I keep meeting up with the idea of a “new religion,” or religious idea, that is to take hold of man. I experienced this idea during some work I did during last September’s harvest moon—a magical full moon, indeed. I learned about Earth Healers, and about how “churches” would be needed to teach Earth Culture ways and lead humans to begin healing the earth.

Edward Edinger writes in Creation of Consciousness of Jung’s idea of a new myth—a myth holding the idea that “all individual egos will become potential vessels for the transpersonal value of consciousness." This idea of man becoming a “vessel” includes the idea of “its capacity to unify the various current religions of the world…it will elucidate and verify every functioning religion by giving more conscious and comprehensive expression to its essential meaning."

What excites me, however, is his statement that “when enough individuals are carriers of the ‘consciousness of wholeness,’ the world itself will become whole and possibly expressing itself “in some new community to be created." This is the idea that has been coming to me—the idea of an Earth Church.

Matthew Fox in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ talks of a new form of worship coming for man, one that creates a new community to worship. There is a need for “a vital and living cosmology, a cosmological mysticism, a Cosmic Christ." This involves a paradigm shift creating “a new wineskin that is supple and soft," to hold this new form of worship of the inner Cosmic Christ and the Earth, the planet.

This is some of what I learned last year:

Every possible act created to heal will be within the church as ways the congregation will heal the planet and themselves: yoga, meditation, sacred rituals involving medicine and teacher plants, vision quests, rituals of adolescence, dreamwork. Schools in the mode of Waldorf will be created to teach the children and youth.

Here’s what Fox says:

 

Worship that lives is so powerful because it gathers the dreams of past and future into the hearts of those desiring to live fully in the present…in the Newtonian era ritual virtually died from anthropocentrism. Today the human heart yearns for ancient and new cosmic visions. If they cannot be born, expressed, and celebrated in worship, where can this happen? Worship is the ultimate folk art (p. 224).

How to bring this about? What is next in the step of awakening man’s consciousness so that it can be the “vessel?” How can a new form of religion bring about a healing of our planet and of man’s life?

In these days of Mother Earth waking to remind us of the need to bless and thank her, perhaps an Earth Church wouldn’t be such a bad idea! All of the earth’s elements have taken part in a year-long attempt to create what could be an equilibrium of man’s consciousness: the earth, air, fire and water have each played a role in the massive changes on the planet that have occurred via flooding, earthquakes, tsunami’s, hurricanes, rainstorms, heat waves, and winter storms. This isn’t to mention the melting of the polar ice caps.

Waking to our connection with the planet wouldn’t be a bad start to a Sunday sermon. Perhaps we could begin with this moment.