James Morgante

My encounter with the holistic health movement when I was searching for alternatives in psychology became an important formative influence in my life. It expanded my understanding of the parameters to health and validated the importance of religion and spirituality in human culture. It also changed my vocational focus from psychology to ministry. Rudolf Steiner was subsequently responsible for shifting my spiritual focus from Eastern religions back to Christianity, and Valentin Tomberg for emphasizing the value of traditional Christianity. My book The Yogi Diet and the two books I have been involved with translating -- Father Thomas Schipflinger's Sophia Maria and Valentin Tomberg's Lazarus, Come Forth! (entitled in the first English edition Covenant of the Heart) -- reflect the important influences in my life and relate to one another in an intimate way. The revelation of the Feminine Divine in modern times was an important theme in Valentin Tomberg's work. In his Ten Commandments essay that I translated (in Lazarus, Come Forth!), he speaks of a six-fold Godhead that includes a feminine Trinity. Elsewhere he relates Mary to the figure of Wisdom, or Sophia, in the Hebrew Bible and speaks of Sophia's incarnation in Mary (similar to the incarnation of the Word, or Logos, in Jesus Christ). Mary's relationship to Sophia is, in fact, an important theme in Sophiology, and Thomas Schipflinger's book Sophia Maria explores this relationship in detail. The Yogi Diet is dedicated to Lady Wisdom and seeks to cultivate wisdom, or sound judgment, about the role that vegetarianism should play in one's life, if at all. The book reveals the importance of health in the holistic sense -- of body, mind, and spirit -- and how total health relates to diet. It also reveals the pros and cons of vegetarian and meat diets, which necessitates discernment in order to decide what is right for oneself. The wisdom that the book tries to foster is thus understood as a contribution to the revelation of the Feminine Divine, Lady Wisdom, in our time. Two further related works are planned. The first, Mother Cow, will take up cow worship in "third-world" Indian culture as a reflection of the importance of lacto-vegetarianism in this culture and contrast such reverence with cow treatment in "first-world" Western culture, where farm animals are exempt from animal cruelty laws. The resultant abuses of the "factory farming" method of animal husbandry are well known. The second will take up in depth the significance of the complementary relationship between resurrection and reincarnation. Both themes play an important role in The Yogi Diet, and each in its own way relates to wisdom, or Feminine Divine, concerns.