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Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox 

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How Recognizing Our Nobility Empowers

09/21/2023

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Nobility empowers. Original blessing empowers. Knowing you are an image of God empowers. Knowing you are a son or daughter of God empowers. Knowing you are another Christ or another Buddha or another image of God empowers.

The first lesson to learn from the eagle who visits Father Sky daily is: Nobility. AND our capacity to soar also.  

Isn’t that what Icarus was trying to do as a young man—to soar like an eagle? But his father failed to communicate the dangers well.   

The Lakota legend of Grandfather Eagle. Native-Red Cloud3rd Mahpiya Luta 5th Gen

Honor the eagle within. The nobility within. Then we will be doing less projecting and hating onto others.

Then fascism will be less attractive and begin to melt because, as Erich Fromm teaches, fascism is born of self-hatred. And Aquinas tells us that the first effect of love is melting. 

Maybe the compulsion to own an AR 15 to feel important or to threaten others with might melt. And the refusal of politicians to pass laws that keep military weapons off our streets and out of the hands of immature young adults.

"When a child does not feel part of the village, they will burn it to the ground to feel its warmth." - The real roots of youth violence | Craig Pinkney | TEDx Talks

One example of the nobility inside is our capacity to connect to “Father Sky.” Like the eagle does.

That is why the first of the metaphors or archetypes I offer to regain a healthy sense of the masculine is that of Father Sky. So much was lost in the modern,

industrial era when we were told the sky was a machine, cold, inert, essentially dead. 

Men could no longer project their greatest passions of love, joy or moral outrage onto the sky but had to hold it in, hunker down, be obedient on an assembly line or risk your life going into mines to make a living. Or get in line and join an army and kill others in the name of ideology or nationhood.  

To be continued.

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See Matthew Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.

And Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine, pp. 3-18, 33-42.

Banner Image: Communities transforming guns into roads: after a 2016 buy-back, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department melted down 7,044 guns into rebar for local infrastructure. Another buy-back is scheduled September 30. Photo by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, used with permission.

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Queries for Contemplation

Do you agree that knowing one’s nobility empowers? Do you agree with Aquinas that the first effect of love is melting? What follows from that?

Recommended Reading

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

The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine

To awaken what Fox calls “the sacred masculine,” he unearths ten metaphors, or archetypes, ranging from the Green Man, an ancient pagan symbol of our fundamental relationship with nature,  to the Spiritual Warrior….These timeless archetypes can inspire men to pursue their higher calling to connect to their deepest selves and to reinvent the world.

“Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know.” — Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God

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UPCOMING EVENTS

See Matthew Fox's full calendar HERE

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Join Matthew Fox online as he lectures and responds to questions on his book on Meister Eckhart, A Spirituality Named Compassion. The event is hosted by the Weber Retreat and Conference Center. Thursday, October 12, 2023 , 4:00pm-5:30pm PT. Learn more HERE.

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Join Matthew Fox as he discusses “A New Reformation: Creation Spirituality and the Transformation of Christianity” in an Our Lady of the Prairie Retreat, Thursday, October 19, 4:00-6:00 pm PT. To register, click HERE.

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Join Matthew Fox for two days of learning and practice as he speaks at the online Stanford Medicine Contemplation by Design Summit, Wednesday and Thursday, November 1-2, 2023.

Wed 4:00pm-5:30pm PT – Lecture, Q&A – Grounding & Expanding, Psyche & Cosmos, Friendship with Self, Others, the Universe: Toward a “Cosmic Religion” (Einstein) and Human/Planetary Survival

Thu 7:30am-8:15am – Guided Practice – Finding the Divine (the “I am”, the Christ, the Buddha Nature, the Tselem or Image of God) Within

Thu 12:00pm-1:30pm – Workshop –  Recovering the Sacred Masculine and the Divine Feminine

Register HERE.

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Creation Spirituality Conversations

Aaron Perry hosts Matthew Fox on the Y On Earth podcast, on “Hildegard von Bingen & Her “Viriditas,” sharing profound wisdom and deep insights about the essential importance of our relationship with Mother Earth, our celebration of the Divine Feminine, and our connection with Creation Spirituality, drawing upon centuries of knowledge and wisdom from indigenous and mystical traditions world-wide… particularly from the Rhineland Mystic Movement of the medieval European Renaissance, and a most extraordinary woman at its helm: Hildegard von Bingen.

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