Work and Inner Work – Continued

We continue our meditations on work and returning to the Source and how our inner work and outer work complement one another.  Insights to live out in a time of a pandemic. The Tao te Ching teaches us to seek the source.

Just realize where you come from:

This is the essence of wisdom.

It teaches the value of connecting to source. 

If you don’t realize the source,

you stumble in confusion and sorrow.

When you realize where you come from,

you naturally become tolerant,

disinterested, amused,

kindhearted as a grandmother,

dignified as a king.

Immersed in the wonder of the Tao,

you can deal with whatever life brings you,

and when death comes, you are ready.

Notice what we are promised: peace, harmony, kindness, and the overcoming of the fear of death.  Returning to source, realizing “where you come from,” moves us beyond confusion and sorrow and stumbling.

We are promised that we can “deal with whatever life brings us” when we ground ourselves in source.  Aquinas calls God “the source without a source.”  What is source?  Different persons and traditions will name it differently.  For some it is God, Creator, Spirit, Tao.  For others it is history and evolution and the unfolding of the universe.  For others it is all of the above.  For some it is unexplainable Mystery; Silence; Nothingness.  For others it is the Sacred however we name it.  It is that From which we come and To which we shall return.

However we name it, it is bigger than us.  Beyond names.  Beyond controlling.  Beyond possessing. 

Maybe it is Love.  And the love within love.  Or Joy.  And the joy within joy.  Or Light and the Light within Light.  The Tao Te Ching is reminding us is to Return and Remember and Be Embraced by this Source and all the other beings through history who have been so embraced.

It is from that Source that our work derives.  And moves from heart to heart.  Meister Eckhart teaches that “the inward work is God-like and Godly” and for this reason our work, both inner and outer, becomes very large.  Large from within.  As he puts it, “the outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward work can never be great or good if the inward is small or of little worth.  The inward work always includes in itself all size, all breadth and al length.”

“All size and breadth and length”?  That makes our work very large indeed.  It grows our souls.  The inward work includes our joy, gratitude, reverence; and our silence and stillness; and our grieving and letting go.  All are very large and God-like. 

In short, the Via Positiva and the Via Negativa constitute our mystical work.  These in turn lead to our outer work of creativity and transformation, compassion, justice making and healing. 

Adapted from Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work, pp. 65f., 82. 

See also: Matthew Fox, Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful & Useful Names for God…Including the Unnameable God.

Banner Image: “As one with the Earth, we are never lost.”Los Algarrobos, Panama. Photo by Ian Espinosa on Unsplash

Queries for Contemplation

How do you name Source? 

Do you see the great size and breadth and length of your inner work? How does that affect your outer work?

Recommended Reading

Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science 
by Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake

Natural Grace, a 208 page inspired dialogue between theologian Matthew Fox and scientist Rupert Sheldrake, unites wisdom and knowledge from unconventional angles. Considering themselves heretics in their own fields, Matthew and Rupert engage the conversation from postmodern and post-postmodern perspectives, deconstructing both religion and science—while setting the foundation for a new emerging worldview. Having outgrown the paradigms in which they were raised, both Fox and Sheldrake see it as part of their life missions to share the natural synthesis of spirituality and science rooted in a paradigm of evolutionary cosmology.

Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God …Including the Unnameable God

Too often, notions of God have been used as a means to control and to promote a narrow worldview. In Naming the Unnameable, renowned theologian and author Matthew Fox ignites our imaginations by offering a colorful range of Divine Names gathered from scientists and poets and mystics past and present, inviting us to always begin where true spirituality begins: from experience.
“This book is timely, important and admirably brief; it is also open ended—there are always more names to come, and none can exhaust God’s nature.” -Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, author of Science Set Free and The Presence of the Past