‘Nature’s path to God is direct, eternal and objective, without external chance.’ So wrote Edith Sodergran. She understood that creation is our teacher and that in her is a truth that can act as a reliable guide to our own spiritual journey. Studying creation from its beginning, from the birth of the stars to the movement of life on our own planet, we find that evolution is punctuated by times of breakdown and destruction which become the gateway to new levels of complexity and awareness. This observation underlies the thought of both Teilhard de Chardin and his disciple Thomas Berry and it is at the heart of all major spiritualities and religions. It is reflected in the life-death-life pattern of the pre-patriarchal, goddess religions, as in the Christian Easter mystery. In popular western culture, however, it has become rather an unreal theory, probably because modern life has distanced us so effectively from nature and her rhythms that they are no longer part of our lived experience. Electricity means that we do not know sunrise as a daily miracle or winter as a closing down of life and beyond this we are protected from the fact of death itself as no earlier peoples have ever been.

A word we commonly give to this process of breakdown and rebirth when it occurs in our own lives is transformation. But wherever we find it modern humanity tends to run away from it in fear. In ‘The Love song of J Alfred Prufrock’, Eliot expresses this powerfully as he explores his hero’s inability to ‘ask the overwhelming question’ and the terror that leads him to spend his life on trivia, ‘to measure out [his] life with coffee spoons’, rather than face fundamental questions about himself and the meaning of his existence. Such questions will inevitably lead to a death, in his case involving particularly his own self esteem. Today a collective ‘overwhelming question’ which we dare not ask involves the future of our planet itself. It is an issue which seems to stare us in the face and yet for most people, especially those in high places, it is taboo. Possibly only those who have at some point in their lives dared to ask such questions or who have lived through experiences which seemed to destroy all that they held most dear and survived, can look at the questions at the heart of GreenSpirit and live with confidence in their hearts rather than terror. It is, as in Grace’s poem, on the edge of chaos that creative things happen. Living the life-death-life process is radical and demanding, a hard birth and one that involves trust. ‘Before the event it is unpredictable, after the event it is inevitable’, said Michael, and ‘it is about learning the power of powerlessness’. The process of transformation is the enemy of any sort of religion that imposes sameness. It is an inevitable part of growth and implies a spirituality of a personal journey and evolution.

When old patterns are no longer useful or simply don’t work any more systems break down and are replaced by new ones. The process is not one of a gradual transition as of for example a leaf unfolding. It is more akin to the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. The larva goes on eating and getting bigger until one day further development in its present form is no longer a possibility. Then instead of gradually changing into its adult form it spins a cocoon and waits suspended from a leaf while a process over which it has no control occurs. The form of the caterpillar breaks down completely so that inside the cocoon there is something like a soup and it is from this that a completely new life form evolves. So in our journeys we can come to times when answers or patterns of behaviour that worked in the past don’t work any more and to a greater or lesser degree we enter some form of dark night in which we feel no longer in control. To pursue the analogy of the caterpillar a bit further, the ego is dying, and a more evolved and spiritual level of our journey is unfolding. The Self, the divine centre from which we come becomes more conscious and our kinship with Spirit in all life and indeed in all creation becomes less a matter of theory and more our lived experience.

Both the universe and I are part of spirit.

‘I’ and ‘Matter’ are one.

Who are we in Spirit? For a long time in early adulthood, I thought that the universe is so huge that I personally didn’t matter that much. That didn’t distress me much, it seemed like common sense. But then I came across psychosynthesis, a spiritual psychotherapy, which said quite unequivocally that ‘I matter’, that I personally am significant, that I and the universe are in some sense, one, as is everything else. It matters what I do, what I say, who I am. And every other living thing matters: everything that lives is holy and each creature's experience is of great significance.

To feel that this really applies to me, is a huge shift, a revolutionary shift, of viewpoint. Politically in the west, various groups of people have stood up to say ‘we matter’: ‘black is beautiful’, ‘gay is good’, women matter as much as men. This affirmation is seen in some ways as political rights, but it is far deeper psychologically and spiritually than this. Working in therapeutic and healing agencies, but more particularly in just living in our society, it strikes me that most people do not really believe they do matter. Low self-esteem is prevalent, not only in minority groups but in so many of us, even white middle-class men. Our materialistic society does not tend to see us and our parents and children as soul, spirit, holy, so we have little experience of feeling our utter significance in the nature of things. I remember facilitating a huge meeting at the Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Quakers), around the theme of "Love thy neighbour as thyself". It was divided into two: no - one had any difficulty about ‘love thy neighbour’. It was the separate section on ‘As thyself’ that caused the mayhem. Love thyself? Impossible for many: and a new, a revolutionary, thought – surely you could be advocating being ‘selfish’? (The Puritan ethic again) But if we do not love ourselves, how can we love our neighbours, or the planet and all other fellow species?

To love ourselves, we also need to be in touch with ourselves, have self-knowledge. We need to know that we are more than our personalities – we are soul, and one with spirit, if we can only recognise this. "There is a dream dreaming us", as the Aboriginal nation in Australia say. Consciousness is part of the universe, and we can be more or less in touch with this: what stops us is the many barriers in our own personalities and lack of awareness.

