The Creation Spirituality Lineage Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox |
Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and
the Power of Ritual
By Matthew Fox 3/07/2026 |
We have been meditating on the story and person of Dorothy Day this week. I was inspired to do so on listening to an interview last Saturday with Robert Ellsberg, author of Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings. |
Dorothy seems especially pertinent to our challenges today, since she was a Resister of the first order. She had a deep inner life, which included daily Mass and daily prayer that prepared her for her powerful outer work on behalf of the anawim or forgotten ones. |
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She
lived a life of great simplicity in and among the poor, sometimes in the city and sometimes in the countryside. She summarized her work as an effort to render it easier for people to be good. And happy. She was close to the Catholic monk Thomas Merton, as we discussed in yesterday’s DM. We meditated there on their shared
stand on behalf of Native Americans, and on how Dorothy wrote a Foreword to Merton’s book Ishi Means Man, in which he laments the genocide of indigenous peoples and holds up their
rituals for their capacity to connect us to the greater cosmos. |
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| Merton criticized missionaries for failing to grasp the beauty of Mayan rituals and painted a picture of the “graceful, ritual dancing of the men and women” at prayer in tribal ceremonies. One commentator says Merton recognized pre- |
colonial
Mayan culture as “a symbol of the paradise that is possible for all.” In his final year, 1968, Merton wrote a major poem called The Geography of Lograire and offers these lines: Redneck captains with whips
Fire in their fingers….
Friars behind every rock every tree
Doing business
Bargaining for our souls
Book burners and hangmen. |
Strong language to name the oppression that has gone on for centuries toward indigenous peoples, often in the name of religion. Merton recognizes how ceremony or ritual should connect the human to the |
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cosmos and how it helps us move from an ego consciousness to a larger awareness, one might say from self to Self. For the Native Americans, it brings about the awareness of a network of relationships in which one had a place in the mesh. One’s identity was the intersection of cords where one
‘belonged.’ The intersection was to be sought in terms of a kind of musical or aesthetic and scientific synchronicity. This is how “one fell in step with the dance of the universe, the liturgy of the stars.” A sense of belonging seems hard to come by in our time, when so much time is spent on computers and so little time in community
or community celebration. We have been slow to ritualize our connection to the vast universe being discovered in our time. |
A poet/activist recites during a Cosmic Mass on racial justice.
Photo by Katy Gaughan, Washington National Cathedral. | But that connecting, that “network of relationships” and sense of belonging with a “place in the mesh” is what healthy ritual can and ought to provide. It connects us “into a cosmic system which was at once perfectly sacred
and perfectly worldly.” |
Such belonging is not beyond our capacity; it undergirds all community, which Pére Chenu defines as the quest for the common good. We have surely felt this power in our Cosmic Masses over the decades. Ritual honors the network of relationships that allows society to happen and the “I” to become “We” and for “self”
to graduate to “Self.” Union with the whole. Communion in the fullest sense of that term. “Oneing,” to use Julian of Norwich’s word for mystical experience. |
Queries for Contemplation Do you sense a loss of a sense of belonging in today’s world? Do you agree
that a healthy ritual is meant to provide that sense of belonging? And that community and a quest for the common good are possible? And that the new cosmology beckons rituals that gather people to celebrate our beauty and awe in the context of creation? |
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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