We are meditating on St. Brigid within the context of the “Magnificat” and the original 12th century “Hail Mary.” Instead of dwelling on patriarchy’s labeling us all sinners preoccupied with guilt and death, a better prayer is to remind ourselves of our powers of creativity as co-heirs with Christ and the angels.
Accepting our divine powers of creativity for birthing compassion and justice, we call on the Divine Feminine, the Cosmic Mother of the universe, to be with us “at the hour of our creativity.”
Our creativity represents the image of the Divine in us—God is primarily understood in religions around the world as Creator, after all. As poet Bill Everson observes, “most people experience God in nature or experience God not at all.”
As I point out in my book on Naming the Unnameable, God is variously called “the Ground of Being,” “the Mind of the Universe,” “the Planetary Mind Field,” “Creative Intelligence that Operates by Way of Evolution,” “the Enfolding and Unfolding of Everything That Is,“ ”the Universe,” “the Self of the Universe,” “Co-Creator, and the Power of Creation,” the “Artist of Artists,” “Light,” “Flow,” and so much more.
Evolution is the history of creativity embedded in nature’s laws and habits.
It is in our creativity that “the Divine and the Human Meet” as I lay out in my book, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet. Our creativity, this tool for problem-solving—whether we are talking about putting meals on the table for our children, or ways to turn back Climate Change—is our God-given gift and grace as a species.
Our Creativity is also responsible for a lot of the trouble we find ourselves in—we have a Climate Crisis partly because of our creativity. Beginning with the industrial era, we have been inventing ways to fulfill our energy needs by pouring CO2 into the atmosphere.
Paradoxically, it is this same creativity that can rescue and redeem us, from this corner into which we have painted ourselves. We need divine help to steer us in a new direction:
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our creativity. Amen.”
To be continued.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God…Including the Unnameable God, pp. xv-xvii, 8, 11-17, 24-26, 39f., 42, 44-46.
And Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet.
And Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video teaching, click HERE.
Banner Image: Two Indian women painting a “welcome mat” to invite the Divine Mother into their homes. Photo by Pallab2310. Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
What does it mean to you, to call on the Cosmic Mother “at the hour of our creativity”?
Recommended Reading
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
Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet
Because creativity is the key to both our genius and beauty as a species but also to our capacity for evil, we need to teach creativity and to teach ways of steering this God-like power in directions that promote love of life (biophilia) and not love of death (necrophilia). Pushing well beyond the bounds of conventional Christian doctrine, Fox’s focus on creativity attempts nothing less than to shape a new ethic.
“Matt Fox is a pilgrim who seeks a path into the church of tomorrow. Countless numbers will be happy to follow his lead.” –Bishop John Shelby Spong, author, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Living in Sin
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
In what may be considered the most comprehensive outline of the Christian paradigm shift of our Age, Matthew Fox eloquently foreshadows the manner in which the spirit of Christ resurrects in terms of the return to an earth-based mysticism, the expression of creativity, mystical sexuality, the respect due the young, the rebirth of effective forms of worship—all of these mirroring the ongoing blessings of Mother Earth and the recovery of Eros, the feminine aspect of the Divine.
“The eighth wonder of the world…convincing proof that our Western religious tradition does indeed have the depth of imagination to reinvent its faith.” — Brian Swimme, author of The Universe Story and Journey of the Universe.
“This book is a classic.” Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work and The Dream of the Earth.
9 thoughts on “Calling on the Cosmic Mother at the Hour of Our Creativity”
“Sin” reminds us that between stimulus and response that there is choice, i.e., God acts through the contingency of human freedom.
“Death” reminds us of the grace of finitude, that is to live life fully, serve life, create life in the here and now,
The ‘hour of [our] death’ of any self-limiting, faith denying obstacle, physical death itself, etc., always has to precede the dawn of our new birth, our new creativity. Christianity was born out of death and resurrection, and death and resurrection is its blueprint. What are the ‘new wineskins’, the ‘new covenant’, if not the foregoing of the old. — BB.
Thank you Matthew for this reframing of the Hail Mary. For me it is an option. And has its place.
