W. Va. church used as lab for New Age-like religion
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, April 16, 2002
A Presbyterian congregation in West Virginia was used in 2000 as a laboratory for a New Age-like religion that is led by a woman who named herself Sea Raven.
She commends the former minister of the congregation and his wife, a college chaplain, for “the courage to experiment” as members of the “Gaia Circle,” which held some of its gatherings at Bunker Hill Presbyterian Church in Bunker Hill, W.Va.
Gaia is the name of a Greek goddess who was the daughter of Chaos.
In a May 2001 dissertation for a doctor of ministry degree from the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, Calif., Sea Raven described the rituals conducted at Bunker Hill. They ranged from baptism by passing around “moon water” to smudging oneself with cedar, sage, sweetgrass and tobacco.
Moon water, she explained, is water transformed by placing it outdoors at night when the moon is shining. The four smudgings represented the four directions and the four elements: earth, air, fire and water.
Sea Raven’s dissertation expressed appreciation to John Harris, former pastor of Bunker Hill Presbyterian Church and now a member of the staff of the Presbytery of West Virginia, and Harris’ wife, Victoria “Vicki” Moss, Benfield-Vick chaplain at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, W.Va.
Harris is a frequent commentator on the Witherspoon Society Web site. Lamenting the rejection of Amendment 01-A, the “fidelity/ordination” standard for the Presbyterian Church (USA), Harris said in a recent letter that some of the PCUSA’s “best and brightest and most talented” were stoned “by overzealous Presbyterian Pharisees. And the defeat of Amendment A by the majority of the church handed them the stones!”
Many of Sea Raven’s teachings echo themes similar to the Re-Imagining God Conference in 1993 that spawned an enormous backlash in the denomination. The 1994 General Assembly declared that “Theology matters” and said Re-Imagining God went beyond the boundaries of the Christian faith.
Sea Raven’s dissertation, “The Wheel of the Year: A Worship Book for Creation Spirituality,” draws on the writings of controversial Episcopal Bishop John Spong, the Jesus Seminar, feminist theology, Native American rituals, a variety of books addressing such subjects as magic and herbs — and, especially, Matthew Fox.
Fox, a defrocked Dominican priest who was silenced by the Roman Catholic Church in 1989 after his teachings were labeled “dangerous and deviant,” is the founder of the University of Creation Spirituality.
In June 1989, Christianity Today published an article about Fox’s teachings by Robert Brow titled “The Taming of a New Age Prophet: What do sweat lodges and Mother Earth have to do with Christianity?”
Fox’s ” beliefs and practices should give Christians pause,” wrote Brow, a retired Anglican priest and prolific evangelical writer. “Evangelical eyebrows rightfully rise at Fox’s ideas about same- and opposite-sex lovemaking, phallus worship, sweat lodges, powwow dances, and pipe ceremonies. But these are only skin-deep marks of the animal he is describing,” said Brow.
Brow says Fox teaches a form of monism, which argues against a creator above and separate from his creation. Monism is a metaphysical belief that there is only one reality — that mind and matter, heavenly and earthly, are from the same ultimate substance or principle of being.
“To be precise, Fox is teaching a form of monism that is already 3,000 years old in India,” says Brow, who served 11 years as a missionary in India.
Sea Raven defends Fox’s teachings, which deny original sin and argue for a pantheistic theology because “God/dess contains the universe and the universe expresses God/dess.”
She quotes Fox teachings that contradict almost every Christian denomination’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper. “The Eucharist is about the universe loving us unconditionally … The Eucharist is heart food from the cosmos — the ‘mystical body of Christ’ and the Cosmic Christ or Buddha nature found in all beings in the universe.”
In Creation Spirituality, God is ever-changing — just as the cosmos is changing, Sea Raven says. Consequently, “Like the shamans of neolithic and aboriginal tribes, post-modern spiritual leaders must become priests and priestesses of the cosmos,” she adds.
The Scripture is not ignored in Sea Raven’s Creation Spirituality, but the interpretations lean toward self-affirmation to express the common good in all people.
She refers in her dissertation to a paper she presented to the Third National Women’s Conference of the United Church of Christ in Boston in June 1996. The paper was a composite of feminist theology and Celtic and Native-American spirituality.
“I knew I had struck a powerful nerve when the paper was attacked by representatives of Biblical Witness,” she said.
Biblical Witness is a renewal movement in the United Church of Christ. Sea Raven called it a “fundamentalist sect.”