A Foreword to Welcome Mark Townsend's New Book, Jesus Through Pagan Eyes

This month marks the publication of a most welcome volume by English theologian and author Mark Townsend et al, Jesus Through Pagan Eyes (now available on Amazon).

I was delighted to contribute the following foreword welcoming this book and its honoring of the earth-based spiritual traditions, which have too long been stigmatized and sidelined. In a time when the planet is being systematically pillaged, fundamentalist sects are dividing the peoples of the earth through fear, and our only hope for survival lies in deeply listening to the wisdom of all faiths, this is a much-needed and long-overdue voice for a deep ecumenism that includes - to quote Thomas Aquinas - not only the Peoples of the Book, but the Peoples of the Book of Nature. Highly recommended!

Foreword: Welcoming this Book

I very much welcome this volume by Mark Townsend and his friends that celebrates the wisdom and the practice of so-called “pagan” ancestors.  I say “so-called” because paganphobia has dominated for so long in the West and those who identify with earth-based or pre-Biblical religions have endured the opprobrium of the dominant religious culture for so long that they may well find the term “pagan” suspect insofar as it is more a title given by the dominator culture.  Indeed, the very invective that so often accompanies  the term “pagan” belies the hatred of all things earthly that goes with it since, as we all know, paganus simply means rural person.  Why are those close to the land so threatening to those who no longer are?

Ernest Becker observed that “ancient man—unlike modern man—had not yet lost his awe of nature and being.”  There lies the depth of the gift of pagani, those close to the earth.  Awe is as good a synonym for “mysticism” that I know of.  In our times of a shrinking globe and a rapid communication network world-wide and the rise of interfaith or what I call “Deep Ecumenism” it is more important than ever that we listen to each other’s religious journeys and hear from various religious lineages including especially those who have not lost the awe of nature and of being.  Our very survival as a species depends on deep listening and learning. As the Second Vatican Council put it in the sixties, the Holy Spirit has worked through all cultures and all religions through the human epoch.  Instead of making war in the name of our gods or God or goddesses, it is wise to catch one’s breath, breath deep (in the Bible and many other languages around the world the word for “breath” and “spirit” are identical) and learn rather than judge.  It is often scandalous how “ecumenism” for some religious types means only sitting down with persons of the Book and ignores sitting down with persons of the Book of Nature.

One thing we are learning is how much Jesus had in common with earth-based religions.  Scholars now agree that the historical Jesus came from the wisdom tradition of Israel but this tradition is not book-based but nature-based.  He grew up in Galilee, the green belt and farming area of Israel and his closeness to nature and her animals and her seasons and lessons is everywhere manifest in his parables and teachings.  Wisdom is feminine and she is cosmic and all about generativity and creativity in the Hebrew Scriptures.  She is also a “friend of the prophets” and the prophetic tradition also spawned the historical Jesus who dared to take on religious hypocrisy and privilege in his day.

But Jesus’ relationship to earth-based religions runs even deeper than that.  No less a Biblical scholar than Bruce Chilton, author of Rabbi Jesus and Rabbi Paul and Mary Magdalene: A Biography makes the point that Jesus can rightly be understood as a shaman.  Like shamans everywhere, Jesus withdrew periodically into the wilderness where, we are told in Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, he wrestled with spirits and the wild beasts came to succor him. (Mark 1:12, 13)  His mentor, John the Baptist, with whom he probably spent his formative years as an adolescent, was very much a man of the wilderness.

Nor is Chilton alone in this assessment of Jesus as shaman.  The late poet and ex-Dominican, William Everson, (also known as “Brother Antoninus”), thought deeply about shamanism and he felt that Jesus “was perhaps the greatest of all shamans….Forty days in the desert, the carrying of the cross as a Sun Dance” and more.(1)  He goes on: “The link would seem to be the Animal Powers. Christ would relate to the animal Powers that preceded our more sophisticated religious impulses….Now when you press back, beyond this point, and try to bring those forces—the Animal Powers—into focus, it seems like it’s whittling down even more on the Divinity of Christ, except that the infra-rational has its own Divinity, and it is by maintaining that continuity that the problem can be solved, I feel..  In the arts, it will come in largely through the imagery.”(2)  Everson observes that the shaman descends into the “primordial wound,” to recover a redeeming spirit.

It is interesting that Otto Rank talks about humans all being born with an “original wound” (as distinct from an “original sin”) and if Rank is right, then we see a powerful link between the very meaning of redemption and the work of the shaman. Rank also perceptively identifies our “original wound” as the separation from the womb that we all undergo and that is triggered again whenever other profound separations touch us.  Wisely does Rank prescribe the medicine for this original wound as the “unio mystica”, the mystical union that love and art restore.(3)

Everson talks of “the wounded buck” in one of his poems but of course the psalms also offer similar imagery.  The animals in their wild habitat easily “become a part of the religious persona because it invests us with a sense of the sacred.”  Shamans heal.  They heal this visible world and the invisible one, they heal “the breach between sacred and profane, between divine and mortal, between eternal and contingent.”(4)  They heal because they have journeyed into their and society’s wounds.  David Paladin, a Navajo artists and healer, was tortured for years as a captured soldier in World War II to the point that when found he was comatose and a paraplegic.  Years later his elders told him that this suffering was his initiation into shamanhood and he exclaimed: “Shamans know that those wounds are not theirs but the world’s.  Those pains are not theirs but Mother Earth’s. You can gift the world as shaman because you’re a wounded warrior.  A wounded healer and a wounded warrior are one.”  The warrior-shaman rises above his own dead body and says, “I have died, too.  Now let’s dance.  We’re free.  The spirit is ours because we have died.  Now we are resurrected from the ashes.”(5)

Paladin’s wife explained to me that on more than one occasion dead artists would come to her husband in the middle of the night and request he paint something in their name.  She showed me for example a painting signed Paul Klee that looked exactly like a Klee painting—“I remember the night he came to him,” she told me.  Yes, shamans live in several worlds at once.

One of the techniques shamans use to heal is the beat of the drum and the beat and rhythm of chant.  Much of the shaman’s work is to put people into a trance state.  “The idea of trance [is] the basic psychological function of the shaman,” notes Everson.(6)   Silence also leads us into trance.  The shaman we might say takes us deeper than language (left brain) into that area of the unconscious that is closer to animal communication, into what Eckhart calls “the soil, the ground, the source of the Godhead.”  Into the Godhead, not just into God.  Into the lower chakras, where so many Westerners in the name of false religion and false education are afraid to journey.  The first chakra is about our link to the earth after all; all animals have feet that connect them to the earth.  The second chakra is about our sexuality which we share with all animals.  And the third chakra includes our anger and moral outrage—it is there that we are grounded in the groundless Divinity and it is there that compassion takes root.  This is what shamanism evokes in us.

It is not only Everson who saw this but also the great nineteenth century prophet, Walt Whitman.  Whitman reinvented poetry by taking it out of the classic European models of rhythm and rhyme and opening it up to the beat and to every day language again (no compulsion to rhyme).  He himself was aware that he was doing with language a shamanistic thing.  He called his breakthrough the “breaking up of the crystalline structure of the classic mould.”(7)  His verse-technique was a method that liberated poetry itself.  A telling story is told of how, when he was ten years old, Whitman heard a Quaker preacher named Elias Hicks who was half black and half Native American.  His words and cadence put Whitman into ecstasy.  I am convinced that his shamanistic vocation began at that time and notice—it did not come from books but from masters of oral traditions, an indigenous and black preacher.  To this day and in its latest reincarnation as rap, the black religious impulse, like the Native American drum, beats its message which is as much about sound and vibration as it is about content.  It appeals to the lower chakras, not just the rarefied atmosphere of heady rationality.

Whitman scholar and Jungian therapist Steven Herrmann says that for Whitman “the drum-beat works for him as a transport to the Divine.”  Whitman’s journey is a journey of ecstasy, “an embodied sense of Ecstasy,….he also sinks down into the bodily regions of soul, where body and soul cannot be distinguished: where soul is the body and body is the soul, and he speaks out of this oneness of the soul’s body—out of the language of the body which is the soul-language.”(8)  Back into the lower chakras.  (This is also what makes rave so enticing to the younger generation.  It brings the first chakra into play.  Our Cosmic Mass has demonstrated the power of this return to the body for worship, to dance as prayer.)   Whitman, in a pre-modern way of seeing the world, celebrates how “everything without exception has an eternal soul!  The trees have, rooted in the ground!  The weeds of the sea have!  The animals!”(9)

Whitman also celebrates the second chakra, our sexuality, for he sees sexuality “as the root impulse underlying all creation.  He saw it ultimately as the means to spiritual development and union with the Self.  It was from the animal heat generated during such a summer morning [of love making] that he became a bridge between the known and the Unknown, the ordinary experience of ecstasy and the shamanic state of Ecstasy, which cannot be symbolized.”(10)

Whitman also sings of the sacred dance and how it leads to sacred trance: “I am a dance…Play up there!  The fit is whirling me fast.”  He tells us he beats his “serpent-skin drum” and again, “I hear the dance music of all nations…bathing me in bliss.” (11)  He is deeply ecumenical in his appreciation of putting the lower and sacred chakras to work when he calls explicitly on the music “of all nations.”  Herrmann summarizes Whitman’s contribution this way: “Whitman’s methods of vocalism and free verse are patterned on a shamanic technique of ecstasy that is archaic; its archaic function is to lead the reader to non-ordinary states whereby inflections from the Divine can be made imminent, and where the origin of all poems can be experienced.  His religious vision is an outgrowth of shamanism; yet it cannot be limited to shamanism, or any established religions, for it is essentially contemporary, post-scientific and new.”(12)

Whitman called for a “spiritual democracy” that would culminate a political and economic democracy.  In his way he was calling for “deep ecumenism” or the gathering of all religious tribes, none greater than the other.  He also called for recognition of sexual diversity and indeed of homosexual marriage, an archetype now awakening all over the globe.  In his appreciation of the mystical role of sexuality as well as spiritual democracy he was standing in opposition to “the Puritan myth [which] was based upon an unconscious projection of evil onto indigenous peoples, the lifeways of the two-spirits, and a bi-erotic image of the soul’s wholeness.”(13) His call for a New Religion and a New Bible seems more real today than ever before.

Thomas Berry talks this way about the Shaman while comparing prophet and shaman.  “While both Prophet and Shaman have special roles in their relation to the human community, the Shaman is more comprehensive in his field of consciousness.  The prophet speaks somewhat directly in the name of God, the prophet is a message bearer, the prophet is interpreter of historical situations, and the prophet critiques the ruling powers.  The Shaman functions in a less personal relationship with the divine.  He is more cosmological, more primordial, personally more inventive in the source of his insight and his power.”(14)

To bring earth back to religion and spirituality is to bring the body back and vice versa.  It is also to bring sexuality back with its intimations of mystical encounter, the theophany of human love reconnected to divine love and the body.  It is to take sexuality beyond the realm of mere moralizing into the kingdom of God-experience.  Jesus would recognize this movement; it is the teaching of the “Song of Songs” in the Hebrew Bible.  It is at the heart of a wisdom-based spirituality.  Call it pagan if you must.  The Creator and those who claim to worship the Creator have no need to apologize for the ecstasies of creation, the re-emergence in the sacred wilderness that is ours to remember, ours to celebrate, ours to share.  Those who do not dare to make the journey into their own depths or into the collective depths of the unconscious are today, as yesterday, standing on the sidelines shouting and throwing stones.  But such fundamentalism has never been the religion of the future.  It is a crutch for the fearful and Gandhi warned us that a religion based on fear is no religion at all.

Part of the gift that indigenous peoples and the hunting-gathering religious genius brings to current spirituality is a profound sense of sacred ceremony.  As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her study, Dancing in the Streets, the ancient rituals brought a “kind of spiritual merger with the group” that both healed and awakened joy.  The dancing and the masks, the marking of the seasons and uniting with cosmos via the equinox and solstice, the painting of the body and the wearing of costumes inspired by the animal spirits all brought alive the human challenge and condition.  It also brought defense insofar as many rituals were enacted to strengthen the hunters before they went out to risk life and limb on behalf of gathering food for the community.(15)  Ritual was not just theater or piety—it was a survival mechanism.  The great work of building a Stonehenge was motivated by the ancient realization of our necessary interdependence with the cycles of the cosmos.  Macrocosm becomes microcosm and microcosm macrocosm in valiant rituals.  While early Christianity saw itself in cosmic terms, the Christian church gradually lost that cosmic sense which indigenous ceremonies to this day still reenact and bring alive.

Speaking as a Christian who has been deeply blessed by undergoing indigenous rituals such as sweat lodges, sun dances, vision quests and more, I know what these ceremonies bring to a psyche and a culture that is too cut off from the earth’s ways and sounds.(16)  The spirits of the animals are crying loudly today on behalf of mother earth with all her citizens in such peril.  We need our shamans.  We need our earth spirits.  We need a vital exchange between those who honor the God of the Book and those who honor the God of the Book of Nature.  There need be no split.  Union and communion are beckoning us and this volume is part of that invitation and calling.

A profound invitation to reconnect with Nature in our spiritual practices has everything to do with honoring the Divine Feminine.  The goddess, as Marija Gimbutas reminds us, “in all her manifestations was a symbol of the unity of all life in Nature.”(17)  Native American religion has been called “aboriginal mother Love.”  Again, Wisdom, who is feminine, is speaking loudly today.  Gaia is the new Christ being crucified by excessive Yang forces (consider BP’s assault on the Gulf waters this past summer) of empire and corporate rape.  The goddess is rising up in resistance and part of that resistance is incorporating (or re-incorporating) the Divine Feminine in all of our God talk and God action, including worship and education worthy of the name.  The Divine Feminine deserves a worthy consort, however, and for that reason I believe the Sacred Masculine must also return—cleaned up and detoxicated.  Only thus can we entertain again the Sacred Marriage of Divine Feminine and Sacred Masculine.(18)

It is not enough that we merely return to the past however to renew the relationship of self to nature and to the Universe.  For our understanding of the universe has altered profoundly thanks to contemporary science.  As Thomas Berry puts it, “the small self of the individual reaches its completion in the Great Self of the universe” but we are not there yet.  None of our religions are there yet.  “To move from this abiding spatial context of personal identity to a sense of identity with an emergent universe is a transition that has, even now, not been accomplished in any comprehensive manner by any of the world’s spiritual traditions.”#  Our work is cut out for us.  This is why all traditions, earth based and book based, must work together and with science to forge an effective spiritual practice and rituals if are species is to become sustainable.  Ceremonies that truly inspire and transform, that lead us from greed to community and from ravishing the planet to celebrating and healing it are required.  Can these fit into current ecclesial wine skins?  I doubt it.

For this awakening to take root and for the Divine to truly become flesh again, we welcome earth-based and ancient ways of wisdom.  We—that is our species--need all the help we can get.

As a person who has been received from my original Christian faith tradition by a welcoming Episcopal (Anglican) Church that offered me religious asylum when forces in Rome were hounding me, and now after sixteen years as an Episcopalian I would like to offer a couple of observations apropos of the present volume.  First, I became Episcopalian to work with young people (originally of the Planetary Mass in Sheffield but after their sad and untimely demise exclusively in the United States) to reinvent forms of western worship.  Those forms, borrowed from rave, were also taken from pre-modern or indigenous, earth-based traditions for they are primarily about dance and the beat of the “urban drum” that lead us into our lower chakras.  We have sponsored over 90 of these “Cosmic Masses” as we now call them in various cities in North America from Vancouver to New York, from Houston to Boulder, from Kansas City to Portland and especially in Oakland, California.  We have learned much from this pilot project and it is all positive—healings of a physical, religious and psychic nature have occurred during these Masses which were appreciated not only by the young but by people of all ages.  One 18 year old said to me: “I have been attending raves every weekend for five years and I found here what I have been looking for: deep prayer and community and a heterogeneous community (rave is all one generation).”  An 84 year old woman said to me while dancing away: “I have been waiting 82 years for someone to connect my love of prayer with my love of dance.”  We have proven that when you connect the genius of rave to a liturgical tradition one does not need drugs to get high.  Artists galore tumble out of the woodwork from vj’s to dj’s, from people on stilts to altar builders and rappers. We have also learned that people of all faiths including pagan traditions feel at home worshipping together in such a form of worship.  So I praise the Anglican Church for welcoming this connection between earth-based and liturgically based rituals.  I would like to see much more of it happening.

I also praise the Episcopal Church for standing up for women priests, women bishops and gay priests and bishops and for fighting these battles for justice in the open and not behind closed doors.

But something else has transpired recently that should contribute to the Anglican Church taking on special leadership at this time in history.  The Roman Catholic church, having abandoned so many principles of the Second Vatican Council under the past two papacies and so weighed down by the world-wide priestly pedophile scandal and above all its cover-up at the highest places of the all-boys club in the Vatican, is now purposely and deliberately raiding the Anglican church in search of all homophobic and misogynist clergy to take them on board, married or not, into their for-men-only priesthood.  What a blessing and a lightening of the load for the Anglican Church!  Like a vacuum cleaner, the Vatican is sucking in all the sexist and gay-hating clerics of the Anglican Communion.  A blessing indeed.  And one wishes them well.

But with every blessing comes responsibility and the Anglican church, I believe, should heed the lessons in this book.  Now that it need not entertain sexist and homophobic clergy, and not pander to a Vatican that has turned very dark at this moment in history, it can and should turn itself with ever more vigor  to the bigger issues of eco-justice, eco-spirituality, sexual mysticism along with sexual morality and deep ecumenism shared with those earth-based traditions that were so badly treated in the past.  A new relationship with indigenous and pagan peoples is near.  From this new and deeper alliance and from science  whose sacred task it is to explore nature ever more deeply, much needed wisdom can arise.

These are just a few of the reasons I rejoice at the arrival of this book.

______________________________________

(1) Steven Herrmann, William Everson: The Shaman’s Call, Interviews, Introduction, and Commentaries (New York: Eloquent Books, 2009), 94. (2) Ibid., 95. (3) See Matthew Fox, “Otto Rank as Mystic and Prophet in the Creation Spirituality Tradition” (4) Herrmann, 100. (5) I tell the story in Matthew Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002), 173. See also: Lynda Paladin, Painting the Dream: The Visionary Art of Navajo Painter David Chethlahe Paladin (Rochester, Vt: Part Street Press, 1992). (6) Herrmann, 105. (7) Steven B. Herrmann, Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy and the World Soul (New York: Eloquent Books, 2010), 255. (8) Ibid., 255, 256. Italics his. (9) Ibid., 256. (10) Ibid., 42. (11) Ibid., ix. (12) Ibid., 258. (13) Ibid., 287, 288. (14) Mary Ford-Grabowsky, The Unfolding of a Prophet: Matthew Fox at 60 (Berkeley, 2000), 70, 71. (15) Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 21, 22, 28, 29. (16) I have described some of these experiences in Matthew Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996) and I have treated some of the intellectual gifts I have received from earth based spiritual teachings in Matthew Fox, Wrestling with the Prophets (New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 2003), chapters 6, 7, 8. So much of pre-modern Christian mysticism was creation-centered and earth based as well, thus Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas among others carry deeper similarities to earth-based religions than to heady modern anthropocentric theologists. (17) Matthew Fox, One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2000), 119. (18) I treat this subject at some length in Matthew Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine (Novato, Ca: New World Library, 2010). (19) Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), 190.

Some Thoughts on Occupy and Creation Spirituality

I have visited Occupy Boston, Oakland, New York, Ashville, San Francisco.  There is much to like about the people I have met there ranging from 20-somethings to sixty-somethings.  A 58 year old in Boston told me he was camping out because he had been unemployed for over two years; a 30 something in New York told me he was there “because of Jesus who teaches him that the poor get to heaven, not the rich.”  On Wall Street this past weekend I watched two lines of exuberant young adults playing “Rover, red rover” literally in the middle of Wall Street while police cordoned off the entrance to the street.  Nice to see some fun enacted in the name of social change.  I very much appreciated two very large canvases on a side of a building at Occupy Boston: One was entitled, “What is Good about America” and the second was entitled: “What is bad about America.”  Everyone was invited to write on the pages. I read all the entries and they were moving and thoughtful.  I liked the balance that was invited forth to everyone to express their opinions.  In Oakland one day of protests brought out about 7000 people of all ages and ethnicities, mothers with babies in strollers, a flash mob dance of about 80 people well appreciated by hundreds of observers, a band playing as we marched through the city center streets.  My favorite sign?  “I will believe corporations are people when the state of Texas executes one.” Results have already been significant.  The language of the economic debate in America has shifted from “the deficit is everything” to the matter of justice and injustice—rare words to enter American political discourse the past two decades (though Obama shies away from the words and prefers “fairness”).  A New York Occupy person told me “already Governor Cuomo has learned something and is seeking $2 billion in new taxes from the richest among us.”

More important than immediate “results” and even a change of language and perception is the bearing of witness that is going on.  The bearing of witness against Wall Street’s greed and arrogance, its willingness to borrow trillions of dollars from Main Street but offer nothing in return but more foreclosures, more bankruptcies, more excess, more CEO privileges and more greed.  I have written about greed quite extensively in my book on evil, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Lessons for Transforming Soul and Society. Returning to that book recently, I have to say I was pleased with the teachings that are there.  Greed corresponds to the fifth or throat chakra (“gluttony” comes from the Latin word for “throat”).  Greed interferes with self-expression, stuffing excess things down the throat instead of eliciting wisdom from the inside with the throat as the birth canal.  The fact that 70% of the American economy runs on consumerism is proof positive that consuming is the newest form of gluttony and such gluttony feeds greed and vice versa.  As Aquinas warned, “avarice tends to infinity”—there is no end to a consciousness of greed or its ally, consumerism.  Henry Ford was once asked: “When do you have enough money?”  His response: “When you always have a little bit more.”  So with consumerism.  It never ends.  It is infinite.  Ask Donald Trump.

If Occupy accomplished this alone it would be revolutionary: To educate Americans and others that an economy that runs 70% on consumption and on greed has to reinvent itself.  It is not spiritually or materially sustainable.  We can do better than consumer capitalism.

In the matter of reinventing economics, I never tire of recommending David Korten who I feel is the most profound and most relevant teacher of an “economics that works for everyone”—not just for 1% of the people but for all the earth’s people including the more than two legged ones.  Korten has done his homework about ecology and cosmology as well as about economics and ethics.  He knows of what he speaks when he shows the way to our reinventing economics so that it serves the earth and all her creatures and therefore future generations as well.  Go to Yes magazine web site to see his many articles on the current economic crisis as well as to his books.

Another aspect of the Occupy movement that moves me is its bearing witness to moral bankruptcy.  The banks are very willing to condemn plenty of us to financial bankruptcy at this time of high unemployment and intransigence in refinancing home loans and business loans, for example.  But they are the carriers of a Moral Bankruptcy that needs calling out.  Speaking truth to power (the economic power elites who brought the economy crashing down on us all) is what prophets do.  Occupy is prophetic.  They are daring to interfere with the economic status quo.

There is courage involved in Occupy as there is in all those movements in the Middle East that we attribute to the Arab Spring.  It takes courage and endurance to sleep in the parks and even on the concrete as so many Occupiers have done (including the 68 year old woman I met in Boston!) and to face police harassment.  Courage is, in my opinion, the number one sign of Spirit.  Without courage there is no Spirit.  There is Spirit afoot in Occupy.

There is hope also because of Occupy.  David Orr says, “hope is a verb with the sleeves rolled up” and those in Occupy are doing something.  How important is that?  Doing something, bearing witness, instead of just getting depressed or angry and sitting on it while addicting oneself to more TV or eating or whatever.  Putting one’s moral outrage to action, tapping into anger as an energy source.  All good.  Tea partiers great success has derived from the anger they tapped into.  While I find their solutions short sighted, their energy has made a difference and Occupy’s can do the same—with much sounder solutions.

Part of Occupy’s success has been its appeal to television.  In this post-modern time television is the primary medium for reaching peoples’ heart and minds and the very act of sleeping outdoors has attracted the cameras that have in turned allowed fresh stories to be passed around.  Stories about values.  Social media is part of this post-modern political movement obviously also.  And the effort to reinvent community through democratic means of listening to all and not just the powerful and ego-driven ones.

Now of course Occupiers are not allowed to encamp or sleep out in most cities but that only means that the means of expression are morphing.  More and more Occupy is focusing on foreclosed houses and trying to raise consciousness about that.  In New York I was told that $400,000 still remains in the kitty they have raised and that all of that is going toward housing for the poor and bringing attention to the plight of the unemployed.  The movement is evolving and morphing as anything living does. In Oakland evicted persons are occupying boarded up and foreclosed homes putting them to use.

Occupy is raising consciousness about the big banks, the “too big to fail” profiteers.  Many are the people moving their money to credit unions (I am one of them and I am happy I did that).

When I preached recently in a Unity church in New York City a woman came up afterwards and started to cry.  She said: “I have been supporting Occupy in every way I can bringing food and warm clothes and more but so few of my friends get the point.  They are just living their lives as if this doesn’t matter.  And where are the clergy?  I hardly see them at all.  But to me this movement is about everything Jesus taught us about loving our neighbor.  There are so many people suffering today.  Your talk inspired me to keep going.”

Recently I wrote a book on The Pope’s War which lays bare much of the sickness within the Roman Catholic Church at this time in history, a sickness that panders to sexual abusers as well as to dictators like Pinochet who tortured and murdered thousands and to fascist movements like Opus Dei, Legion of Christ and Communion and Liberation, a sickness that has silenced or expelled over 100 theologians while supporting the movements just mentioned that between them produce armies of canon lawyers and not a single theologian.  The emasculation of Liberation Theology and base communities was a program enacted by the present and previous popes.

Of course not all priests who work in the Roman Catholic church are child molesters nor are all hierarchy busy hiding and protecting them.  So too not all bankers and all financiers who work with Wall Street are crooks.  But both systems are practicing moral nothingness and condoning it so staying in the system and not critiquing carries with it the risk of being an accomplice, however distant, to the system.  Leaving it makes more obvious moral sense but if one chooses to stay you must stay as a critic and with one’s conscience in tact and operating to change the system.  One stays not as a cheerleader to the system and not to profit from it while taking no moral position.  There is no room in a moral crisis whether of economics or of sexual predation for putting one’s conscience on a shelf and hiding either in the pew or in the boardroom.  It is time to stand up and be counted and support those who are so doing.  It is a time for moral courage.  Thank God for Occupy!

News from the Creation Spirituality Front in Oakland

Dear Friends of CS, Holiday Greetings to you all!  Many thanks to all those who are carrying on the work and vision of the movement/tradition from Mary Plaster in Duluth to Susan Coppage Evans in Boulder to Diane Wolverton in Wyoming and many, many more.  (Can’t mention you all.)

A few words from my Oakland base.  Here are some things going on.

My two books that came out this Spring are stirring things up a bit.  Christian Mystics just received an award as “one of the best spiritual books of 2011” from Library Journal. The Pope’s War is coming out in paperback in the Spring and is already out in German.  The translator wrote me that she “cried often” while translating it because her generation (she is in her forties) was promised “never again, no more fascism” and that the book proves fascism is back in the church and especially through the German wing of the church.  This book is a “bomb” she says and Germans need to read it.  Reviews coming in from Germany, all of them positive.  Others have told me the “book is a page-turner—I stayed up two nights in a row to finish it” they say.  A number of positive and thoughtful reviews in the US too.

Susan Coppage Evans and I launched a series of CS retreats this Fall in Boulder, Co., based on the Four Paths.  September event was Via Positiva with Mary Oliver as our guide.  I loved working more deeply on Oliver’s wonderful poetry and had the privilege of seeing her in person deliver a reading and q and a in San Francisco ten days before our retreat.  In January we are doing the Via Negativa with Eckhart as our guide.  Later we will do Via Creativa with Hildegard as our guide and then the Via Transformativa with Howard Thurman as our guide.  Spread the word!  www.wholeheartedretreat.com Lots of good practice stuff going on with Susan leading that and I offering in-put on the various subjects and guides.

I am very grateful to Mary Plaster for carrying the torch with a facebook page with my name on it.  Thank you, Mary, and Congratulations too for the wonderful work you are doing with theater pieces and puppets galore!

Mel and I have been working diligently to rescue some of the wonderful articles and interviews from Creation Spirituality Magazine from its very first issue to its very last.  We are putting these on its own web page very soon and access will be free.  I was excited and pleased to see how many great articles were written and interviews offered over its 13 year history—articles that are still very relevant.  (I was also amazed to see how many I had written, just about one per issue).  Authors or Interviewees range from Jerry Brown to Buck Ghosthorse, from Joanna Macy to Bill Everson, from Jeremy Taylor (a regular) to Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, from Charlene Spretnak to Starhawk and many, many more.  Thanks and kudos to all the editors over the years of the cs magazine.  It is nice to revisit it at this time in my life.

Nicole Porcaro has been working diligently on putting together a Manual for the Cosmic Mass and I have been overseeing the project.  She is drawing on the documents that Debra Martin brought together for her Manual when teaching the course on the TCM at the Ballroom plus history plus more.  We hope to have that Manual on line by February.  (Nicole is getting married in early January!  Send your blessings her way!)

Beginning in January and with the hard work of Diane Wolverton we are launching a teleconference course on “Mystics: Pioneers of Consciousness” taught weekly for 10 weeks (first week free) by yours truly.  We are hoping this will be a first “out of the gate” experience for starting an on-line teaching experience that is global and that is using the latest in technology that insures interaction among students and teacher as well.  You can go to www.CSourcewisdom.com.  Spread the word please!  Maybe we are resurrecting UCS in this teleconference format making it much cheaper and more accessible than ever before.  We shall see how it evolves.

I am working hard with Adam Bucko of NYC who is co-founder of “The Reciprocity Foundation” (see www.reciprocityfoundation.org) who has been working with street youth in NYC for six years.  We are writing a book together in dialog form about young adults and spirituality, have handed out lots of surveys and have also interviewed on film about twenty interesting young adults from Bay Area to Boulder to North Carolina to NYC.  So we are creating a film project as well.  We expect to have the book completed by February and the film later this year.

The work with Yellawe goes very strong in Chicago where Ted Richards is active with three Chicago versions of the project called “The Chicago Wisdom Project.”  (He is also commuting to NYC to work with New Seminary there).  In Oakland we have linked YELLAWE up with Kokomon Clottey’s project, “Art Esteem” and his and Aeesha’s Attitudinal Healing Project this Fall.  This month it morphs from an afterschool program at McClymonds high school to being an accredited afternoon in-school program and we all see that as a plus.

I am still on the road a lot with lectures, workshops and preaching.  And some Cosmic Masses in the works also.  I will be going to England and Scotland in the Spring for a series of lectures.  I remain very grateful to Aaron Stern and the Academy of the Love of Learning for their support and mutual work and vision. www.aloveoflearning.org Their new building in Santa Fe is a stunner and fully Leeds approved and above all full of wonderful activities.

I have been seeing more of Brian Swimme lately and share his joy that his life’s work of putting the “Journey of the Universe” to film is now getting a great hearing by being on so many PBS stations this season.  Surely Tom Berry is blessing the project.

I am currently writing an article on the Occupy Movement, a movement which I have great hopes for.  I have visited Occupy in Boston, NY, Ashville, Boulder, Oakland.  Lots of cs energy and principles there!  I will make the article available on line shortly.

A high point for me this year was going to Rome for the launch of the Italian version of my “Original Blessing” book—they launched it on the anniversary of Giordano Bruno’s burning at the stake in Rome in 1600 (he too was a Dominican and keen on spirituality in science).  A well known Italian philosopher wrote a very rich Introduction to the book (which is now in its fifth printing) and an Italian publisher is committed to publishing “The Pope’s War” and also “Creativity” (which is being translated by a fellow in Florence—seems like the perfect city).  While in Rome I posted an Italian translation of my 95 theses at Cardinal Law’s basilica on a Sunday morning.  Much drama with the Vatican police there in street clothing leading the attacks.  We, not they, remained non violent.

So that kind of brings you up to date from Oakland.  If you have some money to contribute to a still very viable non-profit called FCS, don’t hesitate to do so. www.mcssl.com/store/matthewfoxorg/books/donation If you don’t I fully understand.  You can help other ways by spreading the word and maybe stirring up some lecture invitations or pushing books or courses such as our on-line ones, etc.  And many thanks to Dennis for his continued and dogged work contributions to FCS—and to Dominic Flamiano too for his legal assistance.

Blessings on your Holidays and New Year Days for 2012!

Grateful for all you Be and Do,

Matthew Fox

"The Pope's War" Book Reviews from Germany

Matthew Fox's "The Pope's War" came out in German in September. Below are three reviews from Germany about the book. An Italian version should be released next year.

Much Truth and Insights into Ratzinger’s Style of Leadership: A Review from Germany

M. Plotzki

This book is a must-read for every Catholic and interested Christian because it points out Ratzinger’s schemings and his way of fraudulently concealing facts in clear and factual language without becoming spiteful or biased.  (My compliments to the translator for the excellent translation.)

The book explains a “theology of obedience” that affects our every day lives.  A theology that conceals crimes against children and teenagers, deliberately keeps them secret and even shields, protects and promotes the bishops and cardinals involved.  Ratzinger argues for compassion where openness and justice should be called for. Is this an “intact theology.” one that can reach people and is open and willing to reform?

This book, that I highly recommend to every interested and questioning person, raises serious concerns in me and stirs me up.  As a former member of the Roman Catholic Church, I too belong to those Christians who lament the deterioration of a society that with this behavior sees itself deprived of another one of its supports.  The great amount of people leaving this institution point the same way.

Here and all over the world we find many examples showing how the Vatican operates--Ratzinger has silenced good theologians who had been teaching inspiring, stimulating messages – for instance in the issue of women’s rights - that could bring change. This has been done by dismissing them from the church against their own will.  This book explains the background and mechanisms involved in these cases. Matthew Fox, for whom I wish many readers for his book, belongs to this group of theologians compromised by the Vatican.

Perhaps this book will lead to an enhanced exchange between its readers, so that together we can focus on these grievances!  That would be desirable! As always change can only be brought about when we ourselves as members of our society become active and express ourselves!

Clarification and Truth About Ratzinger: A Review from Germany

Bernd Wagenbach, director of studies (retired)

Helga Simon-Wagenbach

For a long time I have critically studied the history of the church and vigilantly watched the scandalous ideas and activities from Ratzinger that have nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus. Of all the publications dealing with these problems, the outstanding book “Ratzinger und sein Kreuzzug”(in English, “The Pope’s War”) by Matthew Fox is particularly worth reading.

It contains very interesting information about the current pope including some that is to this point unknown and appalling – for example information concerning Opus Dei and the Legion of Christ.  Such an extraordinary and thrilling book as this, that serves the purpose of clarification and truth, should be warmly recommended like hardly any other!  It most definitely deserves a much larger dissemination.

Pope Benedict XVI– A Man of War and a “Murderer”of Theology? A Review from Germany

Roland R. Ropers

philosopher of religion and publicist

The American theologian and former Dominican Monk Matthew Fox, who is known worldwide, describes with brilliant clarity Ratzinger’s thirty year long dictatorship in the Vatican and his part in the cover-up of pedophile scandals and inquisition-like crusades against a large number of theologians and spiritual teachers who don’t conform to his political views and his course back into the religious Dark Ages.

It is obvious that Joseph Ratzinger has exchanged his soul for power.  Matthew Fox refers to Pope Benedict XVI as a “murderer of theology” and a “man of war.”  The current book of the now 71 year old professor of Creation Spirituality is appalling and illustrates how fraudulent and far from Christ the institution of the Roman-Catholic “faith corporation” has been steered.

At the end of his diagnosis Matthew Fox, among other things, points out 25 tangible steps for the revitalization of Christian communities.  Everyone who still relies on Pope Benedict and the cardinals, bishops and priests enslaved by him should very attentively read this book. It is about the urgently needed revolution of spirituality.

The Other Side of the Catholic Tradition

(A shortened version of this article appeared in The Washington Post 061411:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/the-other-side-of-the-catholic-tradition/2011/06/14/AGQuyeUH_blog.html) People who came of age in the past forty years have known only one version of the Roman Catholic Church—a version of an iron-fisted ideology that first a Polish pope and then a German pope have enforced in the process of condemning liberation theology, creation spirituality, women, gays, the “secular world,” and much more.  Not only all bishop-making has accrued to the Vatican headquarters but also all teaching, calling itself the only “magisterium” or teaching arm of the church to whom all must kneel or get out.  Since “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, as Catholic historian Lord Acton observed on hearing of the declaration of Papal Infallibility in the nineteenth century, we have also seen of late immense corruption in the way the hierarchy has and has not responded to pedophile clergy and in the way it has denounced theologians and others who bring ideas to an age-old tradition.

But looking at the long and varied history of the church one gets a different impression.  Diversity and pitched battles abound before the time of instantaneous heresy hunting made possible by faxes, phones and emails changed the rules of the game.  Back when it took mail weeks and months to go back and forth by horseback and river boat, much gestated that was creative.  Let me offer a few examples.

In twelfth century Germany, the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen, author of ten books, the first opera of the West, dozens of songs, and a healer, awakened popes and abbots alike, firing off letters that would make a Cardinal blush with shame in our day.  Her favorite topic when she preached all around Europe (Yes, a woman preached!) was the laxity of priests.  She writes of a vision of a “very beautiful lady,” who is the church who speaks thus to Hildegard: “This fact, that the wounds of Christ remain open, is the fault of priests.  For they are the ones who are supposed to make me radiantly pure and serve me in purity; but instead in their limitless greed they move from church to church in their practice of simony.  And even my robe is torn thereby, for they are violators of the law, of the gospel, and of their priestly duty…..They cover my face with dust, tear my robe, and make my cloak dark, and my shows black….They do not adhere to the straight ways, that is, to the hard and rough ways of justice.” (329f)

In a letter to Abbot Helenger who complained to her of dryness in his vocation, she offers this advice: “Sometimes you have the style of a bear who often grumbles to itself in secret; sometimes you have the style of an ass, for you aren’t solicitous in your duties but are glum and in many things bungling as well….. (303f)

And to Pope Anastasius IV she wrote these blunt words: “O man, the eye of your discernment weakens; you are becoming weary, too tired to restrain the arrogant boastfulness of people to whom you have trusted your hearts.  Why do you not call these shipwrecked people back? And why do you not cut out the roots of the evil which chokes out the good?  You are neglecting justice, the King’s daughter, the heavenly bride, the woman who was entrusted to you.  You are even tolerant that this princess be hurled to the ground.   Her crown and jeweled raiments are torn to pieces through the moral crudeness of men who bark like dogs and make stupid sounds like chickens which sometimes begin to cackle in the middle of the night.  They are hypocrites ….Therefore, O man, you who sit on the papal throne, you despise God when you don’t hurl from yourself the evil but even worse, embrace it and kiss it by silently tolerating corrupt men.  The whole Earth is in confusion on account of the ever recurring false teaching whereby human beings love what God has brought to nothing.  And you, O Rome, are like one in the throes of death.  You will be so shaken that the strength of your feet, the feet on which you now stand, will disappear.  For you don’t love the King's daughter, justice.”  (273ff)

In addition to criticizing churchmen, Hildegard composed marvelous music (I call it “erotic Gregorian chant”) and poems, painted over 40 mandalas that we still possess, wrote ten books including books on trees and stones and medicine.  She has been accredited with discovering vitamins and the need to boil and purify water.  She says “all science comes from God” and taught that the Cosmic Christ or Divine Wisdom lived in every being (“there is no creature that lacks an interior life”).  She wrote: “I, the fiery life of divine wisdom, I ignite the beauty of the plains, I sparkle the waters, I burn in the sun, and the moon, and the stars.”   She was a Renaissance woman.

Thomas Aquinas followed a century after Hildegard and just after Francis of Assisi.  Aquinas was a genius of the first order whose intellectual output has rarely been equaled.  He died at 49 (the last year of his life he was struck dumb and neither wrote nor talked) but he wrote numerous works including commentaries on ten of the works of the greatest scientist of his day, Aristotle, who was being translated in Muslim learning centers in Baghdad for really the first time.  Aquinas said he preferred Aristotle to Plato because Aristotle “did not denigrate matter.”  A pope had forbidden Christians to study Aristotle but thanks to an Irish professor in Naples (a stone’s throw from the pope), who put scholarship ahead of obedience, Aquinas was introduced to Aristotle as a young man at the newly born University of Naples.  Aquinas committed his life to integrating Aristotle into Christianity—a direct affront against the fundamentalists of his day (and ours) who prefer Plato’s dualistic matter vs. spirit rap that appealed to Augustine and forms the basis of the Catholic Church’s teachings on birth control and homophobia to this day.  (Augustine said that all sex must be justified by having children.)   So controversial was Aquinas in his day that at one point the king of France had to call out his troops to surround the convent where Aquinas lived to protect him from…Christians aroused by fundamentalist clergy who insisted that believers did not need the science of “pagan Aristotle” since they had all their answers in the Bible.  For Aquinas, “revelation comes in two books—the Bible and Nature” and “a mistake about nature results in a mistake about God.”  Thus, the importance of science and scientists.

Aquinas rejected Augustine’s “introspective conscience” in favor of a cosmic perspective as when he says: “Every human being is ‘capax universi,’ capable of the universe.”  And again, “all beings love on another,” and “the order of the universe is the ultimate and noblest perfection in things.”  Aquinas says “joy is the human being’s noblest act” and he endorsed conscience in a big way, saying that one is always responsible to one’s conscience, more than to any other authority.  (Indeed, Dr. Martin Luther King jr. cites Aquinas on this point in his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail—Aquinas as a basis of civil disobedience.  We are to obey conscience, not necessarily man-made laws.)  Aquinas was condemned by church authorities three times after he died but eventually he was declared a saint.  Carl Jung has said that by bringing scholasticism from Islam to the West he inaugurated the beginnings of modern science since scholasticism was a method for learning that emphasized questions and answers over recitations of past “authorities.”  To the credit of the Dominicans, they protected their brother against the ire aroused by his forward-thinking teachings.

Another Dominican, Meister Eckhart, came right after Aquinas and he stood on his shoulders becoming the most important preacher in Europe.  He is probably the greatest mystic the West has produced and his writing abound with depth, humor, paradox and challenges to establishment Christianity.  For example, he declares, “I pray God to rid me of God” and he emphasizes what contemporary Biblical scholars are saying, that Christ is found not just in Jesus but in all of us.  Eckhart says, “What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the son of God 1400 years ago and I do not do so in my time and my person and my culture?”  And again, “we are all meant to be mothers of God.”  He declares that “the highest work of God is compassion” and that “compassion means justice,” in fact, “compassion is where peace and justice kiss.”  Eckhart was condemned by Pope John XXII a week after he died.  It was reading Eckhart that converted Thomas Merton from a dualistic monk of the 1950’s to a prophetic mystic of the 60’s.

Today’s eco-prophet, the late Thomas Berry (a priest in the Passionist Order and author of The Dream of the Earth, The Great Work and The Universe Story with Brian Swimme), often talked of how much he owed his twin mentors, Thomas Aquinas and Teilhard de Chardin.  Chardin was a French Jesuit mystic and scientist who was banished from his home country to China early in the twentieth century but who found plenty of scientific and mystical work to delve into in his exile.  He spent his life researching the deeper meanings of science and spirituality and, being forbidden to publish most of his works in his life time, he left his books in the hands of a woman (not to his Order) who got them published shortly after he died.

A fifteenth century scientist, mystic and cardinal in the church, Nicolas of Cusa, taught that “every face is a reflection of the One Face,” that is of God.  He called for deep ecumenism saying that while we call ourselves by many religions there is only one wisdom.  The late physicist David Bohm said he owed more to Cusa than to Einstein!

Recently I was giving a retreat at a Unitarian Universalist Center in Rowe, Massachusetts and a woman said to me: “I am so grateful that you, unlike Teilhard de Chardin, did not remain silent as the church asked.  You spoke out and took the consequences.”  I remarked that we live in a different time than Teilhard (who died in 1955), but I did appreciate her comment.  Ours are not a time for keeping silent.  The old wine skins are no longer holding the rich wine that is still flowing from the teachings, the life, and the story of Jesus.  New wine skins are needed to hold not only the rich lineage of the past but the mixing with other faith traditions, with scientific breakthroughs, with contemporary movements such as the women’s movement and the eco-justice movements, and today’s Biblical scholarship that can and ought to occur today.

Pope John XXIII’s Second Vatican Council of the early 1960’s which inspired many Catholics and non-Catholics alike has been called the “greatest religious event of the twentieth century.” It set the stage for a new future in religion to happen including a spreading of decision-making beyond Rome and empowerment of lay people and deep ecumenism.  It gathered  great theologians from all around the world—people like Karl Rahner, Hans Kung, M.D. Chenu, Yves Congar, Teilhard de Chardin, Edward Schillebeeckx and many others.  Sadly, the papacy of John Paul II crushed it all including the courageous response of Latin American Liberation Theology that supported the poor and oppressed in direct expression of Gospel values and, contrary to the spirit and law of Vatican II, launched a modern day Inquisition with Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) as its chief inquisitor.  It is my opinion (and that of many other theologians) that in squelching the Vatican Council, the Vatican has been in schism for 40 years.

Can the Catholic Church resurrect from its self-dug grave and experience another renaissance in giving great souls and ideas to the world?  Can it move beyond eras of Inquisitions, crusades, witch burnings, sexism, anti-semitism and other dark temptations?  Certainly not in its present form where curial bureaucrats take it upon themselves to censure all thought and creative movements.  But, as I point out in my recent book, The Pope’s War, if an angry and demanding lay movement rises up and declares the present and past papacies schismatic and moves ahead to deconstruct the church as we know it and reconstruct It on the authentic principles of Jesus’ spirit and teaching, and puts spirituality ahead of religion and travels lightly, surely something wonderful and needed could occur.

Memorial Day 2011

Yesterday I watched a film on PBS called “Most Honorable Son” which told the story of a Japanese American’s life as an airman in the American army in the Second World War.  It was a moving film for its reminding us of the many sacrifices so many made at home and abroad to defeat fascism.  400,000 Americans lost their lives in the wars in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific islands while defeating Germany, Italy and Japan.  Sixteen million Americans served in combat.  Many hundreds of thousands lost limbs or retained physical or mental scars from their combat days.  And the subject of the documentary, airman Ben Kuroki, endured much else as a decorated hero who had to fight racism in his own country and projections of betrayal from his Japanese people who were in concentration camps in the West while he served in air combat over France and Germany. Meditating on this sacrifice of so many on the morning after that television program (and I am only counting the American sacrifices since today is America’s day to honor its dead soldiers), something  comes to mind.  The defeat of fascism, this great movement of bluster and control, of genocide and racial hatred, of bullying and advanced weaponry, of “institutionalized violence” and of the marriage of corporate and government powers—how complete was it?  We are told that the German surrender was “unconditional” and that the Italians switched to our side before the war’s end, but there is something deeply disturbing about news we pick up these days.

I am thinking of the return of fascism in the Roman Catholic Church today.  The honoring of Jose Escriva, founder of Opus Dei and card-carrying fascist priest by naming him a “saint.”  Escriva was, among other things, an admirer of Hitler and his Opus Dei tribe was happy to serve on fascist dictator Franco’s Cabinet for many years.  The support in the highest places in the Vatican for Fr. Maciel (yes, Pope John Paul II was so enamored of this man that he invited him along on plane rides and canonized his uncle and set a canonization of his mother into motion).  Maciel abused over 20 youths whom he attracted to his many seminaries and abused four of his own children (3 boys and a girl) born in two clandestine liasons.  He also very publicly supported the fascist dictator of Chile, Pinochet and Maciel’s papally-blessed organization, Legion of Christ, demanded vows that no one question the dictator, the “good Father,” who everyone knew was all about Jesus work on earth.  Then Communion and Liberation, called “the Opus Dei of Italy,” equally extreme in its put-down of women and freedom of conscience and Protestants and anything that smacks of democracy.  All these movements fully endorsed and abetted and sanctified by the higher-ups in the Vatican (including the secretary of state under John Paul II and the present secretary of state and Pope John Paul II himself whom the present pope is rushing into canonization).

Americans sacrificed much to bring fascism to an end.  Given today’s ecclesiastic history, the effort was only partially successful.  It is time to rise up against the well-healed efforts to render fascism fashionable once more and to wrap it in Biblical and Papal covers.  This would be, it seems to me, a rightful response to Memorial Day: Remember the fallen by carrying on their struggle—not by playing ecclesiastical couchpotato while the symbols of Christianity are seized once again by fascist sympathizers.  Resistance once called forth the courage and generosity of a generation of Americans.  It is still needed.  Now more than ever.

Fascism is on the return not only in fundamentalist church circles both Vatican and Protestant, it is also alive and steaming in the Supreme Court’s “Citizen’s United” declaration (recall that several members of the supreme court so eager to render this decision are also Opus Dei members).   This notorious decision has declared that any corporation has the same rights as an individual citizen especially when it comes to financing political campaigns.  Not since Mussolini himself defined fascism as “the marriage of government and corporations” has there been so egregious an endorsement of fascism from so high a place in American society.

I had two uncles who served in World War II and, luckily, came home.  One served in France and Germany and was among those who liberated Dachau.  The other was a marine who served in the Pacific theater including bloody battles of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima.  Both are now deceased.  I wonder if either would be pleased with the return of fascism in our time.  I believe both would be shocked that such sacrifices as their generation made were so easily forgotten.

Thus, Memorial Day.  Let us Remember.  Not just by planting flags but by sustaining worthwhile resistance.  Amen.

Cosmic Wonder, Human Opportunity

This is a review of:  THE NEW UNIVERSE AND THE HUMAN FUTURE: HOW A SHARED COSMOLOGY COULD TRANSFORM THE WORLD by Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack        Yale Press, 2011 This book is in every sense of the word, a prophetic book. Its message ranks right up there with those of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Joel. Like the prophets, it is at times poetic, demanding, grounded, soaring, empowering, and always awe-inspiring.

Rabbi Heschel says the essence of the prophet’s work is to interfere, and Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams are doing nothing if they are not interfering. They are interfering with apathy, couch-potato-itis, anthropocentrism, and despair by inspiring us with the newly found reasons we have for waking up, getting involved, and resisting dumb media, amoral education, and frozen religious ideologies. They inspire us to do what prophets do: give birth to justice from a newly born heart, a newly born consciousness. And to shout the dangerous paths, the ways of folly, we are on. This book does all that and more.

I should offer a disclaimer here. I know and truly love Joel and Nancy. I know their marvelous book, The View from the Center of the Universe and recommend it to everyone I know. I know their sterling credentials as teachers of the new cosmology and the great respect Joel carries in the scientific community. Above all, I know their humility. While helping us access new scientific knowledge to recover our sense of the Cosmos, they also show up at spiritual events, dance circle dances, laugh with us lay people (meaning non-scientists), chant, meditate, make music, write poetry, and just plain participate. I like that about them. They are human beings as well as scientists. They are not preaching from an ivory tower or to the scientific choir alone (though they have the courage to take on the cynics and pessimists in that circle). Their message is for all of us: “Wake up before it is too late. Drink in the new good news of the universe. Join and build up a ‘cosmic society.’”

Wisely the authors point out that human consciousness evolves from self-awareness, to tribe, to religion, to nationality, to species, to Earth, and ultimately to Cosmos. We, like the universe, need to keep expanding (I think of Meister Eckhart: “God is delighted to watch your soul enlarge.”) We can so easily get stuck in any one of these smaller groupings — self (narcissism), tribe (tribalism), religion (my God can beat up your God/goddess), nation (who is the empire de jour? We are number one and the exceptional one). But Gaia and her pain is calling us beyond all these earlier identities to embrace Earth, which needs so much embracing today, and now Cosmos as well. We don’t have to abandon the earlier soul periods; we can incorporate them into this great act of growing our souls, expanding our consciousness. We can love self without being narcissistic; we can love our tribe without being tribalistic and hating other tribes; we can embrace a religious path without denying others theirs; we can be Americans (or Egyptians or Argentinians) without having to go to war to prove we are superior. Of course we are on a path of consciousness expansion. After all, this universe is biased in favor of expansion. This is a scientific fact.

Joel and Nancy are clearly in love with what science is learning today. Their love is contagious. Their enthusiasm ignites all who drink it in. They have the children in mind when they say “today’s children could be the first generation ever raised in the universe they actually live in,” and they urge us to teach the “powers of ten” to the kids and resist teaching the easy metaphors of selfishness, cynicism, or despair. “Earth itself is not a mess but a jewel of the cosmos, rich with life and potential, and possibly unique in all the heavens,” they declare, like twenty-first-century Davids singing new psalms.

Joel and Nancy have looked hard and analyzed deeply the amazing findings of the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments from the past two decades of explosive findings in cosmology. Here is one metaphor that they put forth for our understanding:

Imagine that the entire universe is an ocean of dark energy. On that ocean there sail billions of ghostly ships, made of dark matter. At the tips of the tallest masts of the largest ships there are tiny beacons of light, which we call galaxies. With Hubble Space Telescope, the beacons are all we see. We don’t see the ships, we don’t see the ocean — but we know they’re there through the Double Dark theory.

They take on the literalists of science (who have so much in common with the literalists of the Bible) when they say:

If taken literally, scientific cosmology is completely misleading. There was no loud bang at the Big Bang, and it wasn’t big. (There was no size to compare it to.) Metaphor is our only entrée into invisible reality.

I have often said that the most important things in life are metaphors, whether we are speaking of life or death, spirit or sex, love or body. And the universe too is metaphor and accessible by metaphor. All the prophets knew these things. Metaphor carries us on wings larger than despair, self-pity, talk of “selfish genes,” and pessimism — all of which is so often a cover-up and escape from responsibility.

This is a book on ethics, a book about renewing our foundation for ethics. The authors talk passionately about the folly of our race as we face our own potential extinction and the extinction of this marvelous planet as we know it. They see our uniqueness not just in terms of this planet but also in terms of what we know about the universe. They urge us to “crack open our imaginations” and to wake up to the “accident” of our being “born at the turning point.” And what turning point is that? It goes back to the fact of the rediscovery of how unique we are as a species: “It took a series of outrageously improbable events on Earth, plus multiple cosmic catastrophes to earlier species like the dinosaurs before humans could evolve.… Our level of intelligence (and higher) may be extremely rare” in the universe.

We Are the Self-Consciousness of the Universe

With our uniqueness comes a special responsibility, for if humans go down, like many primate species before us have, then something very precious will be lost in the universe.

From the point of view of the universe as a whole, intelligent life may be the rarest of occurrences and the most in need of protection…. We — all intelligent, self-aware creatures that may exist in any galaxy — are the universe’s only means of reflecting on and understanding itself. Together we are the self-consciousness of the universe. The entire universe is meaningless without us. This is not to say that the universe wouldn’t exist without intelligent beings. Something would exist, but it wouldn’t be a universe, because a universe is an idea, and there would be no ideas.

We are living at a “pivotal” moment in the history of the universe for today we can “see” the entire history of the universe, but there will come a time when, because of the expansion of the cosmos, the past will no longer be visible; distant galaxies will disappear over the horizon. We are able to take in more galaxies today than ever will be perceived in the future. And, in our own local group of galaxies, because of gravity at work, there will be a blending of the Milky Way and Andromeda that will shut our descendants off from the rest of the universe. No wonder Joel and Nancy feel so called to sing the universe’s story at this time.

The authors recognize our moral obligations to change as a species. With the human race now at almost 7 billion people, the inflation we have been undergoing is not sustainable. We could — and are — destroying our planet as we know it. This is why they call for an ethic of sustainability that is itself sustained by the wonder of the world we now know we live in, the universe at its pivotal moment. They point out how we do not know if there is other intelligent life out there but we do know what we have here. Moreover:

We randomly-alive-today people actually have the power to end this evolutionary miracle, or not…. Without human beings, as far as anyone knows, the universe will be silenced forever. No meaning, no beauty, no awe, no consciousness, no “laws” of physics. Is any quarrel or pile of possessions worth this?

We need to adjust to realities as we now know them. For example, talk of “space war” is beyond dangerous because if we launch just a truckload of gravel into space we will destroy not only all sophisticated weaponry but also the satellites that we all depend on for weather information, global positioning systems, and communication.

Enough Is a Feast

We must move beyond the inflationary period of economics, of judging things by growth of GNP. We have to realize that spiritual relationships can grow continuously — but economic ones can’t. Joel and Nancy write:

Our drive for meaning, spiritual connection, personal and artistic expression, and cultural growth can be unlimited … if we valued them above consumer goods, then we would have a new paradigm for human progress. For our universe the most creative period, which brought forth galaxies, stars, atoms, planets, and life, came after inflation ended, and this could also be true for humanity. A stable period can last as long as human creativity stays ahead of our physical impact on the earth.

If this isn’t a call for a simpler lifestyle I don’t know what is.

What is right action? “The goal should be sustainable prosperity, which is perfectly defined by the Zen saying ‘enough is a feast.’… Nonstop creativity will be essential to maintain long term stability.”

This is a daring book. The authors take on the hypothesis of multiple universes and draw a stunning conclusion:

If the theory of Eternal Inflation is right, then our universe — the entire region created by our Big Bang — is an incredibly rare jewel: a tiny but long-lived pocket in the heart of eternity where by chance exponential inflation stopped, time began, space opened up, and the laws of physics allowed interesting things to happen and complexity to evolve.

Just as our Earth is an “incredibly rare jewel,” so too is our universe, whether it has happened alone or is one among many. The authors of this book have not grown numb to awe and wonder.

The authors also take on the subject of God’s causation when they ask this question:

Is this then at last the place to credit God as the literal first cause? That’s an option. But rather than skipping lightly over eternity itself to paste in the idea of God ‘causing eternity,’ we might do better to think of the beginning as being just as unknown as the distant future, and ourselves, as true explorers, moving outward from the center in both directions. In cosmology both the distant past and the distant future are in a real sense ahead of us, the one waiting to be discovered, the other to be created.

As a theologian, I hear this as a clarion call to rediscover the apophatic Divinity, the God of Darkness, the pathway of letting go and letting be, the God who “has no name and will never be given a name” (Eckhart), where the alpha (beginning) and omega (ending) are both bathed in mystery and in darkness — a double darkness, we might say. It’s a call for a transcendence that is not “up” so much as deep down

There is wisdom and passion in these pages. There are sacred cows to let go of, inner work to do, and outer work to accomplish. But we have the tools. Do we have the will and the heart? Anyone who studies this book will be deepening and strengthening both. Read this book and grow your soul. Right behavior can and should follow.

101 Reasons for not Canonizing Pope John Paul II

Pope Benedict XVI is in a big hurry to canonize his former boss Pope John Paul II, who hired him as Director of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition) in 1981 and stood by him for 23 years as he brought back the Inquisition contrary to the letter and spirit of Vatican II. Following are 101 reasons not to rush.

1. The very tradition of canonization was seriously compromised under JPII when the office of devil’s advocate was done away with.  An immediate pay off was the unprecedently swift canonization of Fr. Jose Escriva, founder of Opus Dei. A woman who worked closely with Escriva for 13 years and wrote a book that detailed his fits of anger, pique, sexist attacks and more was denied any appearance at the proceedings.  As were those who heard him say he admired Hitler.

2. Special privileges were bestowed directly from JPII to Fr. Maciel, notorious for having on the one hand raised more money than anyone in church history but on the other having sexually abused over 20 of his seminarians. Even after these facts were made public, Pope JPII supported the man and his organization, the Legion of Christ, ordaining dozens of Maciel’s priests in large public events in St Peter’s square. As it turned out, he had two wives on the side and sexually abused his four children (three boys and a girl).  Maciel was a fierce supporter of Chilean dictator Pinochet who murdered over 700 priests, nuns and lay leaders.  Numerous other covering-up of pedophile clergy around the world occurred on Pope JPII’s watch as continued news articles make clear.

3. Pope JPII, with Ratzinger leading the attack, dismantled and emasculated what was probably the most Christ-like movement in the past 500 years of church history, namely the base community movement and liberation theology movements of Latin America.  Instead of supporting the poor and those standing with them in Jesus’ name, JPII replaced the brave and justice-committed church leaders (such as Oscar Romero) with those committed to the fortunes of the rich and powerful.

4. Pope JPII emasculated the most alive liturgical movements in Europe, namely those of the Dutch Catholic Church and forbade Bishop Casigalida to offer an Afro-Brazilian liturgy he  had created with Brazilian artists.

5. Pope JPII dumbed down the leadership of the church by appointing bishops whose sole qualification was that they were sure to be obedient Yes men.  This had everything to do with the priestly pedophilia scandal not being dealt with appropriately.

6. Pope JPII put the Virgin Mary on a pedestal but allowed women no responsibilities in the church, forbidding priests to use the feminine pronoun for God (as if the Divine Feminine is not just as important as the Divine Masculine) and even forbidding girls to be altar girls.

7. When he removed the condemnation of Galileo after 450 years, JPII commented that religion should learn from science.  Yet he fully concurred with Cardinal Ratzinger’s two documents that condemn homosexuals mercilessly and without any scientific backing (science having demonstrated that 8-10% of any given human population is going to be homosexual and 464 other species with homosexual populations have been revealed).

8. Pope JPII, contrary to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, eliminated the principle of collegiality along with theological diversity and freedom of conscience and lay leadership and substituted for it a Vatican dictatorship that claims all rights to appoint bishops and to teach as the only “magisterium” of the church.  He “killed all theology in Europe” according to a professor at the Institut catholique de Paris.  He confused “infallibility” with totalitarianism and ruled with an iron fist that would make Ghadaffy look proud.  A Vatican insider in JP II’s reign told me that “in front of the cameras he was very forgiving (as to his attempted assassin), but within the Vatican anyone who disagreed with anything was gone in 24 hours.”

9. Return of Simony.  Not only was the Maciel scandal awash in cash, but the pope’s private secretary, a Polish priest (now a cardinal), was charging $50,000 to attend private Masses with the Pope as reported by Jason Berry in the National Catholic Reporter.

10-101. Ninety-one theologians and activists from many countries were condemned under JPII’s pontificate, a good number of whom lost their livelihoods as well as their ministries, some suffered nervous breakdowns or died of heart attacks under the pressure imposed on them by Rome and rabid right wing attackers buttressed by the Vatican. To see the full list, visit this site's Wailing Wall.

Some Thoughts on Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Beyond

Michael Lerner has asked me to write a few thoughts about the message of Good Friday and Easter.  I appreciate his invitation, a sign of the meaning of deep ecumenism and what we have to learn from each others faith traditions. To me, the “paschal mystery” of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the rabbi is an archetypal reminder about how, as science now teaches us, all things in the cosmos live, die and resurrect.  Supernovas, galaxies, solar systems, planets, beings that inhabit our planet—we all have our time of existence and of passing out of existence.  But we leave something behind for further generations and that constitutes resurrection.  Supernovas leave elements behind in a great explosion that seed other solar systems, planets and ever our very bodies.  Every being leaves something behind as food for others—Einstein said no energy is lost in the universe and Hildegard of Bingen said no warmth is lost in the universe.  I like to say that no beauty is lost in the universe.  The universe has a memory for energy, warmth and beauty.   Nothing our ancestors accomplished is lost—so long as we remember.  Hopefully, as humans, we leave beauty behind and wise progeny, maybe books or paintings or scientific breakthroughs or insights, or healed souls or bodies, etc. etc.  Our resurrection is very much a part of our creativity.  Otto Rank: The artist is one who wants to leave behind a gift.

Jesus left behind the gift of his teachings, a distillation as I see it of the basic teachings of his Jewish ancestors: That compassion and justice are what link us to the Divine and that we are to look not to empires or to objects for the Kingdom of God but within ourselves and among others in community for the love that is at once our love of neighbor and our love of God, a love “that the world cannot give.”  In other words, to “all our relations.”  The fact of his being tortured and killed in a most ignominious way by the Roman Empire is a stark reminder that we do not take on the powers of darkness as our prophetic vocations require without paying a price.  But the story is that life triumphs over death, even if it has to succumb to powers of death at times and the form that a resurrected life takes is diverse.  It often surprises!

We do not die once.  We all die many times.  Life does that to us with our losses, our betrayals, our own mistakes and emptying out.  But we also resurrect on a regular basis as well.  We forgive, we are forgiven, we bottom out, we move on, we give birth anew thus that life and death are more synergetic that we usually imagine them to be.  “God’s exit is her entrance,” as Meister Eckhart put it.  The depths of the valley of death do not overcome the power of life which makes things new again.  Injustice seems to triumph so often but justice will have the last word provided we live and work for it.

To me these are some of the passages that the Good Friday/Easter Sunday archetype bring to awareness.  There is no resurrection without visiting Hades (the story is that Saturday following his death Jesus visited the underworld).  Good Friday rules for a short period.  But the longer period is the new life and the victory over death and the fear of death that Easter Sunday represents.  It is that hope that rises daily with every new sun.  Moving beyond the fear of death we can live fully again and cease our immortality projects, our empire building and pyramid constructing (wall street too) and get on with…living.  Which is sharing.  Heschel: “Just to be is holy; just to live is a blessing.”  Now our fear of death does not have to rule our lives.  Now we can live fully, generously and creatively.

Posting 95 Theses at Cardinal Law's Basilica

Just before we started the event I asked my 30 year old woman translator if she was scared.  “No,” she said. “Even though we don’t know what is going to happen, I am looking forward to it.  It is important that we do this and what happens will happen.”  Courage!  Always a sign of the spirit. The action at Cardinal Law’s basilica was memorable for many reasons: the crowd that gathered (it was announced beforehand in the paper), their questions; their passion in taking on the policemen especially around the right to hang the theses on a gate; the beauty of the morning with sun shining from an all-blue sky; the length of time we stayed there—about 80 minutes (much larger gathering than Wittenberg);  the Vatican plainclothes police with dark sun glasses staring at me the whole time; and above all the strategy and courage of the young people who created the excellent poster which looked like a medieval Manuscript in a large type that yet was practical and easy to read; their flexibility in adapting to the policemen’s tactics, for example they smartly engaged the moment and the Vatican plain clothed police when the crowd had dispersed.  I was away from this engagement but saw dramatic interaction from where I was.  I so look forward to seeing their film.  I especially wonder if Stephano the filmer got the attack by the Vatican thugs of the second film maker on film?

How right Barbara was about 1) Vatican police dictating orders to Roman police and 2) the thugs that are policing the Vatican these days. Just as I learned after my Wittenberg action how much darker the Vatican was than I had anticipated, so with this Italian, Roman, action, I learned how much darker still were the forces and veritable police state ruling not only Vatican City but, in many respects, Rome itself.  Penny Lernoux’ words are chilling: “Ratzinger is only a front man for the German-Polish mafia,” she said.  Or Barbara’s words: “The Vatican is run by a gang of mafia thugs.”

Our protest was non-violent and remained that way in the face of violence on the part of the Vatican police.  Are Italians forbidden to preach or to listen to a preacher in a public square?  Was the Basilica event an historic moment?  One of empowerment for Italians vis a vis the church?  Consider that Italy never underwent the Protestant Reformation (but only the counter-Reformation of the Council of Trent).

Our videographers and photographers were taking pictures of the police videographers and photographers and vice versa.  It was like a scene from old East Germany.  The Stasi.  That was the feeling emanating from the Vatican police.

Before we began, one of our people went into the church to scout things out.  Many policemen were inside.  He went up to one and said, “I heard there was going to be a demonstration here today,” (or something close to that) and the policeman got very agitated and said: “No there won’t be.  We will see to that.”  So that was our first clue that our demonstration would be outdoors and even outside the fence.  But as it happened, even that distance was not enough to satisfy the Vatican police (who apparently have very broad jurisdiction in Rome itself).  During the course of my presentation and the q and a period of about 80 minutes, the sheet containing the theses were taken down (I took them back at one point from the policeman who took them down), put up again, taken down, held up by some of the participants standing by, etc. etc.  Up-down, Up down, Up-down.

A man who asked some very sophisticated questions about my presentation (he had the air of a lawyer about him and was of mature age), ended up in a shouting match with the policeman who was literally receiving phone calls from higher ups on his ear phone telling him what to do.  From the pained look on his face I had the distinct impression that he wished he was elsewhere—like rescuing a cat stranded in a tree or even a spouse form domestic abuse or handing out traffic violations—just anywhere other than in a church courtyard on a Sunday morning being dictated to by plainclothes police with their phones in their ear and hearing a presenter calling for a religious reformation (or revolution?).  The shouting match between the police and this “lawyer” person was about 1) who owned the property we stood on and 2) Who owned the fence demarcating this property from the church steps and on which we hung the theses.  The “lawyer” said in an angry voice to the policeman, “my taxes paid for this sidewalk and fence so keep your hands off the preacher’s theses.”  There was considerable back and forth.

Meanwhile, “radio radicale” was there the entire time with a microphone in my and the translator’s face and with a number of questions posed as soon as I finished my presentation.  My presentation followed my 4 points I laid out in my “New Reformation” book—how our day paralleled Luther’s day in four respects: 1) invention of printing press/invention of electronic media 2) politics as rise of nationalism/politics as globalization and sparks of democracy 3) rise of humanist scholarship of which Luther was a part/rise of scientific and theological scholarship of our time and 4) corruption in the highest places of the church/corruption in the highest places of the church including Cardinal Law overseeing this particular cathedral, he who passed one priest from parish to parish who abused 150 boys and who now sits on a commission in the Vatican appointing bishops around the world!  A woman professor told me she took a 3 hours train ride to be present for the event.  She taught anthropology and religion and invited me to come to her university to lecture—they would pay for my trip to Italy she said.

Before we began, one man came up to me who was about 44 years old and said: “I no longer call myself a Catholic but simply a Christian.”

All the while the young members of our team were alert and smiling and doing their assigned tasks whether taking video, guarding the theses, mixing with the group, translating, photographing the cops, hanging around me for protection.  (They had arranged all that beforehand among themselves with no coaching from me.)  They did it with smiles on their faces. They gathered with the plainclothes Vatican cops when the event had finished and argued vociferously about their demands to see their papers and my documents as well.  “We have done no crime so you have no right to demand our papers,” they declared.  But maybe they had committed a crime.  The crime of inviting people on church soil to think.

Their final act was to keep the thug Vatican cops demanding my papers engaged while one of their group quietly slipped away, came rapidly up to me and said “walk away fast” to the taxi stand at the side of the church.  Drama.  A day of drama.  Working with the young people was marvelous.  They were alert, flexible, prepared, strong, smiling, committed, competent, brave.  Intergenerational wisdom indeed!  Intergenerational courage also.

A number of people requested copies of the theses to read and study.  We told them that they would be posted in the Italian version on the Fazi web page.  Among phrases I heard from thoughtful Italians in conversation during my visit: “The church is dead.”  “We are a culture today with no new ideas. Old people are running things in a very old way.”  “Unemployment among the young is at 24%.  Many are being supported by their grandparents and parents even after college graduation sincere there are no jobs to be had.”  “A growing tension between the young and old.”  “Old money is running everything. “ People are scared with the bad economy.  The women’s movement is very weak.  “We are a conservative country.  Even liberal minded people have trouble imagining women priests.”  You can get a college degree for just $2000 per year but there are no jobs after school.  “The one thing Italy gives the world consistently is…Beauty.  That is our only gift to the world.”

I ask myself: Why are the Italians seemingly so keen on my work at this time?  One reason is the timing.  There is a lot of anger among Catholics and it is clear that first a Polish papacy and then a German papacy have not always sat well with Italians.  Another is that there is no love lost for Ratzinger himself.  In my time there and even near St Peter’s I did not see one poster for sale of Pope Ratzinger.  Another is that Aquinas with his non-dualistic philosophy is SO Italian in spirit in so many ways and the Augustinian mind-sets of the two recent popes is not at all of the Aquinas mind-set.  Furthermore, we need to remind ourselves that the Protestant Reformation did not penetrate Italy; it affected it by way of the counter-reformation but that did not question the powers of the papacy.  My 95 theses do put deeper questions.  Is calling for a Reformation in the church today rousing a sleeping giant in Italy?  The Italian capacity for real spirituality in the creation spiritual tradition is vast.  Is the Roman Catholic church, together with the media, not perfectly set up for non-violent resistance? For church-step sit ins?  For filling the jails?  For exposing the darkness of the Vatican and its ways at this time in history?

All in all, it was a most amazing trip—perhaps the most amazing gig in my life.  The people I met from the publishing house, Vito and our public dialog at the amazing conference of writers, his passion and radical critical mind, the many serious and passionate and intellectually-solid interviews on radio, in magazines and newspapers, and the amazing TV program.  The filming and event at Law’s Basilica.  Much to remember and to build on.

