Expensive buddies, As , Matthew’s colleague Gianluigi Gugliermetto (GG) has been writing three DMs every week to present Matthew time to work on a number of concurrent ebook initiatives. Sadly, GG must take a while off on account of in poor health well being, and so for the close to future, Matthew shall be doing all six weekday DMs. Please be part of us in sending prayers for GG’s fast restoration!
In yesterday’s DM, we sat on the ft of Father Bede Griffiths as he spoke of how meditation places us in “solidarity with the universe,” each the remotest star in outer house and the “minutest particle within the atom.”
And the way we “expertise solidarity with each residing factor” on earth and may go “past all these outer kinds” of issues to “uncover the Floor from which all of them spring.” We are able to know“the Father, the Origin, the Supply, past being and non-being, the One ‘and not using a second.’” He provides, that “I can know the start of all issues from this Floor, their coming into being within the Phrase.”
This phrase, “coming into being within the Phrase” could be very becoming for the Creation season we discover ourselves in, and the Christmas Good Information that awaits us this week. The “phrase made flesh” is made flesh not solely in Jesus however in all beings, thus we name it the “Cosmic Christ.” (Or Buddha Nature or Picture of God.)
“The phrase made flesh and dwelt amongst us” summarizes all the Christmas story. How all issues are sacred and start is paramount. We all know “the start of all issues from this Floor, their coming into being within the Phrase.” Thus Eckhart: “Each creature is a phrase of God and a ebook about God.” Each creature is one other Christ.
All this spells the top of loneliness; it restores us to the cosmos and the cosmos to us. The trendy period, so steeped within the “I” consciousness—“I believe due to this fact I’m”—piled on by telling us the universe was a machine—chilly, mechanical, decided, uncaring, extra highly effective than us—ushered a “cosmic loneliness” into our lives.
Indigenous peoples weren’t lonely. As we indicated a couple of DMs in the past, there isn’t any phrase for loneliness in Swahili, and really probably in different indigenous languages as properly.
We hear “all our relationships” as a mantra among the many Lakota folks once they pray at the hours of darkness in a sweat lodge or underneath the solar in a beneficiant act of the Sundance. To talk repetitively of “all our relationships” is a medication for the illness of loneliness foisted on us by individualistic consciousness, together with a sick non secular consciousness that leaves Creation and the Cosmic Christ out.
Russian Orthodox theologian Nicolas Berdyaev speaks to this fact when he writes: The central concept of the Japanese Fathers was that of theosis, the divinization of all creatures, the transfiguration of the world, the thought of the cosmos and never the thought of non-public salvation. When one leaves creation and the entire and solidarity with the universe and with all creatures out of 1’s non secular viewpoint, perversion units in. Individualism takes over the soul and concern and trauma accompany it. A neurosis is born.
Berdyaev continues: Solely later Christian consciousness started to worth the thought of hell greater than the thought of the transfiguration and divinization of the world…The dominion of God is the transfiguration of the world, common resurrection, a brand new heaven and a brand new earth.
How fantastic it’s to refigure the that means of the approaching of the Phrase into human, cosmic and planetary historical past at Christmas time. Christmas itself will get reborn on this non-sentimental and profoundly mystical context. A high-quality preparation for the mysteries we attend to, on this Christmas Eve.
Banner Picture: A meticulously detailed diorama of the start of the Christ. Picture by garten-gg on Pixabay.
Queries for Contemplation
Which speaks to you extra: The concepts of hell and private salvation? Or the concepts of the divinization of all creatures and the transfiguration of the world and the cosmos?
Associated Readings by Matthew Fox
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations, pp. 261f.
Stations of the Cosmic Christ.
“Creation” and “Meditation and Mindfulness” in Fox, One River, Many Wells: Knowledge Springing from International Faiths, pp.26-49 and 189-217.
Authentic Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
Meditations with Meister Eckhart: A Centering E book.
The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Knowledge for Arduous Instances.
Sheer Pleasure: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality.
Matthew Fox: Important Writings on Creation Spirituality.
