GENESIS, LOGOS, SOPHIA
©February 1999 by Sea Raven
"In the beginning there was the divine
word and wisdom.
The divine word and wisdom was there with God,
and it was what God was.
It was there with God from the beginning,
Everything came to be by means of it;
nothing that exists came to be without its agency.
In it was life,
and this life was the light of humanity.
Light was shining in darkness,
and darkness did not master it." 1
Western Christian religion, especially the Protestant tradition, is liable for much of the degradation and destruction of the Planet's life systems, including humanity itself. The mechanistic definition of the natural world, eliminating "soul" and "spirit" from everything not specifically "male" and "intellectual" is like a virus that has infected the universe story told by both science and religion for the past 300-400 years. Yet the story told by the Judeo-Christian traditions is resilient. When the Gallileon revolution challenged the "triple-deck" view of the Universe, the Church rejected the "new age" at first, but eventually re-framed the scriptural interpretations, scrapped mysticism, and embraced the idea that the Earth and its resources are for the exclusive use of "mankind." 2 Now at the end of the second millennium of the Common Era, Western Christianity is also caught between what Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry describe as the "anthropocentric and the biocentric norms of reality and value" (The Universe Story, p. 250 3 ). Which side will ultimately prevail is impossible to predict, but the battle lines are forming between fundamentalist literalists and prophetic universalists.
The Genesis story was first written during a time of exile of the Hebrew people in Babylon as a tool to maintain a spiritual and political identity. The story was retold by the writer of John's Gospel sometime in the second century of the common era to establish a new identity for a group of believers who found themselves on the cutting edge of political influence. The time has come to recreate the story, as The Jesus Seminar has done in the translation quoted above, in response to the "special need in this transitional phase out of the Cenozoic to awaken a consciousness of the sacred dimension of the Earth" (The Universe Story, p. 250). It must be a transition from the anthropocentric Word (logos) to an inclusive understanding of Wisdom (Sophia).
For bio-centric universalists, the Genesis of being can only be expressed as metaphor, whether it is scientific or religious. The ancient words, translated and retranslated still describe the "primordial flaring forth:" "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," (Genesis 1:1) but it is earth-centered: "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light" (Genesis 1:2-3). The Christian "New Testament" Gospel of John as translated by the Jesus Seminar is more sophisticated -- a mystical "new covenant" in which the "word and wisdom" of God brings forth the Light -- but it is the light of humanity, not photons. The Judeo-Christians emerged from the primordial earth-centered matrix into the anthropocentric universe that still holds sway nearly 3 millennia later:
In [the word and wisdom
of God] was life,
and this life was the light of humanity.
Light was shining in darkness,
and darkness did not master it.
Nevertheless, the metaphor translates into the poetic language of the Universe Story: "In the center of our own Milky Way galaxy a black hole churns..." (P. 50) trapping the photons so that no light can escape; yet the neutrinos manage to fly away from imploding stars, to form new beings and the process continues. So the darkness does not master the light. Instead, the darkness gives birth to the light. Mystic religion has never abandoned the truth of the metaphor, even though it seems earth-bound. But we are not merely earth-beings. We are star-stuff, and we seem to know that intuitively. Our myths help us to deal with the greatest of paradoxes -- that from destruction and death, comes new life. The Black Goddess Kali, the Morrigan, the Cailleach, Hecate, Grandmother Spiderwoman - all are expressions of the myth that the Logos and Sophia of God are manifestations of the light that shines in the darkness that cannot quench it. Even the possible "Death Spike" that could at any moment slice through our own Galaxy would "scatter us into elementary particles" that would start the process again (p. 51).
In our "enlightened" Western mind-set, death and destruction are buried in the unconscious mind, covered over with consumerism. But where the shadow is denied, the shadow reigns supreme. The religion that gets all the press is grounded in fear that the "Devil" and a vengeful, angry "God" will "get you" for your inevitable "sin." One could read the description of the "Death Spike" rifling through the Galaxy as a perfect metaphor for the Scythe in the hands of Death; the long-predicted Apocalypse. Biocentric faith grounded in love is not so easy because in order to win through the fear, one must not only confront it but embrace it and take it in. The Four Paths of Creation Spirituality provide a road-map for creating a new myth to counter the old fear. The Via Positiva, the place of awe and wonder, is precisely the place where wisdom is found. The "fear" of the Lord that Job talks about is not animal terror, but the realization of the awesome creative power of God at the heart of the Cosmos. From that place we fall into the Via Negativa, the primordial silence full of all sound, and nothingness full of the elements of creation. In Meister Eckhart's Sermon 18 (Breakthrough, pp. 256-257 4 ) he says,
"If your eye wishes to see all things and your ear to hear all things and your heart to ponder all things, your soul must truly be dispersed in all these things. Therefore a master of the spiritual life says, "If people are to accomplish a spiritual deed, they must collect all their powers, as if into a corner of their souls, and conceal themselves from all images and forms." Then they can accomplish their deed.... In this way you have to divest yourself of all your activities and bring all your powers to silence if you really wish to experience this birth within yourself. If you wish to find the newborn King, you must outrun and cast behind you everything else you may find."
