Episode Summary
What would you think if you received an invitation to attend to something called a Techno Cosmic Wedding? Would you be curious? Avoidant? Undecided? What if it was framed as a post-modern, rave-inspired event where your whole self was welcome. How would you feel then?
Episode Resources
→ Techno Cosmic Wedding (Pt 2 - The Event): https://ever-changing.net/episodes/s5-e2-techno-cosmic-wedding-2
→ Matthew Fox: https://www.matthewfox.org/
→ The Cosmic Mass: https://www.thecosmicmass.com/
→ A Joyful Wedding Can Still Make Room for Grief: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/07/31/joyful-wedding-can-still-make-room-grief/
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→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings
→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss
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Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.
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Full Transcript
Thomas: Can you hear?
Torres: Oh, now I can. Yeah, now I can.
Thomas: Good. Alright. I’m going to turn this light off because it makes a hum.
Torres: [HUMMING]
Thomas: Okay, say something.
Torres: That makes it hum too…
Thomas & Torres: [HUMMING]
What would you think if you received an invitation to attend to something called a Techno Cosmic Wedding? Would you be curious? Avoidant? Undecided? What if it was framed as a post-modern, rave-inspired event where your whole self was welcome. How would you feel then?
This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. So you’re invited. You are retroactively invited to attend my wedding. And joining us today to help me bring you into the scene, into the moment, is my amazing husband, Rodrigo. We’re going to tell you about how this unusual ceremony came to be, why it was modeled on an event called the Techno Cosmic Mass, and how it welcomed something you don’t normally see at a wedding - grief.
We’re going to share the story in two parts. Today we will fill you in on the who, how and why and take you through the planning phase - which as you know is really the richest part of any intentional event. Then, next time, you’ll hear how it all turned out, including the bumpy ride that led to the actual wedding day.
So, here’s the story. A long time ago, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend graduate school in spirituality. The school I attended was called The University of Creation Spirituality and it was run by theologian Matthew Fox. You may know of Matthew through his many books. He has actually authored 40 books over the past 50 years. Some titles that might sound familiar are “Original Blessing”, “The Coming of the Cosmic Christ”, and “One River, Many Wells”. Like several other students at the school, I felt that the universe had somehow called me out to complete that very program. And one of the pieces that spoke to me the most was an event Matthew and his team regularly hosted called the Techno Cosmic Mass. Now, unknown to me, Rodrigo was also attending the Cosmic Mass which at that time was held in the historic Sweets Ballroom in downtown Oakland. This was before we met, like way before we met. Here he is helping me describe it.
Torres: And the Techno Cosmic Mass was kind of a multimedia Mass held in a huge ballroom in Oakland, when I went to it. And you'd walk in, there was a lot of screens showing a lot of different spiritual designs and images and music. Very low lights. It was kind of like a rave, almost, the atmosphere… Not that I've really been to a rave, but what I imagine one to be like. And then there were altars in the big ballroom you could walk around to. And then when it would start, they would go through a whole sort of ceremony and kind of a four… four movements. Some of them were very upbeat and, and had like dancing, and were kind of like a rave, and some were very introspective and dark. It was pretty unique. It was pretty cool.
Thomas: And we were going at the same time and we didn't know each other then.
Torres: Right
Thomas: And I was volunteering at a lot of them. In fact, when I first came out to check out the University of Creation Spirituality, I just spent a weekend here in Oakland, and I just wanted to hang out at the school as much as I could to see what it was about and what the people were like, and if it was a place I wanted to study. And so I helped with… helped with the Mass, because that was going on over the weekend and I built this beautiful altar. I had, like, the whole day to build it. And all this big room of stuff. It was like multi-layered, different heights. I found a big bowl, a big silver kitchen-type bowl that had a glass, a really tall, clear glass, glued into it. I don't know why it was glued into it, but I put a candle like a taper candle inside there. And then it filled the bowl of water and then the candle was inside the glass and it burned down throughout the night. So it eventually was under the water. You know, it was just really… it was really meaningful to me and it was a signal that this was a place I definitely wanted to come and study.
And so I did. And I loved the school and loved my classmates and loved my teachers and had an amazing time. And then over the years everything kind of faded away. I’m sad to say that the school actually closed shortly after I left. The Masses continued for a while but then they stopped too. And then, many years later, I met Rodrigo through a completely different community. And we did all the things. We dated and moved in together and were not going to get married. And then changed our minds. But when it came to wedding planning, it was a little bit difficult.
