Matthew Fox: Creation Spirituality
Matthew Fox is the passionate prophet—and pied piper—of Creation-centered spirituality. A radical priest, visionary theologian, and ecumenical mystic, he has been called “the most creative, the most comprehensive, surely the most challenging religious-spiritual teacher in America” (Thomas Berry) as well as “one of the great prophetic voices of our time” (David Korten). He has devoted five decades to exploring the creation of spiritual traditions in Christianity and other world religions and demonstrating their relevance to the significant challenges of our times. These traditions affirm the inherent sanctity and creativity of the universe and all its inhabitants. They assert that a central human mission is to co-create a world of justice and compassion, beauty and peace, love and gratitude. Matthew Fox is a spiritual theologian, an Episcopal priest, and an activist for gender justice and eco-justice. He has written 37 books that have been translated into other languages over 70 times.
An Interview with Matthew Fox – Creation Spirituality
To listen to the full interview with Matthew Fox by Sandie Sedgbeer on the OMTimes Radio Show, What Is Going OM, click the player below.
In this interview with Sandie Sedgbeer, Matthew Fox discussed his latest book, Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality, which shares fresh perspectives and approaches to the most vital issues of our time, including spirituality and science, culture and politics, ecology and education, work and the creative arts, gender and sensuality, youth and eldering, evil and activism and more.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Matthew Fox, several critical moral issues are dividing humanity right now. Racism, climate change, religion, terrorism, supremacism, eco-fascism, and a worrying resurgence of authoritarianism, patriarchy, and the growing suppression of women’s rights. But in your new book Essential Writings on Creative Spirituality, which contains gems of insights taken from all your books, we’re reminded that resolutions to these postmodern problems can be found in pre-modern wisdom. Tell me more about that.
Matthew Fox: Well, you’re certainly right, Sandie, and in naming the challenges that face us, and especially that of climate change, where we’re now literally facing our extinction as a species. So, we must dig deep and grow up fast, but science tells us we have seven years left to change our race. And this is where I think the mystical traditions of the world¬¬ are telling us some very basic things.
For example, Thomas Berry, the eco-theologian and scientist, tells us that we will not save the earth without a recovery of the sacred. He says that you do not save what you do not love, but also, we will not love what we do not consider as sacred. And then he answers how we recover a sense of the sacred when we’ve lost it? And his answer is recovering the universe – the awareness of the universe, its wonders and beauty, and how it’s been working for us for 13.8 billion years. This new creation story from science, a new cosmology, is terribly important because it unites all people around the globe. The truth is that our species results from 13.8 billion years of the universe unfolding and birthing, and this just fills one with awe. And as Rabbi Heschel says, ‘Awe is the beginning of wisdom.’ What we have to do as a species is move from just knowledge, which is raw power, and take the road to wisdom, and, of course, built into wisdom is the feminine wisdom found in the world in the Bible. She’s feminine Hokhma in Hebrew, Sofia in Greek, and Quan Yin in the East. So the banishment of wisdom that has taken place over the last few hundred years in the West and in education has been the banishment of the feminine and vice versa. So, bringing balance back is absolutely essential. And again, a lot of pre-modernism had that. For example, Julian of Norwich, in the 14th century, during the bubonic plague, the most severe pandemic Europe had ever faced, one out of two people died, she developed very deeply and richly a concept of the motherhood of God. Again, the Divine Feminine, 700 years before feminism. Of course, she was the first woman to write a book in English, but it wasn’t published for 300 years–that’s a long time to wait for your first review! Nevertheless, we’re ready for her now. And she has so much to teach about the Divine Feminine without banishing the mask of the healthy masculine.
That’s another thing, deconstruct patriarchy because patriarchy is an imaginary, false, and toxic version of masculinity. It’s a philosophy of looking at the world exclusively in terms of competition––our reptilian brains Vs. As science teaches us, our mammal brains are our capacity for mothering and fathering, kinship and compassion. The word for compassion in Hebrew and Arabic is the word for womb. So, mammals have this special capacity for compassion. And this is what Jesus taught and what Muhammad teaches. So, all the spiritual traditions remind us that we’re capable of compassion, which is a divine attribute. As Jesus says in Luke 6, ‘Be compassionate like your Creator, and heaven is compassionate.’ So, it’s bringing heaven and earth together to develop our powers of compassion, instead of just our powers of ‘I win, you lose,’ which is the ancient reptilian brain in all of us.
Sandie Sedgbeer: When you say that suppressing the feminine was the cause of us losing our love and knowledge of the sacred, would you put racism in that category as well? Because it seems that every time we get news of another shooting, it’s usually racially motivated. We must wonder what’s happening in the world and why humanity is so easily divided.
