The WeCreators Guild of Mystical Evolutionaries
Part Twelve: WeCreating the Future of Christianity and the World
WeCreating is about being an active part of bringing forth heaven on earth, in the here and now. We might also call that the work/play of loving evolution—a divine process of ongoing creation and holistic becoming.
In our divine participation, we are called to be co-creators of the new heaven and new earth—which is not a separate realm or distant future, but an integrative becoming and emergence in this world, in this life together. In this way, we become evolutionaries, those actively participating and contributing to loving evolution of the world, WeCreating the future.
This may even be the most vital spiritual calling for this day and age. Perhaps it is our invitation to “do even greater things” than Jesus (John 14:12). I believe it is the primary divine vocation for the life and work of the body of Christ now. To step more fully into this, we repent of the ways we have denied and distorted this calling, making it all about ourselves in an insular way, and we disabuse the evil within and without that twists and corrupts the energy and life of our deeper power and capacity to be creators.
This is our new act of worship and a holistic calling to a new way of being and living. It is rooted in the truth of our divine being and a fundamental orientation of how we attend to this life, what it’s all about, who we are called to be. We experience this more as we come into living from our enlivened power and charge of divine vitality. From this powerful energy, rooted in our spiritual womb, we find ourselves more and more inspired to be, become, and bring about the heavenly creations of and for the here and now.
We will do this together—because in truth, we are not separate. We are alive in the interbeing and communion of the mystical body of Christ, which is no metaphor but a living, dynamic reality. We don’t lose our uniqueness, but our individual self is no longer the commander and central reference point of our lives. Our personal calling and divine vocation comes into participation with the communal vocation of the body of Christ, which is to love and create, to abide and attend, to serve and to bring forth the life abundant—the transfigured, resurrected life, full of hope.
In order to discover, develop, and come into living out our divine vocation in the world today, we need new ways of learning, preparing, being guided, and even becoming “ordained.” We need collectives of evolutionary practitioners sharing and supporting one another. Perhaps we could call it The WeCreators Guild of Mystical Evolutionaries.
What is a Guild?
A guild is an association of artisans and creators, a community of interest where individuals and groups can come together to share knowledge, skills, best practices, and ongoing learning.
Many of us probably most commonly associate the model with medieval craftspeople, masters and apprentices, and European merchants. While there are social and economic differences between the guilds of medieval times and today, there are some aspects of guilds which are integrated successfully into today’s network communities—especially online networks.
An Embodied Learning Collective
One of the primary allures of a guild model is the holistic, embodied approach to learning.
For some time now, the religious and spiritual training within Christianity has been dominated by the academic model and approach. This is true of the majority of education, not just religious. Particularly in Western culture, our learning processes greatly prioritize the theoretical, abstract, and mental components. Not exclusively, as there are many more holistic approaches to learning employed in various academic settings. But even then, the orientation toward knowledge retention vastly outweighs skill development or personal transformation.
The primary function of academic institutions is career-oriented, providing certification as a means of credentialing. The goal becomes to get the paper (or digital certificate nowadays), which is the necessary, never-expiring-job-ticket. Learning is secondary, though still important. Personal transformation or positive impact in the world is way down the list, if it even makes the cut. For the faculty, prestige and publishing overshadow instruction. Not to mention the influx of AI is currently wreaking havoc on this entire system as well.
There are certainly many good things about academic learning, but especially for growth in becoming WeCreators of spiritual evolution, we can integrate some very beneficial elements from the guild model.
In learning to become divine makers, we need hands-on guidance and practical engagement with the materials—the practical and energetic substance of our creative work. We need to be “in the studio” even more than the classroom. Our “measure of success” will be based not on scholastic criteria, but transformative enaction and generative emergence.
And we aren’t solo students on an individual journey to learn what we need and then go off on our own to make our living. In a guild model, apprentices would learn from the masters, and when they became good enough at their craft, they become journeymen. Good enough to do the work but still learning, continuously growing through ongoing practice. In our WeCreators Guild, we live our making continuously together, sometimes journeying forth but always still a part of the guild, where we can return anytime.
Creative Mastery & Learning – Beyond Hierarchy
Guilds recognize and draw upon master craftspeople as essential to learning and development. From a certain perspective, this may seem hierarchical. In a way, it is, and probably was in practice in medieval guilds.