Torres: Well, our spiritualities are different and I'm… I think I was pretty sure that wasn't something very conventional and I think you didn't either, that’s my guess… I’m not sure… or did you?
Thomas: We did a lot of thinking and talking about that about traditions. Like what are the wedding traditions? What… Why are they there? What do we want about them? Because I think it's always fine to pull them in if…
Torres: If they make sense.
Thomas: If they're meaningful, right? If it's not just, “Oh well we should….”
Torres: I think we were trying to find… something that was meaningful to both of us.
Thomas: Yeah, and we couldn't. We hadn't. We were in limbo as I recall and then we went that night to… well, as luck would have it, or as synchronicity would have it, they started doing the Masses again - right then. Because they had stopped.
Torres: They hadn’t done them in a long time.
Thomas: Yeah, just out of the blue they started and I… I saw the flier that with that old art they used to use with the… you know, the event flier. I was like, “Oh, my goodness!” It's like I mean, Oakland, not at Sweets Ballroom but in Oakland, right. And we went and Matt was there and he was welcoming people from all the different faiths, which was one of my favorite parts. Getting to represent for my underdog faith, and then getting to be welcomed in and then the dancing and... I just remember, we were dancing. It might have been the Via Creativa dance, the Via Transformative dance - I think it was toward the end of the night - and just looking over at you and being like, “I want this for our wedding!” And you were like, “Yeah”. And I was like “Oh my gosh, we finally found something!” And we were both a big yes to it.
Torres: Totally. And that was good to find the big yes.
Thomas: Yeah. And looking back at it from now, what was the yes to you?
Torres: It just felt right. It just felt aligned. And it felt like it wasn't… it wasn't even a very conscious thing, it was just “Yes”. Just like from my gut. How about you?
Thomas: Yeah, it definitely had that perfectly right…. and really excited to hear that it felt that way to you, too, because sometimes we're not on the same page. So I was like, “Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, definitely. We're on the same page!” And for me, it had always been like, you know, I'm super into bringing the body into worship into ritual and remembering we have bodies and coming into the bodies and dancing with the body and you know, all of the… bringing the chakras and the colors and the lights and the celebration and the grieving that's in the body too like, the whole way that it's so embodied and so fun. Yeah.
Torres: Yeah. And it had, like elements of what felt like a wedding, like bringing a whole bunch of people together and doing ritual and ceremony and… But it was like, a different way of doing it.
Thomas: And we… It felt sort of divinely guided because like we said they came up with a Technic Cosmic… they started doing the Cosmic Mass again out of the blue from our perspective. And then we jumped in and started volunteering with a Cosmic Mass crew for about six months to learn how to do it. And then pretty much right after we had our wedding, they stopped again, they stopped doing the Masses again. So we got in this tiny little we know, which was like maybe nine months or a year or something?
Torres: Yeah.
Thomas: I think they're still doing the Mass, but they do them only at events now. So they… it's an on-the-road thing. But we were perfectly aligned and and doing the volunteering with them was great.
Torres: Yeah. Yeah, we got to see kind of behind the scenes.
Thomas: Yeah
[MUSIC]
So at this point you might be wondering what actually happens at a Techno Cosmic Mass and why we would want to use it as the foundation of our wedding. Bear with us as we take you into a bit of the spiritual framework behind the event.
Thomas: So in Creation Spirituality, there are four “tivas”, as we call them affectionately. There are Four Paths of Creation Spirituality. There is the Via Positiva, which is joy, awe, and wonder. And the Via Negativa, which is about darkness and letting go, grieving. The Via Creativa, which is about… we are creative beings, creative as the… divinely creative as the Creator is divine, right? And then Via Transformativa, which is where we ready ourselves to return to the world as spiritual warriors - that's how I always think about it.
Torres: Transform.
Thomas: Transform. Yeah. And in the Mass, traditionally, my experience was that they did a trance dance, a joy dance, during the Via Positiva, and some kind of group grieving during the Negativa. And then they did the Eucharist during the Creativa…
Torres: Right.
Thomas: …the actual taking of the bread and the body of Christ. And then the Transformativa was another trance dance. Yeah, to prepare yourself to go out into the world and be a warrior for social justice. So I remember when we were planning the wedding, I was really enamored with the idea of having a dance for the Positiva, cause I really loved having the trance dance. And then grieving for Negativa. But then instead of the Eucharist, we wanted to come up with something non-Eucharist-y to do there. So we came up with honoring the cosmos. It kind of feels to me like at the Mass, the Techno Cosmic Mass, the focus… a big part of the focus was on the Eucharist, since it's a Mass, right? So… But yet for us, we realized that the Transformativa might be a really good place for the wedding ceremony itself.
