Matthew Fox: Bowing to the Heart Over Authority
"And so creativity should be at the heart of all ritual; not a frozen form, but a flexible form. Dance is at the heart of our prayer. We do circle dancing. We dance to DJ music and live music. And we also do spiral dancing.
Getting the body involved is so important. You don't have a Hindu body or an atheist body or a Buddhist body. You have a body. We're all human there, so we can all dance together and look each other in the eyes. We use a video jockey (VJ) to tell the theme that we're honoring in images. We've done a Mass of the African diaspora, for example, several times where we tell the story of the African-Americans in America.
It began with a ria positiva dance honoring the stories of the great African-American heroes and sheroes that we know about. And then we go into the via negativa, into the grief, into the middle passage, into slavery. And we're led through the blues, if you will, of the black experience."
Matthew Fox is a pioneering spiritual theologian, author whose courageous stance on issues like the sacredness of our relationship to the environment, the divine feminine, gay rights, and other controversial issues have helped spark a spiritual revolution. He shares more in the following interview on "Fidelity vs Faith: Bowing to the Heart Over Authority."
Host: Aryae Coopersmith
Moderator: Rahul Brown
Guest: Matthew Fox
Rahul Brown: Matthew Fox really needs no introduction. He's regarded as one of the foremost influential spiritual figures of modern day. So, Matthew, if it's OK with you, I would just love to just jump right into our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. It's a real honor to have you here today.
Matthew Fox: Well, thank you, Rahul and Aryae for inviting me. I
think these conversations are really important at this time -- this critical
time in planetary history and our country's history. We are at a lot of
crossroads, all at once.
Rahul: Right. So, Matthew, our theme today is, fidelity versus faith, bowing to the heart over authority. You have quite a big story in that regard. But before I get there, I wanted to talk a little bit about your background and your childhood, particularly as it related to growing up in the church. Could you share a little bit about your early formative years?
Matthew: Sure. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. It's a capital city and it's also a university city, though it wasn't very large. It was about 65,000 in population when I was a kid. It had four really severe seasons. I remember one winter when I was young, there was so much snow, we had to go out on the second floor. You couldn't open the doors downstairs. So, I knew what winter was [chuckles] as well as fall and spring and summer. It was very nature-based. There are five lakes within the city grounds. And, there's a great presence of Native American spirit in Wisconsin. I had many dreams as a child about Native American consciousness. So, it was a beautiful place to grow up.
I was one of seven children. I was in the middle. They say the middle is the most neurotic. I don't know [chuckles]. And, my parents were very, what should I say, conscientious about exposing us to the world. For example, when I was in high school, my brothers would go off to college and there's an extra room in their house, so they would invite a University of Wisconsin Master's student to live with us. It was always someone from another country and very different cultures. I mean, there's one fellow who was there from India, who was a Singh. He would cook wheat germ, I remember, at 2 or 3 in the morning in his room and he didn't smell good. But he taught me a lot, including how to tie a turban. In high school we had to give a talk to explain something. So, I tied a turban on someone and I got an A+. There was an atheist from Yugoslavia. There was a fellow who was sure the atomic bomb was going to drop. He had skis in the trunk of his car cause he was going to head for Canada as soon as the atomic bomb was going to drop. There was a fellow from South America who used to pull up a shirt to show where he had been gorged in a bull fight and so forth.
So, I grew up learning that the world is not all Christian and not all Catholic and not all white [chuckles]. And, I think it's one of the finest dimensions to my parents' parenting. And, it was just done organically. These people would eat dinner with us and it wasn't a big deal. But, I remember my first year of college, I brought a friend home for holiday. Afterwards, he said, “visiting and eating with your family is like being in the United Nations [chuckles] -- things you talk about and the diversity around the table.” So, anyway, that was part of my growing up.
As a Catholic, I loved the mass. I went often because, for one thing, I sold newspapers outside of church on Sunday mornings and made some living there. Often, when it was cold, as it is in Wisconsin, I'd go in for every mass to get warm again. So, I would have like seven masses on a Sunday morning. So, I learn a lot about preaching. I learned how not to preach. I knew what bad preaching was and a few good instances as well. I especially loved Saturday because Saturday mornings in the Catholic church, back then were dedicated to Mary. And Mary, of course, is the goddess in the West. No Pope ever admits that but that's what it is. And the scriptural readings were these beautiful cosmic readings, like from the Book of Sirach, "I walked on the vaults of the sky and I walked on the sands of the deep." That stuff really moved me as a teenager.
Life is more than just football and cars and all those things that just said "me too," but there was this other thing going on, a mystery kind of thing that now I know as the divine feminine. But then I just knew that it was something I needed, that it balanced something else that was going on in my cultural experience.
Rahul: Right. I'm hearing a lot of the eclectic nature of your background in the diversity that you experienced when you were growing up in Wisconsin. And also the deep involvement in the church. And I know in an interview you did with Ram Dass you shared how some of those early church experiences started to open up a mysticism in your childhood. Was that something that you were experiencing or did you have the language for it at that stage in your journey?
Matthew: That's right. I was experiencing, but didn't have the language for it and it wasn't only in church, but also in nature, just canoeing and ice skating and sports too. Yeah, I just felt mystical all the time. Now when I was 12 years old, I got polio and they couldn't tell me if I'd ever walk again. But when I did get my legs back after, I don't know, a year or so, I remember saying to the universe, I'll never take my legs for granted again.
And to me, that's a very mystical statement, even though I was 12 or 13 years old. And that is not to take for granted. So, that's what meditation is about isn't it? When you meditate on breath, when you pay attention to your breath, you're no longer taking it for granted. And breath is pretty primal.
And if you're present, when a baby's born, for that first breath, or when someone dies, for that last breath, you know how sacred breath is. But in between, what we call living, we're taking breaths all the time, and so often, take it for granted. Although now it's getting harder. Like here I am in Northern California with wildfires happening monthly, and the air is often so poisoned that you're advised not to go outdoors or even take your dog for a walk.
So I think, as a species today, we may be learning more about not taking for granted. Not just air, but water, and many other things that are coming at us because of climate change.
Rahul: Yeah. The seeming normal days, or normal before the pandemic, are certainly ones that give grounds for gratitude. I mean, when the sun comes out after it's been an apocalyptic sky, it's just a marvelous thing to see blue.
Matthew: Exactly, to see blue sky again. And, gratitude is the same thing as not taking for granted. Really it's all part of the via positiva that the mystics talk about. Awe, wonder, gratitude. And, I think we as a species today, we have to ingest this in a deeper way. I think during previous moments in history or eras of history, we were more grateful. I think our secularizing of life has taken things for granted. However, science and the new creation story from science -- I mean, 13.8 billion years has brought us here, each of us and all the species that we know -- ups the ante on gratitude to know that this is a pretty surprising event that we call the Earth, and the human species, and the rest.
So, yeah, I think when that really seeps in, the new creation story from science, I think a lot of awe, wonder, and gratitude will rise. But we don't have much time for that seeping to happen. So I think that's part of the rattling of the cages we have to do today is to take in the new creation story and then draw conclusions from that about how fragile and special this Earth is and our species is.
