Christmas 2024: Our Birth as Immortal Diamonds & Original Blessings

We ended yesterday’s DM, that of Christmas Eve, with one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture, one that traditionally was read at Christmas Midnight Mass, and which comes from the Book of Wisdom:

When peaceful silence lay over all,
and night had run the half of her swift course,
down from the heavens, from the royal throne, leapt your all-powerful Word.
Into the heart of a doomed land the stern warrior leapt….He touched the sky, yet trod the earth.  (Wis 18.14-16)

I love it because it speaks of the wonderful and mysterious things that happen in the night.  After all, night is a holy time and great mysteries happen in the dark.  Adrienne Rich reminds us of how sacred night can be when we sleep with our partners:

a touch is enough to let us know
we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.*

As our awareness of the size of the universe has expanded to being 2 trillion galaxies, such a touch, such a grounding, may be more necessary than ever.

Probably most of us were conceived in the night.  And Christ, who like the Buddha and like Tselem or the image of God, promises light in the midst of darkness chooses to arrive at night.  Even and especially in dark times to troubled souls and troubled nature and to a troubled species.

And I Iove it because the Christ did not just arrive at night—but leapt into history. An eagerness drove him to dwell among us and within this 13.8-billion-year-universe in all of its splendor and all its pain and pathos and all of its on-going creativity.  

And to us, among us (Emmanuel—God-with-us), being just like us.  Weak, confused, perplexed, ruled over by others, subject to sickness and frailty, encountering hard hearts and subject to injustice, violence and death.

But a model and teacher of what it means to be an image of God.  A person whose vocation was to be an artist, a story-teller and parable-maker announcing Good News especially to the poor and dispossessed but to all including those who are spiritually famished as well.

The birth of the Cosmic Christ among us is celebrated by poet Gerard Manley Hopkins this way:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Are we all—in spite of our smallness—truly immortal diamonds?  That is the question Christmas answers.  Are we all—is creation itself—an original blessing?

We are all reborn as other Christs (Buddhas or images of God) on this Christmas Day—and every day.  That is the Promise of Christmas, to recover how we are all immortal diamonds.  The doxa, the glory, of this revelation renders life holy and eternally meaningful and precious.  One resists the sentimentalism of a baby Jesus’ version of Christmas and instead takes on the responsibilities of a “stern warrior” who leaps to earth today in 2024 into each of us to carry on a struggle for all that is precious: Mother Earth and our capacity for love, justice, truth and compassion.

Happy Birthday, all!  And Blessed Christmas.

*Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language, p. 30.

Adapted from Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, pp. 8, 129-156.

And Fox, Original Blessing, pp. 35-41, 67-81.

And Fox, “Sermon Twenty-Four: We Are Other Christs,” in Fox, Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, pp. 338-353.

And Fox, “Spiritual Warriors,” in Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men,” pp. 77-104.

Also see Matthew Fox and Bishop Marc Andrus, Stations of the Cosmic Christ.

Banner Image: “Adoration of the Shepherds,” Painting by Gerard van Honthorst, 1622. Wikimedia Commons.

Queries for Contemplation

Are you an Immortal Diamond?  And a stern warrior for love and justice?  And an original blessing amidst a universe that is an original blessing?  And does Christmas remind you of all that?

Recommended Reading

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.

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

Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart

Matthew Fox’s comprehensive translation of Meister Eckhart’s sermons is a meeting of true prophets across centuries, resulting in a spirituality for the new millennium. The holiness of creation, the divine life in each person and the divine power of our creativity, our call to do justice and practice compassion–these are among Eckhart’s themes, brilliantly interpreted and explained for today’s reader.
“The most important book on mysticism in 500 years.”  — Madonna Kolbenschlag, author of Kissing Sleeping Beauty Goodbye.  

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

Stations of the Cosmic Christ
By Matthew Fox and Bishop Marc Andrus.

This is a book of meditations on the Cosmic Christ, accompanying the images of 16 wonderful clay tablets by Javier Ullrrich Lemus and M.C. Richards. Together, these images and meditations go far beyond the traditional Stations of the Cross to inspire a spirit awakening and understanding of the cosmic Christ Consciousness, Buddha consciousness, and consciousness of the image of God in all beings, so needed in our times.
“A divinely inspired book that must be read by every human being devoted to spiritual and global survival. It is cosmically brilliant.” — Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit