The Creation Spirituality Lineage Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers |
Beauty, Politics and Justice: From Gandhi to bell hooks and more 06/02/2023 |
The awakening to beauty and awakening to justice often go together. After all, what is more ugly than injustice? The injustice being perpetrated in
Uganda, for example, where just yesterday a gay person was beaten practically to death by several citizens acting on recent presidential and congressional declarations condemning homosexuality as a crime against the state—is that not just plain ugly? |
And what is more beautiful than the organizing of moral outrage and overthrowing of systems of injustice that raged when colonialism ruled in India or Jim Crow laws ruled in America or a dictator ruled in the Philippines? | Civil Rights Music Video made by Joseph Pham: “We Shall Overcome” by Pete Seeger |
No
wonder Gandhi said, “real beauty is my aim.” And “those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.” Gandhi was not alone in connecting beauty and justice, beauty and politics. Audre Lorde
put it this way:
The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic….the passion of love in its deepest meanings. In an article
on postmodern blackness, bell hooks proposes that the “next revolution will be a revolution in aesthetics” and it is aesthetics that will bring the “black underclass” and others in society together. |
| Arturo Paoli was an Italian priest who during the Second World War worked overtime to save Jews from the fascists. He lived to be 102, and in a book he wrote in 1997, he said: To be religious is to give your life so that |
the world may be more beautiful, more just,
more at peace; it is to prevent egotistical and self-serving ends from disrupting this harmony of the whole. There is a harmony of the whole. The universe is such a harmony. Earth is such a harmony. Human communities ought to be such harmonies. Simone Weil proposed that “beauty constitutes the only finality here below….Beauty is eternity here below.” |
Buddhist poet Kenji Mayasawa
said: We ordinary people must forge our own beauty. We must set fire to the greyness of our labor with the art of our own lives. In this kind of creation, every day becomes a pure enjoyment. | Hands playing the piano by students of Áron Gábor Secondary School of Art (2006 mural) Made for the 5th Miskolc Montmarte (Street Festival of Art Students) – Dajka Gábor Street in Hungary. Photo by Globetrotter19. Wikimedia Commons. |
Yes. Beauty and justice go together. Balance and harmony, justice and beauty are built into the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of human communities. If we work at it. |
Adapted from Matthew Fox, Original Blessing, pp. 293, 278, 201, 229, 202. Banner Image: The purpose of rangoli is decoration, and it is thought to bring good luck. Design
depictions may also vary as they reflect traditions, folklore and practices that are unique to each area.Rangoli is an Indian sandpainted design often seen in Diwali, the Indian festival of lights. Photo by Dinesh Korgaokar. Wikimedia Commons |
Queries for Contemplation What are your experiences of beauty and justice in microcosm and macrocosm going
together? |
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Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very
ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way. “Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the
natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story | |
See Matthew Fox's full calendar
HERE |
Join Matthew Fox for an online lecture and Q&A on “Letting Our Minds be Remade Regarding Religion,” hosted by The World Community for Christian Meditation, Tuesday, June 13, 11:00am-12:30pm PT. Learn more:
https://wccm.org/events/metanoia/ Join Matthew Fox as he discusses “The A.W.E. Project – Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human” in an online Our Lady of the Prairie Retreat, Thursday, June 15, 4:00-6:00 pm PT. Register HERE. Join Matthew Fox for a Cosmic Mass and Panel Forum at the 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions - A Call to Conscience: Defending Freedom & Human Rights, August 14-18 in Chicago, IL Wed., 8/16, 7:00pm CT - The Cosmic Mass - Honoring Gaia, Solidarity for Our Earth Thurs., 8/17, 1:00pm CT – Panel and Response to The Cosmic Mass Register here: https://parliamentofreligions.org/ |
Creation Spirituality Conversations |
Tikkun Magazine releases a new Interview of Matthew Fox by Andrew Harvey regarding Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality (Orbis, 2022) edited by Charles Burack. Read the interview HERE. | |
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