Rahul: Sure. I definitely want to talk more about creation, but before I get there, I want to understand a little bit more from you on how you define and experience mysticism, because I'm hearing it arising through perhaps awe and wonder and just being in nature. But what is mysticism to you and what leads to its awakening?
Matthew: I like Julian of Norwich's definition, if you will. She uses the word oneing, O N E I N G; she invented that word in English in the 14th century. She was the first woman writer in English, actually. And a great mystic. And so for me, mysticism is our experiences of union and communion. And they can happen as you say, in nature, in friendship, in experiences of beauty and truth, in study, also in loss. When I lost my legs for a year and they couldn't tell me if I'd walk again, (Meister Eckhart says, the soul grows by subtraction, not addition) that subtraction shifted my view of the world, and at an important age, 12 or 13 years old.
So, and of course in creativity, in giving birth of any kind, I think there is very often a union and a oneing. I wrote a book called Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet and I think when we're in creative states that the spirit pours through us. And I think there, too, people have deep experiences of union, also in working for social justice, eco justice, racial justice, the struggle.
I know one Catholic sister used to tell me her best prayers were being towed away in a paddy wagon, being arrested at nuclear sites and so forth. She said she felt closest to God when she was on her way to jail.
So, life in all its dimensions contains this invitation to connect to all things.
I'll tell you one quick story. Years ago, I was still a Catholic priest then, and I was lecturing in a church basement in Chicago. And the subject came up about mystical experiences and I talked about a lot of them. And then I was asked about fasting and I mentioned that suffering itself can be a unitive experience.
And this woman came up to me. She said, I have a story to tell you. She said, my four-year-old son was dying. I couldn't do anything but sit at his side and hold his hand. She said, once I got over the denial and I just sat there with him, she said, I've never in my life felt closer to the universe, to ancestors, to my son, or to God, she said.
It can come to us in any circumstance. I think the key is that we be open and yield to the experience. Often it's a very positive thing which the mystics call the via positiva, but sometimes it is a dark thing. The dark night of the soul, the letting go of patterns of operating and so forth, and as Eckhart said, to sink eternally from letting go to letting go into the one. There's a sinking process too.
So there are just so many angles on mysticism, but the essence is that you have a breakthrough (Eckhart actually invented the word breakthrough in German) that allows you to see the connection with all things, and the interconnectivity of all things, and the beauty of all things.
William James says one of the marks of mysticism is ineffability. So you can't talk about it, it is bigger than words. And this is why we do art. This is why we like music and dance and color and painting because there have to be expressions of these unifying experiences that go beyond words.
Rahul: Sure. It sounds like you had many doors open for these sorts of unifying experiences and they were coming from lots of different dimensions of your life. And certainly it felt like that was also arising inside your own faith and your practice as a Catholic. Can you talk a little bit more about the choice you made to deepen into choosing your faith as one of your primary explorations of this unitive experience?
Matthew: Sure, yes. My family was practicing Catholic, and so we went to mass together every Sunday usually. But I often went more than that, especially in high school. I went to a public high school. My best friends were Jews, Atheists, and Protestants, and there weren't that many Catholics.
So I would go to my parish priest who was Dominican to get ammunition for these philosophical debates we would have. And he had me reading G. K. Chesterton and Thomas Aquinas when I was 15 and 16 years old. And I love that part of faith -- that there's an intellectual side. I grew up in that context. My parish was Dominican, and Aquinas had been a Dominican. So there was this intellectual side. And of course also because of the university, I was quite aware. My father had worked at the university, so a lot of their friends were professors. And so, I was just aware that there is a strong intellectual dimension in the tradition, and I liked that a lot.
But I was also having the mystical experiences we talked about -- often in church itself -- in the mass and other ceremonies. So, yes, I felt very blessed. And in my senior year of high school, I was thinking about the priesthood. I took a retreat at the Dominican house of studies in Dubuque. I took a retreat for potential Dominicans, and I was moved by three things.
First, the community aspect. I grew up in a family of nine, so living with other personalities was pretty organic for me. But I liked that part of it. Second, I liked the intellectual part, the studying. And then the third thing, which I wasn't expecting, was they were chanting the Office every day. And we who were on retreat would go and just listen. I love that it was very aesthetically moving to me to hear these men chanting the sounds which of course are wisdom literature, poetry from Israel. And we now know that historical Jesus came from that wisdom tradition.
So all those three things really moved me, and I said, "Well, I'm going to give this a shot." So after high school I joined the Dominicans for preparation at Loras College for two years. And then I took vows, and I went to the novitiate and so forth.
I loved my training as a Dominican. And again I had a lot of spiritual experiences. At one point, my confessor said, "Well, you should consider being a hermit." And I thought that was just crazy. I didn't think I was at all a hermit. But it really got under my skin, and to make a long story short, I went to a hermitage for a summer on Vancouver Island. And my provincial, who is the head guy of the organization locally, said, "This is a crazy thing to do. You may never get ordained to preach." And I said, "OK, I'm going anyway."
So I left the priesthood before I was ordained a priest because I went to this hermitage and I loved it. I told a friend that I ran on that energy for 25 years. And they did eventually ordain me a priest. But to me, the priesthood was secondary to the experiences. And that's why I wanted to study spirituality near the end of my training. After about 12 years, I said to the head people at the seminary, "My generation is going to be less interested in religion and more interested in spirituality. You don't have anyone here with a doctorate in spirituality, so you should send someone on and I'm glad to volunteer."
And a few months later they said, "OK, you can go." And I wrote Thomas Merton about where to go, and he said, "Go to Paris." So I said, "I've got to go to Paris." They said, "We never sent anyone to Paris who came home again." Well I said, "Merton says we have to go to Paris." So we had this battle for three months, and finally they let me go to Paris. That is where I met my mentor (the late French Dominican Marie Dominic Pere Chenu) who named the creation spirituality tradition for me. So I was very blessed to have every day that special education actually. And I tried to make the most of it. Eventually, I think they regretted that I did come home, but that's another story.
Rahul: I want to fast forward to that story because what I'm hearing and what you shared are both the deepening into the tradition and enjoying the richness and fullness in it and also the beginnings of a little bit of a conflict with the institution. Or if not conflict at that stage, just a clarity that perhaps the institution wasn't really focused on the parts of the experience that you were focused on. What was brewing in those years leading up to this big fall out that you had with the Vatican?
Matthew: Well of course I came of age in the 60s. I went to Paris in 1967 to 1970. There was a civil rights movement, and then there was the anti-Vietnam movement. And then, shortly afterwards, the gay movement, the women's movement, and the ecology movement.
And the question I brought to Paris is really your question. How does mysticism relate to social justice and action? Is there a connection? That's a question I brought, and that's what I loved about Pere Chenu. He is really the grandfather, not only of creation spirituality because he named that tradition for me, but also of liberation theology.
In fact, in retrospect, I realized that in my class with Chenu -- by the way, a great man, who was 75 in his last year teaching -- about two-thirds of the students were from Latin America. The liberation theology movement, of course, was born after the council in South America. And it was deeply influenced by his theology. So I was able, with his help and the other professors in my doctoral thesis, to bring together the connection between what I call the mystical and the prophetic. The mystical is about a yes to life, and the prophetic is a no to injustice because injustice is what kills life.
