited us to be participants. Dr. James Forbes, Jr. (speaking to an assembled group): There’s a call … a recruitment call – who is willing to say “Lord, I’m willing to be your space for grace, so that what you do within me begins to help me to be an agent of transformation in the places where I shall be sent. Narrator: Dr. Forbes maintains that human beings also need to take responsibility for what we contribute to this co-creative process. Rev. Scotty McLennan, Dean of Religious Life at Stanford University, agrees with this perspective on the ethics of co-creation and the responsibility we have for what we do to the Earth. Scotty McLennan (Dean of Religious Life, Stanford University): I really think it’s important to see ourselves as co-creators with God. I think that’s part of what we were charged to do. We’re made in God’s image. We’re put on this Earth according to the Jewish and Christian and Muslim concepts of creation to be stewards of what we have here. So it really is our fault if we globally warm this Earth in such a way that we destroy it. It really is our fault if by development of and use of nuclear weapons we destroy this Earth. We are co-creators with God, and we also have the potential to destroy this Earth. Joan Chittister: Unless we see that we have a responsibility and put down this passive attitude of ‘they know best,’ ‘somebody else is doing it,’ ‘what power do I have,’ ‘how would I have anything to do with that?’ That’s all been heightened as well as obscured by the assembly-line mentality of the 20th century – ‘I don’t make nuclear bombs; I just rivet nose cones.’ By breaking down … by atomizing the process, we have atomized the human conscience and we have atomized the human being’s participation in the world. So recalling to ourselves that we are part of this great mosaic of human responsibility, I believe, is absolutely essential. Joan Chittister (speaking to audience): So we are, then, one with the entire universe. We are not separate from it. We’re all simply in it together, swimming in an energy that is God – all of us: Afghans and Iraqis, Palestinians and Israelis, Americans and Arabs, Christians and Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews. James Forbes, Jr.: We are granted out of love the participation to be in the laboratory with God and to help make stuff. And the challenge is: with this invitation, do we make that which tends towards destruction, war, chaos, the consummation of a kind of love affair with ourselves that allows us to consume the Earth? Or do we, in our partnership,

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create forms that enrich life, build upon, tend towards the fulfillment of more global sensitivity … teaches how even between species to have respect one for the other and that even the smallest speck is valued by the God who created it and how we have reverence for even that which is other than ourselves. That’s a part, I think, of the continuing creation. Joan Chittister: To bear in your own soul a spirituality of co-creation, you must ask: ‘for what am I responsible? What can I do to bring that creation to an even greater fullness?’ I’m not saying that the past was wrong. The past has brought all of us to exactly the point we are … starting with me. I am simply saying that the past is past and that we need to develop a spirituality proper to our times. Other than that, we will have religion, perhaps, but I’m not sure that the world will be better off because we’re in it. John Shelby Spong: An awful lot of religion is designed to make you feel secure – to give you peace of mind. Well, the tragedy of that is if they succeed, they take away your humanity. To be human is not to be secure. To be human is not to have peace of mind. What the Christian faith does for me is not to make me secure, but it gives me the courage to embrace the radical insecurity of my world and to continue to walk forward. That’s what it means to walk by faith. So I think I take this creature called “human” and I say we’ve got to discover what it means to live in a spiritual realm because that’s the native realm for transcendent human beings who possess that incredible gift of living in time and participating in transcendence. Narrator: What does it mean to “live in time & participate in transcendence?” Philosophers and theologians have been contemplating and debating such things for centuries. Scotty McLennan: I think most of our great religious traditions have always had a very powerful sense both of transcendence and of immanence … of an idea that there is a soul that you can access or the spirit of God that is within us. Or as I was saying earlier, the Quaker’s sense that there is that of God in all of us. Or you can imagine that actually it’s immanent in a more substantial way as the Hindus would say from a pantheistic sense -- all is one; one is all. God is in all things; all things are in God. And that’s a more full sense of immanence, as well … which again, the mystics tend to speak of quite easily, and tend to speak of across traditions. Narrator: In the Christian tradition, it’s been common to speak of three interrelated aspects of God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It’s this third dimension that appears be of particular importance in relation to the concept of co-creation. Scotty McLennan: I think the notion in the Christian trinity of Holy Spirit is very important and often forgotten. I think that you talk about the creator God and the incarnation in Jesus, but we forgot of the importance of the third part of the trinity -- the Holy Spirit. The sense that within all of us all the time God is present … that God is present in the world … that as Jesus left, he said ‘I leave behind the Holy Spirit with you.’ And that is the incarnating force, if you will, that’s here all the time for us.