The abuse at the hands of church has been going on for so many centuries—buttressed by an ideology of suffering and penance and sin, that I had no idea what Romans have suffered at in the hands of the Roman Catholic church.  This is one reason a number of commentators called “original blessing” a “Copernican revolution” for a religion based on punitive images of God and a consciousness of sin. A difficult thing to do, to change it. I recall a Native American woman who was also a Catholic returning from a ceremony at the Vatican to beatify Blessed Tekawitha: “There are evil spirits in that place, (i.e. the Vatican)” she recalled.

I think most Catholics today—Italy, Ireland, United States, Latin America and parts in between—are in a complete state of disgust.  This morning’s Boston Globe quotes some Catholics in Ireland.  One says: “When we were growing up, you believed in the church more so than you believed in God….Now the whole thing is transformed.  You believe in God but you don’t believe in the church.”  And a priest, Fr. Tony Cullen, says: “I’d like to see the clerical church die, and the proper church emerge, the church of the people.”  What to do?  How create new structures?  Stay and fight?  Abandon it altogether?  Fight from the outside?  All of the above?  One thing is certain: The clerical church is dying.

Italian Newspaper Reviews Original Blessing

The following interview appeared in the Italian Newspaper, Corriere della Sera , on Feb 17, 2011, the day that Matthew Fox’s Original Blessing appeared in Italy in Italian.  It begins with a brief paragraph.  The Italian interview was shortened so here, for English-speaking readers, is the fuller interview (the bracket signs are for parts left out in the Italian version).  Photos included in the newspaper included Fox nailing 95 theses at the door in Wittenburg church.

“I Challenge the Church Like Luther”

Matthew Fox: Stop the obsession with sin: Rediscover St. Thomas

Not original sin, not fallen humanity, wounded and then redeemed by Jesus Christ.  But a panentheistic (in everything and in everybody), creative God.  Death as natural factor, part of the vital cycle and not a consequence of Adam’s sin.  The “original blessing” of the creation precedes the Redemption.

These are theses expressed in the book by Matthew Fox entitled precisely Original Blessing, that came out in American in 1983 and is now translated by Fazi in Italy with the title, “At the Beginning there was Joy.”  A text in which the Catholic and apostolic tradition is transformed in wisdom religious consciousness that is feminist, ecological, sensual with a strong vitalistic and new age vein.

You are strongly against St. Augustine.  Cardinal Ratzinger who had condemned you, is a follower of Augustine, and now is the Pope of the Catholic Church.  What was your reaction to his election? My reaction to Ratzinger's becoming Pope was to go to Wittenberg, Germany that year at Pentecost time and pound 95 theses at the door there as Luther had done.  This seemed especially appropriate because Ratzinger is of course the first German pope in hundreds of years but also to highlight the need for a profound reformation in the church of our day. I think my 95 theses point to appropriate directions we must move.  Events since his being made pope including the tsunami of revelations about priestly pedophilia and its cover-up at the Congregation of Doctrine of Faith which he headed indicate that my actions were justified.  [So also the continued shut-down of theological thinking and debate in the church and the backing of anti-intellectual and obedience-driven sects such as Legion of Christ and Opus Dei.]

The great English convert Chesterton says in an unpublished until now work written in 1910 that : “The good of the world, is the world like so God created it.” It seems very similar to your “original blessing.”  But Chesterton argued as well that the Catholic Church is the only “place where all the truths meet each other.” Do you agree or not?

Chesterton was indeed in many ways a celebrant of a theology of "original blessing" or goodness.  In his book on Thomas Aquinas (which I read as a teen-ager and which influenced my desire to become a Dominican), [he says the basis of Aquinas' philosophy "is entirely the praise of Life, the praise of Being, the praise of God as the Creator of the world."]  And he talks about the "old Augustinian Puritanism" and pessimism that Aquinas fought so stoutly. As for Chesterton's ecclesiology, our knowledge of the world has grown since the early part of the twentieth century when Chesterton wrote, we are learning what the Second Vatican Council taught: That the Holy Spirit works through all traditions and all cultures.  And the institutional church is "semper reformanda"--always need to be reformed and today more than ever.   [There is, unfortunately, an ever-growing gap between the "kingdom of God" that Jesus preached and the church institution as it now operates.]  Chesterton wrote about evil that occurs both in the church and in the world.

The “Credo” was established  under the Emperor  Constatine in 325 A.C..  And there was written: Ὁμολογοῦμεν ἓν βάπτισμα εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν. Id est: Profiteor unum  baptisma  in remissionem  peccatorum. It was established thirty years before St. Augustine was born…. Then, what’s to be done with your theory? This credo speaks of "the remission of sins" (plural)--not the remission of one sin (original sin).  Adult baptism cleanses people of past sins and welcomes them into a new life in Christ.  Infant baptism welcomes children into the community of faith and into the world and into a full life with Christ.  Contrary to Ratzinger's false characterization of my book, I do not deny original sin. I question what we mean by it.  The term "sin" is very problematic and the term [“original sin”] is nowhere to be found in Jewish (i.e, Jesus') consciousness.  It is not Biblical.  [I very much like Otto Rank's language of an "original wound" that we all are born into--that wound being the separation from mother that occurs at birth and whose bell is rung every time we experience other separations such as death or sickness or divorce, etc.  He says the only cure is the "unio mystica."

Today's scholars are also questioning the Nicene Creed and the Council called by the Emperor and how it often reflects the political/philosophical/religious battles of the Roman Empire of the fourth century more accurately than it does the teachings of Jesus and the early church as found in our Scriptures.]

Your book was written 5 years after JPII  was elected.  What do you think about Pope Wojtyla that is announced to be declared “Blessed”  on next May 1?  His point of view was not, positive, creative, blessing? As for being declared "blessed" on May 1, one has to question [what his papacy did to the whole tradition of canonization by removing the role of the devil's advocate and rushing through canonization of someone like] Fr Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, who was a violent man who abused women in his order and who admired Hitler and was rushed into canonization faster than any one in modern history  The entire canonization process has been tainted under JPII's reign.]

Some of JPII's writings are admirable but overall I believe history will show that his eradication of liberation theology and base communities throughout Latin America, his complete disregard for the courage and holiness of lay and clergy in Latin America, thousands of whom were tortured and murdered to defend the poor and proclaim Good News of Justice in a concrete way (the saintly Oscar Romero being just one such person), [his denunciations of theologians world-wide which has effectively shut down theology and reduced it to blind obedience, his dumbing down therefore of the church,] his appointment of right-wing extreme hierarchy (often opus dei), his refusal to honor the principle of collegiality established in Vatican II, his support of Fr Maciel and Legion of Christ even after revelations about his pedophilia ways were made public, his put-down of women, his refusal to even consider married clergy or women clergy even when the sacraments are being denied many people from shortage of clergy, his support of fanatical right wing "lay movements" that in fact are not lay led at all such as Communion and Liberation and Opus Dei and Legion of Christ, his deeply homophobic denunciations, [his killing of vital liturgical experiences such as in Holland and in Brazil,] his bringing back the inquisition contrary to the teachings and spirit of Vatican II—[all this history will not admire.]

You left Dominican Order in 1993, during GPII papacy: Didn’t  you realize  the great renewal of the Church in such period, testified by the crowds that followed the Pope’s world pilgrimage? I did not leave the Dominican Order.  I was expelled.  I fought for 12 years to stay and I had the support of many Dominicans especially in Holland. [The Vatican received over 10,000 letters of support for me from readers of my work around the world urging that I be allowed to stay in the Order.] [I do not believe that a cult of the papacy or large crowds necessarily speaks to a renewal of the church. Papalolotry is not a virtue. The Second Vatican Council was all about church renewal but most of the declarations of it have been denied under the papacy of JPII and Ratzinger.]  That is why many church thinkers today who know something about history believe that the present and past papacies are in schism.

Schismatic?

A pope and his curia (no matter how many dozens are made cardinals and how many are made busy canonizing one another), does not trump a Council.  In the great schism of the 14th century in which three persons laid claim to the papacy, it took the Council of Constance to fire all three popes and elect a new one.  I think it is time for a post-Vatican Catholicism, a truly catholic Christianity. Jesus taught that leadership in his name was a leadership of love and service, not of power and dictatorship.  Maybe Vatican City has something to learn from Cairo about dethroning dictators and cleaning up a corrupt system that has wandered so far from Jesus' teachings.  I suspect Jesus himself would re-enact his turning over of money lenders in the temple [(basilica)] if he were to arrive on the current ecclesial scene.

[Diocese of Oakland – where you now lives - was at center of sex abuse of children in Catholic Church,  what’s your opinion about that? The diocese of Oakland was not at the center of priestly pedophilia in the United States.  That dubious honor belongs to the Boston diocese where Cardinal Law passed one pedophile priest who abused 150 boys from parish to parish.  The greatest scandal occurred when, about to be subpoened by the Attorney General, he fled to Rome where he now oversees the ancient Basilica of Maria Maggiore and where he works in numerous curial offices including that which appoints bishops around the world!  Many in Boston believe he should be in jail but of course in the Vatican he has friends in very high places who, among other things, appreciate his support of Communion and Liberation of which he was a champion in the United States.

As for the Oakland scandal, Bishop Cummins is to be commended insofar as when he found out about an abusive priest he wrote the CDF several times and he went to Rome to have him removed.  He did not, however, report the priest to the civil authorities.  Ratzinger and JPII refused to do so for six years during which he abused still more victims!  The priest eventually went to jail for six years and the diocese paid millions of dollars to five of his victims.  The Oakland story parallels many other stories worldwide that demonstrate that Ratzinger did not do his job but rather put the interests of the church institution ahead of defending youth from pedophile clergy.  Perhaps Ratzinger should have spent a little less time chasing down theologians a la Torquemada and a little more time chasing down pedophile clergy in his reign at CDF.]

[You had often written in your book of sexual pleasure as always a good thing, meanwhile the destructive charge of eros had been studied since Freud  as well as dialectic between eros and thanatos ….

I do not believe that anything humans do is "always a good thing" and indeed, "corruptio optimi est pessima.(corruption of the best is the worst.)"  What I do say is that too much manichean and platonically-based theology (Augustine is a good example) only moralize about sexuality and does not celebrate the divine theophany or mystical experience that sexuality can be and often is for people (cf. the "Song of Songs" in the Bible).  I celebrate the mysticism of sexuality but also the responsibility that goes with it.  Sexuality has both a mystical and a moral dimension to it and Western religion too often ignores the former.  Benedictine monk Fr Bede Griffith, who lived in India for over 50 years, put it this way: "Everything is sacred...we have lost that awareness...There is this sacramentality of the universe.  The whole creation is pervaded by God."

Of course another issue regarding sexuality is gender justice.  Sexism is a sin.  In his condemning my work, Ratzinger's first objections were 1) I call God "Mother" (yet the Bible and most medieval mystics called God "Mother") and 2) I am a feminist theologian.  Yes, I am.  Women's wisdom and women's rights and the respect for the Divine Feminine is absolutely essential for our survival as a species.  Patriarchy is unfair to women, men and the Earth herself.  It is the source of so much destruction on the planet.  To forbid the balance of the masculine and feminine in God-talk, as Ratzinger and JPII have done, is to invite degradation of women.]

At the end of his life, St Thomas Aquinas is told to have said: “All I’ve written is straw.” You are a best selling writer. Do you endorse what he said? As an avid reader of Thomas Aquinas, I am glad that his works were preserved and did not go the way of straw.  [In my major book on his spirituality, "Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality," I was moved when I translated his many works that were never before put into English, French or German such as his first and most mystical work, his Commentary on Denys the Areapogyte as well as many of his Biblical works.  I find so much there that is moving and relevant to today's debates.]

Aquinas' mystical experience in which he saw all his work "as straw" in comparison to the light of God is a profound experience that we all should meditate on.  All our best efforts whether in our work worlds or our family lives or our citizenship seem as straw in the great scheme of history [and the unfolding of history.]  But that does not mean we are not here to work hard, play hard, and love generously.  It just means that we are mere instruments of a 13.7 billion year drama we call the universe [and that is so much bigger than us but that has invited each of us on board to participate as fully as we can.  We all have work to do--Aquinas surely did his to the utmost.  Spirit will make something of our straw-like efforts.  We have only to do our best.]

Today (Feb 17), a presentation in Rome.

The event is scheduled for this morning.  Date and time could not be more evocative.  Piazza Campo dei Fiori in Rome, just before the statue of Giordano Bruno, the monk who was burned alive at the stake of Catholic Inquisition on 17^th February, 1600, that is exactly 411 years ago.  The publisher Elido Fazi and theologian Vito Mancuso will introduce a new series of books called “Campo dei Fiori” that promote spirituality as freedom, faith in life, critical skills, personal evaluation, love of beauty, communion with nature and with human beings.  The first volume that is coming to the bookshops is titled “In the Beginning was the Joy” (432 pages) by Matthew Fox, an Italian translation of Original Blessing which created a shock when it was published in 1983.

Global Warming, Global Warning: Time to put Original Blessing Before Original Sin

Global Warming, Global Warning: Time to put Original Blessing Before Original Sin Spring 2009

A time of global warming is a time of global warning.  It is time for humans to wake up and to grow up.  And our religions and governments along with us. The paradigm shift from Original Sin to Original Blessing offers profound implications for our struggles for a healthy earth and for eco-justice.  Allow me to articulate a few of those implications in this essay.

1. First is the awareness—lost in great part during the ‘modern era’ which was so centered on the human agenda—that we humans are only a part of the great drama that creation is revealing itself to be.  (And has always so revealed itself but we shut our eyes to much of it and committed what Thomas Berry called “autism” in cutting ourselves off from nature during the modern era.)  The gift of creation, whether we are talking about clean and abundant water (the governor of California has just declared an official “drought” in the state where I live), healthy soil, vibrant forests, happy trees, abundant and thriving species of animals, fishes, insects (the bees are disappearing) and birds—all these are original blessings.  Like everything original and everything good (“blessing” is the theological word for “goodness”), they deserve not to be taken for granted.  Will we miss them only after they are gone?  Will polar bears matter and elephants, tigers and lions, only after they have gone extinct?  What can prevent their extinction from happening?  A sense of gratitude.  A sense of reverence.  All this comes from awe, from an awesome encounter with the beauty of nature’s diverse giftedness.  An awakening to the original blessing that all creation has been and continues to be to all of us.

Not only has creation blessed us abundantly with its beauty and diversity and necessary constituents such as healthy soil and seeds, rainfall and ozone, sunshine and clouds, trees and animals, but nature must be wondering where our gratitude lies.  Is our gratitude showing?  A perspective of original blessing awakens such gratitude and moves us to both defend the blessing that nature is and to not take it for granted.

In mystical traditions both East and West, nature is presented to us as the incarnation of the divine.  The word “incarnation” means to take on flesh.  The Divine takes on flesh in the orange, in the rainforest, in the tiger, in the wheat, in the human also.  In the East they might talk of the “Buddha nature” in all beings and in the West we might talk of the “Christ in all things” or Wisdom in all things.  The name is not what counts.  What counts is the immediate experience we have of the divine in nature.  Mahatma Gandhi said: Gandhi: “All embodied life is in reality an incarnation of God, but it is not usual to consider every living being an incarnation.”  It may not be usual but maybe it ought to be.

Most people experience the Divine through deep experiences in nature.  Most people are nature mystics.  Nature of course includes human nature.  What humans give birth to in art and poetry, music and ritual, books and children, love making and healing, architecture and insight—all this too is the “word made flesh” or Divinity incarnated.

Silly are those who complain that “this is worshipping nature and not God.”  Silly because such people presume God is outside of nature.  They deny the immanence of Divinity, set God outside the sky and above all of nature.  Above and beyond.  Perfect for one’s projections.  “Christ without creation is pure projections” warned the Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, a number of years ago.  Christ is in all things.  God is in all things.  Spirit blows through all things.  God is not only transcendent but also immanent.  God is the “one in whom we live, move and have our being” says the Book of Acts.  This is panentheism which means God in all things and all things in God.  Projecting God beyond and outside of nature is theism and theism gives birth to atheism and is a weak theology indeed.  The great fourteenth century mystic Meister Eckhart said that “only ignorant people” deny that God is in all things.

1. If we understood all creation as original blessing instead of original sin life would be much more peaceful than it often is.  Less competition.  More at-home-ness with what is. More gratitude.  More joy.  Less greed, less drivenness, less gobbling up of the earth’s resources.  Simpler living.  Just yesterday I was talking with a young man who told me he had wanted to take a vacation but did not have the money to travel.  So he decided to volunteer at a center for AIDS patients and to offer massage there which is his chosen profession.  So instead of spending money and fuel on vacation he is finding a kind of vacation and recreation by serving others and by offering his gifts for free to those who especially need them, the gift of touch.  He sees in these ill people the original blessing that we do not see if we avoid the places where they congregate or find ourselves in fast track lifestyles that prefer spending money to being-with, rushing around to being in touch with others, gossiping to listening, making money to practicing compassion, being served to service and serving.

1. What grows and grows in the context of original blessing is a deeper and renewed sense of community.  How important is that?  The modern era left us estranged, lonely, cosmically alone in the universe.  Being taught as we were that the universe is a machine was another way of saying: “You are on your own.  Find your own meaning.  Find your own connections.  Inflate your ego.  It’s okay.  It’s the survival of the fittest.  Even the tiny atoms are waging war for space and do not inter connect.  Competition is all there is.”  The universe became a lonely place under this modern cosmology and the results were vast and sad in the human soul.  Violence, loneliness, ego-mania, all flourished.  And there was no where to pour out our grief at all we were losing so from this bottled up grief our creativity became blocked and an inability to connect to the whole was rampant.

This is why community is so important in our time.  Because we have been cut off from it for so long.  But today’s science is the mirror opposite of the modern consciousness of individuality and rugged survival of the fittest.  Today’s science is rediscovering how our interdependence is the most foundational of our relationships.  My breath and yours interpenetrate thirty minutes after being in the same room.  Your breath and mine contain molecules from all over the planet.  Community already is.  We are breathing in one another’s water vapor after all.

What we need to do is to celebrate community anew and in forms that are elastic enough to allow for all the creativity that wants to express itself, all the creativity that is waiting to come alive.  A recent movement that calls itself the Creation Spirituality Community movement is trying to do just that: To honor the need for community today in forms that are elastic enough to welcome great diversity but focused enough to make sense and make a difference in one’s life.  This group is gathering July 31-August 3 at De Pauw University near Indianapolis and can be reached online at www.CreationSpirituality.info.

A new and deeper sense of community will itself be an original blessing, it will inspire and support creativity in all its needed dimensions today—the remaking of economics, politics, religion, education, media, work itself—that are so needed if our species is to be sustainable.

Original sin and the many ideologies spawned by it (such as consumerism and advertising) creates great havoc in the human soul and in human community.  Original sin ideologies feed pessimism and self-doubt and often lead to self-hatred and despair and depression.  In the year 2004 American doctors wrote over 147 million prescriptions for anti-depressents.  Maybe original sin ideologies are contributing to such a wave of sadness and acedia (the capitol sin our medieval ancestors named “the lack of energy to begin new things”).  Acedia is despair, depression, apathy, couchpotatoitis.  It has sometimes been defined as ‘sloth.’  It is a spiritual sadness.  It is eating our culture up.  It is behind our compulsion to buy things and so many addictions, all of which easily take over one’s soul whether they be addictions to shopping , drinking, drugs, what have you.  Original sin ideologies set pessimism in motion.

Original blessing consciousness, on the other hand, sets creativity in motion.  It ignites  growth and curiosity, learning and wonder, possibility and creativity back into our souls.  The great psychologist Otto Rank observed that “pessimism comes from a repression of creativity.”  Original blessing theology is not pessimistic; it spawns hope.  It connects us to the deep down goodness in things and in all our relations and renders us awestruck just to be here, just to be part of the history and wonder of our universe, our amazing planet, our varied communities.  It drives one not to wallow in regret or victimhood but to rejoice, to sing, to thank, to praise.  And if we have praised deeply enough, then the warrior in us who is called to defend the earth and even to change our ways of living on the earth, can and will emerge.

Recently I was speaking of these things and of the need for masculine spirituality that awakens men and gets them acting deeply out of their deepest values and a middle aged man came up to me and said: “You are right. I am watching far too much television and sports on TV.  I am going to get my life back.”  Yes, we can get our lives back.  Biophilia—love of life—is offered to all of us.  Pessimism, anthropocentrism, and original sin ideologies not withstanding, we can move to original blessing and the world will be better for it.  And we will be better for it.  Compassion and justice flow from this renewed passion for living and gratitude for life. For it is natural to defend what one cherishes and a lover, one who has tasted original blessing, is deeply in love with life. That is what original blessing teaches: To love life at all costs and with all your passion. Interestingly, St Thomas Aquinas the great medieval theologian observed that the solution to acedia and its many brothers and sisters is falling in love.  For he said that zeal (which is the opposite of acedia) comes from an “intense experience of the beauty of things.”  That is original blessing—an intense experience of the beauty and gratuity of things.  This triggers our falling in love again--it is our medicine, the antidote to pessimism and despair.

The late Ernest Becker put is bluntly when he wrote: “Modern man’s meaninglessness is a problem of what to do with life, what to do with it beyond simply living it out in a completely fetishized way…. This is why modern man whines so pitifully with the burden of life—he has nothing ultimate to dedicate it to; nothing infinite to assume responsible for; nothing self-transcending to be truly courageous about.  He has only himself, his dazzling and diverting little consumer objects; his few closely huddled loved ones; his lifespan; his life-insurance his place in a merely biological and financial chain of things.”  (Awe pp. 24f).  Here surely we have an epitaph on the modern Western soul,  on what happens when a whole culture succumbs to the pessimism of an original sin ideology and strives to fill the hole in the soul with consumer goodies and fetishes.

All biblical scholars worthy of the name acknowledge that neither Jesus nor any Jew before Jesus ever heard of original sin.  Original sin is not a biblical concept.  It was first uttered as a term by the fourth century theologian, St. Augustine, who lived in a time of great pessimism and who did not understand the Jewish story of the Fall told in the Book of Genesis.  Jesus did understand original blessing however and all the gifts that have come from the hands and heart of the Creator.

Clearly an original blessing consciousness represents a whole new (and ancient) way to go, a direction not only of joy and promise and creativity, but of responsibility as well.  The earth as we know it is waiting to see if humans will respond to the challenge.  Whether we will stand up not only for our own survival but for the sustainability of the rest of creation as we know it.  We will not survive without all of creation surviving.  For all our relations are blessed and revelatory.  All our relations inspire us to community, compassion and beyond.  They are all original for we did not make them.  They were here long before we arrived on the scene.

The Return of the Black Madonna: A Sign of Our Times or How the Black Madonna Is Shaking Us Up for the Twenty-First Century

The Return of the Black Madonna: A Sign of Our Times orHow the Black Madonna Is Shaking Us Up for the Twenty-First Century

Rev. Matthew Fox, Ph.D © 2006 Matthew Fox

Every archetype has its seasons. They come and go according to the deepest, often unconscious, needs of the psyche both personal and collective. Today the Black Madonna is returning.[1] She is coming, not going, and she is calling us to something new (and very ancient as well). The last time the Black Madonna played a major role in western culture and psyche was the twelfth century renaissance, a renaissance that the great historian M.D. Chenu said was the “only renaissance that worked in the West.” [2] It worked because it was grass roots. And from this renaissance was birthed the University, the Cathedral, the city itself. She brought with her a resacralization of culture and a vision that awakened the young. In short, it was the last time the goddess entered western culture in a major way. In this essay I want to address what the Black Madonna archetype awakens in us and why she is so important for the twenty-first century. But before I do that, I want to tell a personal story of my first encounter with the Black Madonna. That encounter occurred in the Spring of 1968 when I was a student in Paris and took a brief trip—my first—to Chartres Cathedral located about thirty five miles from Paris. While all of Chartres was an amazing eye-opener for me, its sense of cosmology and humor and human dignity and inclusion of all of life, I stood before the statue of the black Madonna and was quite mesmerized. “What is this? Who is this?” I asked myself. A French woman came by and I quizzed her about it. The answer was as follows. “Oh, this is a statue that turned black over the years because of the number of candles burning around it,” she declared. I didn’t believe her. It made no sense. I looked carefully and saw no excessive candle power around the statue. The story is an old one, one of ignorance and of racism. Even the French, at their most central holy spot, have lost the meaning and the story of the Black Madonna. And racism has contributed to this neglect. The Black Madonna is found all over Europe—in Sicily, Spain, Switzerland, France, Poland, Chechoslavakia—as well as in Turkey and in Africa and in Asia as Tara in China and as Kali in India. She is also named by Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. (Sometimes called the “brown Madonna.”) What is she about and why is interest returning in her today? An archetype by definition is not about just one thing. No metaphor, no symbol, is a literal mathematical formula. The Black Madonna meant different things in different historical periods and different cultural settings. What I want to explore is why she is re-emerging in our time and what powers she brings with her. Why do we need the Black Madonna today? I detect twelve gifts that the Black Madonna archetype brings to our time. They are more than gifts, they are challenges. She comes to shake us up which, as we shall see, is an ancient work of Isis, the Black Madonna.