So that dialectic is what I wrote about in my first book, and it is basic to everything I do. And when I talk about the four paths of creation spirituality, the first two paths -- the via positiva and via negativa -- are about mysticism. The next two paths -- the via creativa, creativity, and the via transformativa, the work of justice and compassion -- that is really about the outer work. So you bring the inner work to the outer work, and then you return. And it's a spiral, really. One feeds the other.
So that's what was on my mind. And in 1968, when I was in Pere Chenu's class, the students at the universities in town brought down de Gaulle's government. There was all this marching, and of course it was going on in Berkeley and Madison and other places around the world. But I really went through it there in Paris because it was really profound to throw over the entire government.
So these were turbulent times and when I returned in 1970 to Dubuque to the place of study where I was going to teach, there was a great conflict. The young Dominicans were all on board with the protests, and many of the priests were not. And I parachuted in the middle. [laughing] And one thing that happened was an election for subprior -- that's the second role in the entire community of around 125 people. As it turned out, I was elected subprior. I got every vote from the students. And I didn't know any of this was going on. You don't go around nominating yourself. And I got no votes from the priests. The student vote outweighed the priests' but the priests would not let me take the position because they thought I was too dangerous and scary.
So that was just kind of an eye-opener. I had been gone for years, but it was an eye opener about the conflict and the culture at the time. Families were split, just like they are today, over politics. And including Dominican families, if you will. But for many years I was accepted in my province. In fact, I was elected to an important position, but I couldn't take it because I needed an operation after I was in a serious car accident. But the Dominicans were very supportive of me for many years. It's just when Rome started turning on me that they got scared.
It's interesting that the Dutch Dominicans offered me what they call religious asylum so that I could join the Dutch Dominicans and still continue my work. And they said they would fight the Vatican. "We've been fighting the Vatican for 700 years. We know how to do it. Americans don't know how to do it," they said. I thought, "This is a win-win." So I went to my provincial and said, "Here, you guys get rid of me. No more problems for all. And the Dutch will take care of me and let me stay in California." But my provincial who was 10 years younger than me said, “No, I don't want you in any province in the world.” They were allowed to veto an invitation like that. That is how I ultimately was forced out.
Rahul: It sounds like the process of feeling the resistance of the Vatican and following that voice of your heart, really has a lot of bumps and bruises implicit in that journey. For a lot of people, their community or their church represents the herd. So, to be part of the herd is safety and to be outside of the herd is a kind of death. What was it that allowed you to be able to go against the establishment in such bold ways and to be OK with stepping outside of the institution? You did not know that you would be expelled, but even flirting with the process of being thrown out, how did you deal with that? What were you processing internally? What was going through your mind?
Matthew: Well, the motto of the Dominican order is “Veritas”(Truth). The book that most upset the Vatican was my book called The Original Blessing. What I learned in their opposition was how committed they are to original sin. What I prove in my book, is that original sin is not a Christian category. It is not in any place in the Bible. Elie Wiesel, the great Jewish philosopher says that, original sin is alien to Jewish thinking. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus never heard of original sin; no Jews ever heard of original sin.
The fallen is one thing, and we all know our species is fallen. It has problems. The concept of original sin is totally “other,” and it came in the fourth century from St. Augustine and I prove this in my book. Not from Jesus, not even from Paul. Augustine mistranslated parts of Paul to prove his point. What else happened in the fourth century was that Christianity took over the empire. When the empire collapsed, Christianity was there to pick it up. Those two things, to me, really ring a bell and raise red flags. If you are going to run an empire, original sin is a great idea because it gets everybody in line to follow a leader. But “Original Blessing,” which is the phrase I came up with, is just saying, 13.8 billion years of the universe bringing forth this amazing Earth and our amazing species is a blessing. Blessing is just a theological word for goodness.
In fact, rather recently, I discovered that Thomas Aquinas (a doctor of the church, a Saint and a Dominican) writes about original goodness. He used that phrase “original goodness.” He does not even talk about original sin until halfway through his major work of the Summa Theologica. He begins with goodness. Check out chapter one, page one of the Bible. It is not about human sin. It is about cosmology. It is about how the universe began empty, and then the sun came, and the moon came, and the plants came, the animals came then came the humans. It is not unlike the current story from science. I cannot believe so many of these fundamentalist and right-wing Christians, I swear, tore out the first page of their Bible because they want to live right in this sin.
God was creating the Earth and the universe 13.8 billion years before sin happened, because only humans sin. Thomas Merton, the great mystic, says every non two-legged creature is a Saint. So, the sacredness of creation just gets ignored. Now, this is where Julian of Norwich comes in, in my latest book. She lived her entire life through the bubonic plague in the 14th century. Thomas Berry says that’s what killed creation spirituality. People became afraid of nature because of bubonic plague. Without science, without a promise of vaccines, we who are going through a plague now can understand that. A human response is to freak out and they really did freak out.
For example, many people said, “Oh, it's because of our sins that God is punishing us.” So, these men gathered in clubs and they went around beating themselves. Flagellants. They tried to go to three villages every day and beat themselves bloody because it was their sins that were killing people.
But Julian of Norwich was just the opposite. She stayed true to what she called the goodness of nature. She says, God is in nature. God and nature are the same thing. She goes on and on about this creation spirituality that everyone else was fleeing from. By the time the bubonic plague ended, you had a decimated church and population. Between 35% and 50% of the population died from the plague.
A century later, you had the Reformation. If you look at the arguments between Catholics and Protestants, and Protestants and Protestants, in 16th and 17th century it is all about redemption. There is nothing about creation. So, religion has shifted from a love of creation and experience with God in creation and the sacredness in creation to “how am I going to be safe? How am I going to avoid hell?” Which is not Jesus’ teaching at all. Jesus does not get into that. In fact, one great Biblical scholar Krister Stendahl says that the question, “Am I saved” is a neurotic question; it is not a biblical question. It is not in the Bible at all, he said. This is what has dictated the majority stream of Christianity since the 15th century.
Then of course, and this is really scary, in the late 15th century, just as Columbus was about to sail the ocean blue in 1492, two Popes created three papal bulls giving permission to, first, the Portuguese king and then the Spanish king and queen to go and raid Africans from Africa or indigenous people from the Americas -- anyone who was not a Christian. These Christian empires had the right to steal from their lands or to wipe them out. I have just learned about this in the last several years, that this was behind these horrible encounters between the West, the East, the Americas and Africa through slavery.
So again, it was all about redemption. When the Christians landed in America, they did not say, “Wow, you people have a beautiful way of communicating with God, and nature, let us talk about it. We will tell you how we do it.” No, they said “You're not saved, you're going to hell.” These things did not even make sense in the minds of the indigenous people. We had all this genocide.”
Rahul: It certainly seems that a distorted idea of scripture is what led to a wrong turn in history. I get the sense that your mystical connection informed your sense that truth comes from the inside out. Would it be fair to say that anchoring in that inner truth while seeing the injustices of your time, were what gave you the strength to stand in opposition to things that you saw were not playing out correctly?
