Image courtesy of Daniel Olah/Unsplash.
With the United Nations Scientific Report on the climate change crisis telling us we have less than 11 years left to turn our ways about as a species if we are to slow climate change down at all, we are feeling the need for all of us to do what we possibly can. This is clearly a time for All Hands on Deck! And all hearts and minds and bodies too!
For this reason I am offering Daily Meditations to contribute to the struggle that clearly must take place both within us and in society, our work worlds and professions.
On Mother’s Day, May 12, 2019, in honor of Gaia, our wounded Mother Earth, I and a dedicated team of helpers, launched a series of FREE daily meditations to support your being and your work, your inner and outer work, your contemplation and your action, your mystical and prophetic vocations. We are naming this project: Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox. Simply go to: www.dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org
Our heading inviting people to the DM reads like this: Calling all Lovers of Creation, Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Sacred Earth Keeper.
If you find yourself named within that list of peoples, maybe the DM is for you.
Some of the meditations are brand new in response to current events and some are adaptations from my previous writings. Suggested practices or meditations are offered and a short (90 second) video accompanies each day’s meditation. Comments and peer group blogging is encouraged as well.
Building on the Mother’s Day launch, the first few weeks of meditations focused first on the return of the Divine Feminine; followed by meditations on the Sacred Masculine—these themes lie at the heart of the eco-disasters we are facing as a species.
To put it bluntly, Patriarchy with its compulsion to control and extract and take and dominate and play reptilian games of being #1 is killing the earth as we know it and often killing the souls of children as well as other species. It does not have to be that way. Healthy masculinity and the throwing off of Patriarchy is a requisite for defending Mother Earth. As is of course a healthy feminine energy that feeds mothering, caring, nurturing and the practice of compassion and justice.
I hope you will join me in this daily meditation project and invite your friends and families and communities to join as well. Use email, your fb pages, twitter, Instagram, whatever! Just send them this link: www.dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org. We want to get it into as many hands as possible, especially that of young adults who have some big lifting to do to save mother earth as we know her.
In these meditations I find myself drawing out themes that I have been developing in my work for the last fifty years where I tried to take treasures from the burning building of our Western spiritual heritage to inspire and train mystics and prophets. We will be creating a conversation with emerging movements of eco and gender justice as well as those of interfaith or deep ecumenism. My goal is to create a creation-centered vision and practice for a spirituality that can nurture and help sustain mystics and prophets for our times with a “Great Turning” upon us.
Creation spirituality has always been eager to incorporate science and in our day a new cosmology assists us to grow our souls larger and our hearts stronger. Hopefully by drawing on the riches of the CS lineage we can be better empowered to carry on healthy resistance and inspire creativity that leads to authentic transformation of hearts as well as structures.
The team that is assisting me in shaping and sharing this special gift includes Dennis Edwards, Rich Reich, Gail Ransom, Ellen Kennedy, Jill Angelo, Phila Hoopes, Adam Bucko, Mariko Pitts and Brian Nguyen.
While I am of a Christian lineage, those who know my work over the years know that the Creation Spirituality tradition that I espouse is bigger than any single tradition and creation or nature is not restricted to any religious movement. As I have written, there is no such thing as a Roman Catholic ocean or a Buddhist rainforest or a Jewish river, or a Baptist moon or an atheist corn field. The realities we face that are staring extinction in the face are beyond denominations or ideologies. Thus these daily meditations call on many traditions for their wisdom.
Recently for example we celebrated these teachings from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
August 6
August 5
http://dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org/2019/08/05/rabbi-heschel-on-the-via-positiva-part-2/
August 4
http://dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org/2019/08/04/rabbi-heschel-on-the-via-positiva/
And more: http://dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org/?s=heschel
Teachings from the Kabbalah were also included in the recent video discussing importance of Joy, the Via Positiva.