What is Creation Spirituality: Diversity
Essential Five:
We rejoice in and courageously honor the rich diversity within the Cosmos which is expressed in every individual and embodies multiple cultures, religions, and ancestral traditions.
What does it mean to say that Creation Spirituality honors the rich diversity within the Cosmos and every individual? Like I stated earlier in the section on panentheism, at the core, Creation Spirituality proports the bold theological idea that God is in all things and that all things are a part of God, but the sum of all things cannot define the mystery and ineffability of Divinity. God fills the Cosmos and everything in the Cosmos is a Word of God. As the Psalmist once wrote (Psalm 24:1) “The Earth belongs to God and everything in it!”
Another way that Creation Spirituality honors the rich diversity is recognizing the way Spirit is embodied in multiple cultures, religions, and ancestral traditions. This is illustrated in the idea of inter-spirituality or syncretism, what some people call “deep ecumenism.”
While our individual practice or tradition may be Christian or Buddhist or Wiccan, God is not a Christian or a Buddhist or a Wiccan. Rather, Divinity is expressed fully in these and other living religions. In fact, Creation Spirituality especially recognizes the imprint of spirituality that underlies or precedes all world religions.
Meister Eckhart said that “God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop.” We all draw from different wells, wells defined by particular histories, mythologies, rituals, and belief structures. The fundamentalists gathered around those wells tend to believe that their well is the only true well, but the mystics and prophets drawing living waters from those wells hear the rumbling of the underground river and recognize that the river underlying those wells is the true Source. Creation Spirituality is contextual and can be practiced within any religion, but it also recognizes that there is an interconnectivity between all living faiths and that we can learn a great deal when we honor and celebrate each other.
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Read Essential Six: Ecological Justice.
Read An Introduction to Creation Spirituality.
By special guest contributor, Rev. Dr. Sid Hall.