Matthew: Yes, that that was a big part of it, as well as the intellectual side to faith, the research and scholarship I was doing to unpack these things and the questions I was asking. I think I ask good questions. Then of course I was teaching, I was lecturing, I was writing and I got a lot of feedback. And there were other communities; for example, women. In the 70s, my first four years of teaching were at Barat College for women in northern Chicago, where I heard stories of how they had to fight with their husbands to finish a BA. Meanwhile their husbands had MBAs and were running the city of Chicago. I was amazed because my family had three boys and three girls, and both my parents were strong personalities and there was an honoring of the feminine there. My three sisters went to college as well as my brothers. So, I was taken aback by it. I would be reading Mary Daly and Rosemary Ruether. In fact, I hired Rosemary Ruether, a Catholic feminist, to teach at the school with me.
Hearing people's stories, getting people’s feedback makes you realize this is where people are. This is what people are asking questions about. Then I designed a program for a master's degree in spirituality, and I realized the whole educational system -- and it's still true -- is off whack in the West because it's all about the rational. The intuitive, the mystical and the creative are ignored for the most part. I learned that even in music, conservatories and art institutes it tends to be all techie, all about craft and not about the imagination and the spirit and the rest.
One interesting night for me, I was invited to speak at the Art Institute of Chicago years ago and the place was packed and they said I was the first theologian ever invited there. But things were so bad [laughs] they had invited a theologian. But afterwards, several prominent artists came up to me and each one said the same thing: "It is time, we have to bring in this other dimension."
Einstein says that we've been given two gifts: rationality and intuition. He said “The first should serve the second, because only in intuition, do we get our values. You don't get values from rationality. You get method, but not values.” He also said we live in a culture where we honor the first gift, rationality, and we ignore the second. Now to me, that nails it. When I designed the program for spirituality, I embedded in it the Art as Meditation. We do the seminar work, intellectual work, the reading and the writing, but we also do Art as Meditation in the afternoon, whether it's dance, chant, painting or sculpture. It's that balance, that dialectic between the two, that makes for alive people. We've had some wonderful successes over the years in my programs because people have really come alive in that dialectic. I really criticize our educational system because it's not about values. And this explains a lot that's going on in American culture and politics today. If you're not teaching values and getting people to think in terms of values, then what you're doing is you're accepting the status quo, whatever that is. And that's not the way to grow up, spiritually or intellectually. I've been fighting the educational system at least as hard as I've been fighting religion in my time.
Rahul: With the rise of computing and being in the era of AI, it does seem that this is exacerbated, right? We're in a world where data is crowding out wisdom or insight and this is actually viewed as progress by the dominant paradigm. I'm wondering if you can talk us through a little bit more deeply what we're losing by losing this inner lens, this inner connection?
Matthew: Well, you named it in one word -- wisdom. We're losing wisdom. We have knowledge factories, but very few wisdom schools. And it's showing. When you don't have wisdom, everything's about yourself. Everything's about your salary. Everything's about your small world. Whereas wisdom looks to the future, looks to future generations. What is life going to be like for our children's children's children at the rate we're going, in terms of climate change, destruction of forest and soil and oceans and rivers? And of course species are going extinct at never before levels. Last time it was this bad was 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs went out of business.
And yet we have a whole political party in America that's in official denial about climate change. I mean, and we tolerate it. In fact, they win elections. And it's amazing. What world are these people living in? Well, it's an anthropocentric world. It's a world that says, "I think, therefore I am. And I buy, therefore I am. And I make money, therefore I am. And I am powerful, therefore I am." I mean, the whole system is being laid bare.
Jung said that in the age of Aquarius, which we're now in, evil will no longer be under the table. It will be on top of the table for everyone to see. But will we have the will to act on it? And to me that means, well, politics. Will we have the sense of community and the sense of both our ancestors and of our descendants to care enough to change our ways of living? It includes changing our diets, the way we do agriculture and of course changing our economic system which is absurdly, absurdly crazy. Billionaires pay no taxes and giant corporations make billions paying no taxes because it's a game. They've got their lawyers, and they get the senators in and the judges in to create their own laws. I mean, it's a pitiful game.
So wisdom is different from knowledge. It doesn't exclude knowledge, but wisdom is bigger. First of all, she's feminine. Over here [gestures to a statue behind him] is Kwan Yin, the feminine Buddha. She's about compassion, not about competition. The reptilian brain comes in here. You don't compromise with a crocodile. You win or you lose. That has been running things for centuries. It's patriarchy, too. Patriarchy and the reptilian brain are very aligned, maybe something to do with testosterone.
The divine feminine is so important to balance things, which is one reason I love Julian of Norwich. She was a feminist 700 years ago. Before anyone had the words, she was deconstructing patriarchal religion. She was substituting God as mother, Christ as mother, Spirit as mother for what she was given in terms of patriarchy in her day. At one point she says, "The church teaches me that God is angry, but I see no wrath in God. I see no wrath." [Laughs] Well, that's a typical mystic. They listen to their experience and they want to share it. That's why I love Julian. She's so appropriate for our time, in addition to the fact that she lived through a pandemic herself.
What I tried to do for 45 years in terms of pedagogy was to develop a school that was a wisdom school, not a knowledge factory. That's why I brought in Art as Meditation. Hildegard of Bingen, the great 12th century Renaissance woman, says that there is wisdom in all creative works. So when we get into the right side of our brains -- that hemisphere that is about intuition and creativity -- that balances the rational. Then you get a healthy dynamic going on there.
And I took my pedagogy to an inner city high school in Oakland, because 64% of black boys in America are dropping out of high school. What I learned is they're dropping out because they're bored. They're not dropping out because they're dumb. They're dropping out because school is dumb, because it does not honor the creative and the intuitive brain. So I had this pilot program for two years. We had the kids making movies, but we also developed a value system. In public schools I couldn't talk about religion but I wrote of something called the 10 C's: cosmology, ecology, chaos, creativity, community, critical thinking, and character building, et cetera. We said, "You can make a movie about whatever you want, but it has to include a couple of those C's." That way they're learning something. Well, I tell you, after two years, a hundred percent said they wanted to stay in school. Why? Because they discovered the joy of learning, the joy of learning! You don't get that in most education because it's about knowledge.
Rabbi Heschel puts it in a wonderful way. He says the human race will not be saved by more information, but by more appreciation. This is what we were talking about earlier -- gratitude. Information -- what computers do for us -- is useful. It's facts. Good, but not good enough. To be human, you need appreciation, you need this mystical dimension: appreciation, savoring, loving, gratitude. And we have to make room for that in our schools and in all our training.
I think whether you're in law school... I mean, I'm embarrassed by a lot of lawyers these days. I really am. I'm embarrassed by pedophile priests too, and the bishops who cover it up. But I mean, all of our professions are just, I think, in collapse today. And they're in collapse basically because there's no effort to teach wisdom. Whereas good law, of course, is about wisdom. It's about the common good and about creating a society, a community where people can get along and serve the greater good, not about just seizing your piece of the pie and lying. I mean, there's so much untruth in what we call the justice system and racism, which is part of that, that it's appalling.
Rahul: Sure. You've mentioned Julian several times and of course your book has just come out about Julian of Norwich. There's a chapter in it called, “Why Julian? Why now?” I'm wondering if you could give us the headline of “Why Julian? Why now?”