1. The Black Madonna is Dark and calls us to the darkness.. Darkness is something we need to get used to again—the “Enlightenment” has deceived us into being afraid of the dark and distant from it. Light switches are illusory. They feed the notion that we can “master nature” (Descartes’ false promise) and overcome all darkness with a flick of our finger. Meister Eckhart observes that “the ground of the soul is dark.”[3] Thus to avoid the darkness is to live superficially, cut off from one’s ground, one’s depth. The Black Madonna invites us into the dark and therefore into our depths. This is what the mystics call the “inside” of things, the essence of things. This is where Divinity lies. It is where the true self lies. It is where illusions are broken apart and the truth lies. Andrew Harvey puts it this way: “The Black Madonna is the transcendent Kali-Mother, the black womb of light out of which all of the worlds are always arising and into which they fall, the presence behind all things, the darkness of love and the loving unknowing into which the child of the Mother goes when his or her illumination is perfect.” [4] She calls us to that darkness which is mystery itself. She encourages us to be at home there, in the presence of deep, black, unsolveable mystery. She is, in Harvey’s words, “the blackness of divine mystery, that mystery celebrated by the great Aphophatic mystics, such as Dionysisus Areopagite, who see the divine as forever unknowable, mysterious, beyond all our concepts, hidden from all our senses in a light so dazzling it registers on them as darkness.” [5] Eckhart calls God’s darkness a “superessential darkness, a mystery behind mystery, a mystery within mystery that no light has penetrated.”[6] To honor darkness is to honor the experience of people of color. [7] Its opposite is racism. The Black Madonna invites us to get over racial stereotypes and racial fears and projections and to go for the dark.

2. The Black Madonna calls us to cosmology, a sense of the whole of space and time. Because she is dark and leads us into the dark, the Black Madonna is also cosmic. She is the great cosmic Mother on whose lap all creation exists. The universe itself is embraced and mothered by her. She yanks us out of our anthropocentrism and back into a state of honoring all our relations. She ushers in an era of cosmology, of our relationship to the whole (“kosmos” means whole in Greek) instead of just parts, be they nation parts or ethnic parts or religious parts or private parts. She pulls us out of the Newtonian parts-based relation to self and the world—out of our tribalism—into a relationship to the whole again. Since we are indeed inheriting a new cosmology in our time, a new “Universe Story”, the timing of the Black Madonna’s return could not be more fortuituous. She brings a blessing of the new cosmology, a sense of the sacred, to the task of educating our species in a new universe story. [8]

3. The Black Madonna calls us down to honor our lower charkas. One of the most dangerous aspects of western culture is its constant flight upwards, its race to the upper charkas (Descartes: “truth is clear and distinct ideas”) and its flight from the lower charkas. The Black Madonna takes us down, down to the first charkas including our relationship to the whole (first chakra, as I have explained elsewhere is about picking up the vibrations for sounds from the whole cosmos), our sexuality (second chakra) and our anger and moral outrage (third chakra). European culture in the modern era especially has tried to flee from all these elements both in religion and in education. The Black Madonna will not tolerate such flights from the earth, flights from the depths. [9]

4. Because she honors the direction of down and the lower charkas that take us there, the Madonna honors the earth and represents ecology and environmental concerns. Mother Earth is named by her very presence. Mother Earth is dark and fecund and busy birthing. So is the Black Madonna. Andrew Harvey says: “The Black Madonna is also the Queen of Nature, the blesser and agent of all rich fertile transformations in external and inner nature, in the outside world and in the psyche.” [10] Mother Earth nurtures her children and feeds the world and the Black Madonna welcomes them home when they die. She recycles all things. The Black Madonna calls us to the environmental revolution, to seeing the world in terms of our interconnectedness with all things and not our standing off to master or rule over nature (as if we could even if we tried). She is an affront to efforts of capitalist exploitation of the resources of the earth including the exploitation of the indigenous peoples who have been longest on the earth interacting with her in the most nuanced of ways. The Black Madonna sees things in terms of the whole and therefore does not countenance the abuse, oppression or exploitation of the many for the sake of financial aggrandizement of the few. She has always stood for justice for the oppressed and lower classes (as distinct from the lawyer classes). She urges us to stand up to those powers that, if they had their way, would exploit her beauty for short term gain at the expense of the experience of beauty that future generations will be deprived of. She is a conservationist, one who conserves beauty and health and diversity. Furthermore, if Thomas Berry is correct that “ecology is functional cosmology,” then to be called to cosmology is to be called to its local expression of ecology. One cannot love the universe and not love the earth. And, vice versa, one cannot love the earth and ignore its temporal and spatial matrix, the universe.

5. The Black Madonna calls us to our depths, to living spiritually and radically on this planet and not superficially and unthinkingly and oblivious to the grace that has begotten us in so many ways. The depths to which we are called include the depths of awe, wonder and delight—joy itself is a depth experience we need to re-entertain in the name of the Black Madonna. She calls us to enter into the depths of our pain, suffering and shared grief—not to run from it or cover it up with a myriad of addictions ranging from shopping to drugs and alcohol and sport and superficial religion. She calls us to the depths of our creativity and to entertain the images that are born in and through us. And she calls us to the depths of transformation, of social, economic, gender, racial and eco justice and the struggle that must be maintained to carry on solidarity with the oppressed of any kind. She calls us to the depths of our psyche which, as Meister Eckhart says, are “dark” and to the depths of the earth, which are surely dark and to the depths of the sky that have also been rediscovered for all their darkness. Black holes abound in space as well as in the mysterious breadth of our souls. We need to explore them. They too are fecund. They have much to teach us.

6. The Black Madonna calls us to our Divinity which is also our Creativity. First, our Divinity. Because she is a goddess, the Black Madonna resides in all beings. She is the divine presence inside of creation. She calls us inside, into the “kingdom/queendom of God” where we can co-create with Divinity and feel the rush of Divinity’s holy breath or spirit. But to call us to Divinity is to call us to our responsibility to give birth. If Carl Jung is correct when he says that creativity comes “from the realm of the mothers” then the Black Madonna, who is surely a realm of the mothers, calls us to creativity. She expects nothing less from us than creativity. Hers is a call to create, a call to ignite the imagination. What but our collective imaginations can succeed in moving us beyond our energy dependence on fossil fuels to an era of self-sustaining energy based on solar and renewable, clean fuels? What but an education in creativity can reinvent learning so that the joy and wonder and enticement of learning displaces our failing and boring educational systems? What but moral imagination can move us beyond the growing divide between materially impoverished nations and materially sated but spiritually impoverished nations? The Black Madonna would usher in an era where more and more artists will get good work and thrive on good work and reawaken the human soul by way of moral and political imagination. [11]

7. The Black Madonna calls us to Diversity. There is no imagination without diversity—imagination is about inviting disparate elements into soul and culture so that new combinations can make love together and new beings can be birthed. Because the Black Madonna is black, she addresses the fundamental phobia around race and differences of color and culture that come with race and ethnic diversity. Meister Eckhart says: “All the names we give to God come from an understanding of ourselves.” [12] To give God the name “Black Madonna” is to honor blackness and all people of color and to get over an excessive whiteness of soul and culture. It is also to honor the feminine. Divinity is diverse. Diverse in color and diverse in traditions and diverse in gender. God as Mother, not just Father. God as Birther, not just Begetter. Gender diversity is honored by the Black Madonna and so too is gender preference. The Black Madonna, the Great Mother, is not homophobic. She welcomes the diversity of sexual preferences that are also part of creation, human and more than human. (We have now counted fifty four species of birds and mammals that have significant homosexual populations. The medieval notion that homosexuality is “against nature” has been disproven: A homosexual minority is very much part of nature.) John Boswell, in his ground-breaking scholarly work entitled Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality has demonstrated that the twelfth century, that century that birthed the great renaissance and the Black Madonna in France, rejected homophobia. For a period of 125 years—years that were the most creative years in western civilization—diversity was welcomed at all levels of society. [13] Creativity thrives on diversity.

8. The Black Madonna calls us to Grieve. The Black Madonna is the sorrowful mother, the mother who weeps tears for the suffering in the universe, the suffering in the world, the brokenness of our very vulnerable hearts. In the Christian tradition she holds the dying Christ in her lap but this Christ represents all beings—it is the cosmic Christ and not just the historical Jesus that she is embracing, for all beings suffer and the Black Madonna, the Great Mother, knows this and empathizes with us in our pain. She embraces us like a tender mother, for compassion is her special gift to the world. She invites us to enter into our grief and name it and be there to learn what suffering has to teach us. Creativity cannot happen, birthing cannot happen, unless the grieving heart is paid attention to. Only by passing through grief can creativity burst forth anew. Grieving is an emptying, it is making the womb open again for new birth to happen. A culture that would substitute addictions for grieving is a culture that has lost its soul and its womb. It will birth nothing but more pain and abuse and misuse of resources. It will be a place where waste reigns and where Divinity itself wastes away unused in the hearts and imaginations of the people. Andrew Harvey writes of how the Black Madonna provides “an immense force of protection, an immense alchemical power of transformation through both grief and joy, and an immense inspiration to compassionate service and action in the world.” She is also “queen of hell,” or “queen of the underworld,…that force of pure suffering mystical love that annihilates evil at its root and engenders the Christ-child in the ground of the soul even as the world burns.” [14] She holds both creative and destructive aspects within her. To grieve is to enter what John of the Cross in the sixteenth century called the “dark night of the soul.” We are instructed not to run from this dark night but to stay there to learn what darkness has to teach us. The Dark Madonna does not run from the darkness of spirit and soul that sometimes encompasses us. She invites us not to flee from pain and suffering. Mechtild of Magdeburg in the thirteenth century wrote of this darkness in the following manner: “There comes a time when both body and soul enter into such a vast darkness that one loses light and consciousness and knows nothing more of God’s intimacy. At such a time when the light in the lantern burns out the beauty of the lantern can no longer be seen. With longing and distress we are reminded of our nothingness….I am hunted, captured, bound, wounded so terribly that I can never be healed. God has wounded be close unto death.” [15] Mechtild does not run from the darkness but stays and learns. “God replied: ‘I wish always to be your physician, bringing healing anointment for all your wounds. If it is I who allow you to be wounded so badly, do you not believe that I will heal you most lovingly in the very same hour?” [16] What is it we learn in this darkness of soul and spirit? “From suffering I have learned this: That whoever is sore wounded by love will never be made whole unless he embrace the very same love which wounded her.” [17]

9.The Black Madonna calls us to Celebrate and to Dance. The Black Madonna, while she weeps tears for the world, as the sorrowful mother, does not wallow in her grief, does not stay there forever. Rather, she is a joyful mother, a mother happy to have being and to have shared it with so many other creatures. She expects joy in return. Celebration of life and its pleasures lie at the core of her reason for being. She expects us to take joy in her many pleasures, joy in her fruits. Sophia or Wisdom in the Scriptures sings to this element of pleasure and eros, deep and passionate love of life and all its gifts.

I have exhaled a perfume like cinnamon and acacia, I have breathed out a scent like choice myrrh…. Approach me, you who desire me, And take your fill of my fruits, For memories of me are sweeter than honey, Inheriting me is sweeter than the honeycomb. They who eat me will hunger for more, They who drink me will thirst for more. Whoever listens to me will never have to blush….(Eccl. 24.15, 19-22)

Celebration is part of compassion. As Meister Eckhart puts it: “What happens to another be it a joy or a sorrow happens to me.” Celebration is the exercise of our common joy. Praise is the noise that joy makes. Joy, praise and celebration are intrinsic to community and to the presence of the Black Madonna. She did not birth her Divine Child by whatever name in vain. She opts in favor of children, in favor of life, in favor of eros and in favor of biophilia. She is a lover of life par excellence. She expects us, her children, to be the same.

10. The Black Madonna calls us to our Divinity which is Compassion. Compassion is the best of which our species is capable. It is also the secret name for Divinity. There is no spiritual tradition East or West, North or South, that does not exist to instruct its people in how to be compassionate. “Maat” is the name for justice, harmony, balance and compassion among the African peoples. The Black Madonna calls us to Maat. To balance, harmony, justice and compassion. Grieving and Celebrating and Acting Justly are all parts of compassion. In both Arabic and Hebrew, the word for compassion comes from the word for “womb.” A Patriarchal period does not teach compassion, it ignores the womb-like energies of our world and our species. If it mentions compassion at all it trivializes it and renders it sissy. (For example, Webster’s dictionary declares that the idea that compassion is about a relationship among equals is “obsolete.”) Patriarchy neglects what Meister Eckhart knew and taught: “Compassion means justice.” [18] Compassion has a hard side, it is not about sentiment but about relationships of justice and interdependence. Because the Black Madonna is the goddess that dwells deeply and darkly within all beings, ourselves included, she brings with her our capacity for compassion. We are not whole—we are not ourselves—until we partake in the carrying on of compassion. Meister Eckhart taught that the name of the human soul properly is “Compassion” and that until we are engaged in compassion we do not yet have soul. [19] Compassion knows when enough is enough; compassion does not overindulge; compassion does not hoard and does not run its life on addictions of insecurity and pyramid-building to overcome these addictions. Compassion trusts life and the universe ultimately to provide what is necessary for our being. But compassion works hard as a co-creator with the universe to see that a balance and basic fairness is achieved among beings. Compassion is present in the Black Madonna in her very essence for “the first outburst of everything God (and Goddess) does is compassion.” (Eckhart) To return to compassion is to return to the Goddess. Cultural historian and feminist Henry Adams writes about the role of Mary at Chartres Cathedral in the twelfth century. “The convulsive hold which Mary to this day maintains over human imagination—as you can see at Lourdes—was due much less to her power of saving soul or body than to her sympathy with people who suffered under law—justly or unjustly, by accident or design, by decree of God or by guile of Devil.” [20] Adams understood Mary as the Buddhist element in Christianity for with her as with Buddha, compassion is the first of all the virtues. “To Kwannon the Compassionate One and to Mary the Mother of God, compassion included the idea of sorrowful contemplation.” [21] Only the Great Mother could provide the compassion needed by the sorrowful human condition.

The Mother alone was human, imperfect, and could love; she alone was Favour, Duality, Diversity. Under any conceivable form of religion, this duality must find embodiment somewhere, and the Middle Ages logically insisted that, as it could not be in the Trinity, either separately or together, it must be in the Mother. If the Trinity was in its essence Unity, the Mother alone could represent whatever was not Unity; whatever was irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this was the whole human race.[22]

She was beyond the law, a friend of the outlaws who appealed to the masses who “longed for a power above law—or above the contorted mass of ignorance and absurdity bearing the name of law.”[23] This power had to be more than human. It required the goddess. The Black Madonna, the goddess, provides the womb of the universe as the cosmic lap where all creatures gather. An ancient hymn dedicated to Isis underscores her cosmic role as sovereign over all of nature and queen of all the gods and goddesses.

I am Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are. My nod governs the shining heights of Heaven, the wholesome sea-breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below.[24]

How like a twelfth century poem to the Christian goddess Mary is this ancient hymn to Isis. Alan of Lille wrote the following poem about Nature in the twelfth century:

O child of God and Mother of things, Bond of the world, its firm-tied knot, Jewel set among things of earth, and mirror to all that passes away Morning star of our sphere; Peace, love, power, regimen and strength, Order, law, end, pathway, captain and source, Life, light, glory, beauty and shape, O Rule of our world! [25]

Interestingly, Alan of Lille speaks of the “Mother of things” as a “firm-tied knot” and the Thet which is an important symbol of Isis is also understood to be a knot.[26] We play in her cosmic lap, we bump up against one another there, and we work for balance, Maat, and justice there. The Black Madonna is the Throne of Compassion, the Divine lap. That is the meaning of the name “Isis” and Isis is the African goddess who gave us the Black Madonna both in Ephesus, Turkey and through Spain and Sicily directly into Western Europe. Indeed, certain passages of the Christian Gospels such as the birth narratives, which are clearly not historical but are stories of the Cosmic Christ, are passages taken from stories about Isis and her son, Horus. Sir Ernest A. Wallis Budge, the late keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum, writes:

The pictures and sculptures wherein she is represented in the act of suckling Horus formed the foundation for the Christian paintings of the Madonna and Child. Several of the incidents of the wanderings of the Virgin with the Child in Egypt as recorded in the Apochryphal Gospels reflect scenes in the life of Isis…and many of the attributes of Isis, the God-mother, the mother of Horus…are identical with those of Mary the Mother of Christ.[27]

11. The Black Madonna Calls us to a renaissance of culture, religion and the city. Isis often wears a regal headdress that symbolizes her name as meaning “throne” or “queen.” Erich Neumann has written about Isis as “Throne.”

As mother and earth woman, the Great Mother is the ‘throne’ pure and simple, and, characteristically, the woman’s motherliness resides not only in the womb but also in the seated woman’s broad expanse of thigh, her lap on which the newborn child sits enthroned. To be taken on the lap is, like being taken to the breast, a symbolic expression for adoption of the child, and also for the man, by the Feminine. It is no accident that the greatest Mother Goddess of the early cults was named Isis, the ‘seat,’ ‘the throne,’ the symbol of which she bears on her head; and the king who ‘takes possession’ of the earth, the Mother Goddess, does so by sitting on her in the literal sense of the word.[28]

The twelfth century renaissance was especially conscious of the role of “throne” and the goddess. In Latin the word for “throne” is “cathedra.” The medieval church gave birth to cathedrals—over 125 were built the size of Chartres—and every single one was dedicated to Mary with such titles as Notre Dame de Chartres, Notre Dame de Lyons, Notre Dame de Paris, etc. Over 375 other churches the size of these cathedrals were built dedicated to Mary also. In many of these cathedrals a statue to the Black Madonna can be found even to this day. A cathedral by definition meant the throne where the goddess sits ruling the universe with compassion and justice for the poor. Anthropocentrism, clericalism and sexism have co-opted the invention of cathedral to mean the “place where the bishop has his (usually his) throne.” This is false. The cathedral is designed to be the center of the city, it is bringing the goddess to the center of the city to bring the city alive with goddess energies and values. Cities were birthed in the twelfth century with the breakup of the land-based economy and religious and political system of the feudal era. The youth fled to the cities where religion reinvented itself apart from the monastic establishment that ruled for eight centuries and where education invented itself apart from the rural monastic educational system in the form of universities. Worship reinvented itself in the Cathedral in the city and apart from the monastic liturgical practice in the countryside. Today for the first time in human history more than 50% of humans are living in cities; By 2015, over two-thirds of humans—a great proportion of them young people—will be living in cities. The Black Madonna and the “throne as goddess” motif contribute to the resurrection of our cities. They give us a center, a cosmic center, a synthesis and unity and a life-energy by which we can redeem our cities and take them back from lifelessness and thanatos. Artists gather in a city. Celebration and ritual happen in a city. Nature and human nature congregate in a city. No wonder Meister Eckhart and other medieval mystics celebrated the human soul as city and the city as soul. It is the task of a renaissance to bring soul back to city. We might even define renaissance as a “rebirth of cities based on a spiritual initiative.”

12. The Black Madonna calls us to reinvent education and art. The goddess also ruled at the university—she was “Queen of the sciences” and “mistress of all the arts and sciences” who was “afraid of none of them, and did nothing, ever, to stunt any of them.”[29] All learning was to culminate in her. She was about wisdom not just knowledge. The renaissance that the Madonna represented was both religious and educational. Often the headdress of Isis depicts the full moon between curved horns and has the shape of the musical instrument that the Egyptians played in her honor called the sistrum. Plutarch stated that the purpose of the sistrum which is a kind of rattle was that “all things in existence need to be shaken, or rattled about…to be agitated when they grow drowsy and torpid.” [30] The Black Madonna shakes things up. Is this not an archetype for our times? Is she not a forebearer of a renaissance, one who comes to give new birth to a civilization, a birth based on a new sense of spirituality and cosmology and learning—a learning that reawakens us to our place in the universe? How will work in the world become wise as opposed to exploitive without wisdom? How will the human soul move from knowledge to wisdom without the kind of effort the goddess can bring? Without a balance of male/female, heart/head, body/spirit truly happening at all levels of education from childhood to professional degrees? How will a renaissance happen if education is left behind? What role will art play when the artist too lets go of the internalized oppression of the modern era and recommits himself/herself to serving the community and to serving the larger community of ecological sustainability? [31] These are some of the questions raised by the return of the Black Madonna in our time. They beg for response. They beg for listening ears and attentive institutions. They beg for self criticism of nation-states, governments, corporations, academia, religion, law, professions of all kinds which are called to something new (and very ancient): a new relationship between earth and humans. One of mutuality, not mastering. One of joy and wonder, not boredom. One that honors all our relations. For this to come about some rattling of our modern cages and mindsets is in order. The Black Madonna provides such a shake-up. Still. After all these centuries.

FOOTNOTES

[1] See, for example, China Galland, Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna (New York: Viking, 1990). [2] See M. D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957), chapter one. [3] Matthew Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart (Santa Fe: Bear & Co., 1982), 42. [4] Andrew Harvey, The Return of the Mother (Berkeley, Frog, Ltd. 1995), 371. [5] Ibid. [6] Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, 43. [7] See Eulalio R. Baltazar, The Dark Center: A Process Theology of Blackness (New York: Paulist, 1973). [8] See Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) and Brian Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996). [9] For a fuller development of the charkas see Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh (New York: Harmony, 1999), 94-116; 167-327. [10] Harvey, 371. [11] Cf. Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991). [12] Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, 42. [13] John Boswell, Christianity, Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980). [14] Harvey, The Return of the Mother, 372f. [15] Sue Woodruff, Meditations with Mechtild of Magdeburg (Sante Fe, Bear & Co., 1982), 60f., 64f. [16] Ibid., 68. [17] Ibid., 69. [18] Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, 103. [19] Matthew Fox, Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2000), 442. [20] R. P. Blackmur, Henry Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 203. [21] Ibid. [22] Ibid., 204. [23] Ibid., 203. [24] Eloise McKinney-Johnson, “Egypt’s Isis: The Original Black Madonna” Journal of African Civilizations, April, 1984, 66. [25] Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, 19. [26] See McKinney-Johnson, 71. [27] Ibid., 67. [28] Ibid., 68. [29] Blackmur, Henry Adams, 206. [30] See McKinney-Johnson, 71. [31] See Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art.

BP vs. Original Blessing

BP vs. Original Blessing June 2010

Every pelican we see in the Gulf coated with oil is an Original Blessing.

Every turtle we see drenched in gook is an Original Blessing.

All the shrimp beds and oyster hatcheries being poisoned by BP tar is an Original Blessing.

The sea itself, home to so many marvelous creatures large and small, is an Original Blessing.

“Blessing” is the theological word for “goodness.”  The sea and its creatures are very good, full of blessing, and they bless us with livelihoods, with food for our table, with delight for our children and the child in each of us as they conspicuously display their beauty and their skills of flying, swimming, diving, parenting, surviving.  We are surrounded by blessing and by goodness.  The fishermen know about the gratuitous blessing, i.e. grace, that healthy fisheries extend to them, assuring them their livelihood.

A tragedy like the BP oil spill is so radical an awakening about what we take for granted: The Original Blessing that nature so often extends to us.   Nature is a bountiful bestower of grace and we are capable of taking grace for granted.

No one can deny that it is human greed and human denial that has turned this blessing and this sea of grace into a scene of ugly destruction and wanton misery.

A theology of Original Blessing ceases the taking for granted of health and nature’s wealth and bountiful gifts to us.  Such a moment as this, tragic as it is, is a wake-up call to us all:

--About our life styles and our addiction to poisonous energy sources.

--About the need for clean energy, a need that can no longer be put off and delayed.