Matthew Fox: Exactly, and so easily turned to violence. I mean, look at Ukraine. Europe was done with wars, and now 80 years later, we’re seeing it again. And we’re seeing it alive in our living rooms, the first war that’s ever been live-streamed. You would hope this might wake us up to how foolish and disastrous war is. And, of course, this awful bombing in Buffalo. But notice who it is¬¬––it is a young, 18-year-old man. Doesn’t this ring a few bells? What’s wrong with men? We have to ask that question, and humans, well, they’re so confused. Malidoma Somé used to say that society and culture without rites of passage for young people have three things wrong with the–– One, the young men are angry. Second, the adults are confused. And third, the overall system is in chaos. And I think that is so true.
Of course, racism has been whipped up in the media; you cannot let Rupert Murdoch off the hook for that. This man is getting rich on it. Capitalism involves this when you want to make money for money’s sake or power for power’s sake. All morality goes out the window. And then we have this man Tucker [Carlson,] who has a big audience because of Murdoch, and I understand he has given over 400 talks about this nonsense theory of the so-called Great Replacement. So much of it derives from fear, right? Apparently, white people are afraid there are going to be fewer white people. The world is a big place already, with fewer white people. If we don’t learn to get along while in the majority, how will we ever get along when we’re in the minority?
I laugh because it’s so absurd. We’re all from Africa. We all had an African and black mother, just to remind everybody. The interesting thing is that recently, we’ve discovered over 14 cousins of ours, hominids like ourselves, but in Southeast Asia. Of course, we knew previously about the Neanderthal because they were wandering Europe, and that’s where white people’s ancestors are from. However, now we’ve got 14 more, and they’re going to find more still, and the message is this: every one of them is extinct. Homo sapiens, that’s us, are the last ones standing, and what are we doing? We’re trying to kill each other. Because we have different skin colors? I mean, are you kidding me?
Where does hatred come from? I’m writing about this in my daily meditations now. It comes from envy, misuse of our powers of caring, and anger, which relate to love. We get angry when something we cherish is threatened. Then there’s this whole thing about making machine guns available to ordinary citizens. These guns were designed to kill people at war because our political system is frozen. Some of it is so indebted to the big cash corporations and the N.R.A. that politicians aren’t making decisions based on what’s good for Americans. But on what’s good for their bottom line and buying themselves back into office. And we do the same with judges now as our judicial system is all wrapped up in big money. Dark money.
Sandie Sedgbeer: I want to talk a little about evil and creativity because you’ve said that evil abounds when humanity’s capacity for creativity is at its greatest. Paul Levy, who wrote two books on Wetiko, which is a mind virus, a psychospiritual disease of the soul, says the way to combat what is plaguing our world is to use the divine gift of our creative imagination in the service of life. Do you think there is such a thing as real evil, or have we just gone astray?
Matthew Fox: I wrote a major book on evil a couple of years ago [Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh, Revised Edition: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society]. Deepak Chopra wrote the foreword to it, and he predicted that the number one spiritual problem in the 21st century would be evil. I feel the West has underserved us in teaching us about evil. How many classes have people taken in college or high school about evil, Evil 101, or 202? The same is true of creativity. That, too, is underdeveloped in our educational systems. And when there’s a budget crunch, out goes theatre and music and dance classes, and so they’re related. Thomas Aquinas said that one human can do more evil than all the other species put together. It’s amazing. He said that 800 years before Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot or Putin. How did he know that in the 13th century? Because he respected our incredible intelligence, which is real, and our incredible creativity, which is also real. But it’s one thing to have intelligence and creativity and another thing to steer it in the right direction. Because with our creativity, we can now tear down rainforest in a day that has taken nature and God 10,000 years to give birth to, and you cannot replace a rainforest. A rainforest is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Religion has such an oversold sin that people don’t want to hear about sin. And the result is we don’t have a language for dealing with evil. Now sin is much smaller than evil, but the key to the relationship came to me from a Lakota teacher, Buck Ghosthorse, a faculty member and friend of mine, who said to me one day. ‘In our tradition, fear is the door in the heart that let’s evil spirits in.’ I think that’s really important. So, I apply that in my book to all the chakras. I take the seven chakras of the East and compare them to the seven capital sins of the West. Because if sin is misdirected love (which is Aquinas’s definition of sin, and it’s a Jewish understanding because the Jewish word for sin is an archery term which means ‘missing the bullseye). Well, what if each of our chakras is a bullseye? It’s a source of energy, of love. But if it’s off center, then what? Then we have a correspondence with the capitalist. I’ll give an example. The seventh chakra in our crown is, of course, a culmination of all the Kundalini energy that goes up our spine and, when it’s healthy, goes out into the world as light energy that links up with others to create community and not only with other humans who hold light and want to make light happen, but with ancestors and spirits or angels as well. That’s the healthy seventh chakra.
But an unhealthy seventh chakra would be envy. Envy recognizes the light in others but doesn’t want to link up with it and make good things happen. Instead, it wants to shoot it down so that It is the last one standing. So again, it’s the reptilian brain notion of “I win/you lose.” So that’s what I do in my studies; I apply this to all the chakras, giving us a new language and bringing together Eastern and Western wisdom to think about how we deal with evil.
