Foreword

By the Reverend Dr. Matthew Fox

I welcome this book with open arms, and I am pleased to be invited to pen a foreword for it. As an elder, now living my seventy-fifth year on this planet, one looks to the upcoming generations for hope and for leadership that will make a difference in our world where strife and self-centeredness, the reptilian brain and mindlessness, so often dominate. One looks for signs that rigid religion need not perpetuate itself and space is made for justice and compassion to assert themselves in all our relations, whether that be with one another or with Earth and her marvelous creatures.

This book offers such a vision in both a theological and a practical way, for it presents many insightful breakthroughs in the Western grasp of the person of Jesus while it brings the wisdom of the East and West together, enlivens body and spirit, and moves us beyond a world of dualisms and antimatter philosophies to a consciousness that opts for a sacred marriage of the divine feminine and sacred masculine. It also offers concrete practices to get there from here. It warms this creation spirituality theologian’s heart to know that a new generation is coming along, not just to carry on the tradition but to offer genuinely fresh rapprochements in all these important areas. Let me elaborate a bit more.

Back in 1988 I wrote my book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, and in it I coined a new term, deep ecumenism, which I derived from my Buddhist friend Joanna Macy, who was actively involved in the work of deep ecology. Deep ecology was that movement for environmental rights that operated not out of a mere secular political context of “we are right and you are wrong and we are going to defeat you polluters” but included the dimension of the sacred: that there is a holiness to creation that cannot be bought, sold, and discarded lightly; that every being has its integrity and right to exist; and indeed that every being is a Cosmic Christ, a Buddha Nature, an Image of the One who is beyond all names.

By adapting that language to the ongoing dialogues between faith traditions that flourished in a special way after the Second Vatican Council, I was underscoring the spiritual dimension needed for a deeper interfaith encounter. I abhorred the dialogue that stopped at the superficial level of theological position papers—“We believe this. What do you believe?”—and wanted to engage at the deeper level of what Father Bede Griffiths calls the “cave of the heart,” where mystical experience takes route as a connection to the Source and in turn gives birth to prophetic actions that result in justice making.

The book was released at the same time that I was punished with an enforced year of silence by Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who was then the inquisitor general at the Sacred Congregation for the Propogation of the Faith (previously known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition) in Pope John Paul II’s Vatican.

Today the term deep ecumenism is still in circulation, but other language has emerged as well, such as interfaith and interspirituality. A graduate of my master’s program, Gina Rose Halpern, launched a school in interfaith chaplaincy in Berkeley, California, that has thrived for sixteen years and is called the Chaplaincy Institute (ChI), an Interfaith Seminary and Community. Brother Wayne Teasdale, now deceased and a student of the late Father Bede Griffiths, is credited by Kurt Johnson, author of The Coming Interspirituality Age, with coming up with the term interspirituality, and Kurt and others are working energetically in that field. Father Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk who lived in an ashram in Southern India for over fifty years, wrote numerous books on the interface of Hindu and Christian spirituality, including Christ in India, Return to the Center, The Marriage of East and West, and The Cosmic Revelation. He stands out as a genuine pioneer in the field of deep ecumenism and Interfaith.

So, too, does Father Thomas Merton, who woke up to Eastern wisdom, especially in dialogues with the Japanese Zen scholar Dr. D. T. Suzuki, who urged him to read Meister Eckhart in particular as a representative of authentic Western mysticism. Merton’s final trip as a Trappist monk ended in his death in Bangkok, but it was not before he made deep connections with Eastern thinkers and underwent a profound mystical breakthrough at a Buddhist shrine in Sri Lanka. Merton kept a record of his last journey, now published as a book, Asian Journal, where he shares the people and events that moved him deeply. Among the people he met was the Dalai Lama (who was only thirty-two at the time), who made a deep impression on him and vice versa. Indeed, the Dalai Lama has written that Merton was the first Christian he had ever met, and it started him on his own path of deep ecumenism. Thich Naht Hanh was also a friend of Merton’s, as were Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who visited him several times in his monastery.

Bishop William Swing, Episcopal bishop of California and the one who welcomed me into the Episcopal fold after the Vatican fired me, launched his interfaith movement, called United Religions Initiative (URI), which has flourished mightily around the world. Its goal is to create a global grassroots interfaith network that cultivates peace and justice by energizing people to bridge religious and cultural differences and work together for the good of their communities and Earth.