The birth that is found is deep Self, and the creativity for the work of transformation -- the Via Creativa and the Via Transformativa. At those deep levels, we discover our relationship to Creator and discover that all Beings are our relations. In his 3rd Sermon, Eckhart argues that when God created the Universe, "the deed is so great that this deed is nothing other than love. Again, love is nothing other than God. God loves himself and his nature, his being, and his divinity. In the same love, however, in which God loves himself, he also loves all creatures, not as creatures but he loves the creatures as God. In the same love in which God loves himself, he loves all things." This is the beginning of Compassion. Further, Eckhart goes so far as to say "God becomes God where all creatures express God." In Matt Fox's discussion (Breakthrough, p. 79) he says, "And creatures know, however dimly it can be remembered, that they speak for God. ... Humans too, actually need the world in order to know God." Matt quotes Eckhart then: "If [humans] could know God without the world, the world would never have been created for the soul's sake." This is an astounding insight, in light of the Universe story as told by Swimme and Berry, who speak of a creative intentionality in evidence from the first explosive "seed event." In Sermon 31, Eckhart says, "The highest work that God has ever worked in all creatures is compassion ... Whatever God does, the first outburst is always compassion." Again, Eckhart's mystical revelation reflects the intentionality and the interrelationship in the Universe, flowering forth from the original "seed event." Other metaphors are "God," "Wisdom," "Sophia."
"All that exists in the universe traces back to this exotic, ungraspable seed event, a microcosmic grain, a reality layered with the power to fling a hundred billion galaxies through vast chasms in a flight that has lasted fifteen billion years. The nature of the universe today and of every being in existence is integrally related to the nature of this primordial Flaring Forth. The universe is a single multiform development in which each event is woven together with all others in the fabric of the space-time continuum" (The Universe Story, p. 21).
In a diverse, self-actualizing, relational (or communal) universe, an interventionist "God" makes no sense at all. Throughout the Universe Story, Wisdom is the generative force. Contained in the primordial point where it all began is the Wisdom that knows the precise timing and balance of elements; the Cosmic Consciousness that finds the proper niche for each of the billions of transformations that result ultimately (from humanity's point of view) in life on Earth. Here is Eckhart's first outburst of Compassion, which leads to justice, which is the saving grace of humanity.
The institutional church has begun to embrace "eco-justice" as equal in importance to social and political justice. The Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation (1996) says:
We call on all those who are committed to the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to affirm the following principles of biblical faith:
The cosmos, in all its beauty, wildness and life-giving bounty, is the work of our personal and loving Creator.
Our creating God is prior to and other than creation, yet intimately involved with it, upholding each thing in its freedom, and all things in relationships of intricate complexity. God is transcendent, while lovingly sustaining each creature; and immanent, while wholly other than creation and not to be confused with it.
The Creator's concern is for all creatures. God declares all creation "good" ...
Men, women, and children have a unique responsibility to the Creator; ... Created in God's image, [we] also have a unique responsibility for creation. Our actions should both sustain creation's fruitfulness and preserve creation's powerful testimony to its creator. ...
The earthly result of human sin has been a perverted stewardship, a patchwork of garden and wasteland in which the waste is increasing. "There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land ... Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away" (Hosea 4:1,3). Thus, one consequence of our misuse of the earth is an unjust denial of God's created bounty to other human beings, now and in the future.
But eco-justice as inferred in this quote seems to mean the "unjust denial of God's created bounty to other human beings, not that sustainable life practices extend Creator's bounty to all of creation, or to "all our relations," in the Native American cosmology. Starhawk, a Witch grounded in the justice traditions of Judaism, published her "Declaration of the Four Sacred Things" in her novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (Bantam 1993):
The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth.
Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.
To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.
All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance; only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.
To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.
To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.
Christian theology generally is missing the cosmic ingredient that will bring most garden-variety Christians (even the ones willing to declare for the bio-centric camp) from the anthropomorphic stewardship of the earth to Starhawk's call for justice. "Only justice can assure balance; only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity." The problem is to find a meaningful definition of "spirit." That word is not included in the index of the Universe Story, but it certainly lives in the subtext where a psychic dimension is found in the impulse to all elemental beings to seek out a niche where they can grow and develop and mutate and relate to other elemental beings. The terms describing the "cosmogenetic principle ... characterized by differentiation, autopoiesis, and communion as "diversity, self-manifestation, and mutuality" (pp. 71-72) sound like the basis for a trinitarian theology, or "spiritology" that might carry human minds beyond the need to personalize or iconize Creator. The challenge is to develop liturgy that expresses non-anthropomorphic metaphor.
