Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action

Description

Matthew Fox, a 76-year-old elder, activist and spiritual theologian, along with Skylar Wilson, a 33-year-old wilderness guide, leader of inter-cultural ceremonies, and an event producer, and Jennifer Berit Listug, a 28-year-old writer, spiritual leader, and publicist, are presenting a challenge and an opportunity in the vision launched in this modest book. That vision is about creating an Order of the Sacred Earth. Essay contributors to the book and its vision include Mirabai Starr, Brian Thomas Swimme, Adam Bucko, and David Korten.

Jennifer Berit Listug works in book publishing as a private consultant for authors assisting with manuscript editing and book publicity. She is also the co-director of Wild Awakenings, an adult rites of passage organization dedicated to fostering the thriving of earth, life, and humanity. Jennifer was on the Board of Trustees at the Unity in Marin Spiritual Community for three years, serving as the Board President for 18 months. Also at Unity in Marin, Jennifer was a guest speaker for Sunday mornings, she led Rites of Passage groups for teenagers, and founded a young adult interfaith group committed to conscious connection, community service, and social activism. She is a passionate hiker, reader, writer, and public speaker.

"The Order of the Sacred Earth is a vision as vital and inspired as any on our planet in this time of cultural collapse and regeneration--a gathering together of mystic warriors and visionary artisans of cultural evolution. There are now millions of us--imaginal cells of emerging ecocentric cultures--but what is needed is a consciously convened community that brings us together to synergistically deepen and amplify our artistry and to train and initiate others. Fox and Wilson's co-dreamed vision draws from the very heart of the dream of the Earth."--Bill Plotkin, author of Soulcraft and Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche "The Order of the Sacred Earth not only calls us home to our true nature as Earth, but also offers us invaluable guidance and company on the way."--Joanna Macy, environmental activist and author of eight books, including Active Hope "The creation of he Order of the Sacred Earth is a magnificent step forward for humanity. What we need now are sacred activists willing to come together to live conscious and sacred lives while pooling their resources and passions to preserve the earth and humanity. I am honored to celebrate and join this great adventure!"--Andrew Harvey, author of over thirty books, including Way of Passion and The Hope "I feel grateful for this inspiring book and the inspiring initiative it launches. The Order of the Sacred Earth gives me new hope; its founders are visionaries who set out a plausible program to engage all aspects of our life, and motivate much-needed change. I hope and pray that their message and their Order will spread and transform our relationships with the Earth and with each other."--Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, author of Science Set Free "In this timely book, the authors provide a blueprint for creating a sacred community, one united by compassion, social action, and a commitment to protecting the sacred earth. The historic framework of spiritual renaissance outlined in the book provides a helpful perspective for relating to this call to a new order. May everyone who reads this book be inspired to take the vows of The Order of the Sacred Earth so they may find the clarity in commitment, direction, purpose and vision the authors so generously offer!"--Isa Gucciardi, PhD, author of Coming to Peace and founding director of the Foundation of the Sacred Stream "It is with great joy that I discover this vision of an Order of the Sacred Earth....Everywhere I go now, as I travel and teach, I am seeing these seeds bursting through the ravaged landscape. The youth I meet are hungry for meaningful spiritual practice and are wary of organized religion.....I want to be part of this revolutionary effort to build a holy container in which to access and express the deepest truths of love echoing from the heart of the world's wisdom communities in honor of 'Our sister, mother earth, ' who sustains us."--Mirabai Star, spiritual teacher and author of God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity & Islam; Caravan of No Despair: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation "'I promise to be the best lover and defender of Mother Earth that I can be.' Might this sacred pledge required of those who join the Order of the Sacred earth save humanity and our Earth Mother? It is surely worth a try....I welcome the opportunity to find a spiritual home and intellectual identity in an Order of the Sacred Earth in fellowship with other spiritual-intellectual-- activist seekers/doers seeking a deeper truth beyond the partial and outdated cosmologies of established religious dogma and political ideology."