Week of 12/23-28/2024: The Coming of the Light & Spiritual Warriors

December 23, 2024: Is there One Advent—or Several?
The convergence of the winter solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa is a potent time of year. It’s a time when we celebrate the coming of the Light. Part of the mystery of existence is the play between the Via Positiva and the Via Negativa, the joy and the suffering in life. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke underwent a profoundly painful childhood, locked in the attic frequently by his mother for long periods of time. From it all he learned something of both pain and praise. Oh, tell us, poet, what do you do?  I praise. But the deadly and the violent days, how do you undergo them, take them in? I praise….

December 24, 2024: Christmas Eve 2024
When we are in the midst of feeling loss and grief, it can, paradoxically, bring a greater feeling of the preciousness of life. In the midst of this darkness, we remember the coming of the Christ about 2020 years ago and we call that remembrance Christmas. The Great Mystery behind the vast consciousness of the cosmos chose to visit Earth and become human. There lies the wonder of Christmas. The Mystery beyond all names is part of a continuous creation and continuous incarnation all around us and in us, as Père Chenu taught. We are all reborn on Christmas morning, when Wisdom leapt down from her heavenly throne and became the Divine incarnate.

December 25, 2024: Christmas 2024: Our Birth as Immortal Diamonds & Original Blessings
Here is one of Matthew’s favorite passages in all of scripture: 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) Christ was a model and teacher of what it means to be an image of God. 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. We are all reborn as Christs on this Christmas Day—and every day. That is the Promise of Christmas, to recover how we are all immortal diamonds. 

December 26, 2024: Christmas 2024: Jesus’ Prayer Sustaining Stern Warriors
The reading from the Book of Wisdom for Christmas Midnight Mass speaks of the arrival of Christ as the arrival of a “stern warrior” who leapt into a “doomed land.” The Book of Wisdom speaks of a stern warrior who “touched the sky, yet trod the earth,” one who brings heaven and earth together. Jesus taught us to pray to “Our Father who art in heaven…thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Neil Douglas Klotz translates Jesus’ words above from his original Aramaic: O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos, you create all that moves in light…Create your reign of unity now—through our fiery hearts and willing hands... Help us love beyond our ideals and sprout acts of compassion for all creatures.… Let your heart’s fervent desire unite heaven and earth through our harmony.

December 27, 2024: Lily Yeh’s Fiery Heart and Willing Hands—and Ours
In this Christmas season, it’s good to bring alive in ourselves the mystic and the spiritual warrior. Jesus surely embodied both for us. Yesterday we reflected on a translation of the Our Father from the original Aramaic, part of which was: Create your reign of unity now—through our fiery hearts and willing hands. If we look around us for examples, artist Lily Yeh is such a person. Lily recently gave a TED talk in which she speaks about how beauty saves us, especially in the hard times. Matthew wrote to her and said, Thank you for being true to your big vocation and courage in going to the broken places. Lily first helps children to create and embrace beauty. This, in turn, influences the adults. Healing and miracles result.

December 28, 2024: Social Media as Heroin?  Thom Hartmann on Today’s Politics of Rage
As we look for spiritual warriors to inspire us, another is Thom Hartmann. He is a  a journalist and writer who uses his “fiery heart and willing hands” to question that which doesn’t work in our politics and culture. Case in point: He recently wrote an article called “Is Social Media This Generation’s Heroin?” He says: If you could invent a drug that would cause people to be fearful—and thus stimulate the rage that comes from fear—you could have incredible control over a population if you could simply tell them where and against whom to direct that fear-induced rage. Social media propagates this fear and rage. (If you want to assess your level of addiction to social media, click HERE.)

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Banner image: Morning light with sunbow. danna § curious tangles on Flickr.

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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

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