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James Forbes, Jr.: I believe that the Holy Spirit is what Jesus promised us as the director of continuing education in our lives. But I believe that the Holy Spirit is not just my meditation in my own heart -- it is listening to the tradition of which I am a part, since there are wise men and women who have also been seeking to discern what Jesus means and what Jesus would have us do. So I have respect for the Bible that is attempting to remind us of what Jesus said; I have respect for the preaching and the teaching in history, where people in all sorts of circumstances have been trying to discern what the Holy Spirit would be saying to them. And so, if I take the personal experience, I take the Bible, I take the history of the church and I take the sense of the gathered community, even in reading other writers, I can sometimes discern more clearly what I have to do. John Shelby Spong: And so when I do my trinity, I talk of God as the ground of being – the source of all that is … that’s Father; I talk of God as the power of love – that’s the Jesus story; I talk of the Holy Spirit as the call to be all that we could be – to live fully; to love wastefully; to be all that we can be. That’s what I think the Christian message is. And that’s the message I think we’ve got to communicate in this world. And that’s a long way from the old traditional stuff that I grew up with, but I think that it’s the wave of the future. Narrator: To gain a sense of what may now be unfolding and what the future has in store, it might be helpful to reflect upon the past. Stephen Prothero of Boston University has studied religious trends in American history, delving into the history of Christianity in America. Stephen Prothero (Professor of Religion, Boston University): Well, one thing that really intrigues me is that Christianity is trinitarian, right? So it’s supposed to have these three persons -- one God manifest in these three ways, right? God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And it just seems to me … and maybe this comes from my study of Hinduism where you’ve got arguably millions of gods but people tend to pick one. It seems to me Christians do the same thing. So even those who are trinitarian they have a hard time saying … devoting a third of their attention to God the Father and a third of their attention to Jesus and a third of their attention to the Holy Spirit. It seems that Christians tend to pick. And so if you look at the colonial period and you look at Calvinists, they’re very clearly focused on God the Father. Their sermons are not about Jesus. They’re not about the Holy Spirit. They’re about God the Father. They’re quoting more from the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament than they are from the New Testament in their sermons. And then evangelicals in this evangelical century in 19th Century America and 20th Century very much focused on Jesus. And so we shift from God-fearing religion to Jesus-loving religion. We shift from the first person in the trinity to the second. And what intrigues me now is we may be shifting to the third person of the trinity … at least we are in some places. If you look at the fastest growing forms of Christianity in America, they tend to be Holy Ghost forms. They tend to be things like Pentecostalism. And if you look at these big mega-churches that are very popular, they’ve taken the cross out of them. They don’t tend to have crosses. They might tend to have little doves as symbols of the Holy Spirit. So there seems to be something going on. I don’t quite know what it is yet. It’s too early to know, and I’m a historian instead of a