--About a government corrupted by corporate powers that have their way in making laws, deregulating overseers, and ignoring the health and wealth of nature in favor of the idolatrous version of wealth as their bottom line and their shareholders profits.

--About the takeover of governments by corporations.

All this has to change if Original Blessing is to shine.  Original Blessing is the doxa, the divine “glory” and numinosity and sheen that glistens in every creature.  It deserves to be preserved.  It is what we mean by the word “sacred.”  It is precious and great and not to be destroyed in our pursuit of false gods of power, wealth, cheap grace.  Indeed, it is our responsibility to see that it shines seven generations from now in all its beauty and healthy and earth-based wealth.

When Jesus said that what we do “to the least of my brethren you do to me” he was speaking profound wisdom that echoes in the hearts of all who witness this current tragedy.  Every creature we see coated with oil and gook and close to death, and those thousands we do not see because they are under the poisoned sea, is another Christ being crucified at the hands of the current empire of cold-hearted multi-national corporations that prefer profits to people including the finned people and the winged people as well as the two-legged ones out of work and out of luck.  The sacredness of the earth and her creatures ought not be compromised.  Original Blessing says it all.

Original Blessing Twenty Five Years Later

Original Blessing Twenty Five Year Later

Easter 2008

Matthew Fox

I am grateful to Matt Henry for his ambition and imagination in drawing together so many writers and thinkers for a celebration of twenty-five years of Original Blessing.  Because this project has been undertaken under a strict deadline, I have not read any of the essays contained herein—though I certainly look forward to reading them when the book appears.  What I write therefore is not in the context of what the authors gathered here have given birth to.  I do notice, however, that in my original Introduction, penned at Easter, 1983, I point out that each chapter or theme in this book is merely “an unfinished meditation that is only briefly sketched out” and invite the reader to develop the theology and the theme.  Thus, a challenge was laid out twenty-five years ago that Matt Henry has taken up along with each of his writers and artists in this volume.  Thank you, Matt, thank you fellow writers and artists.

As I look back on twenty-five years of this book and the experiences teaching and lecturing and writing and battling that have followed upon it a number of lessons arise and come to mind.  There is the lesson from my mentor, the late French Dominican pere Marie Dominic Chenu, who used to say: “I do not do theology from a comfortable armchair.”  (Chenu, who worked with the worker priest movement in France after WW II and became the grandfather of Liberation Theology as well as Creation Spirituality was silenced by Pope Pius XII and forbidden to publish for twelve years until he was himself liberated by the Second Vatican Council where he was the principal author of the document on “The Church in the Modern World.”  An activist and a theologian, he died at ninety-five the day Nelson Mandela was released from jail.)

I too and creation spirituality as a movement have not been doing theology from a comfortable armchair.  A theology of Original Blessing is a theology of action as much as of ideas.  Its ideas lead to action.  The Via Transformativa is about transformative action that grows from the actions that derive from Creativity (the Via Creativa) and which in turn derive from the levels of being and surrender and awe-filling and facing down injustice that derive from the Via Negativa and the Via Positiva.

I was reminded of the price one pays for living out the Four Paths recently when I was in Omaha, Nebraska to conduct workshops and also to be part of a Cosmic Mass that students of creation spirituality were sponsoring (and which was both well attended and well received).  A woman in her young forties approached me and told me this story: She had been enrolled in a master’s course in religion at Gonzaga University, a Jesuit college in Omaha, and she had cited my work in a footnote in a paper she did for class.  The paper was returned with a red pen x-ing out the entire page where there was a reference to my work.  A sentence said: “We do not cite this author in our religion department.”  The woman subsequently left the school.

I tell this story because it is recent and it is true.  The transformation of consciousness and ideology that an Original Blessing theology requires is still a fierce threat to powers that support the status quo in religion and society and education.  People do have to choose—and their institutions have to choose—whether to go with original sin and all that entails or with original blessing and all that encompasses.  There are those who have sat on the sidelines long enough, mouthing praise but never voting with their feet.  They are like those Dante warns will be in the lower realms of hell because they have not stood up in a time of crisis when choices were called for.  They are mere armchair theologians or armchair scientists comfortable with their privileges but unwilling to challenge religious or secular power structures.

Like Chenu, I am not just a theologian but also an activist.  My activism has been invested primarily in attempting to alter the forms of education and worship.  In education, by establishing ICCS with its right brain/left brain pedagogy at Mundelein College in Chicago (an eight year run), then on to Holy Names College in Oakland (a twelve year run) and then, when then Cardinal and Chief Inquisitor Ratzinger won his ten year battle against us and I was expelled, I established my own University of Creation Spirituality in downtown Oakland (where we had a superb nine year run before it was emasculated by a new president and effectively ended).  Twenty-nine years for an alternative educational institution for adult graduate students was a great blessing.  Many of our faculty and students, including Matt Henry and other writers here, are busy doing great work in the world bringing Original Blessing alive in many and various communities.  It was not easy financing and staffing and recruiting and teaching all those years—but it was a very great adventure and a deep joy.

The late activist and business woman of conscience, Anita Roddick, who appreciated and supported creation spirituality and many alternative movements, said she was an activist “because being an activist makes me feel alive.”  She defined activism this way: “Activism is being a voice for the voiceless, standing up for the weak and the frail, engaging the human spirit.  It’s putting your head above the parapet.  Being heard.  Being seen.  Being counted.”  This strikes me as a twenty-first century definition of justice and compassion.  The Via Transformativa come to life.  And to call it “feeling alive” is to call it one’s spirituality.  For spirituality is about living one’s life in fullness and in depth.

Part of my activism the past nine years and Via Creativa and Via Transformativa has been to bring the body, dance, post-modern language of vj’s, dj’s, rap, world music into western liturgy in what we call the “Cosmic Mass.”  We have celebrated over ninety of these Masses under the auspices of the Episcopal church and trained over a hundred students to do them in various part of North America.  I believe that a revival of ritual and worship is as important as a revival of education and learning if our species is to wake up to its potential and out of its denial and couchpotatoitis.  When the pope fired me as a Catholic priest I met young Anglicans form England who were bringing rave to liturgy with impressive results so I went to the Episcopal Bishop of San Francisco who welcomed me to carry on my work and to attempt a liturgical renewal.  I remain grateful to Bishop Swing.

Now my activism has led me to work with “Professor Pitt,” a gifted rapper and film maker from the inner city as together we attempt to bring to inner city youth lessons learned from the pedagogy of ICCS and UCS over 29 years with adults.  Our YELLAWE program, based on the philosophy of education I lay out in my recent book, The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human, is an effort to reinvent education from the inner city out and the bottom up.  We are doing this program in Oakland and other cities are approaching us for possible alliances as well.  The results are encouraging as we see youth regaining a sense of their own dignity and finding their voice as they drum, make rap and videos and theater based on the “ten C’s” which are my latest way to teach and tell about the creation spirituality tradition.  I believe the “ten C’s” are needed to balance the “3 R’s” of education:  They are: Cosmology, Contemplation (or meditation), Chaos, Creativity, Compassion, Community, Ceremony and Celebration, Critical Thinking, Courage, Character and Chakra Development.

Recently I was invited to speak on the Black Madonna and on YELLAWE at Morehouse College in Atlanta which is the alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. and the occasion was the fortieth anniversary of his assassination.  Morehouse is also where Dr. Howard Thurman taught and where he and his wife, whom I was privileged to know in the last years of her life, are buried.  They are the ones who visited Gandhi in 1935 and brought back his non-violence strategy to America.

I was reminded of how, early in our sejour at Holy Names College in Oakland, we had invited a very prominent black pastor, Rev. Alfred Smith Senior to speak to our ICCS class and he began this way: He held up a copy of Original Blessing and he said: “Our people need this more than they need jobs.  Because what was ultimately taken away from us by slavery was the sense of our own dignity.”  I am struck by the bluntness and truthfulness of this observation: That, as I point out in the original Introduction to this book, empire builders (and slave masters) have an investment in original sin ideologies—and still do.  This explains more than any thing else the fierce opposition to this book by the Vatican and other purveyors of fundamentalism in our day.  A few years after visiting us, Rev. Smith was interviewed by BBC about my work and he told them: “Matt Fox is so ahead of the church that the church confused him with the enemy.”  There is a sense of political awareness in the black church that one finds refreshing.

As I pointed out in the Introduction twenty-five years ago, the search for wisdom requires a new alliance between religion and science.  Science after all is meant to be studying nature for the rest of us.  As I pointed out then the ecological crisis was a major moral issue of our time.  This is why a creation-centered spirituality and not a psychologically oriented (still more anthropomorphism) is so needed. Now, with global warming finally squeezing its way into the media along side the latest antics of the Paris Hiltons and sexual peccadilloes of our politicians, there might actually be some action that gets humans (including religious believers) into action on this, the number one moral issue of our time.  Though we who preach creation spirituality have been dismissed as “tree worshippers” and “pagans” (I take this as a compliment since a paganus is a peasant or rural person and the historical Jesus himself was a peasant) and heretics, the tide may be shifting.  Reality may finally be setting in and cutting through religious ideologies.

Amazing to tell, the Southern Baptists (sic) just produced a document entitled “A Southern Baptist Declaration of the Environment and Climate Change” in which they confess that they believe “our current denominational resolutions and engagement with these issues have often been too timid.  Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring reckless and ill-informed.  We can do better.”  This was signed by the current president of the Conference and two former presidents among others.  In 1993 the Evangelical Environmental Network produced a document on “Evangelical Declaration of the Care of Creation.”  While still arousing opposition within these denominations, at least the word creation is back on the front pages of their theologies.

This past week the states of California (where I live) and Oregon have announced the suspension of all commercial salmon fishing.  The salmon are fished out.  Four countries from Egypt to Haiti and southeast Asia have had food riots this past week.  Food shortages are just beginning to make the news.  One is reminded of the warning from Hildegard of Bingen: If humans tamper with the “web of justice” that all creation is, God will allow creation to punish humanity.  A new word for “justice” has emerged in the past twenty years: Sustainability.  What is just is sustainable; what is unjust is not.  Injustice leads to chaos and insustainability.

At this time we are also experiencing a new awareness of cosmology and our amazing place in the universe.  Hubble Telescope and other technologies orbiting in space since this book was written assist us marvelously in seeing and understanding the wonders of our universe.  In The View from the Center of the Universe by astrophysicist Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams we are treated to a telling of the new creation story with metaphors and story but also to a search for the deeper meaning of this new story.  I am very grateful for their work and for their willingness and indeed eagerness to teach their findings to our inner city youth in the YELLAWE program.  I keep in my pocket a wonderful saying from the Native American tradition: “To be human one must make room in one’s heart for the wonders of the universe.”

Dialogs I have had with Rupert Sheldrake and with Ralph Abraham, one of the founders of chaos theory and author of Chaos, Gaia and Eros, have also helped me and others to explore in deeper richness the implications of a healthy via negativa and the mysteries of darkness and of disorder that we experience in our lives and in the creative richness of nature.  Professor Abraham has also volunteered to share his findings on chaos with our inner city teen agers and to great effect.

Recent Biblical scholarship has also been turning in the direction of a creation spirituality in so many instances.  It is striking, for example, that scholars like Markus Borg, Bruce Chilton and Dominic Crossan are rediscovering the wisdom origins and nature-centered spirituality of the historical Jesus.  In addition, Chilton and Crossan are coming to grips with the cosmic origins of the Christian story not unlike what I outline in this Original Blessing and reinforced in a subsequent book, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (published twenty years ago this year).

Christianity flies on two wings, that of the historical Jesus and that of the cosmic Christ.  By lumping the two together we have done a great disservice to both.  We have put Jesus up for sentimentalization and robbed the Christ dimension of its power and its universality restricting it only to Jesus.  This is especially so in a context that is strictly psychological and anthropocentric (“am I saved?”  “Will my ego live for ever after death?”).  Consider what these two authors say about Paul, who after all is the first writer in the Christian Scriptures and the first Christian theologian.  Says Chilton:  “No Christian thinker before or since has thought on so cosmic a scale, linking God’s Spirit to humanity’s and both to the transformation of the world.  The picture he conveyed of what it meant for even small groups of believers to meet together involved them in a literal reshaping of the universe…The range of Paul’s thinking was literally cosmic, and metacosmic, because the viscera of Christ, the mind of Christ, wove all things into the primordial whole that had been their source.”[1]

John Dominic Crossan underscores the role of mysticism in the earliest Christian teaching when he asks: “Does Paul think, therefore, that only mystics can be Christians or that all Christians must be mystics?  In a  word, yes….For Paul being “in Christ” [a phrase he uses 164 times in his letters] is not just metaphorical trope, but mystical identity.  It determines everything in his theology….That in is the beating heart of Paul’s theology, and everything else flows from it in life and in death.”[2] The historical Jesus is being recognized again for the nature mystic, the creation-centered mystic, that he was. First, because he lived in the “green” area of Palestine, Galilee, but also because he comes from the wisdom tradition (the feminist, creation-centered, cosmic and earth based tradition) of Israel.  The wisdom tradition is deeply imbued with the prophetic tradition of Israel—Wisdom is said to be a “friend of the prophets.”  She (and wisdom is always a “she” the world over including in the Bible) interferes with injustice and lack of compassion. Just as Jesus did.  The Christ of John’s Gospel is presented practically as the incarnation of Wisdom.  Wisdom speaks and acts through Jesus in the synoptic gospels as well.  The reader will note that from the first pages of Original Blessing Wisdom played a major role in creation theology more than twenty-five years ago.  I welcome the Biblical scholars back to that table that so nurtured the historical Jesus.  For wisdom theology is the creation spirituality of the Bible.

Deep Ecumenism lifts the veil on the Western church’s preoccupation and investment in original sin when it inherited the empire in the fourth century.  Eastern Orthodox Christians are not so invested and neither are Jews, Muslims, Buddhists or native peoples.  The late psychologist Otto Rank talked about “original wound” and I think that language is far more accurate and helpful than the convoluted theologies of original sin, a concept that the advertising mania of a consumer-driven economic system has, quite literally, cashed in on.[3]

A number of theological seminaries are closing in the West.  I do not see this as an unabated tragedy.  Academia including theological academia has been far too slow, lazy and busy protecting its privileges to apply activism to its own backyard. The pedagogical lessons learned from my twenty-nine years of teaching graduate programs in creation spirituality (and Original Blessing was the primer for those programs) have been for the most part ignored by mainstream seminary educators, lessons like the importance of the body, of art and creativity, of meditation both bodily and artistic, of awakening the mystical or right hemisphere of the brain, etc.  Why is it that we had over 400 students in our doctor of ministry program three years after opening the doors and a D Min program at GTU in Berkeley had 4 students in it after 15 years in business?  GTU never bothered to investigate.  Our students have gone on to accomplish such things as launching Engineers Without Borders which sends engineers to places like Haiti and the Amazon and Africa to assist in eco-conscious and solar generated irrigation systems, etc.  Others are involved now in launching creation-centered base communities.

One reason for the storm raised by my book is that it represents a deconstruction of religion and theology and with it a reconstruction as well.  This is seen as a threat to the status quo.  Which it is.  The book, by emphasizing creation again as integral to a faith journey, is calling for a Green Christianity and a reminder of how green the historical Jesus truly was.

It is not easy to propose a new paradigm for religion (even though we can prove intellectually that it was the original one).  Many factors go into people’s complacency or feeling threatened by the new that is really the ancient.  Not least of these factors is that personally and psychologically speaking, there is much in our upbringing that does not teach us we are blessings at all.  We wrestle with our own self-doubts and qualms about our worthiness often on a daily basis. But that is what the good news of original blessing is about.  That goodness precedes all failures and all imperfections and it comes not from our achievements but from our existence itself.  “Isness is God” as Meister Eckhart put it.  We are here.  By the great groaning of the universe in labor for fourteen billion years, we have arrived.  We don’t have to prove ourselves so much as be ourselves.  For deep down we all carry goodness, we all carry our original blessing.  Can religion teach these things once again?  Is religion up to it?  Or can we travel more lightly with spirituality alone? That is part of the human drama unfolding in our time.

Religion itself needs a heavy dose of activism, indeed a New Reformation as I wrote about in my book on that topic and which I made an effort to draw attention to by going to Wittenburg and pounding 95 contemporary theses of protest at the church door there.  One person has remarked how those 95 theses are themselves another summary of the creation spirituality tradition outlined in this book.

The scandal of opus dei bishops and canonization of their Hitler-admiring founder, the silencing of over 109 Catholic theologians by the present pope when he was employed as Chief Inquisitor, the support of pedophile priests including the founder of right-wing seminaries known as Father Marcel will not go away in the Catholic church.  And the scandal of Protestants turning the name of Jesus over to Fundamentalists preaching a crackpot Christianity wedded to a pursuit of an American Empire will not be erased by history’s judgments.  Where are the religious activists?  Who has the courage to apply the Via Transformativa to religion itself?  One waits.  And one must act.

For all these reason I welcome this celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Original Blessing and I look forward to reading the essays contained herein and to continuing to entertain stories from people who tell me their “lives were changed” and “religion transformed” by reading this book.  And of course I want to ask as well: “And how has your activism profited from reading it?  What are you doing as a result of this theological shift to make a difference in the world we live in and that is suffering so much at this time?”

Until we meet again,

Matthew Fox

Oakland, California Easter 2008

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[1] Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 207, 249.

[2] John Dominic Crossan, Jonathan L. Reed,  In Search of Paul (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 280, 278.

[3] You can see this understanding of “original wound” developed in my article on Otto Rank available on my website, www.matthewfox.org.

Mel Gibson’s Passion and Fascism’s Piety of Pain

Many years ago, after finishing doctoral studies in Paris, I spent a semester at the University of Munster in Germany. While there I lived in a Dominican convent which housed about six other Dominicans, one of whom was old and very strange and never appeared during the day time at meals or for any other reason. He seemed only to go out at night. One day I was asked to go in his room to fetch a book and I was amazed to see the books on his bookshelf (including Mein Kampf). I was especially amazed by a “holy card” on his prie dieu (a place where one kneels to pray). This “holy card” was the most gory I had ever seen, with Jesus depicted as thoroughly bloodied, beaten, abused and victimized. I later learned that this Dominican priest with the gory holy card was a self-appointed “chaplain to the Nazi’s of Munster”.  The year was 1970. As I sat and watched Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” with its unrelenting emphasis on blood and gore I had a déjà vu experience as I vividly recalled this Dominican priest and his particular form of piety. Gibson set out his intentions for his film in an interview: “I want to push you over the edge, push you right over the edge, so you can stay there and hang out with and get to a higher plane… through the pain.” Piety as pain, pain as piety. This movie opens a door on fascist piety which is pain-driven.

The piety of fascism is inevitably a piety of pain and suffering (thus the complete fascination with redemption and total refusal to entertain grace and original blessing) and it manifests itself in full bloody form in this movie. Gibson is allegedly a member of Opus Dei, a secretive Catholic sect of wealthy men whose spirituality is deeply fascistic. Its founder, a Spanish priest named Escriva, whom the Pope rushed into canonization two years ago in record time, was a card carrying fascist who actually praised Adolph Hitler and who was also deeply sexist. Two of his Opus Dei members served on Franco’s cabinet. The present pope has taken this religious order under his wing (his own press secretary is a member of Opus Dei) and has appointed many Opus Dei bishops and cardinals (especially in Latin America after decimating the liberation theology and base communities there). They have constructed an $81 million edifice in Manhattan and are ensconced in the financial capitals of Europe, especially in Frankfurt, which is replacing Switzerland as the financial capital of Europe.

One Peruvian I met told about growing up in an Opus Dei household and how his father forbade him to be alone at any time with his mother and sisters. Thus as a boy he lived on the streets and never went home before 8pm, when his father would most likely be home from work. (Boys could not be alone in the house with females of any age—so much for sexual common sense.) In addition, the family prayed the rosary on their knees on upturned bottle caps and were expected to bleed. Piety of pain indeed. Not, alas, the pain of the world—the suffering of others that can be relieved by acts of compassion—but self-inflicted pain.

In many ways the film is a monument to sadomasochism. By emphasizing the worst eighteen hours of Jesus’ life and leaving most of his teachings out of the movie, Gibson makes Jesus a victim rather than a martyr while removing Jesus’ passion for justice and substituting the term “passion” to mean passive victim.

Our culture is deeply engaged in sadomasochism—understood here as the haves lording over the have-nots. How so? Let’s take contemporary capitalism and the world distribution of wealth and power as an example: In the 1960s, the overall income of the richest 20 percent of the world’s population was thirty times that of the poorest 20 percent. Today, it is 224 times larger! In the 1960s, the richest 20 percent held 70 percent of the world’s revenues; in 1999 it was 85 percent. Today the income of the richest 225 people in the world is equal to the income of 3 billion poor people. The income of the three richest people in the world is equal to the collective national incomes of the poorest forty-nine countries! It would take no more than 5 per cent of the overall annual sales of arms in the world to feed all the starving children, to protect them from dying of preventable diseases, and to make basic education accessible to all.

Yet Gibson’s Jesus shows none of the passion for justice that served as a corrective to the sadomasochistic tendencies of his own culture and times, and barely opens the door to issues of soul and society that could serve as correctives to our culture and times. Where is the compassion, human dignity, and love that lie at the very heart of Christ’s teachings? You don’t cure sadomasochism with more sadomasochism and by legitimizing it with religious sentiment.

Gibson’s rejection of Vatican II (which, among other things, apologized for the church’s long and sorry history of blaming Jesus’ death on the Jews and its primary role in fueling anti-Semitism over the centuries), gives one a sense of where his piety lies.  I lived for one year, unknowingly, in Paris with a family that was “integriste” or extreme right wing Catholics who like Gibson would only attend Mass in Latin and who like Gibson rejected Vatican II.  They said that “Vatican II was a Jewish and Freemason conspiracy.”  Thoroughly anti-Semite, they denied that Jesus was Jewish.

Gibson tells us that people who object to his movie are actually objecting to the Gospels, but in fact the movie owes much more to the medieval practice of the Stations of the Cross which is a practice of meditating on Jesus’ trial, his carrying of the cross to his crucifixion and a nineteenth century nun’s visions named Anne Catherine Emmerich than it does to the Gospels. It is in the Stations of the Cross practice that we are told Jesus fell three times; that Veronica wiped his face with a veil; etc.—all scenes graphically depicted in the film. Mixing all of the gospels into one narrative, as Gibson does, is artistic license but it is not history. The gospels themselves lack historicity, as in their muddling of the Pharisees and Sadducees, and their bias against Judaism stems from the fact that they were written after the fall of the Temple, long after Jesus’ death.  They also let Pontius Pilate off the hook (which this movie does in spades).

Religious imagery is not a private matter; it is a profoundly public matter. Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart said that “all the names we give to God come from an understanding of ourselves.” If we apply this insight to this film, we learn that the images Gibson gives to Christ reveal much about himself. As one viewer said, they reveal a tough childhood supposedly when his father must have taken him to the woodshed with a belt and a whipping. The point being that the God represented in this film is not a God whom I would want to worship in any form whatsoever or whom I could recommend others worship.

It is no wonder, then, that this film is being seen by so many Christian groups whose piety is built more on fear than it is on love and hope, more on sin than on blessing, more on victimization than on liberation. It provides a logical haven for fall/redemption religious world views.  No wonder Gibson leaves out so much of the message of Jesus: It is not compatible with fascism which is about control and not justice, about power-over, not power-with (compassion).

It is one of the signs of our times that new generations born since the defeat of fascism in World War II (and the attempt to throw off fascism in the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council), know very little about fascism.  I recently met a twenty-six year old college graduate who did not know what fascism was.  It is a scandal that our Congress appropriates millions of dollars to build monuments to the heroes of World War II but apparently very little to educate youth (or itself?) about the lessons to be learned from the purpose of that war: To defeat fascism.

Susan Sontag has defined fascism as “institutionalized violence.”  I would define it as authoritarianism, an authoritarianism that swamps all else--conscience, community, human rights, justice—and that in the process legitimizes violence.  Fascism is a philosophy of disempowerment based on fear, power over (sadism), power under (masochism), victimhood, and scapegoating.   Fascism seems to need religion and even religious piety to wrap around itself and render feelings of pious sentiment and self-righteousness.  Its God is the God of Authoritarianism. Cardinal Ratzinger, the present pope’s right hand man and current inquisitor general, is a devote of authoritarianism. It is in this context that the late theologian Dorothy Soelle wrote of a new “Christofascism” coming to the fore in our day.