The Hail Mary prayer is deeply imprinted in my heart and soul. Generations of my family prayed it. Long ago I dropped the word ‘sinners’ to simply an invocation to our Mother to ‘pray for us NOW…and at the hour of our death’ Amen.
I love the immediacy of these words. An invocation. Memories of praying it with my family at the deathbeds and coffins of my mother, father, sister, grandparents, aunt and others. When I pray these words each morning and night I am praying for all the innocents being slaughtered by men with guns, bombs and missiles and those being slaughtered by automatic weapons in schools, shopping malls etc.
It is a way to unite myself in prayer with Mary and the innocent souls leaving the planet earth every minute of every day. It is an offering from my grandmother’s heart to them. As a Celt Brigid, Mary of the Gauls is in my heart also.
George Floyd’s last words were a cry for his mother.
May my last words echo that cry. ♥️
What a beautiful response! I have heard some Black pastors say that George Floyd’s last words were not for his mother but actually to his mother, whom he saw waiting for him as he died. The sense of being surrounded by ancestors is a powerful one in some cultures, like yours.
Yesterday, I was blessed with a surprising gift from our Cosmic/Earth Mother. It was a small, delicately woven birds nest that had fallen from a tree. What was so surprising about this nest, was that my own long strands of white hair were woven into its making. At first I thought I might be imagining this, so I kept it to myself, brought the nest inside, placing it in a candle holder, laying a crystal egg in it. Later my husband saw it, and he commented to me, “Did you see your hair woven into the bird’s nest?”.
For me, this is symbolic of my relationship with our Cosmic/Earth Mother, and She was reminding me of the ways in which our creativity and imagination is woven together; guided by the weaving of Her wisdom ways and the nature of own essence of beingness. There’s a delicate fragility, yet at the same time an enduring strength that unfolds, evolves and emerges in our learning to consciously balance these gifts of creativity and imagination, as one awakens to the wisdom truths of Her ways.
We all carry the egg of potential, of imaginatively creating beauty for the greater good of the whole in more harmonious ways; that respects and honors the reality of our interelationships; all those sacred threads that weave together the nest of wholeness, that our Cosmic/Earth Mother has artistically woven, which holds everything in balance. Call out to Her, and She will guide you in the gifts of creativity and imagination given you!
Beautiful DM about the Divine Feminine~Cosmic Mother Whose Spirit of Divine Love~Wisdom~Truth~Peace~Justice~Healing~Transformation~Creativity~Beauty~Joy~Compassion~ONENESS IS PRESENT with-in All of Us here on Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth with all Her creatures & graceful abundance, and with-in our Sacred multidimensional-multiverse Evolving DIVERSE COSMOS in the Sacred Co-Creative LOVING Process of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT… COSMIC CHRIST CONSCIOUSNESS….
Matthew, You and Richard Rohr offer, wisdom and hope to the world and the church, who have difficulty facing their hypocrisy. This is the first time i hay offered a comment. This is my version of the Hail Mary and I think it flows better and easier to remember and pray. i think it includes the intentions of yours and more.
Hail Mary Mother of God, full of grace, the Lord is indeed with you. Blessed is the fruit thy womb, who is Jesus.
Holy Mary, queen of peace and creativity, pray for the needs of us and others and at the time of their deaths. Amen
Humbly suggested. jeremiah ofs
Thank you, Jeremiah for your Hail Mary prayer. And isn’t it interesting that we speak of God as “the Creator,” yet conservative Christians and conservative people in general place creativity as the least important of any of the subjects in school. Yet, we are told we are “made in the image of God.” Doing creative work comes last in importance in the minds of those wearing the badge of conservatism, and artists generally are expected to have “a real job” to support their creative work. What then does it mean to be created in the image of God?
In 2007, when my wonderful wife Marietta passed suddenly, after 47 years of marriage, I started keeping a journal, and I began to get introduced, or get reintroduced to all the deceased people in my life who have loved me, and continue to love me into the person God calls me to be. In the past 6 months, since we are all called to “birth” Christ in our world, my rosary uses a Hail Mary where “Mary” is replaced by the name of one of my deceased friends. “Sinners” is replaced by “Beloved sons and daughters of God”, and “death” is replaced by “final blessing” (calling to mind the blessings of the Sermon on the Mount).