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Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox 

10/20/2023

Aren’t the prophets who call for justice and compassion Judaism’s greatest gift to the world? I see it that way. 

When I was researching my book on A Spirituality Named Compassion (1979), I was thrilled to find a message that brought together the struggle for justice with the experience of love and contemplation.

Judaism, argues Rabbi Shai Held, demands that we step out of our comfort zone and practice true kindness. ELI Talks

I criticized the over-emphasis on “contemplation” in the history of Christian spirituality because it was often spoken of as climbing a ladder away from matter and earth and mother and the feminine to a sky God that was an abstraction. I was thrilled to find the word compassion so central to Jewish thinking. 

Indeed, I learned for the first time that in Judaism, “compassion is the secret name for God.” That meant to me that for Jesus, compassion is the secret name for God.

As a Christian attuning myself to Jesus’s Jewish lineage, it thrilled me further to return to his teaching recorded by Luke (6.36): “Be you compassionate as your Creator in heaven is compassionate." He was clearly letting the great secret of Judaism out of the bag–the secret name of God. Compassion.

Long-running meditation video with music and birdsong for relief of stress and anxiety. Open Heart Music – Helios 4K

We need a calming of the reptilian brain that we can call “contemplation” and which is also an influx of peace (and delight as Aquinas insists). It comes with gazing on the Divine in any form or none. 

Aquinas says that not only God is an object of our contemplation but any being whatsoever. This would include surely the earliest beings of the universe that Webb Telescope is pumping into our computers and phones daily. 

It also means those who suffer from attacks in Israel and those who suffer from attacks in Palestine today.

Meister Eckhart reminds us that “compassion means justice” but also he names the union of action and contemplation, of justice and love, wonderfully when he cites the (Jewish) psalmist: 

“Peace and Justice Will Kiss” by Michael Stern. From Blessed Be: Songs of Faith and Action.

Compassion is where peace and justice kiss.

We need this kissing in the Middle East today.

See Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion.

Banner Image: Around 200 peace advocates organized by Jewish Voices for Peace rallied in front of the White House on 10/16/23 to protest the collective punishment of civilian Gaza for the horrific terror attacks by Hamas against folks in Israel. Photo by Stephen Melkisethian on Flickr.

Queries for Contemplation

Do you yearn to see humanity’s capacity for compassion, both justice and love, assert itself in the Middle East and world over today? Can humanity survive without compassion?

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Recommended Reading

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice

In A Spirituality Named Compassion, Matthew Fox delivers a profound exploration of the meaning and practice of compassion. Establishing a spirituality for the future that promises personal, social, and global healing, Fox marries mysticism with social justice, leading the way toward a gentler and more ecological spirituality and an acceptance of our interdependence which is the substratum of all compassionate activity.
“Well worth our deepest consideration…Puts compassion into its proper focus after centuries of neglect.” –The Catholic Register

UPCOMING EVENTS

See Matthew Fox's full calendar HERE

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.

Join Matthew Fox as he delivers a Lecture and Q&A: “Towards a New Mythology: New & Ancient Names for God from Mystical Ancestors and Contemporary Science (& Fit for Some Atheists too)” as part of the Unitarian Universalist of Berkeley Lawrence Lecture Series. Friday, November 10, 2023, 7:00pm-8:30pm PT. Register HERE. 

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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