The most open-minded Christian, whether clergy or lay, seems to harbor a kind of xenophobia of anything that is not "scripturally based." Scripture, however, offers us mystery, not answers:
But where shall wisdom
be found?
And where is the place of understanding?
Humanity does not know the way to it,
and it is not found in the land of the living ...
God understands the way to it, and God knows its place.
Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom ...
Job 28:12, 23, 28
"O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all..." Psalm 104:24
Hymnody is beginning to fill in some of the gaps:
God, who stretched the
spangled heavens infinite in time and place,
Flung the suns in burning radiance through the silent fields of space;
We, your children, in your likeness, share inventive powers with you;
Great Creator, still creating, show us what we yet may do.
We have ventured worlds
undreamed of since the childhood of our race;
Known the ecstasy of winging through untraveled realms of space;
Probed the secrets of the atom, yielding unimagined power,
Facing us with life's destruction or our most triumphant hour.
As each far horizon
beckons, may it challenge us anew,
Children of creative purpose, serving others, honoring you.
May our dreams prove rich with promise, each endeavor well begun;
Great Creator, give us guidance till our goals and yours are one.
New Century Hymnal, p. 556
The traditional seven sacraments in the Christian tradition have nearly all been in reaction to an interventionist "God": baptism marks the newborn as belonging to God; confirmation celebrates the conscious choice to align oneself with God; communion commemorates the saving death that reconciles the sinner with God; ordination is the designation of a mediator between ordinary people and God; marriage started out as a sacred reenactment of the unity between humanity and God; confession is the acknowledgment of falling out of relationship with God; anointing at the point of death returns the soul to God. Suppose that liturgy was written for these seven sacraments that would reflect our relationship to Brian Swimme's "all nourishing abyss," or the Native American's "Great Spirit," or simply "Creator"? The purpose of liturgy would then be to remind us of our place in the Universe and our relationship to all the elements that comprise the Universe. Such liturgy would lead us far deeper than simply the idea that humans are "co-creators with God." Rather these liturgies would teach us to experience that we are woven into the fabric, and part of the whole process. As Brian Swimme encourages in The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos (p. 42), "In a culture where cosmology is living, children are taught by the Sun and Moon, by the rainfall and starlight, by the salmon run and the periwinkle's hideout. It has been so long since we moderns have lived in such a world, it is difficult to picture, but we can just now begin to imagine what it might be like for our children, or for our children's children."
The following liturgy for Christian Communion begins to address this need. By substituting the word "Wisdom" for "God," the liturgy approaches the universality I am striving for. It was based on the liturgy developed by Hal Taussig in his 1986 book Wisdom's Feast. (5)
COMMUNION RITUAL
INVOCATION
L: Wisdom comes to meet us in every thought; She pervades and permeates all things.
P: Wisdom is found in the midst of the people; She is at play everywhere in the world.
L: Wisdom raises her voice in the public square; She sends her power from one end of the Universe to the other, ordering all things for good.
P: Wisdom is the Tree of Life for those who hold her fast.
INVITATION
L: Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and those who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without price, for Wisdom calls us away from oppression and greed to a realm of justice and love; Wisdom calls us away from famine and poverty to an abundance of milk and honey.
P: We have ignored the Call and abandoned the Wisdom that Jesus taught us, but we remember when we share this Feast.
CONSECRATION:
L: Jesus taught us that Life is a willing sacrifice; When we give our lives for Wisdom's cause, we cannot lose. [Celebrant breaks the bread]
P: Blessed be the One who comes in the name of the Lord!
L: Wisdom is like a vine putting out graceful shoots; her blossoms bear the fruit of glory and wealth. [Celebrant pours the wine into a chalice]
P: Blessed be the One who comes in the name of the Lord!
L: To remember Wisdom is as sweet as honey; to inherit Wisdom is as sweet as the honeycomb. [Celebrant pours honey into a bowl]
P: Blessed be the One who comes in the name of the Lord!
L: Wisdom is our perfect food; it is all we need. [Celebrant pours milk into a cup]
P: Blessed be the One who comes in the name of the Lord!
All partake of the elements on the table, passing the Bread so that each person can dip portions of it into the wine, the honey, and the milk, as desired.
NOTES
1. The Gospel of John 1:1-5, The
Five Gospels, Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and The Jesus
Seminar, Harper SanFrancisco,
1997. Return to text
2. The
Catholic Church did hold out until late into the 20th
Century before dismissing the charges of heresy against Copernicus
and Galileo, but nevertheless entered whole-heartedly into the
exploitaiton of all worlds found during the Age of Discovery.
Return to text.
3. The Universe Story Return to text
4. Breakthrough, Matthew Fox,
Image Books 1980 Return to text
5. Wisdom's Feast Return
to text