Torres: Yeah. I mean, that was what I thought was our sort of more… our focus in terms of the wedding itself was the transformation of being two people that weren't wedded to two people that were wedded.
Thomas: Correct. Exactly.
Torres: And so… I mean, for me the Transformativa was kind of a no brainer, because it's like, yeah, it's a transformation. So we have to have the wedding in the Transformativa. And the dancing is interesting, because in a lot of weddings, the dancing is… comes like afterwards, and it’s like the reception, it's not part of the wedding. So, I liked it that we had it as part of the part of the wedding ceremony that people were dancing.
Thomas: Yeah, me too. I loved that.
Torres: Yeah. I think we really liked that about that. And then we… I think the Negativa was kind of… we sort of knew that that was kind of going to be like the most unusual thing to have in a wedding.
Thomas: Yes. My mom was not happy, to say the least.
Torres: What did she… Do you remember what she said?
Thomas: Oh… No, I don’t. I remember talking to her more about the song that we had our really good friend Dara sing before… because she had that wonderful album, and we wanted to incorporate her music into the day and we listened to it and she had a song called “I am Not Afraid” that I think you were like “Oh, I think…” Of I forget which one of us was like, “We need this right before we get married!”
Torres: Yeah, I think it was me.
Thomas: Because it’s this song about, “I’m not afraid. I am so afraid. I am not afraid, but I am so afraid…” It was just.. it was such a beautiful song and I remember playing that for… or telling my mom about it. I think I didn't play it for her. And she was like, “Oh, no, no, no, no.” She was like trying not to put her foot down about anything I think throughout the, you know, year I was telling he plans for the wedding and then she had to with that. She was like, “That is a bad idea.”
Torres: For some reason I had the story flipped in my head that she was saying that about the Negativa, about having the Negativa. I think she was pretty much also against having the Negativa from what I remember.
Thomas: Yeah. I mean, she's pretty traditional. And it sounds like a weird thing to have people crying at a wedding… on purpose.
A communal grieving ceremony in general might be something you’re not used to experiencing - but imagine it at a wedding. We actually had a mix of folks at the event, some of whom were more traditional and weren’t really sure what to do but kind of went with it, and others who actually had a lot of experience in holding space for deep emotions in a group setting. And a lot of this latter group were from Rodrigo’s work community at a non-profit called Challenge Day.
Torres: It's interesting because I think part of the… part of the reason that I felt more sort of comfortable with that was because I had gone through a lot of Challenge Day stuff, so, which is kind of an emotional workshop that I did and then I worked at for many years. And there was kind of a lot of that sort of going into your feelings and being okay with that and doing it in kind of like a group setting. So I felt a lot more comfortable with that then much more than I would have had I… had I not gone through that sort of experience. And kind of like seeing… not as not seeing it as a kind of a negative thing is a kind of a healing thing.
Thomas: Exactly. Yeah. And you'd been to the Masses to where that was also part of like, you know, really, really presencing the destruction of the planet or the destruction of the rain forests or whatever the focus was that night at the Mass. Like really, all the stuff that we know is happening in the world but we don't want to think about, becoming really focused on it and aware of it and allowing the pain of it to really become present and allowing ourselves to grieve. Grieve the things that we try to not look at - in community. I mean, that's not a… that's not a normal experience, a day-to-day experience in the US so like getting our… getting comfortable with that learning what that is and that it might be weird, it might feel weird. But yet going through it, especially in community can be very healing.
Torres: Totally. Yeah.
Thomas: It was a very NorCal wedding.
Torres: Absolutely.
Thomas: California wedding. [LAUGHS]
[MUSIC]
Torres: Oh and the… also the altars were important. Creating the altars…
Thomas: You didn't really want the altars though. You didn't really care about the altars.
Torres: Yeah. I guess. I don’t remember.
Thomas: You were like, “That’s your thing.”
Torres: Was… really?