Ken Wilber has made the helpful distinction between dominator hierarchies and growth hierarchies. The former seek to hold power over, which is bad, and the latter represent a more natural order. We want to learn from the master who has created for years and excels at their craft, not from the novice. Institutional degrees may point toward mastery, but not automatically. Institutional positions and certifications don’t always necessarily reflect proficiency.
In a guild, natural authority and applied mastery is recognized. However, perhaps we may even be invited to go beyond the hierarchical model—rooted as it is in our transcendency bias. Our growth in capacities, skills, development, and areas of expertise do not take us higher up. They make us more whole.
The fullness in part of those who have grown more in a certain area need not necessarily manifest in being over anyone else—this is a flawed assumption based on a faulty and incomplete model of living systems. Rather, the mastery of a given aptitude is made available in service to the whole and to the work, not the masters themselves nor the institution alone. It is attractive and free-flowing.
So rather than a top-down pyramid or a ladder of ascent, picture a great flower of life with ever-growing petals of myriad colors, some faint and yet-to-be filled in, others bright and vibrant with fullness and beauty. And still others are falling away, being released and returned back to nourish the earth. Could this be a better picture of creative growth and the evolutionary process? For the flower of our divine becoming is always still unfolding and illuminating.
We might do well to apply this way of creative authority specifically and directly to spiritual and religious authority. Here are just three of many ways mystical evolutionaries in the WeCreators Guild might embody natural, creative authority:
Specialization – Mastery in one domain does not mean proficiency in other areas, rather areas of expertise and growth are celebrated, offered, and held humbly in the context of the whole—for many skills and aptitudes are needed.
Apprenticing – Creative gifting, skill, and wisdom is offered not as a means of control or position of rank, rather as an act of loving service and empowering guidance for the support and growth of collective inspiration, vitality, and WeCreative enaction—for we will need generous stewardship and everyone learning, growing, and contributing.
Devotion – Dedication in growth and evolution is not to any career ascendency or personal status, rather our commitment focuses on our deeper communal divine vocation, which is the creative work of God in the world in our greater and more holistic divine participation—for we will need joy and passion to suffuse our efforts.
In The WeCreators Guild of Mystical Evolutionaries, our learning can be holistic processes of divine becoming and creative making, in integrative embodiment within the larger communion and body of Christ, living and serving today to bring about new creations of heaven on earth.
What are the skills, aptitudes, capacities, and creative gifts for us to learn, cultivate, and embody?
A Relational Creating Community
A guild is not just a community of learning, for it is not just a training institution or academy. It is a community of practice.
Practitioners don’t just study or learn about their craft (or faith), they go about the work of creating it every day. The “works of art” we create in this guild will be more than paintings, crafts, or wares—though perhaps those as well—but expressions and forms of evolution in spiritual, systemic, and relational contexts. To make in such a way will take great intention, energy, and practice—including many failures and less-than-ideal forms along the way.
Our practices will not just be the common forms we think of as “spiritual practices.” Those are essential and vital aspects of the work, but often can become overly narrow and focused only on specific methods and particular aspects of growth and development. Our evolving global and cosmic context today calls for more. Loving evolution beckons us to more.
While most of us probably know what is meant by “practice,” it really isn’t the best word. It is helpful to distinguish an active engagement and participation beyond just mental understanding, but it is insufficient because this is not practice—this is the real thing.
Sometimes in creative work, an artist will do studies to work on how to render something. And each work of art is always a sort of practicing to get better. But it is also the engagement in creating something, however imperfect it may be.
We still practice, but we also enact. We create. We bring forth.
And we do it together. Not just as coworkers but WeCreators engaged in vital collaborations and essential explorations. We need one another for relational guidance and companionship, and for the deeper experiential participation in the communion of who we truly are.
We are not the solo artists isolated in their studios tortured by trying to bear the weight of the creative force alone. We are not alone. And not that, the creations of evolution ahead will mostly only occur through and from our communal being and becoming—not a collection of individuals with a shared mission, but a living organism, the Cosmic body of Christ coming to be more and more. Expressed and embodied through us, together, in the I, the We, the All, and the Eternal.
What are the practices, engagements, works, and relationships for us to inhabit, create, and express as a community?
A Generative Guild of Mystical Evolutionaries
This is specifically mystical not because it is only for esoteric or particularized forms of spirituality. It is not about ecstatic experiences or lofty states. Rather, we emphasize and necessitate the mystical because it is the only epistemological approach (ways of knowing) that seeks to encompass the holistic nature and direct experience/participation with/in/as reality.