I have just completed a book with the current bishop of California, Bishop Marc Andrus, called The Stations of the Cosmic Christ, which includes contributions from artists who have created clay tablets to depict the “I am” sayings that are often cited in this book on the tantric Jesus and that are Cosmic Christ sayings (“I am the bread; the light; the vine, the good shepherd,” etc.) and to the Cosmic Christ events that are frequently invoked in this book. Among these are the Transfiguration, the Nativity, the baptism, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Pentecost. With these sayings and events, we are also swimming in a sacred sea of archetypes that speak to the self inside us all that yearns to link to the Great One, to the whole. Thus, the Cosmic Christ or Buddha Nature or Image of God.

The World Parliament of Religions also exists to bring religions together in a setting of mutual understanding and respect and common practice to heal Earth.

I offer this modest recall of the road that deep ecumenism has traveled in my lifetime in order to put the present book in context. Much has happened and much is happening, but this book offers a giant step forward for human religions for the foreseeable future.

Deep ecumenism or interfaith are among the greatest signs of hope on our planet today. They rank with the women’s movements and the ecology movement for their capacity to wake us up and invite us to act on common values that matter. A search for the tantric Jesus is capable of accomplishing the necessary rewiring of the reptilian brain that is essential if our species is to survive and the planet as we know it to thrive once again. The need to move from the consciousness of “I win/ you lose” or “my tribe wins/yours loses” and from a dominator to a partnership reality is paramount. What is at stake is the lighting of a fire for the next stage of our evolution as a species. And this book contributes substantially to that change.

Are we up to it? Do we have the courage to let go and to move from religion to spirituality? From species and religious narcissism and tribalism to celebrating diversity while practicing a love of existence, gratitude, and justice making? From reptilian brain dominance to mammalian brain and compassionate consciousness? Time will tell, and time is running out.

But this is certain: this book and what it represents in deep wisdom shared between East and West is part of this movement. This book allows all of us to look with fresh eyes at who Jesus was and what he and the Christ movement mean to us today. It reveals a Western citizen, indeed a Christian and a priest, who has rendered himself vulnerable to the deep and nuanced wisdom of the East. But the author has not gotten lost there. Rather, he returns to his own religious roots and is demanding more in grappling with it. He has learned and he is learning, and he is, in this book, sharing his learned wisdom with others both East and West. We are the better for it. He incarnates the profound possibilities of deep ecumenism and interfaith, and I thank him for this significant contribution.

What are some of those needed contributions? The table of contents lays them out nicely, where he outlines the Five Roots of Christian Tantra: “The Reality and Goodness of the World” (as opposed to a Vedantic view of the world as unreal and illusion); “Christ-Shakti as Divine Activity”; “The Body as the Temple of God”; “Eros and Antinomian Behavior” (i.e., outside the legal boxes); and “Guru and Param-guru” (the guru as a teacher, with Jesus functioning as such and as param-guru, as the vine with his followers as branches).

Other substantive contributions include regular themes that arise again and again throughout the book. Among these are the following: theosis (our divinizing of the universe); Transfiguration (our experience of the Christ-nature in and around us: “What Christ is, I am,” he says); tantric anthropology, which recognizes the original blessing humans are rather than our mere sinfulness; Shekinah, the presence of the light of divine wisdom among us; nondualism; deification (our experience of our God-like-ness); and a return to our “originally blessed” nature; “superlimation” in preference to mere sublimation; indulgence with awareness versus just abstention with awareness; a tantric anthropology, which emphasizes possibility versus “low anthropology” (one that emphasizes sin).

These are concepts that are far too rare among Western theologians and religious writers, yet they hold the key to a more-thanhuman relationship to Earth and a more-than-patriarchal relationship to one another. They move us beyond the narcissism of anthropocentrism and beyond the violence of patriarchy. They also move us to find peace and the reign of God within—within our bodies, within our sexuality, within our imaginations. We do not have to flee this world to experience the Divine; rather we have to travel deeper into our deepest Selves, the “cave in the heart” where God and human interact.