Thomas: Yeah, but that was okay because I was excited. Yeah, so at the Mass there… If you walked into the Techno Cosmic Mass, you would see two or maybe three really big projection screens and then four… at least four really big altars at the four directions. And sometimes they would be set up to honor the Four Directions, you know, earth, air, fire and water, the elements. And sometimes they were themed in some way, depending on the theme of the Mass. But we decided that we wanted to honor relationship in its various forms and so we decided to have five altars. So we had a self altar like love of self, and then a friendship altar, love of friendship and romance altar for romantic love, and a family altar for family love, and then an earth altar for honoring the Earth. And we also had a moon lodge because that was my thing. And I was really excited about the altars because I wanted them to be very interactive. So they were kind of like little sets, almost like, like at a play. So we wanted the self altar to have a beautiful mirror where people could sit in front of the mirror and look at themselves. [LAUGHS] And the friendship altar was meant to look like a front porch where the checkers set and rocking chairs. And then the romance altar we set up at a fireplace which was in the… in the venue. Yeah, at the venue, there was a fireplace and so we set the romance altar up in front of the fireplace with chocolate boxes and..
Torres: Pillows. Like throw pillows.
Thomas: Pillows. And the family altar was the richest, it was beautiful. It was all of these beautiful Ancestor items and your father's paintings were… ended up there. And we had some Day of the Dead coloring books. It was very… it was the most, I think, interactive one. People really liked it. They really gravitated toward it. And then the Earth altar was sort of just a very big houseplant with the globe or something. [LAUGHS] It wasn't very impressive, but it was… They were all meant to be very interactive and very… and so that people could be at the event and they could also kind of wander by and interact with the altars.
Torres: Like at the Mass.
Thomas: Like at the Mass - but even more interactive than at the Mass. At the Mass it's kind of like you look at them they’re really pretty and they’re interesting but you don't really do anything at them.
Torres: Yeah, you really wanted to sort of have it there as sort of something that people that came to the wedding sort of interacted with and participated in.
Thomas: Yeah.
Torres: Yeah. I think I was thinking it was your thing because I… there was so much to organize and I just felt overwhelmed. I was like, I can’t do altars on top of everything else, I'm sorry. It’s like… if you want it, you’re welcome to do it. So, sorry about that, but I just didn’t have the bandwidth.
Thomas: That’s okay.
Torres: I mean, we had… along with all of the regular sort of wedding things, we also had kind of to put on this sort of multimedia presentation of like, big screens and provide our own sound system…
Yeah, so suffice to say, we were planning a big event. It was multimedia, it had trance dancing, it had interactive altars, and it was a wedding… So we took our time and were intentional about it.
Thomas: What was your experience of the planning time which was a huge part of it.
Torres: Yeah. I think we went into wanting to be very comprehensive and very careful about every detail. And I think we were. So that was really nice. And very conscious and sort of wanting the wedding to be part of sort of creating community and the planning to be creating community. And it felt like very much like us doing something together. And, you know, we also had, like, our spreadsheet with like, 25 tabs or something like that.
Thomas: Totally.
Torres: We were very organized.
Thomas: And then toward the end. I remember you found some way to draw the room. You created diagrams of exactly… because at the end of it at the end of the planning, we sort of reached the point of needing to turn it over to our…
Torres: Our team.
Thomas: To our team. And so there was this like process of like, making sure they really got it, and we really got all our thoughts and… We were really sure. And how do we convey this to them? And so that's where you were doing that diagrams of like, “Hey, this is how we want the chairs at this point, and then we're gonna change to this. And then then it's gonna be like this…” Because it was… it was an event.
Torres: It was.
Thomas: It was a whole production.
Torres: And we had to like, move chairs in and move chairs out. And because it was just one big room, and we did everything in that room from just having it way open for all the dancing to having the ceremony with chairs in there and everything had to sort of be coordinated. And we were very clear from, I think, very near the beginning that we wanted to be just present for the wedding. And so we didn't want to be the person sort of like worried about directing things and moving things around and making sure things went right. So I think we sort of made it... I think it was a great decision to “Okay, we're gonna organize everything, we're gonna explain it to our team as clearly as possible and then we're gonna just let go.” And if it happens, it happens. And if it doesn't, and something goes totally different, then that's just the way it's gonna be because we just want to be present for it.
Thinking back now, I’m not even sure where we got that sage wisdom to let go of the details on the wedding day but it turned out to be great advice. Join us again next time to hear how the big day went. I really hope you can make it back because I’m excited to tell you how it all unfolded and, as I mentioned, the bumps that came up along the way.
If you’d like to know more about Creation Spirituality, check out matthewfox.org. For a sneak peek into the Negativa section of our wedding, see Tria Wen’s Washington Post article. Find links in the show notes.
Our music is by Terry Hughes. Find us on YouTube, IG and X at shamepinata. Reach us through our website, shamepinata.com. And subscribe to the show on your favorite player. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.
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