Matthew: Well, because she did live. She was seven years old when the Bubonic plague hit in England for the first time. Then it kept coming back in waves her entire lifetime. She lived into her eighties. She had to deal with the plague, like the pandemic like we're dealing with. She also became Anchoress after having a great vision at the age of 30. Mirabai Starr, who translated her book in a wonderful way, is teaching the course with me beginning soon on the Shift Network. Mirabai Starr believes that Julian lost her husband and child in the plague.
Julian's treatment of grief is very profound and very real and her visions begin with grief and with the architect of Christ on the cross, but she applies it to all of humanity, to all of us. We undergo these grieving and letting-go experiences that are profound. Yet she comes out of it. Her basic theology is extremely joy-oriented and goodness-oriented. Aquinas talked about original goodness and she comes from that tradition. Julian says, “The first good thing is a goodness of nature. God is the same thing as nature. The goodness in nature is God. God feels great delight to be our mother.”
Her emphasis is on going beyond patriarchy to reinterpret the entire biblical message in terms of the divine feminine. Not that she's throwing out the father, but she wants to bring the balance there. I think we need that desperately today as a species. I don't think we're going to survive without the feminine reasserting itself and the masculine cleaning itself up. I think that we men have been deceived with pseudo versions of masculinity, and we need to get more real. After all, the people we admire -- Gandhi or a Mandela or Martin Luther King -- these people have dealt with their inner selves. They've dealt with fear, disappointment and enemies; not by lashing back like the reptilian brain does, but by processing and trying to turn anger into love.
So, Julian is a champion for bringing alive the divine feminine. She was ignored for 300 years. Her book wasn't published for 300 hundred years, a long time to wait for your first book review. Even then, she was ignored after the book came out. But I think today we're ready for it because we have a strong women’s movement, for one thing. And because when you're talking about the divine mother, you're talking about mother earth. I think one reason we're busy raping mother earth or in denial that we're raping mother earth is because the patriarchal mindset is out of touch with the mother inside all of us. And that's the thing Julian goes into great depth about: what are the qualities of a mother? This is not a Hallmark Mother's Day card. She’s talking about strength and compassion. She's talking about love, she's talking about justice and she's talking about wisdom.
There's this one sentence from the Book of Wisdom that I begin the book with because I think it summarizes everything Julian says. When the Book of Wisdom says, “Wisdom is the mother of all good things,” that's the divine feminine, and that's where I hear emphasis on motherhood and on goodness. She says in a time of pandemic, we have to return to the goodness of nature, not flee from nature, but return to the goodness. She's so timely for this moment in history, I think. We're ready for her.
Aryae: Wow. So much going on here in this conversation. I'm just coming in to remind all of you who are viewing and listening that you can submit questions to Matthew Fox. Thanks to all of you who've already done so. So if you've got a question or a comment for Matthew Fox, you can just submit it via the live stream page. Let’s go on for a few more minutes and then we'll get to your questions.
Rahul: Thanks, Aryae. So, Matthew, there's a line from the late, great John Lewis in your book where he said, “Study and learn lessons of history, truth does not change.” And yet, we seem to live in a world of constant change. So can you explain the truth that John Lewis was speaking of and that you're referring to and that Julian is speaking to?
Matthew: That's a good question. Yes. I was struck by that in John Lewis' farewell letter written to the young. It made me think, too, just like you're asking. But I think what he means is wisdom. Wisdom doesn't get old, it doesn’t go wrong with age. Maybe it even gets better, like wine or cheese. The facts change, sure. And it’s important to keep up with those changes and those facts. But the deep questions about why we are here, what does it mean to serve, how do we deal with evil, both within and around us? Evil is a reality. How do we develop habits -- Kratos called them virtues -- to deal with evil within ourselves, but also politically, within the community. What is character? How do you become a full human being? Because the headlines are so often about failed human beings that you can get kind of dour hearing the news.
Obviously, it can be quite depressing; the hypocrisy and the lies and so much of that. But this is why I think Julian would count on us also to go deeper. And of course, we meditate not just on the failures or failed people that usually make the headlines, but on the great people we honor. In the Catholic church, they're called saints and often in other cultures, too. As I was alluding to a few minutes ago, we honor King, Gandhi, Mandela and Dorothy Day. There are just so many wonderful people who have lived lives of generosity. And of course, we all fail at times, but that's not the end of the story.
So, I think John Lewis was talking about wisdom. What is really deep wisdom doesn't get old. I think you can see that when you study the teachings of the Buddha or Lao-Tzu or Jesus or Isaiah or Muhammad. The indigenous traditions, I think, are filled with invitations -- certainly their ceremonies are -- invitations to grow and to let go. Even a sweat lodge is a marvelous, marvelous practice to purify one's intentions. I once brought a fellow into a sweat lodge experience and he'd never had anything like that. He's a very professional writer. He's become very famous since, actually. But he almost collapsed and died in the sweat lodge. And he was a person of great achievement even then, but his wife told me years later, I ran into her and she said, “That sweat lodge changed my husband forever. It made him a much better person.”
There are many practices. This is one of the great signs of hope of our time that all our spiritual traditions have marvelous practices for taming the reptilian brain, for cleansing soul and body and starting over, for learning generosity versus hoarding and feeding just the ego. This is what's so wonderful about our time that you don't have to convert one another. We have to just look deeply into all of our traditions, bring them all to the table and say at this critical time, what do you offer as a Buddhist? What do you offer as a Hindu? What do you offer as an atheist? What do you offer as a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim, et cetera? indigenous people: bring it to the table. We're desperate, all hands on deck! I think that's the level that John Lewis was talking, that deep wisdom we have to bring to the table. Quit hiding in the closet as mystics. Quit hiding in the closet if you've experienced angels.
I wrote a book on angels with Rupert Sheldrake, a British scientist, several years ago. And one thing I learned is how many people experienced angels, but don't have anyone to talk to about it. They're afraid they'll be called crazy. I often -- if I'm talking to a large group -- will say “Shut your eyes. How many of you have experienced angels?” Eighty percent of the hands go up. And then I say, “Keep your eyes shut. How many of you have friends who have experienced angels who aren't crazy?” Seventy-five percent of the hands go up. But whoever talks about having help from the Spirit world, help from angels? We're at a place as a species where we need all the help we can get. And if the ancestors and spirits want to show up and give us help, we should be begging for it.
Rahul: I really get the sense from your journey and your body of work that it's this case of going so deep into your own tradition that you found the place where it connects across traditions and that you're calling forth all of these traditions to speak in the same life-giving water that flows beneath all of them. And a big part of that thrust, I feel like, has been your work in reinventing worship with things like Cosmic Mass and raves. And so, in my last question before I turn it over to Aryae to field audience questions, I'm wondering if you can share a little bit more about the reinvention of worship, both through Cosmic Mass and through these new rituals that you're creating that bring us together into our human story.
Matthew: Well, thank you for the question. Yes. In 2018, we did a Cosmic Mass at the Seventh Parliament of World Religions in Toronto, and it was a very powerful experience for people. There were all traditions represented. There were some Buddhist monks in their robes and many other traditions. One woman told me afterwards that it was the most profound religious experience of her life. She was in her mid-forties. But ritual is very important. Malidoma Some, the African teacher, says there is no community without ritual. Yet I feel a lot of our ritual today is boring, it's modern and it's text-oriented. The Modern Age began with the invention of the printing press. The Post-Modern Age, I think, with electronic media and all that. But so many churches are stuck in the Modern Age when we’re now living in a Post-Modern Age. And so bringing in VJ’s and DJ’s and rap and even B-Boys to lead us, is integral to the spiritual experience.