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futurist … futurologist, whatever they call them, so it’s hard to know. But it seems to me there is renewed interest in the Holy Spirit. Narrator: What is the Holy Spirit? How do people think of something that’s depicted as a spirit? Where did the concept originate? Bishop Spong looks at it in relationship to The Bible. John Shelby Spong: In the biblical tradition, spirit is always the giver of life. The word in the Hebrew tradition that they’d liken to spirit was their word for wind -- ruwach. They had another word for breath called naphach. And both of them got identified with the animating power of the spirit. In the creation story, the biblical myth of creation where God molds Adam out of the dust of the Earth … then the story, if you read it in Hebrew, actually has God coming on top of Adam and doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and breathing the breath of God into him. That’s what made him, according to biblical texts, a spiritual being. He was alive with the life of God within him. So spirit was always the life force. And I think that’s a powerful image. Narrator: The notion of a life force that pervades the universe is not a concept that’s unique to Christianity. Although there may be different images, ideas and names associated with it, the basic concept transcends theological boundaries. Even a Buddhist meditation teacher like Alan Wallace can relate to the notion of the Holy Spirit…. B. Alan Wallace (Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies): Absolutely, though I think the word Holy Spirit has everything to do with breath. And it's a great metaphor. Breathe in. Breathe in all the blessings of Jesus or God or the holy beings -- the saints -- whoever is out there, you know, on a transcendent realm. Breathe in their blessings. Call for them through supplicatory prayer. Call in their blessings. Breathe in deeply. Be nourished by that breath, and then breathe out and bring it out into the world where it's tangible: an act of kindness, a word of kindness, a donation, your occupation, whatever it may be. It's a great metaphor … all breathing together. Alan Wallace (leading meditation): … and to round off this initial settling of the body, let’s take three, slow, deep breaths – breathing through the nostrils…. Narrator: Focusing on the breath can itself be an effective way to calm the mind and connect with the spirit. Many are concerned and agitated, however, because the air we’re breathing today, as well as the Earth itself, has become more polluted in many places. Joan Chittister: If you want to look for a movement of the Holy Spirit, this is certainly it -- the consciousness that what we do to nature, we do eventually to ourselves … and we are doing to other people. We are destroying life, you see. And the people who have come to understand that our rape and destruction of the Earth is actually an attack on the sacrament of life are the people who are calling us to a fullness of spirituality.

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Narrator: A spirituality of co-creation appears to imply that human beings have a sacred role to play in the ongoing evolution of life on Earth. This isn’t a totally new concept, but it does represent a significant departure from the way things have been. Joan Chittister: Actually, religion has had a great deal to do with creating the situation we’re in right now. We taught a theology of domination. We were the top of the creative chain, and therefore everything else was just a cornucopia of benefits given to us for our use. There was no cost implied whatsoever. As a result of that theology of domination, there was never any thought that this was … could be … the last redwood forest … that this rain forest had any use except to us whatsoever. There’s no cost to be implied when you dirty the water and choke up the lakes and destroy the fish. The fact of the matter is that everything I do has a ripple effect in this society. It’s the … again, the American Indian spirituality of make no decisions unless you have determined how they will affect the seventh generation. It’s knowing that what you do does have a universal effect, and holding yourself responsible for that. Narrator: There are few who take their responsibilities more seriously than the Benedictine Sisters. They start each day by affirming their devotion to the Creator and then reach out to serve the world in a co-creative spirit that draws upon both male and female imagery. Joan Chittister: I don’t think we lack for icons and images. We lack for rational consciousness of the irrationality of our present system. It’s half a system; it’s half a consciousness; it’s half a presence; and it’s half the face of God. Narrator: Co-creation … the feminine face of God … Holy Spirit – these are all concepts that leave a lot to the imagination. They can be found in various forms in a number of different spiritual traditions throughout history. As progressive Christians like Joan Chittister and the others we’ve just heard from draw upon these images to fashion a new approach to spirituality, they’re prompting and prodding others to think outside the box and move beyond theology to a consciousness of collaboration. I’m Charles Atkins, Jr. Thanks for being with us.

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Narrator: Have you ever heard someone say “I’m a spiritual person, but not really religious”? What do you suppose they mean by that? Scotty McLennan (Stanford University): And they tend to mean that they’ve left institutional religion; they’ve left groups, other people, leaders that they say they can no longer trust. Joan Chittister (Benedictine Sisters of Erie): Religion wakes us up to the rest of creation – to the ultimate in creation. Spirituality is my own immersion in that consciousness.

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Narrator: Learn more about the distinction between spirituality and religion. Tune in for the next edition of Beyond Theology. Announcer: Production funding for this program has been provided in part by the Shumaker Family Foundation – promoting social and environmental justice, education, spirituality and the arts.

Topeka Copyright 2007