Recently a political scientist, Dr. Lawrence Britt, wrote an article naming fourteen characteristics of fascism.  He based his study on an examination of the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto and Pinochet.  (For the record, we need to remind ourselves that four of these men were Roman Catholics never excommunicated by their church—all except Suharto.)  A summary of Britt’s points follow.

1. Powerful and continuing nationalism employing constant use of patriotic slogans, symbols, songs, flags. 2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights because security needs outweigh human rights which can be ignored. 3. Using enemies as scapegoats for a unifying cause. 4. Supremacy of the military. 5. Rampant sexism including more rigid gender roles and anti-gay legislation. 6. Controlled mass media. 7. Obsession with national security driven by a politics of fear. 8. Religion and Government are intertwined especially in rhetoric employed by its leaders. 9. Corporate power is protected—industrial and business aristocracies put government leaders into power and keep them there creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. 10. Labor power, which represents one of the few threats to fascism, is suppressed. 11. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts and hostility to higher education along with censorship of arts or refusal to support the arts. 12. Obsession with crime and punishment. 13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. 14. Fraudulent Elections.

One does not have to be a paranoid to see these elements alive and well in the USA in 2004.  To encourage this through pious film-making underscores the danger.  Perhaps we can thank Mel Gibson for opening up possibilities to discuss fascism once again including its strange mix of politics and very strange religious notions.  One wonders who will be the beneficiary of Mr. Gibson’s billion dollar profit on the crucifixion of Jesus?  Will it lead to more Opus Dei bishops in North America?  More mixing of right-wing politics and right-wing religion and right-wing media?  Stay tuned.

In the multi million dollar campaign to get churches to support this movie, a four-color flyer was sent to most churches in the country that boasted the following headline: “Dying was Jesus’ Reason For Living.”  It is difficult to imagine a slogan more contradictory to the facts of Jesus’ life or his teaching or indeed of that of the Christ who in John’s gospel says: “I have come that you may have life and have it in abundance.” Mel Gibson ought to read the great spiritual genius Ernest Holmes who writes: “The will of God is never toward suffering.  Man must constantly reaffirm his belief in the Infinite Goodness if he expects to exclude the idea of evil from his thought….God’s Will is always toward Life and more Life…the life within you is God”.  Holmes got Jesus’ message right.  But the slogan Gibson invokes, “Dying was Jesus’ reason for living,” sick as it is, tells the true story about this film and the piety behind it.   What we have here is a clear case of religion as necrophilia.  From this movie we learn that necrophilia (love of death) is more important than biophilia (love of life).

Here lies the ultimate scare of the movie and its success.  It speaks to and elicits from people in our culture a desire to wallow in necrophilia at the expense of biophilia.  (I do not recall an ounce of biophilia much less humor in the movie.)  I am reminded of the wise warning from Erich Fromm in his brilliant study on evil, An Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. He writes: “Necrophilia grows when biophilia is stunted.” And this is how evil is unleashed in the world.  (Remember that the opposite of evil is not good; it is the Sacred.)

Russian Orthodox philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev warned about a “decadent humility” that “keeps humanity in a condition of repression and oppression, chaining its creative power.”  And Rabbi Abraham Heschel reminded us that prophets do not become such from a life of asceticism but from passion for life.  Clearly, a movie like this kills creativity and the prophetic spirit in its appeal to pain and gore.

The question of “who killed Jesus?” is a silly question in the sense that it was done 2000 years ago.  NO ONE alive today killed Jesus.  How could we?  We were not there.  We are fully capable of killing the Christ, however, that is the God-self (or Buddha nature) in all beings.  We do this when we destroy rainforests, render species extinct, starve the children, refuse health care to the people, allow starvation and unjust distribution of the earth’s resources—in short when we ignore the teachings of Isaiah and Jesus and others about the need for justice and compassionate works.  What a shame that Mel Gibson, with all his potential access to decent theologians and today’s contemporary scholarship about the healthy Jewish roots of the historical Jesus, chose to make a film based on false history, contradicting Gospels, anti-Semitic overtones, fascist piety and necrophilia.  Hopefully, prophetic forces of biophilia will resist.

The Good News from Egypt

The Good News from Egypt Isn't the news on Egypt great? I am sure I was not the only observer with tears in his or her eyes all day yesterday hearing and watching the good news of the Egyptian uprising. How moving it is to see the young being brave and standing up for their rights and those of their country’s brothers and sisters!

Among other lessons the events reveal the healthy and sane side of Islam which so rarely makes the news: the fact that the young people were so disciplined and committed to non violence moves me deeply. What a great moment! The Arab world will never be the same again. And it came 'from below,' from the young whose parents went through so much agony. Yet it was wisely intergenerational as was clear from the crowds of professionals and parents that washed into the streets. I wish them well with a government of the people, for the people and by the people. (Us too, but that is another story!)

The uprising was spiritual in the deepest sense of the word for it was based on courage—as the participants said—“to conquer fear”—and once that was accomplished everything else flowed. All spirituality begins with courage. That is why, sad to say, when courage is lacking (as it is in many church circles today), there is no spirituality. Only hiding so as not to be noticed, not to be abused one more time. It was Martin Luther King, jr. who also praised courage when he remarked that one must “love something more than the fear of death if one is to live fully” and to stand up for justice.

It was also marked by community, not by ego and violence or power for power sake or ego sake. This was so clear in the many commentaries of the organizers of the event who did not want to call themselves or anyone else “heroes” other than those who gave their lives to the great cause of social justice that was at stake. There was respect all around. That happens when ego is checked at the door for the sake of a greater cause, namely the good of community. The role of community was also on display because both Muslims and Christians marched together on behalf of their common cause of freedom and justice. (The Christians had to march in spite of the Coptic pope’s siding with the regime—but march they did.) A common brotherhood and sisterhood was engaged in by this common quest for justice.

What will come of the new Egypt? What forms will it take? Of course we do not know but the first step has been taken with grace and courage and a deep sense of community. And that makes the next steps more likely to be positive.

What concerns me the most is that unemployment is so thoroughly a human problem world-wide today. How can Egypt employ her many unemployed and especially the young? America is now part of that unemployment picture and we are feeling it up close and personal. I know many people in America who cannot find work at this time. It is the primal issue all around the globe. When humans don’t have work they don’t feel good about themselves. Boredom sets in. Resentment and self-hatred or despair can easily take hold.

As a species we have to reinvent work and economics so that the work that needs to get done gets done and the workers who can work can find work. As I pointed out in my book on The Reinvention of Work, humans are the only species out of work. The plants and trees, the fishes and stars, all have work. Why do we insist on inventing unemployment when we should be inventing employment? Are we misdefining work? Is art work? Music and theater and film and dance? The art of protest? If so, can one make a living doing such things? How closely is unemployment related to the kind of economic injustice where a man like Maburak and his family amass up to 50 billion dollars while his people starve and have no work? Is economic justice possible in the USA and in Egypt?

These are questions we need to pursue. But first we celebrate the courage and grace of the Egyptian people, especially the young people.

Retirement or Refirement?

Retirement or Refirement?

Matthew Fox

December 2005

This month I reached my sixty fifth birthday.  I made the requisite pilgrimage to the Social Security Office in downtown Oakland, California where I have been living for the last twenty-two years to sign up for medicare and for a social security check.  So much done.

But what is the bigger picture?  What do I and the 79 million baby boomers who are rapidly closing in on their sixties really to make of our so-called ‘retirement’ years?

My own feeling is that baby boomers are not going to go quietly into that ‘sweet night’ called retirement.  I think we still have too much unfinished business from the sixties (or the seventies if you will) that is urging us along.  And we’ve got energy, lots of energy still.  And I think we want to tap into that unfinished business and the ideals that drove us then as we look at our lives today.

Okay, so most of us have raised our children and look forward to holidays with our grandchildren and don’t have to sweat putting food on the table any longer.  What next?  Is this all there is?

I think it is time to retire the word retirement.  There is a tiredness in the word itself that frankly I do not feel in myself or in many of my colleagues.  Whatever I am these days, being tired is not at the top of the list. I’m eager and sometimes I’m a bit despairing, I’m angry and I’m frustrated, but tired does not name where I find myself at sixty five.  Maybe it’s because I’m basically healthy (type 2 diabetes is my worst affliction so far, knock on wood), I try to watch my diet, swim a few days a week, walk a lot, do some yoga daily.  Still, ‘retirement’ doesn’t speak to me.  Does it speak to you?

What speaks to me is refirement.  My best hunch is that the years that follow our daily tripping off to a job to put bread on the table are better named by refirement than retirement.  I’m looking to get fired up all over again.  Re-fired.  That’s what I want to do with my remaining years.  More fire.  More focused fire.  More passion, not less.  More compassion, not less.  Does this speak to your experience too?

At our age we have a greater variety of options than we did when we were young when it comes to becoming fired up and refired.  They may range from planting trees to helping out in soup kitchens; from working with young people to visiting the sick or those in prison; from joining Habitat for Humanity with a hammer in one’s hands to going back to school; from taking up gardening, painting or a musical instrument to involving ourselves in political organizing; from traveling to reading.

There’s no one way to become fired up.  But the key, I sense, is to tend to the fire itself.  Keeping it alive, reigniting it if it has waned, digging deep for the fuel and the flame; reaching down to find where it lurks.

I think it’s altogether natural that a lot of the fire in us is attracted to the younger generation who themselves possess a lot of fire.  Grandparents and grandchildren hold a special attraction to each other.  (Addiction to watching sports on television can be a distortion of this attraction.)  The fire of the elders mixing with the fire of the youth—now that’s a conflagration we would all look forward to see happen.  The young people I meet today are more eager than any generation I have run across (certainly more than my generation was) to mix their wisdom with that of elders.  The natural affinity between young and elders is re-emerging in our time.

For example, I recently met a thirty-one year old African American rapper and video maker who goes by the name “Professor Pitt.”  We are linking up to create an after-school “edutainment” program in downtown Oakland called YELLAWE (Youth and Elders Learning Laboratory for Ancestral Wisdom Education).  We are both fired up by the failure of the current educational establishment to reach the needs especially of inner city youth.  Pitt speaks with the stunning post-modern language of rap and video and he has done his inner work via martial arts. I bring to the table thirty years of teaching adults in an alternative pedagogical model that emphasizes the new cosmology, creativity and meditation.

Together we want to reach the young people especially those 50% of youngsters who are not graduating from high school because they are bored and are yearning for forms of education and learning that can motivate them, that is, that can light a fire of learning in them.  I think we will be very successful; and I’m sure we’ll have fun trying.

Pitt is taking what I call the “10 C’s of Education to balance out the 3 R’s” and is putting them into rap and video.  This is the language that the younger generation gets fired up about.

The content I can coach “Professor Pitt” on guarantees that the message spread through rap and hip hop can be positive even in the midst of the chaos and negativity of our times.  (The “ten C’s include cosmology, contemplation, creativity, chaos, compassion, courage, critical consciousness, community, ceremony (celebration and ritual) and character and chakra development.)  Once we arouse creativity and get the message of awe and amazement that derives from the new cosmology going among the young they ought to be able to pass it on to others.  Learning is that way: If, like a good meal, it is offered in delicious form, it will catch on swiftly.  There is a natural appetite for it.

I of course will be undergoing a lot of learning in this mutual process. The younger generation today, being the first “post-modern” generation, has a lot to teach us older folk that includes but is not restricted to how to use the cyber technological inventions so easy for them and so…challenging for us.

But I must confess that I am fired up about this.  About taking the pedagogy that I developed with adults whom I taught at the master’s and doctoral level to a new level, to the streets and to the young as a precursor to an educational revolution.  The Dali Lama says that education “is in crisis the world over.”  What an opportunity! To work with young people to light new fire into education, a fire that might have worldwide implications.  Elders are invited to join us, not only to experience what all the excitement is about, but to work with the youth.

I am reminded of what Yeats said: “Education is not about filling a pail but about lighting a fire.”  And what Rabbi Abraham Heschel meant when he insisted that  “learning is not for life, learning is life.” Learning, whether it be mine at sixty-five or Pitt’s at thirty-one or our after-school students at fifteen, is not for life.  It is life.  It is our living.  Our being alive.  Our being on fire.

You can sense why I prefer refirement to retirement.  It’s a lot more fun.  And hopefully, more useful.

The Spanish poet John of the Cross attempted to reform society and religion in the sixteenth century.  For his efforts, his brother Carmelites imprisoned and tortured him mercilessly.  He effected a daring escape from their prison in the middle of the night and later he reported in a poem what drove him on, even though he “had no guide, it was the fire, the fire inside.”

We all live in our own prisons.  Our whole species has painted itself into prisons of poverty in the midst of luxury, of ecological disaster and urban blight, of boredom and addiction, of youth despair and ineffective educational forms, of couchpotatoitis and excessive religious zeal.  Can we find the “fire inside” to make our escapes?  Is this part of what being an elder means in our time—to tap into the fire in order to make some escapes?  Maybe we sixties folk ought to lead the way.

Refirement, indeed!

[I see this as a blocked out area:]  Some examples of places to look for refirement, the fire inside and actions that follow::

1.     What is getting you angry and stirring you up? Is it education?  Ecology? Homelessness?  Low voter turnout? Organize or join others in the struggle.

2.     What do you most cherish in life (not counting your grandchildren—that is a given)?  How can you get another generation excited about that and involved?

3.     What fire do you sense in the young people you know?  How can you join forces and contribute to their passion and concern?

4.     What books do you read or speakers do you listen to who stir some fire inside you?  How can you share that fire with others?

5.     Some fire is cool (blue) and some fire is hot (orange, red).  What are the cool fires burning in you?  How can you stoke them to a fuller heat and involve others in your interest?

6.     Creativity is a fire.  How are you being creative?  What art forms are you expressing yourself through these days?

7.     What are your talents and what is your experience in life that might be

valuable to others, especially the young?  How can you take this to them and

join them in their journey of self discovery and community building?

8.     In what ways are you an elder and not just a ‘retired person’?

9.     Have you found a young person (or persons) to mentor lately?  Go for it!

10. Should the AARP change its name to the American Association of Refired People?

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The author is an educator and theologian who has written 28 books of which the latest are Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet and The A.W.E. Project: An Educational Manifesto where he lays out the theory and plans for the YELLAWE project (Youth and Elders’ Learning Laboratory for Ancestral Wisdom Education) he is launching with youth and elders working together to reinvent education in downtown Oakland, California..

On the Future of Religion

On the Future of Religion

Matthew Fox

When one looks at the wars and rumors of wars abounding around the world—and the number that are religion-based or religion-fed—one cannot be optimistic about religion as we know it or the future of religion as we know it.  I think the words of John the Baptist applied to the Christ in John’s gospel may apply here: “I must decrease and he must increase.”  Religion may have to decrease in order that spirituality can increase.  That is how I see the future of religion playing out.

So much religion has taken on an air of Institutional Ego, an air of Institutional Entitlement.  One of the first acts of the new pope, the former inquisitor general, Cardinal Ratzinger, who gave up his theological career to become a theological policeman and expelled over 100 Catholic theologians from their work and livelihood, was to go to Prado, the Italian exclusive boutique clothes designer to get all the papal outfits remade and redesigned. He did this after his first words on being made pope (or making himself pope since he appointed 112 of the 115 cardinals who voted in the election) were that he was a “humble man.”  Indeed.

So much for any hopes of the Vatican wing of Roman Catholicism returning to the spirit of Jesus or the spirit of liberation theology which was a “preferential option for the poor.”  I guess we can expect Catholicism to offer a “preferential option for the well dressed (cleric).”  I guess this story tells us something of the direction some religion is headed.  (Ratzinger is the same person who did the last pope’s dirty work by rushing into canonization Father Escriva, the founder of opus dei.  Escriva was a fascist who admired Hitler.)

In my recent book, A New Reformation, I call for the reformation and transformation of religion, a reinvention that takes into account the profound sociological and psychological shifts from the modern to the post-modern era, and one that honors pre-modern wisdom as well as post-modern awareness.  (No one could accuse modern conscious of honoring the pre-modern awareness—ask the 80 million indigenous peoples of the Americas who lost their lives when the Europeans landed here about that.)  The fundamentalist craze that is circumventing the globe in the name of fierce religion, whether Islamic style or Jewish or Vatican or Protestant or Hindu or whatever does not augur well for the future of healthy religion.  Which is the only kind worth having a future.  As I put it in a poem I wrote recently, “religion can be sin.”  Religious people can come in sheep’s clothing.

Healthy religion does not kill innocent victims in the name of its God or gods or idols.

Healthy religion struggles to practice compassion and to learn what the God of compassion means and desires of us.

Healthy religion respects the healthy religion of other traditions and welcomes shared wisdom and grace.

Healthy religion teaches a healthy relationship to the body and to the earth body and to sexuality (Cardinal Ratzinger and Co. flunk this test.  As one recent priest theologian said, the official church is as much consumed by sex as are pornographers).

Healthy religion cares passionately about keeping the earth healthy for future generations to come.

Healthy religion does not preach war.

Healthy religion recognizes the motherhood as well as the fatherhood of God, sees the Divine as feminine as well as masculine and does not make an idolatry of punitive Patriarchal Deity.

In short, healthy religion is not religion at all.  It is not about institutional ego.  It is about spirituality, about living fully and deeply, about taming the reptilian brain through spiritual practices such as meditation so that the crocodile brain—which we all carry inside of us—does not take over the planet.  Or our corporations.  Or our governments.  Or our religions.

Healthy religion teaches spirituality.  That means it brings alive the mystical capacities of all of us—our capacity to celebrate Awe and Wonder; to undergo darkens and silence (when I heard recently that 83% of the clergy of the United Church of Canada are on anti-depressants I was reminded of how far religion is from spirituality—it has failed to teach us how to grieve, how to navigate the dark night of the soul, how to be mystics on bad days as well as good days).

Healthy religion also arouses creativity, the image of God the Artist comes alive in people practicing healthy religion or spirituality.  The Holy Spirit is the Creative Spirit.  How are we doing?

Healthy religion is a powerful source for social justice (it was good to see some Catholic priests marching with their people in the demonstrations of Latinos against immigration laws that would have made felons of all illegal immigrants and those who fed them or sheltered them or treated them like human beings); for economic justice; gender justice; gender-preference justice and eco-justice.  How are we doing?

The fact that so much homophobia is wrapping itself in religious sentiment is telling.  Did God not make gays and lesbians?  Does God and nature not want sexual diversity?  It would seem they do since 8-10% of any given human population is homosexual—even though most come from heterosexual parents!  Of course we have now counted 464 other species that have gay and lesbian populations so nature, which is God’s work, is obviously biased in favor of diversity.  What other diversity is the religion of homophobia against?

The shibboleth that homosexuality is “against nature” has been proven by those who study nature—scientists!—to be a lie.  Homosexuality is altogether natural to a minority of human population.  To force gays and lesbians into heterosexual marriage is unnatural and unfair to all parties concerned.  The issue of homosexuality is not a theological issue any more than the issue of whether the earth travels around the sun or the sun around the earth is a theological issue.  It is science’s job to answer these questions and science has spoken.

Sinclair Lewis once said: “When fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”  Healthy religion stands up to fascism.  It stands up to control compulsions.  It does not welcome fascism or run from the room when it enters (often in fancy clothes and garments).  Like Jesus did, it stands up to power.  Healthy religion is in touch with moral outrage and anger and uses it to fuel the struggle for justice.

Healthy religion celebrates the insight of the great African American mystic, Howard Thurman, who understood well the call to Interfaith or Deep Ecumenism.  Thurman wrote: “It is my belief that in the Presence of God there is neither male nor female, white nor black, Gentile nor Jew, Protestant nor Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, nor Moslem, but a human spirit stripped to the literal substance of itself before God.”

Of course the Dali Lama warns us that the number one obstacle to interfaith is a bad relationship with one’s own faith tradition.  This is critical.  I think many Taliban-like fundamentalist Muslims have strayed very, very far from the prophetic words of Mohammad who, among other things, broke many taboos in his treatment of women and his insistence on the equality of women.  The same wandering has occurred in fundamentalist Christianity where the Vatican and the Pat Robinsons and Jerry Falwells are so far from Jesus’ teachings as to be unrecognizable.

Healthy Christianity, one that is aligned with its own faith tradition, will fly on two wings—that of the historical Jesus who was a prophet interfering with false religion and false empire building and that of the Cosmic Christ who represents the mystical tradition of the Christ or the Light or the Divine presence present in all beings in the universe.  The historical Jesus comes from the wisdom tradition which is the creation-based spiritual tradition of Israel.  This is agreed upon by all scholars today.

As for the cosmic Christ, one Biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan, has recently written in a major volume on St. Paul that for Paul “only mystics can be Christians and that all Christians must be mystics.” (p. 280)  Paul after all was the first writer in the Christian Bible—and he was a mystic!  Regarding Paul himself, Crossan write, “as far as we can tell, Paul was both an ecstatic and a mystic.  And no matter how one explains or interprets ecstatic mysticism, it is absolutely fundamental for an understanding of Paul.”

Furthermore, Paul was a cosmic mystic!  As another recent biblical scholar, Bruce Chilton, has put it: “No Christian thinker before or since has thought on so cosmic a scale, linking God’s Spirit to humanity’s and both to the transformation of the world.  The picture he conveyed of what it meant for even small groups of believers to meet together involved them in a literal reshaping of the universe….The range of Paul’s thinking was literally cosmic, and metacosmic, because the viscera of Christ, the mind of Christ, wove all things into the primordial whole that had been their source.”  (207, 249)

How well are the churches doing in turning out mystics and prophets?  How well are the seminaries doing?  My advice?  Don’t hold your breath!  Start a Reformation.  Now.

Leadership as a Spiritual Practice

Leadership as a Spiritual Practice

Matthew Fox

The failures of leadership are everywhere to be seen in the globe today.  Whether one speaks of the failure of Wall Street tycoons or its awol government regulators, or the failure of BP and its awol government regulators, or the failure of Catholic hierarchy (including the Vatican) in the pedophile priest scandal, or the failure of legislators to free themselves of ideologies and marriages to uncritical power brokers, it seems that we are living through a colossal failure of leadership in these early years of the twenty-first century.

Perhaps one underlying reason for all these failures is that we have secularized, that is to say, de-sacralized, the very meaning of leadership.  We seem to be living through the shadow side of leadership just as, with the Gulf oil disaster, we lived through months of gushing of oil twenty-four hours a day seven days per week.  The darkness of this excessive yang energy (isn’t oil all about powering our industries and transportation, thus yang and fire energy) has damaged our yin resource (the Gulf waters and their teeming hatcheries and living systems and countless species of once living beings).  Bad leadership despoils Mother Earth and her creatures.  Bad leadership kills life.  Bad leadership enhances necrophilia.  Good leadership enhances life or biophilia.

In this essay I intend to explore the spiritual or sacred side of leadership.  In my book, The Reinvention of Work, I put forth the argument that all work worthy of the name, that is to say all authentically human work, work that brings joy, healing, justice or celebration to others, is priestly work.  I talk of the priesthood of all workers, how when we do our work (as opposed to just our jobs), we are midwives of grace, therefore we are all priests.  Work is sacred.  I draw on spiritual teachings East and West, North and South, to make my point for in speaking of the sacredness of work I am speaking in universal or archetypal language.[i] All healthy societies celebrate the sacredness of work.

They often do this through the emphasizing of vocation. Work as a sacred calling (“vocare” is the Latin word for call).  Call and Response.  That is work.  That is leadership.  Leadership is one’s own response to a call and it always includes making possible to call and response of other workers.  No one is called alone.  A vocation is not an ego thing; it is the opposite of an ego thing.  It is a call from history, the ancestors and those not yet born, to be thoughtful, just, caring, courageous, imaginative, creative, that is, alive.  Work and leadership are our radical response to life itself, therefore, as I argue in my book on the nature of prayer, work is our very prayer.[ii] It is the best of ourselves that we invest so much time preparing for (we call that education), recovering from (we usually call that weekends and holidays) and struggling at (these are our 40 to 60 hour work weeks).

In this essay I will first consider the role of Vocation and leadership; then how archetypes of the healthy masculine can infuse our work as leader/workers; and lastly how

leadership as a spiritual journey follows the pattern of the four paths of creation spiritual journeying.  In defining leadership I find myself agreeing with Deidre Combs, author of the Way of Conflict and Worst Enemy, Best Teacher and a consultant to many profit and non-profit organizations, that, as Margaret Wheatley puts it, “leadership is anyone who wants to help at this time” and with John Quincy Adams that “if your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”[iii] There may be a leader in all of us.  Watch out!

