The Creation Spirituality Lineage Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox |
Dear
friends, We are sorry to say that our teammate Gianluigi Gugliermetto, who has been writing three DMs each week to help lighten Matthew's workload, will be stepping back temporarily due to health challenges. He is planning to return the first week of March. Please join us in sending prayers for his full recovery! ~~The DM Team |
Leonard Cohen on Saintliness, continued By Matthew Fox 2/09/2025 |
We are meditating on what Leonard Cohen says about saintliness, in his book Beautiful Losers.* Saturday’s DM ended with his observation that Love is at the center
of the saint’s energy. |
But Cohen doesn’t define what love is—instead he does name its effect. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. What love accomplishes, Cohen believes, is balance, “a kind of balance in the chaos of existence.” |
Riding chaos: Sailing the Southern Ocean, the world’s most dangerous ocean, where three oceans collide. Video by Kenneth Hoiem. |
Love has something to do with riding the chaos, not running from it, not covering it up, not denying its omnipresence, but enduring in a manner of balance, order and chaos, light and dark. This observation seems especially pertinent in our times of the triple dark night of the soul, Mother Earth,
and democracy. But a saint does not hold the power to “dissolve the chaos.” Otherwise, as Cohen says, “the world would have changed long ago.” Evil would be gone and chaos would not keep returning. Life would be perpetually joyful and light-filled and we would be in control. Not so. Saints don’t eliminate the chaos, they teach us how to
dance with it, how to make balance happen. |
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| I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for
himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory, He rides the drifts like an escaped ski.
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Cohen assures us that saints cannot even dissolve chaos for themselves, they too are thoroughly marinated in chaos. Saints do not have it altogether. It would be both “arrogant and warlike” to imagine a human being could “set the universe in order.” So saints don’t even try to erase chaos,
instead, they learn to ride it, he or she “rides the drifts like an escaped ski.” This is “a kind of balance” and this amounts to the glory that is saintly. An escaped ski has momentum and energy but nothing to steer it, it can go anywhere and at any pace possible. The ski follows the curve and caress of the hill. Equally,
wind, rock and snow determine its trajectory. No one is in charge. A kind of trust otherwise known as faith prevails. |
Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. The key to the saint is that he/she loves the world deeply and surrenders to the laws both of gravity and of chance. Again, he/she is not in charge but chooses to surrender to the forces |
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larger than ourselves that we call gravity and chance. The key is surrendering to loving the world unconditionally. What happens, happens. Do we all have that within us to do? To be continued. |
Queries for Contemplation Have you dissolved chaos even in yourself—or have you learned to navigate it
like an escaped ski? Do you know people who so love the world that they give themselves to the laws of gravity and chance with generosity and without regret? Are you one of those people? |
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Podcaster Jon Wilson speaks with Matthew Fox about Creation Spirituality: how Matthew became a Dominican priest; his studies in Paris, Original Blessing versus the Fall-Redemption tradition; the Four Paths; mystics Meister Eckhart, Carl Jung, and Otto Rank; Eros, ritual and how ‘this is
wisdom to love life’. Listen HERE. |
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