Creation Spirituality @ Trinity UMC

I'm reposting the following from the website of Trinity United Methodist Church in Austin, TX, because it seems worthwhile for us to reflect on.

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Trinity’s Statement Regarding Creation Spirituality

Trinity’s clergy support Creation Spirituality, a movement that draws on ancient spiritual traditions and contemporary science to awaken authentic mysticism, revitalize Christianity and Western culture, and promote social and ecological justice. Creation Spirituality teaches that God permeates all things and that humanity is created blessed, not tainted by original sin. In this paradigm, Christ is God’s liberating and reconciling energy, transforming individuals and society’s structures into conduits of compassion. As we embody God’s love, we become the Creation that God intends.

Creation Spirituality draws on the earliest traditions of the Hebrew Bible and has been celebrated under various names over the centuries, most notably by the Rhineland Christian mystics of medieval Europe. It is an eclectic tradition that honors women’s wisdom and the cosmologies of indigenous cultures around the planet. Creation Spirituality seeks to revitalize contemporary worship by asking what would happen if, instead of requiring artists to conform to established worship practices, Christian worship adapted to the creativity of artists.

Ten Principles of Creation Spirituality

1. The universe is a blessing, that is, something God created and we experience as “very good.”
2. Humans need to relate to the universe as a whole as we are a microcosm of that macrocosm.
3. Everyone is a mystic, born full of wonder and capable of recovering it at any age and of not taking the awe and wonder of existence for granted.
4. Everyone is a prophet, a ‘mystic in action’ who is called to interfere with what interrupts authentic life. We are called to the margins of the status quo to interrupt systems that marginalize other humans, creatures and our Mother, the Earth.
5. Everyone is an artist. Art as meditation is a primary form of prayer for releasing our images and empowering the community and each of us. Art finds its fulfillment in ritual, the community’s art.
6. Everyone and everything expresses divinity. All humans are all children of God; therefore, we have Divine blood in our veins and the Divine breath in our lungs; and the basic work of God is Compassion.
7. Divinity is as much Mother as Father, as much Child as Parent, as much Godhead [mystery] as God [history], as much beyond all beings as in all beings.
8. We experience the Divine in all things and all things are in the Divine. This mystical experience supplants the experience of the Divine as separate and unattainable.
9. Humans have to dig and work at finding the deep self, the true self, the spirit self. This is the spiritual journey. It is not so much about “adding on” as it is “letting go.” If we do not undergo the spiritual journey, we live superficially out of fear or greed or addiction or someone else’s expectations of us.
10. The spiritual journey is an ever-expanding spiral encompassing four paths: Via Positiva: Befriending Creation – wonder, delight, revelry. Via Negativa: Befriending Darkness – emptiness, sinking, suffering. Via Creativa: Befriending Our Sacredness – creating, awakening, birthing. Via Transformativa: Befriending New Creation – coming home, doing, justice.

After Christmas

From W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being”

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –
Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week –
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully –
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.

This excerpt from the end of Auden's long Christmas poem is particularly appropriate for this time of year. It gets at the mix of nostalgia and hope and often disappointment that attends the holiday season. The speaker meditates on missing it, yet again, by not being fully attentive to the “promising child.” His best intentions to love both his relatives and his God have once again been derailed by distraction and by the reality that love is not easy. He is disappointed to return to “the time being”—the time of going to work, scrubbing the table. On another level, Auden's poem speaks to me about my journey in prayer, because I have higher intentions and hopes than are actually realized. Another year gone by and I'm not as committed, centered, mindful as I had hoped I would be. My prayer life has been, for the most part, a series of misses. Just like the speaker of the poem, I catch a glimpse of something beautiful and life-changing, only to be drawn away to my own distractions and shortcomings. It is difficult to retain a sense of God's presence and love, in spite of my best intentions.

But this might be the wrong way to think about it. The shattering of my idealistic expectations about the Christian life is not a failure. Prayer is not easy. Even one glimpse of God at the stable where “Everything became a You and nothing was an It” is enough to leave one changed, reborn. This insight takes root and changes us from the inside out. The final line that I've quoted invokes Buber, who suggests two primary modes of existence: I-It and I-Thou. We primarily move in the I-It dimension, in which we see ourselves, God, other people as objects that can be known, used, and perhaps exploited. There is nothing inherently wrong with the I-It, but it is severely limited. With God's help, we become aware of the I-Thou dimension, by which God, ourselves, and other people are recognized as infinitely valuable persons to be in relation with but never fully known, because to know fully would render the Thou an It. The encountered Thou, Buber writes, "has no borders." The I-Thou is relation without the violence of objectification. Contemplative prayer helps us to recognize God as Thou. Our moments of insight—whether at Christmas or at other times—can move us in this process of awakening to the infinite God. Even as we must return to the concerns of the time being, prayer helps us to slowly grow in the awareness that God is infinite Thou, as are God's creatures. It is this beautiful vision of love and connection with God, with other people, and with myself that sustains me in prayer even when I seem to miss it (again).

Our Calling

As this new year of 2011 begins, I have been reflecting on our community. Below I mix in some of our website statements of who we are with a few comments.

We take our name from the metaphor of living stones in I Peter 2:5 because we are committed to being the kind of spiritual community pictured in this section of Scripture and throughout the New Testament. We find meaning and support in belonging to one another in a simple but explicit way. It provides us a sense of identity and mutuality. Ours is a “little way,” and we don’t seek to draw energy or resources toward ourselves in a demanding manner.

As a Christian community, we seek to support the work of the church of Jesus Christ and the growth of God’s Kingdom through supporting one another in our individual families, churches, and daily work. Daily life is the proving ground of our spirituality.

In his book Where God Happens, Rowan Williams wrote, “The church is always renewed from the edges rather than from the center.” As I understand the intent of our “little way,” we seek to be part of what God is doing in our time to renew and develop the church. I am grateful and excited to be part of this process with you.
--Rickey