Speaking of Spiritual Warriors: MLK, Jr. Day, 2025

Meditating on spiritual warriorhood as we have been doing lately, we now celebrate the national holiday of MLK, Jr. We honor of this courageous and saintly (which does not mean perfect) man who stood up for truth and justice and love and paid the ultimate price. 

“No greater love has a person than this, to lay down his life for his friends.” So spoke his guide and north star in whose name and lineage Martin lived his life. He was, after all, a Christian minister who preached and lived Jesus’ teachings and parables about “loving your neighbor as yourself,” “do this to the least and you do it to me,” and “be you compassionate as your Creator in heaven is compassionate.” 

He walked his talk and lived his life for such values as these, and sacrificed his life doing so. Even today’s national holiday to remember him was a long struggle.

True to his vocation as a prophet, he chose to interfere. He interfered with racism and Jim Crow, rabid segregation and the bogus laws and structures that upheld that evil. He led a movement that filled the jails, marched in dangerous circumstances, yet grew and grew because it caught the attention of peoples’ consciences and because conscience matters. 

He stayed true to his principles of non-violence that he learned from Howard Thurman and Mahatma Gandhi who developed them from the teachings of Jesus (though he was not a Christian). King and Gandhi showed the world how effective non-violence can be as a political strategy, when people are up against powerful forces of evil.

As a spiritual warrior and prophet, he did not turn his back on conscience and instead called out the hypocrisy and lies and injustice and abuse of others so deeply baked into the culture and its politics. He called forth the prophetic vocation of millions of others and remains a model for all of us as we face today’s struggles.

Also today, on Martin Luther King’s holiday, another public event is going on in the nation’s capital in the very space that was desecrated four years ago on January 6, by a mob bent on tearing down American democracy and its national ritual of a peaceful transfer of power to a newly-elected president.

An irony indeed that the crowd on that day chose violence as its method, pummeled police and tried its best to kidnap elected representatives, including the speaker of the House and the vice president with chants like “Hang Mike Pence.” Fifteen hundred of them are now in prison, but have been promised a release by a new administration taking the oath of office in the very same place. And one whom the record shows was clearly responsible for the violence that day. 

Only once before since the first MLK Jr Day, has this celebration of his memory fallen on an inauguration day. King and MAGA on the same day: It almost feels like Christ and Antichrist.

We shall see what unfolds in the next two years in particular. But we should not watch passively or fearfully, but take on our own vocations—for we all have them—as spiritual warriors and prophets called to interfere. And to steer. To steer toward a “beloved community” that lives by conscience steeped in love for the least among us, and a “kingdom/queendom of God” marked by justice, truth and compassion. 

Let those values and that kind of spiritual-warrior strength prevail. Let us emulate MLK, Jr.

See Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.

See also Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.

Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.

Fox, Christian Mystics: 365 Readings and Meditations, pp. 203-217, 324-328.

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

To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click HERE.

Banner Image: Martin Luther King Jr., center front, leads the 1963 March on Washington, with several other civil rights leaders on the front line. Photo from the Center for Jewish History. Wikimedia Commons.

Queries for Contemplation

How are you allowing MLK Jr.’s life and death, teachings and example, to inspire you on this fateful beginning of a new administration?

Recommended Reading

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

Fox’s spirituality weds the healing and liberation found in North American Creation Spirituality and in South American Liberation Theology. Creation Spirituality challenges readers of every religious and political persuasion to unite in a new vision through which we learn to honor the earth and the people who inhabit it as the gift of a good and just Creator.
“A watershed theological work that offers a common ground for religious seekers and activists of all stripes.” — Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice.
“I am reading Liberating Gifts for the People of the Earth by Matt Fox.  He is one that fills my heart and mind for new life in spite of so much that is violent in our world.” ~ Sister Dorothy Stang.

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice

In A Spirituality Named Compassion, Matthew Fox delivers a profound exploration of the meaning and practice of compassion. Establishing a spirituality for the future that promises personal, social, and global healing, Fox marries mysticism with social justice, leading the way toward a gentler and more ecological spirituality and an acceptance of our interdependence which is the substratum of all compassionate activity.
“Well worth our deepest consideration…Puts compassion into its proper focus after centuries of neglect.” –The Catholic Register

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

Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations

As Matthew Fox notes, when an aging Albert Einstein was asked if he had any regrets, he replied, “I wish I had read more of the mystics earlier in my life.” The 365 writings in Christian Mystics represent a wide-ranging sampling of these readings for modern-day seekers of all faiths — or no faith. The visionaries quoted range from Julian of Norwich to Martin Luther King, Jr., from Thomas Merton to Dorothee Soelle and Thomas Berry.
“Our world is in crisis, and we need road maps that can ground us in wisdom, inspire us to action, and help us gather our talents in service of compassion and justice. This revolutionary book does just that. Matthew Fox takes some of the most profound spiritual teachings of the West and translates them into practical daily mediations. Study and practice these teachings. Take what’s in this book and teach it to the youth because the new generation cannot afford to suffer the spirit and ethical illiteracy of the past.” — Adam Bucko, spiritual activist and co-founder of the Reciprocity Foundation for Homeless Youth.

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.