June 10, 2024: From Orvieto: Aquinas and Teilhard
Matthew is in Orvieto, Italy marking the 800th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Aquinas, leading a weeklong retreat which also features three art-as-meditation teachers. Last week we reflected on Teilhard de Chardin. Both Teilhard and Aquinas were lovers of both nature and science. Matthew asks himself, How would Thomas Aquinas respond to today’s science? The answer? He’d be ecstatic, intoxicated, beside himself, thrilled, and deliriously joyful. He would be head over heels in love with the world and the cosmos as we are getting to know it. And so, it is a joy to be in Orvieto, a place of morphic resonance, where Aquinas wrote and taught.

The beauty of the night sky, as viewed through the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in Chile. Video by SpaceRip.

June 11, 2024: Teilhard, Aquinas and Creation Spirituality
Teilhard was accused of being “too pagan;” Matthew was accused of working too closely with Native Americans; and Aquinas was criticized for bringing “pagan” scientist Aristotle into the Christian faith. Aquinas’s response? “Revelation has been made to many pagans” and “the old pagan virtues were from God.” Teilhard talked about “how to see God everywhere.” Matthew says, If that is not creation spirituality, I don’t know what is. Teilhard also criticized organized religion and saw a distinction between religion and spirituality. He warned about the “enfeeblement” of religion. Matthew says: A solution is found in reconnecting to the Earth, the work of the first chakra.  

June 12, 2024: Teilhard and Aquinas Battling Dualism
Teilhard, like Thomas Aquinas before him, waged an incessant battle against dualism. Teilhard said: Matter and Spirit: These were no longer two things but two states or two aspects of one and the same cosmic Stuff…. Matter is the Matrix of Spirit. Spirit is the higher state of Matter. Teilhard came to realize that Spirit was “the very heart” of matter which evolved and morphed into Psyche. Psyche was born of matter and, through all this evolving, Spirit was present at the core of things.

“No Mud, No Lotus.” Reflection by Thich Nhat Hanh. Plum Village App

June 13, 2024: Green Man Jesus Inspires Eco-Martyr Sister Dorothy Stang
[FROM THE ARCHIVE: 5/28/2019] We meditate on how the Green Man archetype challenges today’s toxic masculinity. Hildegard of Bingen called Jesus a “green man.” …This shows how aware Hildegard was to the signs of her times, since the Green Man was alive and well in the twelfth century. Also, Hildegard developed her entire theology around the theme of greening power which she compared to our blood or to the sap of the tree or to the Holy Spirit at work in us. She was a champion of the Earth and of preserving and defending the Earth.  Jesus is, for her, a green prophet, fully alive, fully committed, fully in love with life. Meanwhile, Sister Dot demonstrates the courage and commitment that defending Mother Earth requires. She is one of thousands who were—and continue to be—martyred defending the Amazon. Matthew sees her as a patron saint to resisters and Earthkeepers everywhere.

June 14, 2024: Eco-Martyr Sister Dot & the Sacred Masculine
[FROM THE ARCHIVE: 5/29/2019] We explore more fully the story of Sister Dot and her martyrdom on behalf of Mother Earth. At Sister Dot’s funeral one of the indigenous farmers she had served stood up and declared: “Sister Dot, we are not burying you; we are planting you.” When Sister Dot knew her life was in danger, many advised her to leave Brazil. She wrote: I don’t want to flee, nor do I want to abandon the battle of these farmers….They have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment. Sister Dot kept a copy next to her bed of the book Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen by Franciscan Sister Gabriel Uhlein. Sr. Dot’s brother kindly gave that book to Matthew after she was killed. It is filled with sketches and doodles that Sr. Dot made. Sister Dot, like Saint Hildegard, is living proof of the power of art as meditation to feed and nurture prophets and spiritual warriors. 

Sister Dorothy’s sketches in her copy of Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen, by Franciscan Sister Gabriel Uhlein.

June 15, 2024: More Wisdom from Artist-Shaman David Paladin
[FROM THE ARCHIVE: 4/29/2021] Another inspiring person speaks about the power of art and creativity: Navajo painter David Paladin. Like Sr. Dorothy Stang, he faced forces of evil but did not let it prevent him from stepping up and serving humankind. David was captured during WWII and put into a concentration camp where he was mercilessly tortured. When he was liberated, he was emaciated, paraplegic, and in a coma. He awoke from the coma after two years. Elders told him he could remain in his wheelchair in a VA hospital or heal in the ancient ways. He chose the latter. They threw him into an icy cold river. Miraculously, he recovered. He was able to walk again. He subsequently became an artist, a shaman/healer, and a police chaplain. He tells us: Look at yourself as magicians, as healers, as lovers of humanity, as givers and sharers. From that perspective living becomes an art in itself. Then everything you do becomes magic!


