The Scream from Helene continued: Water & the Sacred

My friend and co-worker, Lakota teacher and ceremony leader Buck Ghosthorse, said to our students one day, “Do you want to know how sacred water is?  Go without it for three days.  That first sip will remind you how sacred water is.”

Today we are being told that it may be months before Asheville, North Carolina and many other towns and cities and farms on the path of Helene will have running water again. 

Maybe this forced fasting will teach us all the great mystery of the original blessing that water is.  Then we can start over again.  We can become mystics again, that is to say, lovers who do not take for granted healthy water or healthy air or healthy soil or healthy food or healthy bodies or healthy relationships.  And the rest. 

“All our relations.”  That is what original blessing means: Not to take for granted the sacredness of our existence and Mother Earth and Father Sky that make it all possible. “Not to take for granted” is one of my working definitions for mysticism.

Of course, a large part of the damage of Helene was due to floods—an excess of water.  Water can be destructive.  One fireman once told me that water is more destructive than fire itself.  Water is powerful and overpowering and much, much bigger and more powerful than us tiny and fragile humans. 

Buck Ghosthorse when praying and leading in sweat lodges, used to call us humans “ants.”  It was uncomfortable to hear, but he was teaching an important lesson.  In the context of the great creation, we are tiny and fragile and not awfully enduring—in fact, far less enduring than ants as a species.

In writing on Evil in the DM lately, I have shared my insight that I learned from researching for my first and longest of three books on Evil: That the opposite of Evil is not good (bad is the opposite of good); the opposite of Evil is: The Sacred.

Maybe our days or weeks or months without regular water can awaken us to the Sacred, just as Buck said it can. 

Maybe re-learning not to take for granted is the beginning that our country and our species needs to light a fire in us that changes our ways so that we can get over our politician’s and media’s lies and silence about climate change and address it more directly.

Maybe the same can happen with our media which loves to be on the spot when hurricanes are coming and after they leave their chaos behind, but who rarely if ever speak the truth of the cause of global warming: Human greed.  Corporate greed.  Politician’s greed. 

The exact greed that Hildegard equates with the value system of the antichrist.

Is it possible that the Scream of Helene can finally, finally, finally, finally, finally get the media and the politicians to tell the truth?  If so, its destruction will have been worth it. 

If not, there will be more, many more events, like Helene.  And Creation—Sacred creation—will move from order to chaos the world over.  And our species and millions of others will go extinct. 

Doom, gloom and despair will mark our future.  The promise of grace, of justice and peace that “flow like a river,” of a coming of a kingdom of love, justice and kindness born of our co-creating, will disappear down the drain.  

To be continued.

See Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society.

And Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.

And Fox, Trump & MAGA as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election.

And Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: : The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance.

Banner Image: Banner from Youth Climate Strike, 2019. Photo by Fabrice Florin on Flickr.

Queries for Contemplation

Do you agree with Buck Ghosthorse that going without water for three days can teach you the sacredness of water?  What follows from that?  What other ways are there for recovering a sense of the sacred?

Related Readings by Matthew Fox

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

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

Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election

Matthew Fox tells us that he had always shied away from using the term “Anti-Christ” because it was so often used to spread control and fear. However, given today’s rise of authoritarianism and forces of democracide, ecocide, and christofascism, he turns the tables in this book employing the archetype for the cause of justice, democracy, and a renewed Earth and humanity.
From the Foreword: If there was ever a time, a moment, for examining the archetype of the Antichrist, it is now…Read this book with an open mind. Good and evil are real forces in our world. ~~ Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Conversations with the Divine.
For immediate access to Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election, order the e-book with 10 full-color prints from Amazon HERE. 
To get a print-on-demand paperback copy with black & white images, order from Amazon HERE or IUniverse HERE. 
To receive a limited-edition, full-color paperback copy, order from MatthewFox.org HERE.
Order the audiobook HERE for immediate download.

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.