--David Korten, author of Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth; When Corporations Rule the World; The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community "What we are facing demands a strategy and commitment of this magnitude and this courage! We cannot stand isolated and expect to make any real difference. I thank Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jennifer Berit Listug for gathering us together."--Fr. Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, New Mexico "The Order of the Sacred Earth has the potential to be a shapeshifter of our culture, transforming humankind on the individual and community levels to nurture our relationships with all of life. This powerful vision will touch the hearts of sacred activists while helping to heal our Earth."--Michael Murphy, co-founder of Esalen Institute and author of The Future of the Body and Golf in the Kingdom "Creative and sensitive humans alive today yearn to make a difference in the world. They can feel the creativity that surges within them....What they need is a way of activating these creative powers. That is what the Order of the Sacred Earth is."--Brian Thomas Swimme, cosmologist and author of The Universe Story and Journey of the Universe "Every human being benefits from intimacy with a place where the original wild temple is still present as a felt-sense, not just a gorgeous view. We have psycho-spiritual receptors for an experiential, embodied, mystical sense of the sacred Earth....Yet we are a long way from such a world. But now, with the emerging Order of the Sacred Earth, ...we are closer to an articulated vision of what such a world might be. We are generating new communities who react and participate in a profoundly meaningful, mystical relationship with our shared larger body, Earth."--Geneen Marie Haugen, loves to intertwine mysteries of nature and psyche and has contributed to many spirituality journals "We need a new interspiritual order. One that exists outside of the current (or failing) institutions and that encourage us to, in the words of philosopher Ken Wilber, 'show up, wake up and grow up.'...It is my hope that this new order serves as a mark of identity--a form of tribal war paint--so that we can see each other more clearly, ....Only then can we become more human and less alone....Only then can we, as a species, live to tell a new story and find each other inside it."--Joran Slane Oppelt, international speaker, author, interfaith minister and singer/songwriter and founder of the Metta Center of St. Petersburg and Integral Church there "The Order of the Sacred Earth enables us to integrate our varied actions worldwide, energizing our quantum connectedness for greater personal and planetary well- being. Accepting our roles as visionaries, co-creators, and Earth lovers, we can be daring collaborators with each other and nature."--J. Zohara Meyerhoff Hieronimus, DHL, award-winning radio broadcaster (www.21stcenturyradio.com), author, social justice, environmental and animal activist "The Order of the Sacred Earth can provide not merely new ideas and practices, but also a community in which to grow and to nourish them. Just as plants require soil in which to flourish, ideas and practices require strong communities....Our work succeeds when we can create caring communities in which young people are free and trust one another....So the work of the OSE is deeply revolutionary, for it challenges our most fundamental assumptions in capitalist culture. To re-image a core narrative...can, and will, be done, through the commitment to creating, through the order, a new kind of caring community."--Theodore Richards, educator and founder of the Chicago Wisdom Project, author of The Great Re-imagining: Spirituality in an Age of Apocalypse "The Order of the Sacred Earth will be like that--full of joy, because it is an invitation to participate in the evolutionary intentions of the Universe. What could be more purposeful and fun than that?! The revolution that Matthew, Skylar and Jennifer are ushering in and leading is perhaps the most important ever, because we really are on the precipice and everything, everything is at stake. So let's take the vow: I promise to be the best lover and defender of the Earth that I can be; roll up our sleeves and get to it! Don't forget to bring your banjo and dancing shoes!"--Kristal Parks, activist whose special commitment for ten years was to defend elephants in Kenya, author of Re-Enchanting the World: A Call to Mystical Activism "We can begin to feel our own 'impeccable warrior' rise up to participate in what Joanna Macy has so aptly called 'The Great Turning.' For Macy, to participate in the restoration of the earth community's body and spirit is to find ourselves engaging in any or all of the following dimensions: Holding Actions, propagating Shifts in consciousness, and generating structural Changes. I contend that every individual can participate in this Great Turning, and that one of the great challenges of our time is for each of us to figure out how and where we plug into this psycho-spiritual current. Perhaps the OSE can be a guiding community, helping us put our revolutionary passion into action."