The Erotic Spirit
"In Genesis 1:1-2, the Spirit is described as the One that draws forth order from the emerging chaos of creation. This is probably a patriarchal view that misses a deeper truth. Ronald Faber (2008, 229ff.) invites us to re-vision the Spirit as an erotic force, not merely a principle of order. The Spirit awakens, stimulates, arouses, and engages the many processes of creativity with passion and intimacy. The erotic foreplay for the birthing of possibilities is a prerogative of the Spirit. Several indigenous cultures view the Spirit this way, and this is the primal perception of the Asian wisdom in its notion of the Spirit as a Great Mother (cf. Ahmed 2002).
"In mainline Christian spirituality, the erotic denotes primitive instinctual drivenness — a wild, uncontrolled release of passion, with demon-like sexual desire as one of its primary expressions. Eros denotes everything that is disordered and disorderly — the subliminal id in Freudian psychology, the source of sin and temptation, the relentless drive that begets compulsions and addictions, driving humans to insanity and beyond. The erotic is central to the fundamental flaw, the basis of original sin, that which has infected humans ever since the original fall. Its sexual expression is the mechanism through which the flaw is transmitted to successive generations, not merely to other humans but to the entire material creation. Humans are flawed — and so is everything in the material universe.
"Long before the antisexual rhetoric of Christianity, eros enjoyed another existence. It was deemed to be the archetypal virtue through which the gods themselves bonded voluptuously, birthing forth the galactic universe in its elegance and beauty, a beauty often infused with violence and paradox. In this context the erotic alludes to a foundational creativity of ageless existence — eternal like the divine life itself — and it has definite connotations of exuberance, elegance, passion, wildness, and prodigious fertility.
"Indeed, creation is alive with the glory of God, a creative urge, a ceaseless becoming, long predating every myth of origin humans ever conceived. Central to that creative erotic birthing drive is that divine life force we aptly name the Great Spirit. S(he) marks the 'beginning' of everything — even that of the Godhead itself.
"Using female metaphors is likely to direct us along more authentic paths in our desire to discern the meaning of the erotic Spirit. For instance, Roland Faber, belonging to the tradition of process theology, uses the image of the Holy Mystery as Sophia (Wisdom), in his attempt to develop a pneumatology for our time. Here he is in league with several contemporary scholars revisiting the notion of Sophia Wisdom in the Hebrew Scriptures.
"Many years ago, scripture scholar Ronald Murphy highlighted the neglected nature of the Wisdom literature as a topic deserving serious study and discernment. Scholars such as Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Elizabeth Johnson mined the likely links with the narrative (story) strategy that Jesus adopted, with his elaborate use of parables, proverbs, and witty sayings, suggesting that Jesus was embracing and emulating the creative wisdom of the Sophia tradition. They suggest, moreover, that Sophia is the more ancient and foundational version of the Greek Logos, and that the deeper meaning of the Logos in John's Gospel can best be accessed by grounding it in the Hebrew concept of Sophia Wisdom.
"In more recent times scholars such as Denis Edwards invoke the Sophia tradition as a basis for ecotheology, the interface between religious wisdom and the pressing ecological and environmental issues of our time. Sophia Wisdom is not merely a personification in human terms. She embraces the whole creation, wherein she is its fecund source and its enduring animation.
"Although Edwards never refers to the Goddess tradition, his insights closely resemble recent scholarship on the Great Earth Mother Goddess. This subject is controversial, often dismissed as new age romanticism, a kind of speculative nostalgia for a utopian past based on flimsy evidence from studies of Paleolithic times. This ancient wisdom poses quite a threat to the conventional patriarchal worldview, especially as articulated in religion, and not surprisingly tends to be ridiculed and dismissed out of hand in several major religious traditions. A number of studies, however, view the tradition of the Great Earth Mother in more metaphorical and archetypal terms, generating insights that complement and deepen our reappropriation of Sophia Wisdom. At the forefront is the seminal work of the British scholar Paul Reid-Bowen (2007).
"Reid-Bowen interprets the current fascination with the Great Earth Mother as an archetypal awakening arising from the pain and suffering of the tortured earth body itself. Humans who internalize this same experience — women for the greater part, and mothers in particular — are often drawn to a kind of mystical awakening whereby a fresh sense of the divine evokes images and connections with a motherly experience of the Holy One rather than the prevailing masculine imagery that dominates formal patriarchal religion. Instead of an urge to worship some God in a distant heaven, these people find themselves lured into an intimately convivial relationship with the embedded divine in the heart of creation itself."
