The Creation Spirituality Lineage Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox |
The Cosmos and Other Original Blessings: Lessons From Mother Africa By Matthew Fox 2/26/2026 |
Swimming in the wisdom of Ghanian musician Rocky Dawuni’s talk that I shared yesterday, and aware that we are coming to the close of February the month of Black Awareness, I want to continue the meditation about creation spirituality and its rootedness in Africa, humanity’s Mother
continent.
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One thing I appreciate about the phrase “original blessing” is that it begins where the Bible begins. “Blessing” is the theological word for “goodness” after all, and Chapter One of Genesis, the first page of the Bible, sings of the goodness of creation. |
Rocky Dawuni “Beautiful People” Official Video: a “meditation on
beauty that lies in every aspect of our daily existence and hidden in the subtleties of our everyday experience.” |
Over and over,
it praises creation as good. And with the arrival of humans, believe it or not, it praises the entire circle of creation, humanity included, as “very good.” Goodness and very goodness mark the first page of our—Jewish and Christian—Scriptures. It baffles me how two previous popes condemned me for the phrase, “original
blessing.” |
“Original Blessing: The Golden Tent.” Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias; included in Fox, Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen. | Saint Thomas Aquinas writes about “original goodness” and “original freshness,” and Saint Hildegard of Bingen writes and paints pictures of “original wisdom” that we are all born with, describing it as a small tent (because we are so small as babies), and life’s journey is setting up that
tent. It’s not an easy journey, as she makes clear. Aquinas and Hildegard are doctors of the church. |
I think the main reason some ecclesiastics are ill at ease with original blessing is that they have fallen into the trap of what Pope Francis rightly called “species narcissism”—they think first about humanity and not about creation. But humanity is not first—the universe is—13.8 billion
years first. Before humanity ever showed up or could show up. It took that long for the universe to birth our galaxy, our sun, our moon, and Earth with its special, “Goldilocks” advantages, which allowed us to be the right distance from our sun, with the right tilt of our moon and the right amount of rocky surface and water that neither evaporates nor freezes all the time, for life to flourish. |
If all that is not a blessing, what is? And it ALL is original, i.e., it happened first—long before our species ever came along. Long before sin came along. Not only is creation good, but it is very good, even with us on board. It is also sacred, as Rocky Dawuni spoke of in
yesterday’s DM. |
The “habitable zone” is the distance from a star that allows liquid water to persist on a planet’s surface, given a suitable atmosphere. Earth sits comfortably inside the Sun’s habitable zone. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lizbeth B. De La Torre |
It is bigger than us. It birthed us; we did not birth it. The sacredness of the universe is, as Thomas Berry insists, recoverable when we have lost it, but only if we make the effort. We will recover our sense of wonder and our sense of the sacred ONLY if we appreciate the universe beyond ourselves as a revelatory experience of that numinous presence whence all things come into being. Indeed, the universe is the primary sacred reality. We become sacred by our participation in this more sublime dimension of the world about us. |
Dr. Dona Richards (Mama Marimba Ani) explains the African concept of God: the Source, the Truth, and the Unity within and around everything. @african.intelligence | He applies this to the number
one moral issue of our time: Protecting the planet. It has been said, ‘We will not save what we do not love.’ It is also true that we will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred…. Eventually, only our sense of the sacred will save us. I heard Rocky Dawuni say the same thing in his own words
on |
Sunday morning. It is an ancient teaching. African-American philosopher Dona Marimba Richards teaches how for Africans, the universe is conceived as a unified spiritual totality….The spiritual is the foundation of all being because the universe is sacred. The universe was created (is
continually ‘created’) by a divine act.* To be continued. |
Queries for Contemplation When you hear the term “original blessing,” do you think of humans first? Or
of the universe first? It applies to both, but it is important that humans leave anthropocentrism and species narcissism behind, isn’t it? And that means thinking of the cosmos first. |
Responses are welcomed. To add your comment, or read other comments and enter into dialogue, please click HERE to go to our website and scroll down to the Comments field. Books and More by Matthew and Friends! Be sure to check out Matthew's new store at MatthewFox.org, now offering books, recorded courses old and new, and special events... and don't miss our growing collection of books endorsed by Matthew on Bookshop.org! CREATION SPIRITUALITY CONVERSATIONS |
Matthew Fox offers a keynote at the Unity Earth Symposium V on The Future of
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