--Trevien Stanger, tree planter who has planted 100,000 new trees and who teaches environmental studies at a community college in Vermont "It is this broken world that is 'waiting, ' as Henri Nouwen wrote, '...for new saints, ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God' that they are free to imagine a radical new political and social reality that reflects compassion and justice. It is this broken world from which Matthew Fox's dream of the Order of the Sacred Earth has emerged. And it is this broken world that has called forth the Holy Resistance we witnessed at Standing Rock."--Adam Bucko and Rev. Chelsea Macmillian "As an African American male, witnessing the suffering of poor health quality within my community, I felt I had to do something about it....Over time, I soon came to understand that the well-being in the black community is inseparable from that of everyone else and the planet as a whole. The Order of the Sacred Earth calls on us to take full responsibility for our connection to this Earth. It recognizes that we are the Earth. It understands that care of the Earth is care for ourselves, and that its health reflects that of our own. The OSE offers a great opportunity for us to come together to not only solve the problems that face our existence but to become more fully human.....the more fully human we become, the more we'll embrace a manner of living that is sustainable, communal, affable, loving, kind, and compassionate."--Broderick Rodell, PhD, ND, whose passions include capoeira and yoga along with other learning systems to awaken values that support human evolutionary consciousness "The idea and vision to have a spiritual order to celebrate, heal, and protect Mother Earth is a gallant one. To dedicate ourselves to this community will require deep prayer and the practice of nonviolence as we witness the destruction of our planet.....I hear the earth crying for people to rise up and act as if every decision we make will either destroy or protect the planet....The OSE is asking us to serve, give back, to become part of a spiritual order. They ask us to hope....I commit to defending mother Earth and to being in circle with those who say 'yes' to this vision."--Deborah Santana, activist for peace and social justice and documentary filmmaker "As I turn the last page of Matthew's, Skylar's and Jennifer's writing, my heart leaps with a sound 'Yes!' One year and a half ago, when I started contributing to the Italian Association for creation spirituality, I did so out of a desire to bring the experience of the sacred out of the cage in which it has been convicted by both religious fundamentalism and materialistic atheism, and I intuitively feel that OSE may be just what we need to accomplish this....Many of us have lost a framework where our 'experience of the sacred' can get nurtured, cultivated, and hence bear fruit....OSE, as I understand it, is precisely such a framework: its openness to all wisdom traditions, its independence from all dogmas, together with its being deeply rooted in what we all share--a life-on this wondrous planet--can thus be the key to open the cage."--Claudia Picardi, seeker, scientist and teacher born and living in Italy who is foremost a person who is constantly striving for creative, spiritual, and intellectual freedom "I knew on the night of the winter solstice, sitting next to a graduate student at the Fox Institute of Creation Spirituality who was of Mennonite background, that the evening would have a very inclusive cast. We were all there to celebrate sacred earth and to begin the journey of Commitment to this Order of Sacred Earth. Now that I have had more time to spend with the various components of the book, Order of the Sacred Earth, I realize the seriousness of this challenge: the realignment of my life to commit to saving sacred Earth. A reading of the book really fills one with the serious nature of this new Order of Sacred Earth. Restoring a sense of the sacred to our present day population is the medicine needed to saving planet earth. There is no doubt in my mind that my sister, Dorothy Stang, known world wide as 'the angel of the Amazon' had a very 'active sense of the living landscape' around her in the Amazon. Her appreciation for Sacred Earth was enhanced by her mentor Matthew Fox when she attended the Institute of Creation Spirituality. Murdered in the Amazon, she paid the ultimate price for standing up for the rainforest and the peasant farmers earning their modest living there. This book has Dorothy written all over it. I can hear her saying, with all the hope and joy her voice can muster, 'See, we can do it, together we can save planet earth.' Just as Dot reached out to the young around her, Matthew reaches out to all the young through the likes of Skylar Wilson who has painted a challenging mountain to climb and Jennifer Berit Lustig who explains the commitment mystic warriors will need to climb this mountain." --Tom Stang, brother to Dorothy Stang