QUOTES
“My
generation was bold enough to question many things and to seek spirituality over
religion. We haven’t succeeded in overthrowing the old order yet, and maybe there
are some meanings to be found in my story about coming of age spiritually in the
latter half of the twentieth century.”
We
are co-creators in an ever-unfolding creation.
Compassion
is the essence of Jesus’ teaching, and indeed of the teaching of all great spiritual
figures from Mohammed to Isaiah, from Lao Tzu to Chief Seattle. Yet compassion
has been sentimentalized and severed from its relationship to justice-making and
celebration. Creation Spirituality links the struggle for justice with the yearning
for mysticism.
A
civilization built on dualism and war within and between persons, one that puts
its most creative minds and its best engineers to sadistic work building more
and more destructive weapons, is no civilization at all. It needs a radical transformation
from the heart outwards. It needs to outgrow and outlaw war just as in the last
century it outlawed slavery. The human race has outgrown war, but it hardly knows
it yet.
A
job is something we do to get a paycheck and pay our bills. Jobs are legitimate,
at times, but work is why we are here in the universe. Work and calling often
go together.
Animals
love. They love their being. They strive to survive, to celebrate, to propagate
. So certainly something we learn from animals is love. To survive and to celebrate,
propagate and to love life. To be the best we can be - the right to be here and
the responsibility to be the best dog or bear or horse that they can be. Humans
have the tendency to self pity that other animals don't indulge in.
Do
not confuse beauty with beautiful. Beautiful is a human judgment. Beauty is All.
The difference is everything.
I
don't think that fundamentalism has anything to do with Jesus Christ. They call
themselves Christians, but if that's Christian, count me out. Fundamentalism is
built on fear and greed. They're telling you to give them your money otherwise
you're going to hell.
I
reject the notion of talking about God as a person, but there's a difference between
talking about God as a person and talking about God as personal. The term I use
is pantheistic - everything is in God and God is in everything. That's pretty
intimate, but it doesn't mean that we don't have to find our own way and do our
own creating. I see the universe as a Divine womb and we're all swimming around
in this soup.
It
has taken fifteen billion years to get you here. That is scientific fact. We are
not just the products of our parents. Sixty percent of our body is hydrogen atoms.
The hydrogen atoms in us go back to the fireball fourteen billion years ago. We
have been around a long time, and it has been a great birthing process to bring
us forward.
We
were made for something cosmic and will not fit peacefully into anything much
smaller. And when we try to build our lives around anything much smaller than
cosmos we become grotesque, and our institutions, be they religious or familial
or educational or governmental are asked to do too much. They become misshapen
and malformed and turn into instruments of cosmic and personal destruction.
"...our
civilization, so addicted to knowledge, has fled from wisdom. Knowledge is very,
very powerful. If it is not tempered and contoured by greater visions, like justice,
compassion, beauty, grace and thinking of the next generation and seven generations
to come -- then indeed, it is dangerous. Unfortunately, many of our educational
systems in the West are still very dangerous places."
