Some Reflections on Community and the Techno Cosmic Mass By Matthew Fox This past summer I had a visit from a seventy-five year old Dominican from Chicago who is a fine man and a good priest and he said to me, "If you visit any church in Chicago today, you will find no one who is under forty years of age." This strikes me as an important sociological statement. Is the younger generation uninterested in heart work? Or might they be so far ahead of the guardians of our ecclesial institutions that they are utterly bored at worship? At our Techno Cosmic Masses, we are exploring answers to these questions and what we are learning is that the young, what I call the first post-modern generation, are indeed gifted with ways to awaken us all at worship. By working with the young at making worship work again, a kind of intergenerational wisdom happens. The result is that many people show up, both young and not so young (30% are in their twenties or in their teens). And many people feel moved deeply by the experience. Transformation happens. Transformation is possible. Hope happens. Beauty flows. Fun occurs. Memory is unleashed and tapped into. The ancestors return. Boundaries melt. Boredom ceases. Creativity breaks out. Depression disappears. Empowerment takes place. Community comes to pass. African Spiritual teacher Melidoma Some says that there is no community with out ritual. If ritual is dead or boring- so boring that no young people show up- then community does not have a chance. Where there is lively ritual, community can happen. It is our experience in celebrating the Techno Cosmic Mass that community happens in the very creating of the Liturgy. Liturgy becomes again a "work of the people" which is the etymological meaning of the work in Greek. The variety of artist and artisans who "show up" for the event is very impressive- carpenters, electricians, builders and designers, altar makers and DJ's, dancers and singers, musicians and poets, rappers and drummers, media makers and video specialists, there is work for all. And their work in turn blesses the greater community who share in it. The modern age deprived us of both ritual and community. It deprived us of the latter by giving us a view of the universe as static, inert, atomized, and competitive. Atoms were understood to be impenetrable billiard ball like objects that constituted all matter and that fought in competition for space. Rugged individualism - not community - became the law of nature. We were also deprived of lively ritual because the modern age was so into texts that we were taught to read prayer and read music at worship but were deprived of hearing the heart and mind at its creative best. This post-modern era can change all that. First, the new cosmology is profoundly community-centered because it is about our common interdependence. Even atoms, we are told, link up to form assemblages that guarantee their continued existence. And ritual too can be reinvented with the powerful new languages of this post-modern time- electronic music and trance dancing (which resembles so much pre-modern dance of indigenous worshippers), rap and multi-media. Why not use these creative inventions to bring the sacred back? To bring joy and cosmology alive in our times? If we don't do this in ritual, where will we do it? And when? In the previous issue of this Original Blessing Newsletter, physicist Brian Swimme was interviewed and he made the point that humanity can change very rapidly and that the Techno Cosmic Mass, which he had recently attended, has a potential to assist that transformation. He of course is correct. The ancient peoples told the BIG stories to the young ones through ritual. This is still the case today. The Big Stories we have to share - stories of our shared origin and how we got here and where "here" is and its timeline, stories of our shared grief and pain and of our shared awe and wonder- all these can happen anew in revitalized ritual. The fact that trance dancing is at the heart of this ritual is of utmost importance. In many African languages the word for "dance" is the same as the word for "breath," and as we all know the word for breath is the same as the word for spirit in Hebrew. To dance is also to return to our origins since we all expressed ourselves early in our careers while still in the womb by stretching our limbs, i.e. by dancing. Dancing brings the mystic child alive and gets the breath and rush flowing – what could be more important in a society as cynical as ours? This Mass also mixes the old and the new, the pagan, the Christian, the Jewish and more, the tragic, and the hopeful. It is fun but it is also very serious. Time and again people who attend comment on the grief aspect of the Mass that occurs in the Via Negativa. They say things like, "I grieve alone in my room but no one has ever invited me to grieve with a group of people before. It is so powerful." St. Thomas Aquinas puts the renewal of worship at the same level as the struggle for social justice and the struggle for the common welfare. He says it takes magnanimity and courage to do all these things. He is right. Certain ecclesial guardians of the ancestral powers feel the forms we have are just fine - even if no one shows up; at the other extreme we have new agers who want to throw the past out entirely. In the middle there is the Techno Cosmic Mass movement wherein we are deconstructing and reconstructing the worship our ancestors with the able leadership of the first post-modern generation. Fortunately, there are some religious figures like the Episcopal Bishop of California, Bishop Swing, who get in it and are supportive of this work. Those involved in the Techno Mass are committed t o exploring how the revolution in technologies so prevalent in our time can contribute to bringing alive a sense of the sacred. It is good work. Come and join us. Then start in your own community. I cannot imagine our species can survive without ritual centers in every city. Matthew Fox, a spiritual theologian and Episcopal priest, has authored over twenty books, which have brought the creation spirituality tradition to life. He is the Founder and President of the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, California, and Friends of Creation Spirituality who produce the Techno Cosmic Masses. Return to Top At Historic Sweets Ballroom: 1933 Broadway, Oakland (between 19th & 20th near the 19th Street BART Station)