It’s not that different from the 12th-century revolution of stained glass in Europe. The invention of stained glass was absolutely stunning. It was a technology and a craft, but above all it was a reinvention of architecture. The Gothic architecture allowed so much more glass, for so much more sunlight and so much more color. And these geniuses who came up with stained glass at that time were amazing in being able to create such beautiful experiences, because that's what they were, those cathedrals. The sun keeps moving and that means that the colored glass keeps taking different shape and form and so forth.
Today, we have this new language that we call electronic or whatever it is, so why not employ it in worship? So I've been doing this since I left -- since I was booted from -- the Dominican order. I became an Episcopal priest in order to stay in the tradition of Christianity, but also to work with young people to create what we call the Cosmic Mass, which as you say, brings rave into the liturgy and the results have been amazing.
We've done over a hundred of them now, mostly in North America, but I think it's time because ritual or ceremony is the shortcut and we need all the shortcuts we can get as a species -- a shortcut to tell the great wisdom stories, including the new creation story from science. And so we pick a theme. For example, we've had -- I'm looking now at a picture of a tree -- we had once a theme of trees. We built the mass around that and we created a tree from a scaffold. And at that time, Luna [Julian Butterfly Hill] was in her tree in the redwoods, saving the redwood forest up here in northern California. We got her on the phone and piped her into the top of this make-believe tree talking about saving the forest.
And so creativity should be at the heart of all ritual; not a frozen form, but a flexible form. Dance is at the heart of our prayer. We do circle dancing. We dance to DJ music and live music. And we also do spiral dancing. Getting the body involved is so important. You don't have a Hindu body or an atheist body or a Buddhist body. You have a body. We're all human there, so we can all dance together and look each other in the eyes. We use a video jockey (VJ) to tell the theme that we're honoring in images. We've done a Mass of the African diaspora, for example, several times where we tell the story of the African-Americans in America. It began with a ria positiva dance honoring the stories of the great African-American heroes and sheroes that we know about. And then we go into the via negativa, into the grief, into the middle passage, into slavery. And we're led through the blues, if you will, of the black experience.
When I say we, I'm talking white people, black people, indigenous people and Latinos. After we did that Mass the first time, a black leader came up to me in Oakland. He said, “This is the first time in my life that I felt white people were listening, were hearing our story.”
So the power of ritual to heal and to take us to a new place is totally underestimated in our culture, but it's very important. Because there is no community without rituals. So, yeah, that's been a big effort of mine for about 25 years since I became Episcopalian. I told Bishop Swing that I want to become an Episcopalian priest for one reason only: to work with young people to reinvent forms of worship. And he said, “Go for it. We're not doing anything for them.” He was honest. So, yeah, it's been quite an exciting ride.
Rahul: Beautiful. Thank you so much. We've got a lot of questions coming in from the audience, so I'm going to turn it over to Aryae to bring in some of those questions.
Matthew: Well, thank you, Rahul. I appreciated your questions and the discussion.
Aryae: It's been wonderful. I look forward to listening to it more to really hear everything you were saying. And thanks to all of you who did submit questions. We can't get to all of them, but we'll get to some. So Matthew, here's a question from Cynthia. She says, “How do we respond to injustice from a place of wanting? Isn't identifying something as unjust, a judgment that comes from a dualistic mindset?
Matthew: No, all judgment does not come from a dualistic mindset. It can come from a mindset of love and wanting. But I think it's very superficial to throw out our capacity for judgment. In fact, it's not only superficial, it's destructive. Jesus talked a lot about love, but he also took on the powers that be and strongly, calling them vipers and snakes and hypocrites. So, the third chakra -- which is our chakra where we ground ourselves, center ourselves -- also contains the element of moral outrage. There's a fire there and moral outrage should move us to good action, not to destruction. And that's what nonviolence is about; about taking that outrage, but steering it into an effective strategy. And this again is what Gandhi and King and so many other people have done in the last century to show us the way; that there is a difference between right and wrong. Right and wrong is not the whole picture. That's true. I love Rumi’s teaching: “Out beyond right and wrong, there is a field and I will meet you there.” So right and wrong morality is not the whole picture.
Spirituality and wisdom embraces the whole. But in the process of living, in the process of serving, in the process of work and citizenship, we have to make judgments all the time. As long as you don't think your judgments are final or that your judgment is the only judgment. We have to work together. We have to judge together, if you will. We have to debate and all that. So, it's not the same realm. The realm of the sacred and the realm of wisdom is the big realm. And that's where the oneness happens, but it happens in the heart. It's not something out there; it happens in the heart.
The psyche and the cosmos coming together is what ritual should do for us. But, at the same time, you do not throw out your conscience. Conscience is a judgment. Conscience is a decision to stand up with your conscience and you take the flack for that. You don't go around saying, everything's equal in terms of right and wrong, or beauty and ugliness or just and unjust or racism or no racism. These are realities and part of the truth, which is a divine name and all the religions that I know of around the world, in the name of truth, you do have to stand up. But we are not God so our versions of truth may not be right so we always have to be self-critical. We have to judge ourselves. But in the big order of things, well, Julian of Norwich says, “All things will be well. All manner of things will be well.” That might even apply if humans destroy ourselves and we go extinct, which is very possible. We are on that path now. If we destroy ourselves and go extinct, nevertheless, Earth will continue on. So that part will still be well.
Aryae: How does that work if I encounter another person and they are supporting a politician or a viewpoint that I consider wrong and destructive and they consider my viewpoint wrong and destructive, then how do I apply right and wrong and oneness in that situation?
Matthew: Well, the oneness, of course, is to embrace the other as a person and to listen deeply, but also to express your own opinion. Sometimes there is no resolution, but on the other hand, facts need to be honored. For example, I don't think [laughs] we can argue about climate change. I think it's a scientific fact. We are feeling it up here in Northern California with these wild fires, unmatched, and down in the South they have got these hurricanes and floods, unmatched. Effects have causes and time is running out; that is certainly clear.
And greater minds than mine, scientists working with United Nations, say we have nine years left to change our ways as a species. This is what we should be arguing about, how to do it most effectively. For example, one fellow I know from India says, “If all of us would become vegans, we could stop climate change in 10 years and turn it back. If you plant trees on all that land now used for livestock, we could reverse climate change in 10 years.” He has done his homework on this. He is a bright engineer. So that's a very interesting piece of news.
Now, does that mean everyone has to become literally vegan? To me, there's a spectrum. I think some people, especially young people, may well choose that as a lifestyle. But there's also vegetarianism, which is a little different from vegan. Then there's everybody cutting back on meat, people who do eat meat and fish and so forth. There are levels there. And you can make up the difference through other means, like solar energy and wind. We need to get into debates like this, but to debate whether there is climate change, I think is pretty crazy. I don't know anyone who is not experiencing it. We have to admit that there is a thing called denial. Denial is a choice. It's a judgment. I am going to deny it, and I am going to live in a world where there is no climate change. Well, good luck, find that world. Good luck to you, sir.
