Week of 6/17-22/2024: Aquinas, Summer Solstice, Juneteenth

June 17, 2024: Happy Father’s Day 2024—One Day Late! Aquinas as Spiritual Father
Matthew, upon his return from Orvieto, Italy, shares some of his experiences there. He taught each morning, and the Art as Meditation teachers helped participants to explore Aquinas with their creativity, which helps truth and wisdom to unfold from within. One participant told Matthew that the week brought her a lot of hope, and so Matthew’s final talk of the week was on that very subject. He tells us that Aquinas is basically an optimist because he sees so keenly the beauty and wonder of existence. Matthew tells us that Thomas Aquinas is his spiritual father in so many ways. He was introduced to him at the age of 15 when his parish priest gave him some writings on Aquinas. Many books later, Matthew is still learning from Aquinas.

June 18, 2024: Aquinas on Truth, Justice, and Compassion—Issues in Today’s Presidential Run?
Aquinas taught: ‘The Lord loves compassion and justice.’  For God loves them in themselves, since these things are in the work.  As Psalm 25 puts it, ‘all the ways of the Lord [are] compassion and truth.’  He also said: Justice without compassion is cruel, and compassion without justice is the mother of weakness.  And therefore it is necessary that they be joined together…. How significant are Truth, Justice and Compassion in this year’s presidential campaigns?  The Washington Post counted 36,000 lies one of the presidential candidates told when he was last president. The bottom line is that, according to Aquinas, there can be no truth or justice or compassion without all three operating together.  As a Trinity. 

June 19, 2024: Aquinas on Compassion & Politics, continued
In his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, Aquinas said: To be compassionate is to have a heart that suffers from the misfortune of others because we think of it as our own…. We see in this passage a source of Meister Eckhart’s definition of compassion when he says, “what happens to another, whether it be a joy or a sorrow, happens to me.” About compassion, Aquinas says: “One looks at another’s distress as one’s own.” And so, sometimes a good citizen risks death for the safety of the commonwealth. Because we are all one interdependent whole.

June 20, 2024: Two Days of Celebration this Week: Juneteenth & Summer Solstice
[FROM THE ARCHIVE: 6/24/2020] The Feast Day of Juneteenth honors the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, and resilience in the face of 400 years of enslavement and ongoing oppression of Black people. Matthew says: When people are in trauma, they don’t think real straight. We do strange things, like making nuclear weapons to destroy the world and one another. But the Feast Day of Summer Solstice reminds us of our place in the universe, for our North Pole has its maximum tilt toward the sun on this solstice. We are invited at this season to reconnect psyche to cosmos. Healing medicine can also be found in Genesis 1, which celebrates the goodness of existence; life; the world; Earth; ourselves. 

June 21, 2024: Juneteenth: Survival in the Face of Racism, Sadism, Domination
[FROM THE ARCHIVE: 6/19/2020] Juneteenth is a celebration of the end of slavery, a day to honor the survival and resilience of Black people throughout 400 years of sheer inhumanity: from the profound sadism of slavery, through the Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and segregation, to the racism of today. Sadism is a kind of tyranny, a kind of domination. So is racism, whether we see it in individual instances or whether we recognize it as baked into our institutions. The photo seen round the world of a white armed policeman, smiling and self-satisfied while on top of a black man who dies as a result of the assaualt, reveals a deep sadism. Martine Luther King’s strategy included appealing to the conscience of white people by exposing the sadism of the system at work. Police dogs attacking children on television changed the course of events. Apparently even hardened segregationists couldn’t stomach that sight. (Thank goodness.)

June 22, 2024: The First Juneteenth Holiday, 2021
[FROM THE ARCHIVE: June 20, 2021] Juneteenth is to the Black community what the Exodus from Egypt was and is for Jewish people—day of victory, celebration and remembrance of a great liberation. Is there a common denominator to the tragic stories of genocide, slavery, ecocide and extinctions? Matthew believes it is our neglect of the sacredness of nature—human and more-than-human. Nature, we now know, preceded us by 13.8 billion years. We are nature’ s guest. Have we been good and grateful guests?  Or have we projected onto nature our own self-hatred in place of awe, wonder, reverence, and gratitude? Creation Spirituality leads with creation and gratitude for the Creator. Thanking is very different from conquering in the name of redeeming.

Banner image: “Black power of the celebration of Juneteenth, now a national holiday.”.Photo by Tasha Jolley on Unsplash

Recommended Reading

The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times

A stunning spiritual handbook drawn from the substantive teachings of Aquinas’ mystical/prophetic genius, offering a sublime roadmap for spirituality and action.
Foreword by Ilia Delio.
“What a wonderful book!  Only Matt Fox could bring to life the wisdom and brilliance of Aquinas with so much creativity. The Tao of Thomas Aquinas is a masterpiece.”
–Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit

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

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society

Visionary theologian and best-selling author Matthew Fox offers a new theology of evil that fundamentally changes the traditional perception of good and evil and points the way to a more enlightened treatment of ourselves, one another, and all of nature. In comparing the Eastern tradition of the 7 chakras to the Western tradition of the 7 capital sins, Fox allows us to think creatively about our capacity for personal and institutional evil and what we can do about them. 
“A scholarly masterpiece embodying a better vision and depth of perception far beyond the grasp of any one single science.  A breath-taking analysis.” — Diarmuid O’Murchu, author of Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics

Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality
Selected with an Introduction by Charles Burack

To encapsulate the life and work of Matthew Fox would be a daunting task for any save his colleague Dr. Charles Burack, who had the full cooperation of his subject. Fox has devoted 50 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship.  His more than 40 books, translated into 78 languages, are inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and have awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. Essential Writings begins by exploring the influences on Fox’s life and spirituality, then presents selections from all Fox’s major works in 10 sections.
“The critical insights, the creative connections, the centrality of Matthew Fox’s writings and teaching are second to none for the radical renewal of Christianity.” ~~ Richard Rohr, OFM.