Our task is enormous … To look at all that has gone before us, and to recognize that each one of us, however small, has a unique task in co-creation—a unique contribution to make in the world and to humanity. Edwina Gateley
Diana Butler Bass begins this book with Genesis and the Creation story in a perfect garden. She ends with the book Revelation the story of a new sacred city. The Bible begins and ends with the same stories.
“In the end is the beginning….” TS Eliot
The Last Days
Diana Butler Bass was deeply moved and changed by 9/11. Some said the attacks were part of biblical prophecy of end times written about in Revelation. She has a different view: Revelation is not a heavenly escape story but a tale of Heaven coming down to us – a new beginning. Pg. 269
Sacred Cosmopolitanism
In this section she describes the 21st Century as Cosmopolitan, meaning that all human beings are citizens of the world, “citizens of the cosmos.” The boundaries are very thin. We are, indeed, part of a worldwide web. God dwells in the midst of the web.
Co-Creation
“Co-creation” is a concept often used in business circles as a means to emphasize partnership as source of creativity. In the 1980s, former Catholic priest, Matthew Fox, argued we are “co-creators with God.” We participate with God in a process of ongoing creation. She writes, “It is a deep awareness that we are creators, creators who work with the Creator, in an ongoing project of crafting a world.”
God yearns for us. In James 4:5, “The Spirit has an all-consuming and passionate desire to have more and more of us. In fact, this desire to possess us is so strong that He literally yearns, craves, and pines after us.” Might this be saying, God yearns to be co-creators with us?
The Last Days of Religion
Diana Butler Bass writes about the decline in religion since 9/11. This decline includes Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, which actually began in 1972. The US has been in a 5 decade religious decline (book written in 2014).
The old God, the one believed in, preached, celebrated, and served in conventional religious institutions is fading from view. And, a new God, one of intimate longing and infinite love, experienced and proclaimed by seers and prophets through the ages, has risen just over the horizon. It is a new spiritual day.
Where Is God?
She writes of 3 conversions in her life, each time she was seeking a deeper awareness of God. The first was from evangelical Protestantism, then to liberal Christianity embodied in the Episcopal Church. The third was leaving the vertical God to an image of God within. On September 12, 2001, she converted to the world, the dwelling place of the divine. God’s presence is with the earth and the world.
God is with us. Here!!
“AFTERWORD“
The spiritual revolution, finding God in the world, is an invitation to new birth, most especially for religion. It is time the church woke up, to the new revolution.
What will you take away from Grounded? In what ways are you motivated to go deeper in your spiritual life?
Grace Episcopal Church 