The Whole Creation: Bede Griffiths & Matt Fox

The whole creation is pervaded by God.

Bede Griffiths

From An Extended Dialogue: Griffiths and Fox… Cited in Christian Mystics

“Perhaps the deepest impression of life left by life in India, the sense of the sacred, is pervading the whole order of nature. Every hill, river, and tree is holy, and the simplest of human acts of eating and drinking, still more with birth and marriage, have all retained their sacred character… 

In the West, everything has become” profane”; it has been deliberately emptied of all religious meaning… It is there that the West needs to learn from the East the sense of the “holy” of a transcendent mystery which is imminent in everything and which gives ultimate meaning to life.

The Western world must recover the ancient vision of the three dimensions of reality. That everything is sacred. This is what one finds in India– eating, drinking, or taking a bath; in any of our normal events of life, there is always a sacred action… We have lost that awareness… [There is} this sacramentality of the universe. The whole creation is pervaded by God.

According to Bede Griffiths, what Westerners most need to learn from India is the “sense of the sacred” that pervades”the whole of nature.” This is creation spirituality, indeed. “Every hill, tree and river is holy” and the simplest human acts are also.We in the West have emptied the daily of all religious meaning. Is Bede accurate in his criticism of the West?  In what ways has religious meaning been “emptied” from daily life in our Western culture?

Bede recognizes a “sacramentality of the universe” which everything that exists and all of our daily actions are a part of. This is what Teilhard de Chardin was also speaking about. How can we deepen our understanding and experience of the sacred in all things and in all of our daily actions? How do we create rituals that accomplish this?”

Without too much contemporary critique, I agree that we have lost the sacred sense of sacramentality, and the way of the world is far more mechanical, utilitarian, soulless. It is as if we have lost the intention to see ourselves and our world as a gift of the creation, and that everything in it contains a gift of grace. Wisdom and responsibility have been largely lost by this mechanization, by this stripping away of the sacred and the mysterious-

As I have said in these many book pages, our task is to infuse the magic, the mystery, and the marvelous back into our lives. To live in such a way that allows our highest aspirations and intentions to guide our human behavior and decision-making.