But if I define evil, I put it two ways. One is the traditional language of privation of good, the absence of good, or the diminishing of good. That’s one dimension to evil. But the other, I see as a force in itself. I think that evil is present in the world. It is spiritual because it does not die; it keeps coming back. You know, racism. Dr. King took on racism in the 50s and 60s and got a lot done. But here we are in 2022, and 18-year-old white boys are traveling 200 miles to murder eleven or more black people in Buffalo. What’s going on? We don’t have to use words like Satan, Beelzebub, or Lucifer. We can use words like racism, sexism, militarism, narcissism, and these other isms that have a spiritual dimension because they don’t die. They keep coming back. We all must examine our culture’s inner worlds to ask why? What can we do to dismantle these ferocious energies like envy, fear, and hatred that obviously attract our species? But if we can’t tame that reptilian brain, we’ll not survive as a species.
And we are talking about evil now, and the methods we have, the medicine we have for moving beyond it because we do have medicines, all the spiritual traditions of the world, have something to say about greed, envy and violence, and hatred. And we have to kind of shake them down because religion can wander from a spiritual root and become a thing in itself. Then we lose that spiritual energy meant to get us all awake and act appropriately.
Sandie Sedgbeer: You talk about the survival of humanity depends upon bringing in the feminine and revising the masculine. Bringing in the feminine is one thing. How do you revise the masculine?
Matthew Fox: I wrote a book called The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine. My method is to apply these 10 archetypes to men, and of course, there’s the masculine in every woman, too. So, it’s not only men walking around today with toxic masculinity. Many women are too. We all have to move beyond patriarchy.
The important archetypes are Father Sky… So let me talk about this. The recovery of cosmology today is so exciting and beautiful. And any day now, we’ll get pictures from the Webb telescope. So what will if that can’t fill us with wonder, gratitude, and awe? But now we’re getting to that original light 13 billion years ago that has bathed and birthed all of creation, including our tiny, fragile, but the special planet. So Father sky is coming alive today. And that is so important in the modern era. When the feminine was banished, we were told that the sky was mechanical and nothing was living up there. Well, that’s utter foolishness. We know a new star is born every 15 seconds from today’s science. And what’s a star? Well, our star, which is medium size, is our sun, which can hold a million Earths. So we’re not talking about something tiny being birthed every 15 seconds, which was nothing awesome. So Father sky.
Then there’s the Green Man, another powerful archetype. After all, the Green Man is the perfect symbol for this time of equal destruction because the Green Man stands for the relationship of humans to the vegetative world to the plant world. So, it’s a celebration of the creativity and the generativity of the masculine, and it’s an honoring of our relationship with other species, especially to the plant world. Indigenous people say that plants are the wisest ones on the planet. Why? ? Because they invented photosynthesis. And if it wasn’t for them, of course, we wouldn’t be here, no plants, no animals would be here. So, we owe so much to the plant world.
Another archetype is the Blue Man, who stands for the powers of creativity and of, healing and art. Hildegard of Bingen did a great mandala painting on the Blue Man in all of us, the healing Christ in all of us. And Swami Muktananda, the Hindu saint of the 20th century. Had this amazing meditation on the Blue Man that morphed from a pearl. And he says that meditation changed his life forever and that he overcame his fear of death. He got in touch with his creativity and his capacity to heal.
So, hunter-gatherers are an important archetype because 95% of our presence on this earth as homo sapiens have been hunter-gatherers. Now, of course, we go shopping instead. But we can ask, Where’s that energy? What are we choosing to hunt and gather for? First, I think that the question brings forth our values. Of course, we want to hunt and gather to save our children and our children’s children. And so that energy of hunting and gathering, the courage it takes, and that tribal community it takes this should be dedicated to saving the planet and taking on climate change. You know, whatever sacrifices we have to make. Hunter-gathering was a sacrificial thing. It was a matter of life and death. This is why, when our ancestors went out to hunt, they always did rituals beforehand to get the energy and courage up to go out and face the tough animals they were going to encounter. So, we have that energy in us, but we have to untrivialize it; It’s not about going shopping or finding our parking places. It is about something more severe and serious, and that is what can we discover and create to turn back climate change?
There are many areas where we are making some progress in that, but one of them, which is never mentioned, is veganism. Scientists have proven that if the human race went vegan in ten years, we would stop and reverse climate change. It would start going backward because we could take all the land that livestock is using and grow trees instead of livestock, and those trees would save the planet for us. You can say, well, that’s extreme, but for young people, not so extreme. They’re still young enough to train their bodies to eat a little differently. But there’s a spectrum of vegans. Vegan would do that, vegetarianism would be a big help, and of course, a lot less meat would be a big help also. So there’s a spectrum where we could include that as part of our efforts to change how we’re doing energy and reinventing stronger batteries so we can hold the sun and wind energy longer. All the rest we’re working on. So humanity is not done yet. We’ve got creativity, the very image that makes us dangerous also makes us survivable if we really put it to action.
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