We launched our Daily Meditations on Mother’s Day and called for a less anthropocentric view of the holiday, urging a Mother Earth consciousness since the Earth we know is in peril.
So today, Father’s Day 2019, I wish to celebrate our Fathers and Grandfathers. In a number of ways we have been doing exactly that the past weeks with our meditations on the archetypes of Fatherhood and Grandfatherhood (the elders) as integral to the Sacred Masculine.
Happy Father’s Day to all Fathers! And Deep Healing to those sons and daughters who may have hoped their fathers had been more true to the “nobility inside.”
But also on Father’s Day 2019 I want to speak to Fatherhood on a larger scale. I have written about the Sacred Marriage between Father Sky and Mother Earth: “What we call the ‘sky’ is the very air we and all beings breathe. By standing on the Earth and breathing, we have already married Father Sky and Mother Earth; inside us, they have already ‘tied the knot.’”*
The Mother Earth picture above was taken by an astronaut and has permeated much of our hearts and minds for decades. But the very special Father Sky icon below was delivered to our species 19 years ago by Voyager One as it was leaving our solar system—the first object made by humans that has left our Milky Way.
On leaving our sphere, Voyager One looked back on its journey and snapped this picture of where it had come from—namely, Earth. What is Earth in this picture? A speck of light. A dot of light. Isn’t that an icon to imprint on all our minds, to inculcate in all our education from pre-school through graduate and professional school and arts and crafts schools?
Doesn’t it tell us something very important, namely that all our wars, all our strife, all our divisions, all our conjured up hatreds for one another, all our racial, religious, gender, cultural differences are nothing compared to this one fact: Our home, the Earth, is a mere speck of light…but on it are all of us. All our histories, all our yearnings, all our ancestors, all our descendants, all our broken hearts and all our aspiring hearts.
Why spend $56,000 per second on weapons when our primary task is to preserve this Earth for generations to come—not just of humans to come but of all the species we share the Earth with today. What is needed today is not toxic masculinity but good, sacred masculine energy, spiritual warriors, male and female, to protect Mother Earth.
Father Sky is speaking to us. Are we listening?
Matthew Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine, p. 224. For more on the Sacred Marriage of Father Sky and Mother Earth, see pp. 224-231.
Banner image: Earthrise, taken December 24, 1968 by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders (photograph: NASA.gov)
Queries for Contemplation
Meditate on the Voyager One picture of Mother Earth taken from Father Sky. What lessons is it telling you (and us)?
Meditate on the picture of Mother Earth taken by the astronauts. What lessons is it telling you (and us)?
What feelings fill you from these two icons in a “sacred marriage”?
Recommended Reading
To awaken what Fox calls “the sacred masculine,” he unearths ten metaphors, or archetypes, ranging from the Green Man, an ancient pagan symbol of our fundamental relationship with nature, to the Spiritual Warrior….These timeless archetypes can inspire men to pursue their higher calling to connect to their deepest selves and to reinvent the world.
4 thoughts on “Father’s Day, 2019”
Thank you Matthew for this beautiful meditation and happy father’s day to you too.I would ask you please to pray very specially for fr. Jack Clancy who followed a course with you away back in the 80’s as he is not too well at the moment.
Maura, That you for writing and meditating on the sacred father and grandfather. I will send Fr. Jack Clancy’s name on to Matthew.
Gail Sofia Ransom
For the DM Team
The popular website “Indigenous Peoples Literature” has a section on its homepage titled “Indigenous Inspiration. It includes the following words: “In this spiritual culture of the Sun, God as Father is wisdom and He lives in the throne within us between the two physical eyes known as the third eye. That is the eternal spiritual Father, who never leaves us. God as Mother is love and she lives in the Temple of the love. Our Father and Mother are one. They never separate and they never divorce, because they are conscious.”
Thank you Thomas for this beautiful quote from “Indigenous Peoples Literature”. It certainly echoes what Matthew has been saying in these recent meditations on the Divine Masculine, Divine Feminine, and the marriage of the two. Knowing that this wisdom already exists in another cultural tradition is encouraging for those who are steeped in western culture who are trying to grasp..
Gail Sofia Ransom
For the DM Team