Nobility empowers. Original blessing empowers. Knowing you are an image of God empowers. Knowing you are a son or daughter of God empowers. Knowing you are another Christ or another Buddha or another image of God empowers.
The first lesson to learn from the eagle who visits Father Sky daily is: Nobility. AND our capacity to soar also. Isn’t that what Icarus was trying to do as a young man—to soar like an eagle? But his father failed to communicate the dangers well.
Honor the eagle within. The nobility within. Then we will be doing less projecting and hating onto others.
Then fascism will be less attractive and begin to melt because, as Erich Fromm teaches, fascism is born of self-hatred. And Aquinas tells us that the first effect of love is melting.
Maybe the compulsion to own an AR 15 to feel important or to threaten others with might melt. And the refusal of politicians to pass laws that keep military weapons off our streets and out of the hands of immature young adults.
One example of the nobility inside is our capacity to connect to “Father Sky.” Like the eagle does.
That is why the first of the metaphors or archetypes I offer to regain a healthy sense of the masculine is that of Father Sky. So much was lost in the modern, industrial era when we were told the sky was a machine, cold, inert, essentially dead.
Men could no longer project their greatest passions of love, joy or moral outrage onto the sky but had to hold it in, hunker down, be obedient on an assembly line or risk your life going into mines to make a living. Or get in line and join an army and kill others in the name of ideology or nationhood.
To be continued.
See Matthew Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
And Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine, pp. 3-18, 33-42.
Banner Image: Communities transforming guns into roads: after a 2016 buy-back, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department melted down 7,044 guns into rebar for local infrastructure. Another buy-back is scheduled September 30. Photo by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, used with permission.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you agree that knowing one’s nobility empowers? Do you agree with Aquinas that the first effect of love is melting? What follows from that?
Recommended Reading
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way.
“Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story
The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine
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.
“Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know.” — Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God
3 thoughts on “How Recognizing Our Nobility Empowers”
Yes, Awareness of Divine Love~Wisdom within and among us in Loving Diverse Wholeness~
ONENESS empowers and gives us Joy, Peace, Healing, Transformation, Creativity, Compassion … with one another, Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth & all Her creatures/abundance, and All our Sacred multidimensional~multiverse COSMOS in the Sacred Process of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT….
Love melts, especially in the midst of such a broken world. If we can recognize that nobility empowers us to be a force of love to ourselves and our neighbors, then we can each be a beacon. But it is a choice, and it seems that our nation has made the death choice, not the choice for life. Two babies have been murdered recently in Tallahassee by siblings playing with guns, and the refusal to see how the culture of gun worship, violence, and hate speech made this kind of occasion inevitable will simply perpetuate more such tragedies. The recent racial murders in Jacksonville is a similar result. Brave prophet, the Rev. Dr. William Barber, composed and delivered a letter of cease and desist to the governor and cronies, to stop the hate speech, and that gives me hope that some folks will wake up. In the meantime, we must learn to live in a fascist state—and, increasingly, a fascist nation.
“Knowing you are an image of God empowers.”
In theory, women WOULD be equal to men in every “Christian” society and church hierarchy. Her contributions would be welcomed and acknowledged. She would be encouraged to stand tall. Her voice would not be silenced, her words stolen and claimed by men, her dignity deliberately attacked. She would not be relentlessly treated as merely a subhuman breeding vessel, a wickedly tempting rutting beast, and a lowly servant, and then relegated to the church basement’s cooking stove to make the church suppers, rather than being preacher or priest. She would not be condescendingly “allowed” to speak her “nice little ideas”, in “properly feminine” tentative, apologetic whispers, as if her “poor feeble female soul” left her suited only for flighty emotional swooning and spouting silly, vapid cliches rather than expressing deep spirituality, intelligent insights, and Mystical Truths.
If women, along with all the minorities and outsiders whose souls are deemed “less than, ” were honored as noble equals, as Jesus commanded, the world would be a radically different place. But Jesus is TOO radical for all those in power. He always has been. That’s why his message of Soul-equality has been suppressed for over 2,000 years.