Matthew Fox: Creation Spirituality

Matthew Fox Creative Spirituality OMTimes Interview

Sandie Sedgbeer: Matthew Fox, you are passionate about reinventing education and bringing art and creativity back into the classrooms. This is a subject close to my heart because I see what my grandchildren have to do in school these days. And it’s no wonder many kids come out of school angry, resentful, and worn out. It takes all of the creativity and art out of them. So what is the answer to that?

Matthew Fox: Several years ago, I did a pilot project for two years with inner city kids because, at that time, 64% of black boys in America were not graduating from high school. And I asked myself, are they done? Or is the system done? What we call education is really dumb and what we brought in was what I call art as meditation. Still, because it was a public school, we just said it was creativity. So, we had kids making movies, and we had them creating poetry and rap and so forth. And at the end of our program, 100% said they wanted to stay in school. They all told us this was their first experience of the fun of learning. There’s so much wisdom and beauty in these kids. But, unfortunately, they don’t have a chance to bring it forward in school because so much of school is testing and the adult version of the right questions, to say nothing of what the right answers are.

I’ve used this art practice as meditation with adults in my university for over 40 years. I saw tremendous results because people learn once you ignite the human heart. They want to learn. Learning is as natural to us as eating.

Thomas Aquinas said the proper objects of the heart are truth and justice. They’re found in the heart, not in the head. And so, I wrote a book on this called The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human. A.W.E stands for beginning with awe and wonder, and that’s what the creative process is––kids making their own movies. But it also stands for ancestral wisdom education. Wisdom and awe go together. As Heschel said, awe is the beginning of wisdom. Awe is how we wake up. That’s what a spiritual experience is. Julian of Norwich called it ‘oneing.’ Meister Eckhart called it a ‘breakthrough.’ Thomas Aquinas used the word ecstasy, which I had used before I found Aquinas’s work. But all these are efforts to name the satori experience, the experience of breakthrough and the arrival of light or intuition, and then wake up to the enlightenment of our hearts, souls, and minds. All these are efforts to name the mystical experience or what Einstein called the intuitive brain. And he said, I quote, ‘I abhor American education.’ Why did Einstein American education when he lived on the Princeton campus? Because, he said, we’ve been given two gifts: the gift of the rational mind and the gift of the intuitive mind. And the former should serve the latter because only the intuitive mind gives us values. But he said we live in a society where we honor the rational mind and ignore the intuitive mind. In other words, we’re ignoring values. And another word for intuitive mind that I would use would be mysticism or mystical mind, our right brain, or our creative mind. But I figured that out early when I started teaching programs on spirituality. We couldn’t do it on a European model of education, which is so rational in the head. I knew we had to bring the body back. The first person I hired to teach was a dancer who led us in circle dancing. We would begin every day at the school doing circle dancing for various traditions and art as meditation, whether you use clay or music, dance or drumming, and so forth. And we would balance that with seminars, which included books, reading papers, debate, and discussion. But that balance of right and left hemispheres of the brain worked. I tested it for over 45 years with adults and some years with inner city kids, and it never failed.

And what you said about your own experience with your grandchildren helps explain young people’s violence. I know these inner-city kids. They told me stories years after they left, saying our program was a high point of their educational experience. And it was calling on their creativity. I could tell you that a few of the projects they did are just amazing. One fellow who was a freshman loved muscle cars. So he did a movie on converting a car. And because we also gave them a series of values we call the 10 C’s––cosmology, ecology, chaos, creativity, community, courage, critical thinking, and so forth––he took that cosmology/ecology thing, and with the help of his uncle who was a mechanic, converted the car from being gasoline-driven to vegetable-driven, so he created a vegetarian car. Then at the end of the film, he had a race between the vegetarian car and the gasoline-driven car. Another group of kids who were gay went around the streets of Oakland with a camera interviewing strangers and saying, ‘We’re gay. What do you think of that?’ But I really noticed how these kids grew in their self-confidence and energy and grew up in doing that one project. And, of course, they had a lot of fun doing it. And why should education not be fun?

Sandie Sedgbeer: You created an alternative education model with the rapper and hip-hop video maker Professor Pitto, which is now running in two California schools.

Matthew Fox: Yes. We got it running in Oakland. And the second year, we had a new director from Chicago. So when he and his wife returned to Chicago, he started the Chicago Wisdom Movement. And now there’s a Baltimore Wisdom Project, which has the grant to take their program national.

Sandie Sedgbeer: If anybody is inspired by this, what would they have to do to get your program into their schools?

Matthew Fox: They could just go to the webpage, https://chicagowisdomproject.org. They have a magazine called Reimagining and many resources on their website.

Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality is published by Orbis Books. For more information on Matthew Fox, his articles, books, speaking appearances, and meditations, visit www.matthewfox.org and www.dailymeditationswithMatthewfox.org, and if you’re interested in reinventing education, do check out his book, The A.W.E. Project – Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human.

Click HERE to Connect with your Daily Horoscope on OMTimes!