The experience we are talking of here is not however about nouns – ‘me’, ‘spirit’. ‘personality’, but about verbs, process. Dreaming is active: we are not substance, as the Buddhists know so deeply, but process, verb, I am-ing. This is part of quantum theory – that we live in fields of consciousness to which we can more or less relate depending on our awareness. Life can be living us, if we can grow into this knowledge: this is close to Jung’s notion of synchronicity – letting the song sing you, knowing we are not separate but deeply interconnected with the whole, living our lives sub specie eternis. This opens us up to the pain of the world as well as the beauty – if we love the rainforest we feel the pain: if we don’t, we don’t – nor do we perceive the beauty.

The horribleness of life springs so much from human action. As Rousseau said, to paraphrase – natural disaster does not horrify us, but ill-will does. Human cruelty springs largely from not being loved and appreciated enough as a child, or actively abused: and this is to do with how the whole society is organised and with pain passing down from generation to generation. You then don’t know that you and every other creature is valuable, and that everything matters.

This is close to what Matthew Fox said in Original Blessing. We are born whole and full of potential, we need to be loved - and seen, perceived by someone also in touch with themselves - to allow that potential to flower. The spiritual journey of our lives becomes slowly clear to us. It will be full of darkness as well as light: the two have to be there to lead to our continuing aware development, to creation: facing the darkness and greeting it is as significant as dancing with the light. And then there arises the possibility of transformation.

Paul Tillich.

A paradox is a form of metaphor which, through the juxtaposition of apparently contradictory statements, highlights both the is and the is not aspects inherent in the metaphorical form. Paradox speaks directly to reason in that it exploits the language of logic, but at the same time subverts it. To begin to grasp the meaning of a paradox requires going beyond reason into the realm of feeling and intuition. We finish up with the paradox that if we can understand a paradox, it ceases to be paradoxical!

What Paul Tillich’s statement means, I think, is that the way God acts in the world cannot be described within the constraints of language except in terms of paradox. It can even be taken further to imply that ‘God acts in the world’ is itself a paradox.

I suggest that one of Tillich's paradoxes can be found in the name GreenSpirit. The 'Green' element relates to the material world that is commonly viewed as being fundamentally other than, if not opposed to, the world of 'Spirit'. The choice of GreenSpirit, as the working title of the Association for Creation Spirituality carries an implicit acceptance of a relationship between the material and spiritual amounting to a virtual synthesis, but one that can only be articulated in a paradoxical form.

About 200 years ago Goethe claimed that, 'Matter cannot exist and be operative without spirit nor spirit without matter.' And the need to view the world as a material/spiritual complex has acquired a new imperative in view of the environmental problems that we face today.

An inevitable consequence of accepting the world as a material/spiritual complex relates to the whole process of creation. W H Vanstone states the problem very clearly, 'if the creation is the work of love, then its shape cannot be predetermined by the Creator, nor its triumph foreknown; it is the realisation of vision, but of vision which is discovered only through its own realisation' (my italics). We are faced with a fundamental paradox. If you take a giant leap of the imagination and start from the Big Bang and try to think forwards and predict the future, there are seemingly incredible coincidences relating to the basic physical constants, all of which are exactly right. The properties of the chemical elements are exactly suited to make earth, air, fire and water and living creatures. These tell the story of a universe on a knife edge, in which if anything was slightly different we would not be here. If on the other hand you look back, with the benefit of hindsight, there is in the story an impression of a rugged inevitability, that what has happened had to happen somewhere, somehow.

I think it was John Barrow who said somewhere that we have finally laid Descartes’ ‘ghost in the machine’ not because there is no ghost but because there is no machine. We now believe that the ‘stuff of the Universe’ is self-organising by processes of differentiation involving symmetry breaking. Initially into space, time, energy and matter, and subsequently into the fantastic variety of systems we see today. The universe is also self-creating through the emergence, over time, of ever more complex self-organising, quasi-autonomous systems that are more than the sums of their parts. Nevertheless, as Thomas Berry claims, to translate this into a functional cosmology requires the recognition of the spirit dimension as well as the physical dimension of the universe.

In this context, Whitehead proposes a veritable catalogue of paradoxes, ‘[Spirituality] is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something that is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final goal, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the final ideal, and the hopeless quest.’

These provide a breathtaking vision of spirit as a fundamental and universal phenomenon; whereas I suggest our most direct vision of spirit is as an emergent phenomenon relating to individual entities and conferring a quality of being more than what they seem to be. A quality of existence, of being/becoming which we can only describe in terms of the sacred.

In reconciling the emergent and the fundamental aspects of spirit, we are faced with the problem of the relationship between wholes and parts. In order to understand, or at least to arrive at descriptions, we need to make distinctions. The problem is how to make distinctions without creating divisions. Anne Primavesi claims that in both scientific and theological description this has to be done by the ‘careful use of metaphor particularly in its paradoxical form, to convey both differentiation and connection, and, having done so, to use the differentiation in order to convey respect both for the part differentiated, and for the whole with which it is intimately coupled.’

Living with paradox is not easy. Accepting a paradox into the realm of reality requires a suspension of strict rationality. But this is the kind of world in which we live. Modern physics obliges us to accept the fundamentally paradoxical nature of the material stuff of the universe. We have to try to carry this understanding over into the spirit dimension of the universe as well.