This follows Raimon Panikkar’s definition of mysticism as the holistic experience of reality, life itself. This comes through incarnational mystical stream of Christianity—embodied and taught by Jesus—which has danced through many stages of religious and spiritual expressions mired by empire, institution, and trappings of Greek/Western philosophy.
And it is in the stream of participatory integral philosophy and evolutionary spirituality. It includes the spiritual and the scientific, the physical and the energetic, the ethereal and the corporeal, the conscious and the unconscious, and many more integrations that lead us beyond the dualistic mind, transcendency bias, individualism, tribalism, and more. It seeks to continually evolve, differentiating and integrating into more holistic ways of living, knowing, and being.
Rather than a sense of the mystical being removed and detached from life, seeking distant realms and ethereal states of transcendence, it’s quite the opposite. It is all about how we live—and how we can live more fully in the here and now.
And the explicit mystical emphasis directly welcomes the spiritual as a vital, natural, and accessible part of reality at all times. The divine is immanently present, so all of our work and play is fully human but not limited to that realm of existence and reality. It is in greater participation with the divine dimension.
This is how Jesus lived and the way he invited us to follow. We are called to live as well, in Christ. The anointed reality of all materiality incarnated with the divine, not just in Jesus, but in all things.
This is not a union we seek, as if it is a separate realm we are divided from. It is an ever-present reality from which we may not often or even generally live, but it is already here. Union is not the end point, but the starting point. And the more we live in faith from that participation, the more real and true will be our experience of it.
And from that holistic experience of divine being—charged with vitality, inspiration, and our true being in divine vocation—from this fuller reality is the new heaven and new earth WeCreated.
This is the emergent, generative potency that arises with necessary force, holism, and divine love required of the evolving future that wants to be. That needs to be. That we are called to engage in bringing about as human/divine WeCreators.
What are the dimensions of reality latent, nascent, and arising for us to discover, foster, and evolve into personally, communally, and cosmically?
“The Dance of WeCreating”
WeCreating the Future of Christianity and the World
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Joining the WeCreators Guild
WeCreating is not about being artistic. It is about approaching all of life with the divine creative impulse and power. We are not passive and powerless beings subjected to the fates. We are able and called to live into the great reality of our divine being—which is full of vitality and life force. It charges us to live fully and to create more fully the world itself, as it is in heaven.
Creatively speaking, this evolutionary process encompasses all domains and areas of life. It can permeate and express in any realm of work, play, relationship, and forms of expression. We will each be drawn to WeCreate in unique and specific areas that we see are in deep need of evolution. We won’t be the only ones to see—we will join together in and from the communion of others who are also moving toward these areas and callings. And on a deeper level, those who are creating in other areas too.
Our creations will be mystical, energetic, and sometimes even mysterious. We will co-generate tangible, practical, and physical forms—working in, through, and beyond the current systems of today. Even creating new systems and evolving structures for the days ahead.
We will seek to embody an evolving form of the guild model itself, integrating the better practices and processes, leaving behind the outdated trappings of previous expressions. We are in a new, global, interconnected context that will afford us unprecedented access and opportunity relationally, technologically, and spiritually.
ICN is a global network community of mystical practitioners. Our embodied spiritual practice and communal relationality are the means by which we deepen into our authentic divine being, becoming more of who we truly are.
And from this growing experienced reality we come more and more into new ways of being that are more loving, more whole, and more generative.
As a community (and beyond), might we take the next step further into the generative, emergent, evolving work and play of loving evolution? Not just along for the ride, but empowered, active divine WeCreators?
Can we commit in a stronger and deeper way to our divine vocation, personally and communally, suffused and charged by the strength and power of our divine vitality, filled with new inspirations now and yet to come?
Can we organize in a WeCreators Guild of Mystical Evolutionaries, forming many studios and workshops, all networked in the deep union of the mystical body of Christ, the greater communal organism we are invited to be and become?
Can we do it? Or…rather, can we make it? Can we be the WeCreators of loving evolution?
This is our shared mission. Not the destination, but the creative act itself, our worship, our divine vocation, our sacred calling, our enlivened being, our Christ nature, our life—here and now, before and beyond, together, eternal, the glory of God.
“The WeCreators Guild of Mystical Evolutionaries”
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