Banner image: “Emergence.” Sand painting by Navajo artist David Paladin. (cropped) Used with permission.


Recommended Reading

Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations

As Matthew Fox notes, when an aging Albert Einstein was asked if he had any regrets, he replied, “I wish I had read more of the mystics earlier in my life.” The 365 writings in Christian Mystics represent a wide-ranging sampling of these readings for modern-day seekers of all faiths — or no faith. The visionaries quoted range from Julian of Norwich to Martin Luther King, Jr., from Thomas Merton to Dorothee Soelle and Thomas Berry.
“Our world is in crisis, and we need road maps that can ground us in wisdom, inspire us to action, and help us gather our talents in service of compassion and justice. This revolutionary book does just that. Matthew Fox takes some of the most profound spiritual teachings of the West and translates them into practical daily mediations. Study and practice these teachings. Take what’s in this book and teach it to the youth because the new generation cannot afford to suffer the spirit and ethical illiteracy of the past.” — Adam Bucko, spiritual activist and co-founder of the Reciprocity Foundation for Homeless Youth.

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

Fox’s spirituality weds the healing and liberation found in North American Creation Spirituality and in South American Liberation Theology. Creation Spirituality challenges readers of every religious and political persuasion to unite in a new vision through which we learn to honor the earth and the people who inhabit it as the gift of a good and just Creator.
“A watershed theological work that offers a common ground for religious seekers and activists of all stripes.” — Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice.
“I am reading Liberating Gifts for the People of the Earth by Matt Fox.  He is one that fills my heart and mind for new life in spite of so much that is violent in our world.” ~ Sister Dorothy Stang.

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 FundamentalismLiving in Sin

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5 thoughts on “Week of 6/10-15/2024: Teilhard, Aquinas, Sister Dorothy & David Paladin”

    1. Thank you, Theresa, for this wonderful sermon, very much in the spirit of Matthew Fox, Richard Rohr, Jim Wallis, and other modern prophets. It is good to know that there are younger people coming up to carry on the word and the work.

  1. Comment Extract Journaled Yesterday – Psyche & Soul, Spirit & Matter

    “We Need to Know There is More Hope and More Life in Less”

    * We need desire to know that there is more, and that is our beautiful possibility. *
    * We need hurt to feel compassion outside of ourselves.
    * We need hunger for many things to understand we live in a complex web of dependencies.
    * We need trials to tell us that we can grow beyond them and know how to use grace-filled willfulness.
    * We need mountains to climb so we can look down and see the big picture below.
    * We need to see duality and contrast it with ‘the whole’ before we can see ‘the whole’.
    * We need to be sad and lonely, to know how to rejoice in togetherness.
    * We need to be lost before love and grace can find us.
    * We need to be separate before we can experience whole.
    * We need a heart that knows the pricelessness of living without need for many things.
    * We need need in order to be satisfied beyond what satisfies us now.
    * We need to know that ‘more’ is what we have been made for and there is ‘more hope’, ‘more life’ in less.
    * We need to know that we can ‘be less’ right now, right away, ‘at hand’ and we can all do that. — BB 06 16 2024.

  2. — from Introduction to Ilia Delio’s “The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole”:
    “A culture without God is sheer cosmic information, in which the human person becomes part of the information that can be deleted or changed. Faith tells us otherwise. We are here because we are the thinking portion of the universe, part of a cosmic wholeness that is grounded in divine reality. God is the Whole of the whole in evolution, distinct yet inseparable from everything else that exists. Relational holistim means that everything is connected. There are no separate parts, rather, each distinct entity is determined by its relationships. The works of Jung and Teilhard impel us to think the Christian story as a relational whole — a “theohology.” Holism calls for a new type of logic, one defined not by causality but by relationality. The logic of love is the logic of relationality; the energy of love is the energy of the whole. Love sees the whole, while the partial intellect sees fragments. We humans have a capacity to actualize the whole by personalizing divine love… “

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