The author stresses the incarnational dimension of the original Christ movement when he dares to conclude that Christianity is the “most tantric” of the world’s faith traditions. Why? Because “it is founded upon ‘the Word made flesh’ who dwells among and within us.” He urges a “deep dive” into our “true sensuousness” and warns that to denigrate our bodies is to denigrate the Earth body and the bodies of the poor. He emphasizes a Christology that is about being and operating with Jesus and not just ruminating about Jesus.

The author skillfully navigates the stories and myths of the East with those of the West, for example in honoring the sacredness of sexuality found both in the Bible in the Song of Songs book and in Hindu teachings of the union of the sacred lingam and sacred yoni. To do this he does not restrict himself to the Augustinian-based religious consciousness of the West, which is so ill at ease with the holiness of matter and sexuality, but draws on the holistic wisdom of the Celtic tradition and the more cosmic lineage of Eastern Orthodox writers and the Desert Fathers and Mothers, as well as creation spirituality mystics of the West such as Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Aquinas, and others.

He has done his homework in examining his own tradition for its deeper sources. Deep ecumenism does this to us: it makes demands on us to look deeper, ask different questions, and search more broadly for insights of our ancestors. That is one of its great accomplishments: we learn to look not only to another culture and other religious stories but to return to our own culture with new questions and more eagerness to examine our own lineage in greater depth. This book does that and is wise in its doing.

But the author is not content to rattle the cages of our beliefs and concepts and even to reinvigorate them—as he does, for example, with the concept of the Trinity—he is also intent on offering practices that can assist our transformation. So the last part of the book lays out many practices of meditation, including the Prayer of the Heart, mantra chanting, icon interaction, gazing eye to eye, washing of the feet, and sacred lovemaking. These practices ensure that our newly found wisdom moves from head to heart and is grounded in the body. This is so important a part today of authentic theological education, for it alone ensures that we are doing spirituality and not just talking about it. A theology that is exclusively about concepts is not a theology at all, for it brackets out spirituality, which is about experience and the practices that allow experience to emerge. No education is worthy of its name if it is not engaging all the chakras (a Sanskrit word meaning “wheels”), including and especially the lower ones.

This is why all of the pedagogy I developed teaching creation spirituality over a thirty-five-year period with adults and more recently with inner-city teenagers included practice as an integral part of the pedagogy. We called the practice “art as meditation,” and we did the same with reinventing forms of worship in our “Cosmic Masses,” where we invited the new art forms of rave and DJ, VJ, and rap along with dance to be the foundational “word” of liturgy once again. It is refreshing to read the author’s practices that take us beyond words and concepts into silence and transformation—that is, into rewiring. This is why a book like this carries so much hope with it. Human beings can change: that is what metanoia means—a change in consciousness. But we need some methods along the way to assist the process, and this book provides that.

And so I do not just welcome this book; I also rejoice at its existence and the history it represents. A hard-won history that allows people of different faith traditions to learn from each other and to plumb in more depth their own lineage. As I insisted in my book on the world spiritual traditions, One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths, we can no longer afford the luxury of staying on the surface of our religions and expecting them to contribute positively to the survival of our planet and our species and to wage battles between our faith traditions based on a superficial understanding of them.

Rather, we must travel deeper down the wells to the common spring and living waters from which all our traditions derive, to what Meister Eckhart calls the “underground river” that God is. This book is testimony to the possibility of such a journey and to the treasures that lie deep and sometimes hidden, begging to be discovered well beneath the surface when we dare to make that journey, treasures that can help us redefine what it means to be human and what it means to be other Christs, other Buddhas, other images of the Nameless One.

MATTHEW FOX is an Episcopal priest and author of thirty-three books on spirituality and culture. Among them are Original Blessing, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, A Spirituality Named Compassion, Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior for Our Times, Christian Mystics, and A Way to God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey. He is founder of the Cosmic Mass, which is a postmodern version of liturgy, and has worked to reinvent forms of education for both adults and inner-city youth. A new school, the Fox Institute for Creation Spirituality, is opening its doors in January 2017 and will offer master’s and doctoral degrees in creation spirituality, employing that much-heralded pedagogy that honors both left brain (intellect) and right brain (intuition and mysticism).