On his deathbed the great psychologist and lover of the human race Erich Fromm turned to his friend Robert Fox and asked "Why is it, Bob, that the human race prefers necrophilia to biophilia?" A significant question, this. Why do we prefer love of death to love of life? Missiles to celebration? Power-over to power-with? Greed to letting go?
I am sure that a question as poignant as this one can yield many rich answers, but I would like to offer just one answer from my own perspective as a theologian. It is this: Western civilization has preferred love of death to love of life to the very extent that its religious traditions have preferred redemption to creation, sin to ecstasy, and individual introspection to cosmic awareness and appreciation. Religion has failed people in the West as often as it has been silent about pleasure or about the comic creation, about the ongoing power of the flowing energy of the Creator, about original blessing.
If the failure of religion in the West is one very basic reason for our culture's love of death - and I have no doubt that it is - then the recovery of a creation-grounded spirituality promises much newness and renewal to society, provided this recovery is not too late and is not thwarted by a lot of backward-leaning battles with tired fall/redemption theological preoccupations.
Let there be no question about it: what has been most lacking in society and religion in the west for the past six centuries has been a Via Positiva, a way or path of affirmation, thanksgiving, ecstasy. ... p. 34. They are journeys of life, not death; of awareness, not numbness; of Eros, not control. And therefore they are journey of salvation, i.e.. healing power.
The Via Positiva represents a new power, in the sense that it has been forgotten; the power that pleasure is and that wisdom is. It is no coincidence that in both Latin language and the Hebrew language the words for "wisdom" are related to "tasting". "Taste and see how good the Lord is" shouts the psalmist. The Via Positiva is a way of tasting the beauties and comic depths of creation, which mewans us and everything else. Without this solid grounding in creation's powers we become bored, violent people. We become necrophiliacs in love with death and the powers and principalities of death. With the Via Positiva, all creation breaks out a new.
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p. 17.
Creation spiritualtiy is a justice spirituality... It is also a "street spirituality" that the oppressed can recognize as their own.
While the fall/redemption tradition has served the needs of what Johannes Metz calls "the history of the successful and the established" during the marriage of empire and religion since the fourth century in the West, the creation tradition has a different historical tale to tell.
Ironically, however, too few liberation theologians have realized that the memory of suffering is only complete when it embraces memories of beauty, of pleasure, of original blessing. ... you can truly lose what you love. (The pathos of the crushing of individuals' dignity happens because individuals have dignity; the pathos of crushing creativity happens because individuals are creative; that of divinity, because people are divine with the image of God alive in them.)
p. 18.
because play is a grace in such ritual-making and rebirthing
Feminist Susan Griffin names the ecological crisis of our time when she says, "Man's notion of nature is again threatened." A patriarchal religious vision such as that fall/redemption spirituality offers cannot deal with this deep "threat."
(to be continued)
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