Leadership and Vocation

The late poet, essayist and teacher Bill Everson (also known as “Brother Antoninus” for his years as a Dominican friar), was so taken with the archetype of vocation that he taught a course on it at the University of Santa Cruz for years that proved to be one of the most popular courses on campus.  He had much to say about the archetype of vocation that is highly relevant to a discussion of spirituality and leadership.  Thanks to interviews conducted with him by a former student in his class, Steven Herrmann, we have access to his deep thoughts in a book called William Everson: The Shaman’s Call: Interviews, Introduction, and Commentaries. Following are some of Everson’s thoughts about vocation.

Everson notes that “Every vocation is controlled by a symbol, and that symbol comes not from the individual but from the race.  The human race cannot go forward unless vocations arise to constellate the collective energies into true realization.  It is the race which creates the vocation. All an individual can do is answer the call.”[iv] The answer we give to the invitation to be a leader is everything.  But the Call comes from some deep place.  We might call it Destiny; or the Collective; or the Future; or God; or Source.  A call implies a Caller.  We are merely the responder.  So a leader is essentially humble—Moses said to God, Don’t send me; I stutter.  No prophet wants to play so visible a role.  Humility is key to leadership because the Responder knows he or she is not also the Caller.

Everson also teaches that the vocational symbols are both personal and collective in nature, pointing to the conscious and unconscious motivations inhering in the life span of the unique individual.  The Call bridges at least two worlds, that of the conscious and that of the unconscious.  This is what makes it deep.  This is what makes it worth heeding.  This is what makes it daring and an adventure.  All leadership (as opposed to bureaucratic top-of-the-ladder hegemony) is an adventure, an exploration of the deep.

Everson defines vocation as a ‘disposition,’ a ‘calling,’ which holds the key to a person’s identity.  The vocational summons may come from a book, an outer situation, a relationship, or the laying on of hands by a master figure.  Its primary means for summoning us, he believes, is via a dream.   For himself, his calling was encountering Jeffers’ poetry that “ruptured” his psyche with a Divine impulsion that in turn led him to accept his vocation as a nature poet of the San Joaquin valley. (41)  I have a habit of asking scientists whom I meet when they first knew they wanted to be a scientist.  Invariably I hear stories such as, “I fell in love with the stars when I was five years old” or, “I fell in love with this bush when I was four years old,” or, “I fell in love with a worm when I was six years old.”  Their vocations are old (they germinate in childhood) and they are about falling in love.  One feels called; one feels the need to respond; one feels joyful.

In an Interview, Everson is asked “What is it that makes the discovery of vocation through the dream life a certainty?”  He replies: “The splitting of a veil, defloration, the splitting of a maidenhead, a hymen, gratitude, joy, complete joy to end the having to discover oneself, or make oneself worthy.  You see it in the religious life, in the form of conversion.  In Christianity, it’s the Christ.  In Buddhistic belief, it’s the Buddha.  I think that these models indicate that, in the arts, it should be the Master that’s there….You see it in marriage too, where the beloved becomes a symbol of vocation; the anima, for instance. Or sometimes the anima becomes a symbol for the poetic vocation, as in the case of Dante.” (52)  Notice how Everson is equating one’s vocation as a leader and worker with the religious experience of conversion (“metanoia” in the Gospels, a change of life).  Indeed, for him it is Christ doing the calling or Buddha doing the calling.  Or the “Master” doing the calling in one’s calling as an artist—one is reminded of how, on his deathbed, Gustav Mahler’s last words were “Mozart.”  Mozart, his master, came to him when he died.  Notice too the role that joy plays in this call.  What the mystics call the Via Positiva is not to be denied.

Another word that Everson equates with our true call as workers and leaders is violence.  For Everson, “specificity or individuation is attained only at the cost violence…individuation can proceed only in a situation of rupture.”  The experience of awe that the child underwent that led him or her to become a scientist is an experience of violence.  The vocational archetype is the rupture point of identity as in. Jung’s model of the Self as a creative-destructive God-image and a self-abnegation of the ego in order for consciousness to evolve.  “Without exposure to violence, in Everson’s understanding, there can be no transformation of consciousness, no creative breakthrough, no ‘divinization’ of the human ego.”  No doubt this is one reason that rites of passage were so important and so effective among indigenous peoples.  Vocation was being elicited through fasting and demanding practices.  Today’s rites of passage that we witness among gangs and in prisons where young people congregate with no invitation to vocation is a sorry imitation of leaderless (and elderless) rites of passage.  They are the shadow side of the vocational archetype that is so missing in our culture.  Herrmann observes that “by ‘violence’ Everson means the creative ‘life force’ that is inborn within the individual. If this force of vitality is lacking in the individual, in Everson’s view, one cannot be truly alive.”[v]

Perhaps a synonym for “violence” would be “wild” as in Thomas Berry’s use of that term or Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ use of that term. Berry writes: “Wildness….is that wellspring of creativity whence comes the instinctive activities that enable all living beings to obtain their food, to find shelter, to bring forth their young: to sing and dance and fly through the air and swim through the depths of the sea.  This is the same inner tendency that evokes the insight of the poet, the skill of the artist and the power of the shaman.”  Estes writes: “The Wild Woman is patroness to all painters, writers, sculptors, dancers, thinkers, prayermakers, seekers, finders—for they are all busy with the work of inventions and that is the Wild Woman’s main occupation.  As in all art, she resides in the guts, not in the head….She is the one who thunders after injustice.”[vi]

In the mystical tradition, this violence or rupture or wildness is experienced both in the Via Positiva—falling in love, tasting awe and gratitude and joy—and in the Via Negativa—crashing, falling, breaking, grieving.  In each case, the traveler is taken deep, or as Meister Eckhart put it, “if you want the kernel you must break the shell.”  A breakthrough happens.  In Everson’s language, a surrender occurs.  “There has to be ‘surrender’ to ‘violence’ in order for a true experience of vocation—individuation of the Self—to take place.”  A sacrifice follows.  Generosity follows.  As D. H. Lawrence put it: “In New Mexico the heart is sacrificed to the sun and the human being is left stark, heartless but undauntedly religious.”  For Everson “this experience of being burned pure, with the brilliant shaft of the sun, was equivalent to an experience of being struck internally by lightning.”  (43)  Everson cites from Jesus in the Gospels that “heaven is taken by violence, and the violent will carry it away” (76) and observes that “for the Christian, Christ mounted the Cross, accepted violence into Himself, to place the crucial point precisely where it obtains, the point of convergence between the higher and lower octaves of existence, solving its problem once and for all…” (73)  But this is what every leader does—incorporates the violence of opposition into herself or himself and transforms it into something useful.  Indeed, it is the power of vocation itself that sees us through such times of trial.  We must see “Vocation as an archetypal force.  Vocation as a power.  It creates wholeness because it effects a focal point of both mental and physical energies.  It gives you the channel through which your drives and energies can pour.  It gives you the sustaining symbol of your wholeness, which enables you to survive the conflict of forces around you.”  (47)

Another element to vocation is synchronicity.  Vocation is too sacred to occur just in linear time.  Nor is it about chance alone.  Says Everson: “whatever occurs in the unfoldment of vocation is based on synchronicity.  Chance could never account for it. Life is too coherent for it to be chance.” (50)  Nor is leadership primarily about career.  It cannot be, for vocation and career are not synonymous. One can occur without the other or long after the other.  Says Everson: “I distinguish between vocation and career. Vocation is the disposition, where your faculties are ordered.  It has to do with your sense of identity; career is the impact of your vocation on your life, and on the world around you.  A person may have a supreme vocation and no career at all.  For some people, their careers don’t occur until after they are dead.  Gerard Manley Hopkins is an example of that.  Emily Dickinson is another.  Neither one published in their own lifetime; yet their work is as good as any.  Neither Gerard nor Emily struggled with career; they ignored it; Emily more than Gerard.” (52f)

Everson greatly admires the indigenous cultures’ commitment to vocation as evidenced in the ceremony of the Vision Quest.  Indeed, he sees the Vision Quest as the basis of all vocational callings.  “The dawning of vocation is the end to the confines of the ego….In the vision quest the seeker goes out into the wilderness, disconnecting his ego supports from the tribe, and this is what makes him vulnerable.  This vulnerability exposes him to the unconscious, the collective unconscious and there the great Animal Presences make themselves known….We evolved from the previous Animal forms.  It’s by maintaining contact with those Animal Powers, I believe, that the psyche activates its wholeness, because the human ego is formed by repression of the Animal Powers.”  (85)  Thus a true leader is not afraid to take retreats away from the crowd, to go into the wilderness and to face vulnerability and with it the great Animal Powers.  Everson recognizes how Jesus did exactly that.  According to Mark’s gospel, after his baptism, Jesus went into the wilderness alone and wrestled with wild beasts and angels.  Everson believes that Christ followed the archetype of the vision quest which is patterned by shamanism.  In aboriginal culture, initiations often entailed some kind of a sacrifice “but the greatest paradigm for initiation in the West, in Everson’s view, is the image of Christ carrying His Cross.”  (74f)

There is a kind of violence in the separation of a leader from the crowd as there is for the vision seeker in a vision quest.  Everson shows how the underlying pattern of vocation in America is the vision quest.  The vision quest, in his view, is structured by the principle of ‘violence.’  Everson sees violence as a primal force in the Universe out of which all life evolves (after all, the original fireball was violent as was the supernova explosion that birthed so many atoms in our bodies).  “Like love, it is a force that thrusts all beings into activity and transcends all individual and collective values.  It is the prime mover of vocations.”  The word violence derives from vis, which means force, pure and simple.  (73)

There is pain involved in being a leader.  The pain of loneliness and the pain of projection and being misunderstood and playing the role of others’ projections, especially in a culture that has few authentic leaders or fathers and thus produces many people wounded by negative leadership.  After writing his first fully realized poem, tears flowed for Everson, as Herrmann puts it, “because you had found your master.  What is it that makes the bond with the Master so deep, so emotional; so deeply painful?”  Everson replies: “It’s like the ache of expansion: the expansion of consciousness   The best analogy is in love.  When we fall in love, we surrender to it—to the mystery of it—the mystery of the unconscious, the mystery of the shadow.  The pain is the shadow side of the archetype….I think it’s the pain that’s the confirming factor in the finding of your vocation.  As long as there is no pain, there is no real progression.  It’s the pain that accompanies the realization that lets you know the breakthrough is true.”  (68f)  This is a testimony to the role of the Via Negativa in the leader’s living out of his or her vocation.

Everson compares East and West around the subject of vocation and he feels that the archetype of vocation hold greater primacy in the West than in the East.  The West he sees as more activist and the East as more contemplative.  Here is how he puts it.  “The finding of vocation is more important in the West than it is in the East, because the controlling symbol in the East, which is essentially a contemplative society, is the mandala; while the controlling symbol in the West, which lays its accent on action, is vocation.  I think vocation is to us what the mandala is to them.  It’s vocation that integrates us, gives us our wholeness, and takes our acts from the linear world to the cyclical, collective world.”  (51)  How important is that, to take our acts of leadership beyond the linear world to the cyclical world?   Herrmann observes that “in The Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade developed the idea that only those acts that are patterned after an archetype can be viewed as sacred and therefore real, occurring in cyclical time.”  (88)

In reflecting with Steven Herrmann and William Everson on the archetype of vocation we can summarize our findings in this way:  A true vocation is always a call from the Sacred (a secular culture destroys vocation and crushes the young because it has no authentic rites of passage calling them into their vocation).  A leader is called to humility because he or she knows that they did not invent their position of power but are called to employ it for the common good.  The call is a deep call, bridging the worlds of the conscious and the unconscious but also of the deep personal identity and the needs of the entire species.  This call evokes joy and it evokes pain. It brings about breakthrough or conversion or metanoia.  Thus it includes violence or wildness.  It is not for sissies.  It requires surrender and with it courage, maturity, magnanimity and generous individuation.  It also requires sacrifice and solitude and leaving the masses at times.

Leadership is not ego-driven but is about service and helping those yet to be born as well as one’s co-workers.  It calls on the strength and wisdom of the ancestors as well for it operates as a cyclical, not a linear, process.  It requires spiritual practices of course and among these vision quests and associations with animal powers are among the most ancient rites of passage to invoke.  Leadership is itself a school, a deep way of learning the most important lessons of life including wisdom which always means embracing the feminine aspects of life.  It means balancing the yin and yang, the feminine and the masculine.  It announces and proclaims therefore the Sacred Marriage of the two in practice as well as theory.[vii]

Leadership and the Archetypes of the Sacred Masculine

Another way to consider the sacred dimension of the leadership archetype is to hold it up to healthy archetypes of the Sacred masculine.  There is a kind of masculine energy to leadership whether we be male or female—but we must clean up our understanding of masculine if we are to become healthy and useful leaders.  I have gathered ten  archetypes of the Sacred Masculine in a recent study called The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors for Awakening the Sacred Masculine and I would like to apply those archetypes to the issue of leadership here in a basic and brief manner.

Leadership invokes the archetype of the Blue Man who is about expansion (the blue sky is expansive) and also about compassion, healing and creativity.  The Blue Man, who emerges from a blue pearl, also represents the violent aspect of becoming a leader.  Just as the currents and sands of the ocean transform a defect in an oyster into a gem that we call a pearl, so too the stridency of leadership can morph us into authentic Blue Men.  Leadership invokes the archetype of the spiritual warrior and in our day in particular of the Green Man who is the spiritual warrior working to defend Mother Earth from all that harms her.  The warrior, unlike the soldier, has taken time to do inner work on one’s heart and one’s inheritance.  Fear (the future) and sorrow (the past) do not deter the leader from standing fully in the present.

A leader learns from the Icarus/Daedellus archetype by emphasizing communication between generations (also a necessary ingredient of the Elder or grandfather archetype).  In many ways, the leader, whether female or male, is playing out the healthy father archetype whose task is to guide, protect, and instruct but also to artfully construct wings of adventure and challenge for the young.  The leader is also a hunter/gatherer, hunting not just for brilliant talent and arranging potential for co-workers but also setting values of what it is we invest our hunting/gathering instincts for.  Why are we doing what we are doing?  Where are we going?  Whom does it serve?  How does our work bring joy to others?

A leader is deeply creative and values imagination for how else can we anticipate or honor the future?  The archetype of Father Sky is also deeply imaginative and generative (as is the Green Man whose fifth chakra is constantly birthing new and living branches) since the Sky, we now know from today’s science, could hardly be more alive and generative—a star is being born every 15 seconds and the fourteen billion years of the universe have been years of constant birthing, dying and resurrecting.  A leader is bodily aware, takes care of his or her bodily health knowing that the hard work demanded of leaders requires a healthy body.  A leader is sexually vital, not stuck in dualisms that pit spirit against sexuality, but one who integrates sexual passion and passion for life itself.

The Four Paths of Creation Spirituality and Leadership

Another way to name Leadership as a Spiritual Practice is to recognize how authentic leadership follows the in-depth naming of our spiritual journeys that the creation spiritual tradition lays out for us.  We see that this in-depth journey is quite opposed to what Everson identifies as the current “cultural climate [which] is not hospitable to charismatic vocation of any depth—the world wants entertainment.  The linear time of performers and athletes are the folk heroes of the day.”[viii] Of course embedded in this linear time/entertainment obsession of our current culture is a strike-it-rich-immediately compulsion of many so-called business “leaders” (who are the shadow side of leadership) who do not care about tomorrow but only about pleasing their stockholders and their own fat prerogatives today.  Such practices are the opposite of spirituality.  They are the shadow of authentic leadership.  They exercise profane careers, not sacred vocations.

The first of the paths of creation spirituality is the Via Positiva, the way of delight, awe, wonder and joy.[ix] As a leader, what makes us happy?  What calls us from joy to joy?  How do we assist others in their journey to wonder, awe and joy?  How is our work affecting that result?  Thomas Aquinas taught that “joy is the human’s noblest act.”  Are we and our work and our leadership style engaged in humankind’s noblest act?  Does our leadership reflect the truth of joy as a bottom line?  If not, why not?  Aquinas also taught that people are changed more by delight than by argument.  Is our leadership that kind of leadership?  What joy do we derive from our role as leaders?  Can we nourish more deeply?  Give it more time and space?

Ultimately, leadership is a joy because it is a tremendous opportunity to serve, to bring truth and compassion into the world.  Aquinas says the proper objects of the heart are truth and justice.  Our work, our service, is to bring truth and justice into others’ hearts.  What is more joyful a vocation than that?

The second path on our spiritual journeys is named the Via Negativa.  This is the path of darkness and silence, of letting go and letting be, of grief and bottoming out.   As Everson insisted pain is a necessary part of the archetype of vocation.  Pain carries us deep.  Grief does that too if we allow it to.  Grief can open us up, stir things up, and bring the best out of us.  If we fail to grieve we become bottled up and our creativity cannot flow properly.

Because the Via Negativa is also about silence, it is about letting go of all input and all projections.  It is what we do when we meditate, however we choose to do so. It is calming the reptilian brain—a leader who cannot calm his or her reptilian brain and assist those around them to do the same is no leader at all but a carrier of an action/reaction virus that can kill us all and is killing the planet at this time.  A leader must find practices for letting go and letting be, for finding stillness and courting solitude.  This is how one develops one’s mammal brain from which we derive the powerful force so underutilized that we call Compassion.  By being in touch with one’s own pain one can share solidarity with others in pain—but only if one has learned to let go and let be.

An emptying occurs in the Via Negativa.  A deep power of listening emerges therefore.  A leader who cannot listen is a crippled leader indeed.  Deep listening is required of authentic leadership.  A listening that encompasses both heart and head.

The third path on the spiritual journey is the Via Creativa.  This is the path of imagination and creativity.  Creativity flows ever so easily and organically from the first two paths: Those “ruptures” (Everson’s word) that awe and love trigger and that silence and pain trigger give way to new birth.  We are made for creativity.  This is, after all, what distinguishes us as a species.  Anthropologists define our species as distinct from our near relatives as bi-peds that make things.  We are makers.  Authors. Creators. That is where the word “authority” comes from: Our powers of authorship or creativity.  Only a leader who is creative and respectful of creativity, a hunter-gatherer of creativity so to speak—can truly lead.  This is especially true today when so much in the world is new and requires new solutions.  New networks.  New alliances.  New ideas.  New directions for energy needs and for global interaction.  New work.  New healing.  Newly understood connections with our ancestors and past efforts to live fully and peacefully on the earth.

Part of creativity is honoring the child, the puer or puella in oneself, being able to see the world newly, with freshness.  There is no creativity without fantasy and play, as Jung observed.  Playfulness, youthfulness, are essential modes for survival and surely for leadership today.  To honor the child within.  To heal the child within.  To unleash the child within.  To welcome the child within.  Play.  Work “without a why” Meister Eckhart advised.  Then and only then do we enter the world of regeneration and renewal.

The fourth path on the spiritual journey is the Via Transformativa, the way of transformation and therefore the way of compassion, celebrating, healing and justice.  Every leader worthy of the name strives for compassion.  To teach it, to live it, to bring it alive.  Compassion is, after all, as we hinted at above, the way of the mammal.  There is a reason why both the Hebraic word for compassion and the Arabic word for compassion come from the word for “womb.”  The mammals, the womb people, bring compassion to the planet in a special way.  There is a reason why all deep spiritual leaders—Buddha and Isaiah, Jesus and Mohammad, Black Elk and Martin Luther King, jr, Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa, call us to Compassion.  The Dali Lama confesses that compassion is his religion and we can do away with all religion but not with compassion.  Jesus said: “Be you compassionate like your Creator in heaven is compassionate.”  In Islam, “The Compassionate One” is by far the most used name for Allah in the Koran.  Compassion is the “secret name for God” in Judaism.

Compassion is about solidarity, “passion-with.”  It is about our shared joy and our shared sorrow.  It is all about our interdependence.  Living it out as celebration (our shared joy) and as healing (our shared pain).  All true leaders work on their powers of compassion and their decision-making is to derive from that place deep inside oneself.  In my book, A Spirituality Named Compassion, written a number of years ago, I point out that authentic leadership today is more about “Dancing Sara’s Circle” than about “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.”  Ladder climbing is rarely joyful, it is elitest and vertical, it separates one from earth and others.  Circle dancing on the other hand is eye-to-eye, curved, embracing of others, close to the earth and joy-filled, playful.  We did it as children. Which path of leadership is compassionate?  Which is elitest?  Which do we strive for?[x] Eckhart warns that “compassion begins at home with one’s own body and one’s own soul.”  The leader must be compassionate toward oneself.  Must find time and space for one’s own inner life and one’s physical well being.  A leader is not superman or superwoman.  A leader needs co-workers, co-helpers, colleagues.  Friendships.  Mentors.

Knowing that leadership itself carries one through the four paths of creation spirituality is to know that the call and work of leadership is itself a spiritual practice, a yoga, a discipline for one’s inner work and one’s outer work, for oneself and for the collective, a work that taps into conscious and unconscious, personal and communal.  To be a leader is to journey through these four paths on a regular basis.  The challenges of leadership, whether positive or negative, break us open and we are reminded of Eckhart’s promise, “the outward work can never be small if the inward work is great, and the outward work can never be great or good if the inward is small or of little worth.  The inward work always includes in itself all size, all breadth and all length.”[xi] Psyche and cosmos marry.  The personal journey becomes the community’s journey and all is part of the cosmic journey.  We are on a true and deep journey.

What a noble journey we are on.  What a noble calling.  What generosity is called for.  What an opportunity.  To inspire others to the greatness of their work, both inner and outer.  And to show the way.  Such a vocation tastes like milk and honey.  It ushers us to the promised land.   We are grateful.  The leader in us is grateful.  Perhaps it is in this context that Meister Eckhart exclaims, “if the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘Thank You,’ that would suffice.”  Gratitude reigns.  This is evidence that our work is sacred, not profane. Spiritual, not secular.  Meaningful, not meaningless.

Chip Conley, an Exemplar of Spiritual Leadership

The day after I finished writing this essay there was a front page story in the San Francisco Chronicle about Chip Conley, founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, California’s largest boutique hotel company.  This business leader is author of The Rebel Rules, Marketing That Matters and Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.[xii] I contacted him and we had a healthy sit-down together.  I find in his story and in his writings considerable confirmation of the themes of this essay—the role that vocation plays, the role that humility plays, the role that joy plays (thus the name of his company), the role that darkness plays (he wrote his “Peak” book at the time of the dot.com bust that was so severe on his business in the Bay Area), the role that meditation plays, the role that creativity and transformation play (he points out that 94% of business leaders believe the “intangibles” are important but only 5% know how to measure them.)  He summarizes Maslow’s work: “The characteristics of these self-actualized people included creativity, flexibility, courage, willingness to make mistakes openness, collegiality, and humility.”[xiii]

Conley visited Bhuton to learn more about a Gross National Happiness measurement because it makes so much more sense than a Gross National Product index.  How do we measure what makes life worthwhile?  Why did we not include these kinds of questions in our recent national census?  Value the intangible.  Measure meaning.  Make joy count and relationships.

It was moving and hopeful and more than mere synchronicity to discover a leader who is practicing what I am writing about in this essay and who has found and practiced many of these principles of leadership in the rough and tumble world of his business milieu.  I am sure there are many other leaders out there (and in all of us) who share the same values.  These are the elders and father (and mother) figures that our young people need to see in action.  Here lies authentic leadership, a true walking of a spiritual path.

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[i] Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).

[ii] Matthew Fox, Prayer: A Radical Response to Life (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam), 2001.

[iii] Deidre Combs, “Defining Leadership” in

[iv] Steven Herrmann, William Everson: The Shaman’s Call (New York: Eloquent Books, 2009), 40.

[v] Ibid., 42, note 63.

[vi] See Matthew Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002), 42, 152.

[vii] See Matthew Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine (Novato, California: New World Library, 2008), 221-276.

[viii] Herrmann, op. cit., 53.

[ix] The Four Paths are laid out in fuller detail in Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (New York: Jeremy Tarcher/Putnam, 2000).

[x] Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1999), chapter Two.

[xi] Fox, The Reinvention of Work, 58.

[xii] See Chip Conley, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007).

[xiii] Ibid., 10.