Week of 12/30/2024-1/4/2025: Holy Work, Jimmy Carter & Lessons from the Universe for the New Year

December 30, 2024: Holy Work: Critiquing Addictive Social Media, continued
We continue to reflect on an article written by commentator Thom Hartmann called “Is Social Media This Generation’s Heroin?” He talks about how social media fans the flames of fear and rage. Hartmann reminds us that social media billionaires make huge profits on these tactics. Fear sells. Certain politicians like to stir up fear and anger as well. Also billionaires like Elon Musk, on X (formerly Twitter) and Murdoch. Is this partly why the world appears crazier than ever?

December 31, 2024: Jimmy Carter: Model of Refirement as Holy Work
Jimmy Carter may not necessarily have been the best president, but most can surely agree that he was an outstanding human being. By that, we mean he lived his values. He was an unapologetic Christian and walked the talk, using his position and station to do good in the world. Matthew has written about the need to move from a retirement consciousness to a refirement consciousness after one steps away from one’s regular job. Jimmy Carter did that, and he set a high bar for the rest of us.

January 1, 2025: My Number One Wish for Humanity on New Year, 2025
Matthew asked himself this question on New Year’s Eve: If I could have one wish for humanity this year, what would it be? He decided that it would be for us to rediscover a sense of wonder, awe, gratitude, and reverence for the cosmos. He realized that, by and large, humanity has lost its sense of the sacred. That sense needs to be rekindled if we are to become sufficiently inspired to save our Mother Earth. Eco-prophet Thomas Berry tells us: We will recover our sense of wonder and our sense of the sacred only if we appreciate the universe beyond ourselves. Matthew dreams “of a world filled with wisdom schools and not just knowledge factories.” Wisdom and knowledge can be learned side by side, and rituals can be employed to reconnect psyche with the cosmos. Even Einstein reminded us that “the most important function of art and science is to awaken the cosmic religious feeling and keep it alive.” 

January 2, 2025: A Wish for Humanity in the New Year 2025, continued
Years ago, a dream told Matthew that there is only one thing wrong with our species: that we have lost our sense of the sacred. The good news is that there is a solution. Reconnecting with the cosmos is how we reawaken that sense. Artist Robert Henri said: Everything that is beautiful is orderly, and there can be no order unless things are in their right relation to each other. If the world seems “out of order” lately; if greed and envy and power-over has taken priority over the search for beauty and orderliness and justice, maybe we have to reconnect more fully with our origins, the cosmos. “Maybe,” says Matthew, “We need a civilization that begins with the cosmos and not with us.”

January 3, 2025: A Sense of the Whole and the Holy vs. a Rampaging Oligarchy
Bringing a sense of the sacred back to humanity involves a renewed relationship with the cosmos. This explains why creation stories are so important to people the world over. These stories are a way to awaken awe and teach both children and adults about our place and responsibility in the universe. But if we “forfeit the sense of awe,” Rabbi Heschel tells us, “the universe becomes a marketplace….” A culture without a living awareness of the cosmos that births us is a narcissistic culture and is set up not only for oligarchy but for consumerism. “I buy therefore I am.” 

January 4, 2025: Universe Lessons: Extravagance, Generosity & Expansion
How can we take lessons from the universe to fortify ourselves in this sometimes chaotic world? Writer Annie Dillard talks about the “extravagance” of nature. And Sufi mystic Hafiz speaks of the extravagance and generosity of the sun: Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky. Poet Ernesto Cardenal believes that “the greatest discovery of the twentieth century is the expanding universe.” Are we expanding, too? If not, we are contracting and shrinking into fear.  We need to remember that expansion means Love. And it’s something the world clearly needs more of.

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Banner image: Galaxy M8s: a composite of multi-wavelength images of the active galaxy M82 from the three Great Observatories: Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and Spitzer Space Telescope. Credits NASA, ESA, CXC, and JPL-Caltech. Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

Recommended Reading

Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Time

While Matthew Fox recognizes that Meister Eckhart has influenced thinkers throughout history, he also wants to introduce Eckhart to today’s activists addressing contemporary crises. Toward that end, Fox creates dialogues between Eckhart and Carl Jung, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rabbi Heschel, Black Elk, Karl Marx, Rumi, Adrienne Rich, Dorothee Soelle, David Korten, Anita Roddick, Lily Yeh, M.C. Richards, and many others.
“Matthew Fox is perhaps the greatest writer on Meister Eckhart that has ever existed. (He) has successfully bridged a gap between Eckhart as a shamanistic personality and Eckhart as a post-modern mentor to the Inter-faith movement, to reveal just how cosmic Eckhart really is, and how remarkably relevant to today’s religious crisis! ” — Steven Herrmann, Author of Spiritual Democracy: The Wisdom of Early American Visionaries for the Journey Forward

The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time

Thomas Aquinas said, “To live well is to work well,” and in this bold call for the revitalization of daily work, Fox shares his vision of a world where our personal and professional lives are celebrated in harmony–a world where the self is not sacrificed for a job but is sanctified by authentic “soul work.”
“Fox approaches the level of poetry in describing the reciprocity that must be present between one’s inner and outer work…[A]n important road map to social change.” ~~ National Catholic Reporter

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

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

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.