But my point is, we mouth these words, “We love our children, we love our grandchildren.” No, you don't. If you are not working with climate change, you don't, because your kids, your grandkids, great-grandkids are going to be living in a very despoiled world if we don't change our ways in the next nine years. I think this is a challenge to our species and it should make us grow up and care about others, even those who aren't even here yet. Otherwise, those words I love, I love, I love; they are just words. Jesus was very blunt about that too. Not all say, “Lord, Lord, enter the kingdom.” The kingdom is already here. He is not talking about life after death. He's talking about the Holy creation where we all should be rejoicing and caring for one another.
Aryae: Thank you. Yes, it's about the distinction between loving the other person and being clear about the truth and about what love means on a larger scale.
Matthew: Yeah, it matters. One thing Meister Eckhart says is, “God is the denial of denial.” I just love that teaching. God is a denial of denial. So where there's denial reigning, God is nowhere present because the truth is nowhere present, just like you said.
Aryae: Beautiful. OK, here's a question from Barbara. I had a spiritual awakening many years ago. Unfortunately, it was labeled by a doctor that it was a mental breakdown, so not true. How can I explore this now?
Matthew: Well, the first part of your question confirms what I have been saying about education. We have doctors, we have psychiatrists and therapists, who in the narrow version of their craft, may be perfectly competent, but when do they ever get any spiritual training in their education?
When I started The University of Creation Spirituality, it was about bringing spirituality to our work worlds. So we meet a lot of therapists, sociologists, engineers, business people, artists and activists. I was struck by how many therapists were so eager to learn about spirituality and mysticism because they didn't get it in all their training. Yet they are here listening to people's dreams, which are often spiritual messages, but not professionally qualified to know what's going on. They don't know the history of the mystics and so forth. I was really struck by how many therapists are actually hungry to learn more about spirituality, and for good reason.
So that's just my first response to your question, that you had a doctor who poo-pooed or put you in a room with padded walls. Don't take it personally. It is a judgment on the entire academic system. And believe me, I think academia is at least as corrupt today as religion is; they failed us. Thomas Berry says the two greatest failures of the 20th century were religion and education.
Anyway, then the second part of your question is, it's wonderful that you remember these experiences and that you want to develop them now. Go for it. I don't know your age, I don't know your background and your tradition, but, read the mystics. Read Julian. Read Meister Eckhart. I wrote a book called Christian mystics, which takes about 35 mystics over the centuries with short teachings of theirs and a short commentary by me on each page. Get to know the mystics, because that's what you have experienced and you want to know you are not alone, you are not a freak and you're not crazy. You are a fuller human being because you have had these breakthroughs. If only our religions and our educational systems and our culture were to put forward this wisdom and learning as vigorously as it puts forward the learnings about information and computers.
Aryae: Yeah, so you're really saying, “Understand the limitations of the conventional medical system and educational system and explore the mystics.”
Matthew: Definitely. And of course art. The artists are often the ones who resist rationalism and the materialism of modern education. The musicians are calling you into your mysticism and artists, painters and the rest. So don't neglect that part. And yourself. Take up an art as meditation practice, whether it's dance, whether it's music, and that is how you express the wanting experience that you had, that was so powerful for you or journal it, write about it, or make poetry about it. So think of creativity as the primary language for mystic things. I say there are two responses to mystic experience, one is silence and other is art. Those are the two languages`for sharing mysticism.
Aryae: A question here from Vicky, who says, “Here in Western Massachusetts, our local NAACP is developing plans for an innovation school, that may be similar to what you described as a wisdom school. What have you learned from your years of fighting the educational system that may be helpful to us?”
Matthew: Well, first of all, I'm glad to hear that. I really am glad that groups are beginning to realize how foundational education can be. And if we don't criticize it, we don't love it. We criticize what we love. Otherwise, you just walk away. What I've learned primarily is, that creativity and joy are missing. There is a wonderful teaching in the Upanishads from India that says that there's joy in all creativity and all creativity brings joy. And that's what I found in teaching inner city teenagers when they could make their own movies and tell their own stories. First of all, there's joy because they're working in a group. There's laughter and all the rest. But more than that, there's pride. At the end of the semester we would have a gathering of about 150 adults, and these teenagers would get up and talk about their movie, show their movie, and then take questions. And I invited a friend of mine, a former Protestant minister in his sixties to come. At the end of the evening, he came up to me and said, I am so moved, Matt. I can't talk. I'm going to go home and I'll call you in a few days. But I felt the same way. I was so moved by the beauty of these young people.
That's one thing I learned: there's so much beauty inside, but it doesn't come out in our schools because it's not invited out. We're so busy stuffing them with exams and foisting on them a value system of what college you're going to get into, that we forget these moments of adolescents are tremendous opportunities to fall in love with the world. And are we allowing them to do that? Are we giving them the skills to do that? There's a wonderful teaching from a Caribbean poet who won the Nobel prize for poetry in 1972: Derek Walcott. He says, “The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.” I think we're living through a time like that. History is very dour. Today is very dour. We need to fall in love with the world and the world is bigger than human history. That's the whole crisis today. It's all about what Pope Francis calls our narcissism, as a species: anthropocentrism. We reconnect ourselves to the world and you will be amazed by how much imagination flows and how much energy, to reinvent education and law and economics and business and politics and religion, and all that can happen if we open ourselves up to the world. And I think today's creation story from science really helps us to do that. We realize now that we're part of a 13.8 billion year journey and that's the world, that's the world.
Aryae: It's just another five minutes or so. Normally we'd stop to wrap it up here. So let's take another one or two questions. Then, we'll get into our closing. This one is from Ted who says, “Awakening to being, we experienced the oneness of all creation. This results in knowing that all life is connected. This universal love may allow human beings to survive this climate crisis.” So his question is, “In your opinion, will Catholicism as an institution evolve to support this awakening. If so, how would you see it happening?”
Matthew: Well, I think that Pope Francis' Encyclical on the environment (the Laudato si') is a very genuine contribution to the ecological crisis. One scientist told me it's far and away the best scientific document ever promulgated by the Papacy. By the way, the main author of the document was a graduate of my master's program in Creation Spirituality; an Irish priest with a missionary in the Philippines. The Philippines, for years, have been ahead of the game when it comes to ecology because they're a small island with a lot of people, and they've been very aware, for example, of the destruction of the coral reefs. There used to be more coral reef in the Philippines than any place on the planet. And I remember lecturing in the Philippines and going swimming one day to a so-called coral reef and it was like a cemetery. It was all gray and ashen and dead. And I think that 97% of their coral reef is now dead. So, anyway, Sean McDonagh went through our program and then went home to the Philippines and wrote books on ecology and spirituality and Pope Francis obviously read some of them and plucked them up and said, write this for me.
So I'm kind of proud of that because two Popes before this Pope condemned my work and called my work, quote, dangerous and deviant, unquote, and now I have a Pope who is, what, plagiarizing it? [Laughs]. So if you live life long enough, sometimes you come around and see it all. So I think that's one achievement. I abhor the fact that the Papacy canonized Father Junipero Serra as a saint. As the founder of the mission system in California, he ran a series of concentration camps (essentially is what they were), and destroyed the Indian tribes in much of California. So that was a huge mistake. We can't put all our eggs into one institutional basket. I think this is where judgment comes, where conscience comes. Your conscience is not Jiminy cricket on your shoulder. Thomas Aquinas says conscience is taking good counsel and then making up your judgment about what's right and wrong.
So I see there are some good things in the Roman Catholic tradition and there are some shadow things, for sure, but this is true of all traditions. This is what humanity is. We're imperfect beings. We're so powerful because of our intellects and because of our creativity and we are very dangerous. Thomas Aquinas said in the 13th century, "One human being can do more evil than all the other species put together." Wow. That makes you proud. Wow. We can do something well, but just think of that. He said that 800 years before Stalin or Polpot or Hitler. He said that one human being can do more evil than all the other species put together. That's just one of us. Why? Because of our intellect. Because of our creativity. So we have to tame this intellect and creativity. We have to ask value questions. What is this for: to make the most money we can make and then die? Is it to rape as much of the Earth as we can before we die? What is our purpose?
I think that the real question today is this: what is a human being? I've been writing about this daily now for a couple of months in my daily meditations. I think it's the question of our time. It's not about Catholicism, it's not about Buddhism, it's not about the Dalai Lama. All this contributes. But the basic question is, what does it mean to be a human being? And if we can begin to agree on this, on the values, and by necessity, on climate change and our coming extinction, this ought to awaken enough of us that we can get down to asking these deeper questions. Then we might have a chance as a species, but there's no question we have to change, and change profoundly, or it's over. And that's where the spiritual traditions come in. They offer ways to change profoundly. There are practices. I call them spiritual technologies: like meditation, which calms the reptilian brain, like sweat lodges, like the Eucharist, like sacred dance and so forth. There are many ways that humans have devised over the centuries and throughout cultures, like drumming, to change the human heart. And that's what we have to get to.
Aryae: So what is a human being?
Matthew: Well, I began my ruminations on it and I did a meditation with a wonderful quote from a Mesoamerican tradition, several thousand years old. It says, "to be human one must make space in one's heart for the universe." Now, that is so unmodern [laugh]. The modern age says, I think therefore I am. Or Francis Bacon says we will rape mother earth for her secrets and all this. It's not about us! It's saying, open your heart up and realize your place in the universe; that you've been blessed by the universe every day. That's what the sun is. And all our food comes from that sun. We're not really eating vegetables and oatmeal. We're eating the sun. That's what photosynthesis is. We can shift from human-centeredness to universe-centeredness and realize it's not just about what's out there. The universe is our daily food. It is the sunlight. It is the warmth of the sun. And it is the rain and the soil and these marvelous animals we're making go extinct even while we say we love them. Humans have to learn to let go, to cut back, to live simpler lifestyles instead of setting up some illusory kingdom of God on Earth, where everyone can be middle-class or above and where everyone can buy as many yachts as they want. It's just crazy.
Studies have been done that if everyone on the planet lived the lifestyles of North Americans, we would need six planets. [laughs] This is where numbers matter. Obviously we have to slow down a bit and drink in more of the wisdom and more of the fun, more of the joy. Aquinas says you don't change people so much by argument as by delight. By delight. If we can demonstrate to ourselves first of all, and then our children and the people we work with, that delight and joy are part of living a simpler lifestyle, and less of this racing and squirrel cages to make as much as possible. That's what we have to undergo: this letting go.
I lay out what it means to be human in my book The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human. I lay out 10 principles, all starting with C, the 10 Cs. And this is what I taught these inner city teenagers: cosmology, and ecology. So that's the universe and our local universe and then, character building, community, courage, compassion, creativity, critical thinking, ceremony, and ritual. I think they all add up to what makes us human and you find them in all cultures, in all religions. That's one way of approaching that question, but I'd love to be in a conversation with more people about that.
Aryae: Thank you so much. You just lay out such an expansive vision and such an expansive path for us to consider. So it's time for us to bring our conversation to a close. Before I ask the closing question, I want to ask Rahul if you have one last comment you would like to offer at this point.
Rahul: Thanks. I just wanted to say that you've quoted Thomas Aquinas quite a bit, Matthew, and I believe that the Tao of Thomas Aquinas is the other book that you came out with this year. One of the things that Aquinas says is the essence of true religions is supreme gratitude. And I find myself feeling a lot of gratitude for all of the topics that have come up, throughout this call. And I feel like we've barely scratched the surface. Probably another hour and a half would suffice to get a little deeper, but I loved every minute of it, so thank you.
Matthew: Well, thank you. And thank you both for creating this excellent work.
Aryae: So Matthew, we have our traditional final question that we ask guests on these calls. So here it is for you. How can we as the larger ServiceSpace community support you and your work at this time?
Matthew: Well, thank you for the question. I do want to get Aquinas's wisdom and Julian's wisdom out in the world. So I appreciate your mentioning both of those books. The subtitle to my Aquinas book was “fierce wisdom for hard times.” The book came out in January, just when the coronavirus was beginning to hit. I didn't have that consciously in mind when I wrote it last year, but it's timely. And it's just what John Lewis is saying, that we need wisdom, this deeper truth that does not grow old with time. And so I find that in Aquinas, I find it in Julian, I find it in Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen. But of course it's everywhere. It's in the Jewish tradition, in Hasidism and Rabbi Heschel and so forth. It's there in the Eastern traditions. That's what's so beautiful. We evolved this wisdom. The image I get is a great banquet and yet many people are starving. It should be free and it should be out there. But because I am a Westerner, I feel it's been my obligation to go deeper to mine the wisdom of my Western tradition. Years ago, I read Jung's commentary on the Tao Te Ching where he says that "We Westerners cannot be pirates thieving wisdom from foreign shores . . . as if our own culture was an error outlived.”
That really moved me; that it wasn't my job to go East even. But I love the wisdom of the East. I co-wrote a book with Lama Tsomo a few years ago on Buddhist and Christian mysticism. But the problem is, I think, the Western soul is more messed up than the Eastern soul. So I find it necessary to go to my own DNA and to try to bring out what's worthwhile. I think that religion as a formal institution is dying. I think that what we want to do is take the treasures from the burning house. And I think the treasures include these: the wisdom of the mystics, but bringing alive the mystic in all of us. I've had atheists get on board with what I'm teaching, as well as Christians and Catholics and Protestants. I just think that we're in a new time and we are facing extinction. Let's just tell it like it is. So, hey, isn't this enough? How much do we love life? How much do we love our species and the other species? How much do we love the Earth? That's really the only question. And if we want to just take our piece of the pie and cling to it till we die, well then fine, we die, not just as individuals, but as a species. So I just think it's an amazing moment and the gifts we have from all the traditions of the world today, they all have so much to teach us. So anyway, I'm happy if you can share some of my work, and tell people about Julian of Norwich and Thomas Aquinas. And join our daily meditations. They're free. I hope you enjoy that too. And then I'm doing a seven-week class with the Shift Network and Mirabai Starr on Julian Norwich beginning December 2nd.
Aryae: Maybe we can send some of this out afterwards. Thank you so much, Matthew, on behalf of all of us in the ServiceSpace community and the people on the Awakin Calls team. And I want to say thank you, Rahul, for just a wonderful interview. And thanks to everybody on the Awakin Calls team who work behind the scenes to make this possible. Before we call it a day or an evening, I'd like to invite each of us to take one more minute of silence, to hold this space together.