E S S A Y S , A R T I C L E S A N D R E V I E W S
A Profile of Thomas Berry, scholar and lover of the Earth
by Matthew Fox University of Creation Spirituality, Oakland, California, USA
EarthLight
Magazine #34, Summer, 1999
Editor's note: This essay was writtten for EarthLight in Thomas
Barry's honor and was part of a special 10-page section featuring Thomas
Berry and the New Cosmology in our summer 1999 issue.
I remember the first time I met Thomas Berry.
It was about twenty years ago in January in Chicago at Mundelein College
where I had begun our Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality a
few years earlier. Scientist Brian Swimme had moved out with his
family that fall to teach with us and he insisted that we invite Thomas
Berry from New York to speak to the students. After his challenging
presentation, we were walking to dinner through the wet slush of a Chicago
January and I told Tom that I was working on a book on Hildegard of Bingen's
paintings and illuminations. "Ah, Hildegard!" he said. "A great
genius." And he was off expounding on Hildegard. He was the
first person I had encountered who knew who she was. And of
course his knowledge was of the deepest kind.
Thomas Berry helps me to resacralize the gift
of curiosity. So many people in our culture and so many clergy appear
to be anything but curious. They are complacent. Intellectually complacent.
But not Tom. Perhaps the greatest tribute I can make to Thomas Berry
is to point out how profoundly his work parallels that of his namesake,
whom he quotes often, Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas, living in the
thirteenth century, was witnessing a breakdown of forms in religion, politics,
and economics not wholly unlike our century. His response was like
Thomas Berry's: Go to science, rediscover the ways of the Universe.
"All creatures love one another," he would observe.
While Aquinas had only one scientist to go
to, Aristotle, nevertheless he spent his life bringing Aristotle's scientific
worldview into culture and into Christian thought. Aquinas was an
intellectual who was both mystic and prophet; his ideas had social consequences
that made him and his work deeply controversial in his time. (Indeed,
he was canonized a saint by the same church that condemned him three times
first!)
Thomas Berry has studied contemporary science
with depth and abandon, mind and heart. He has also immersed himself
in the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples and the wisdom of China and
the East. Yet he has always stayed true to the path of critical thought
and of prophetic consciousness. He speaks with the poetry of his
Celtic ancestors, and his scholarship (as distinct from academic ego inflation)
is both critical and caring.
Above all, his love of the cosmos and his insistence
that all education and all professions are ultimately responsible to the
cosmos is his deepest legacy. By calling us to an enduring creation
story from the new science he gives us tools for beginning over.
He not only deconstructs; he reconstructs. So many priests of his
generation are cynical and so many academicians are only committed to deconstructing.
What Thomas Berry has that these people lack is a sense of wonder that
has not diminished with age. There is a youthfulness in Thomas Berry
that is evident in the radical questions he asks as well as in the wonder
he elicits. He helps us dream the Earth anew, dream our work anew,
dream religion and education anew.
I find in Thomas Berry and his passion for
eco-justice and cosmic storytelling a true descendant (might we say reincarnation?)
of the Celtic spiritual genius. His love of the Earth, his sense
of humor, his gift of language, his poetic consciousness, his moral outrage,
his primal appreciation of the aesthetic, his common sense, and his prophetic
storytelling all point to the interconnectivity of nature and human nature,
the sacred and daily life, the divine and the human and the more-than-human
that characterize the Celtic spirit at its best. His encouragement
of other thinkers is also a gift that he gives to us.
Thomas Berry is a true elder. He has been true
to his catholic heritage in the deepest sense of finding and naming, with
Teilhard de Chardin's help, the sacramental character of the Universe.
And, in the tradition of Aquinas, he has "shared the fruits of his contemplation"
by his writing, his teaching, and lecturing, and by his witness as an elder
gifting other generations with the most precious gift of all: the blessing
of creation. Some day, it may even happen that his religious order
and his church will recognize his spiritual depth. But there is no
need to waste time waiting for that. Rather, our gratitude to Tom
ought to be expressed in getting on with our living and our citizenship
whereby we integrate Tom's values -- which are the ecological values the
world needs today -- into our workworlds and worship worlds, our psychic,
cosmic, and planetary worlds.
I myself have tried to do this by bringing
Universe back to university as we try to do at the University of Creation
Spirituality and Naropa Institute in Oakland and by bringing ritual alive
again through Techno Cosmic Masses at our Howard Thurman Ritual Center.
Judging by the response to both enterprises and from the talent and excitement
they attract, I know Thomas Berry has laid out a correct agenda for our
time. There lies this man's tribute to a master teacher, "Meister
Thomas Berry."
Matthew Fox is president and founder of the University of Creation
Spirituality and co-director of the Naropa Institute's program in creation
spirituality in downtown Oakland (see ad, page 25). He is the author of
23 books including Original Blessing, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ,
Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen and most recently, Sins of the Spirit,
Blessings of the Flesh: Lessons in Transforming Evil in Soul and Society.
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