Week of 8/11-16/2025: Gaza, Shame, & Lion’s Energy

This is a weekly summary of the previous week’s Daily Meditations. Three of them are penned by Matthew Fox (MF), and three by Gianluigi Gugliermetto (GG). On Monday, we will also continue to offer a video teaching by Matthew.

August 11, 2025: World Lion Day 2025 (MF)
World Lion Day was August 10th, and Matthew believes lions are worthy of being celebrated. Lions represent nobility, beauty, grace, but they can also be fierce and terrifying. Matthew had a rather profound experience while present at Joanna Macy’s deathbed. While standing there, he invoked many holy beings: the Buddha, the lineage of Dalai Lamas, Thich Nhat Hanh, St. Francis, and Hildegard. When he got to Hildegard, Joanna rose from her bed with a shout. Intuitively, Matthew added, “Hildegard, a lion….” Then he told Joanna that she was one, too. In both Joanna and Hildegard, there was a deep strength and purpose that would not be deterred. The lioness is a symbol of the Magna Mater, the Great Mother.*  Surely Joanna and Hildegard were about the Magna Mater as well.

August 12, 2025: Evil on the Rise and on the Table: A Call for Lion Energy (MF)
In yesterday’s DM, Matthew referred to Hildegard of Bingen as a lion. This is why: She didn’t mince words, even when talking to emperors, popes, abbots and archbishops. Matthew shares 50 of them in his book, Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works plus Letters and Songs. She told the emperor he was “infant and a madman.” She said that the greedy were “snakelike” and “hellish.” We need this kind of courageous lion energy today as we fight the great evil afoot in our world.

August 13, 2025: Flaming Torches and Flickering Lights (GG)
In the heat of the summer, GG often retreats to his furnished basement in order to do his work. While there, he found that he couldn’t stop thinking of the people in Gaza, living in scorching heat, running from one place to another in order to get food to survive, without clean water to drink, and hoping not to be killed in the process. It has been calculated that the level of destruction in Gaza surpasses many times that caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many prominent Jewish and Israeli intellectuals have said that Israel is killing itself while committing the most horrific crimes. Ariel Toaff, professor emeritus of history at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel, wrote a few days ago: I am not going to talk of the moral image of Israel, because it has been long lost. Gaza might become the tomb not of Netanyahu and his crazy followers, but ours. And we did nothing to stop him. We are, in fact, his accomplices. The right yet cruel punishment will reach us eventually. The dead in Gaza, the women and the children, will run after us with their flaming torches right to the gates of hell.

August 14, 2025: Awareness of Tragedy (GG)
Tragedy is a strong collective archetype that, when it takes hold of a group of people, is very hard to budge. Evil people who are keen on taking advantage of others will exploit any weakness and lead that group toward destruction. In a tragedy, before the final catastrophe, there are mostly frightened people who try to figure out how to get out of the trap, but fear hampers their ability. That’s why the help from outsiders who are compassionate people can be very valuable. In the early 1900’s, many Zionists earnestly believed they were going to create a new society free from persecution and oppression. Most of them had not a clue about the colonial and racist nature of this project. Today, as always, our job as moral and spiritual people is that of taking sides against injustice.

August 15, 2025: The Role of Shame (GG)
As we reflect on the state of the world, we cannot help but address the situation of Donald Trump. Many psychologists and psychiatrists have asserted that his words and behaviors clearly and unmistakably show that he suffers from malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Narcissists repress feelings of guilt and shame and instead project them outwards in a desperate effort to free themselves from them. The question, of course, is how was such a broken man allowed to gain so much power? GG’s friend, Fr. Richard Rubin, points to the dynamics of shame and guilt, and how Christianity could be understood as an attempt to “lift the shame” (the inappropriate kind of shame) from people’s hearts. Dying on a cross in Roman times was a shameful death, but GG is convinced that early Christians “appropriated” such shame. By consciously placing “the crucified” as the foundation of their community (see 1 Corinthians 1), they proclaimed that the most humiliated are actually more than worthy.

The Gaza Horror and Israel’s & America’s Decline in Morality
Israel is not today the country it was in 1961, when Adolf Eichmann, often called the “architect of the Final Solution,” was captured, in spite of all the horrors that he perpetrated, there were elements of humanity in the way he was treated. But there is NO humanity present in the way Israel is treating the citizens of Gaza—avenging the killing of 1,250 Jews by killing 64,000 Palestinians. The oppressed have become the oppressors. And the United States is complicit. Not only Donald Trump but President Biden, too, failed to check Netanyahu’s revenge in Gaza in any meaningful way. It is our duty, as people of conscience, to speak up.

Related Readings by Matthew Fox

Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works: With Letters and Songs

Today there are many websites and Hildegard groups that celebrate and honor Hildegard’s teachings, philosophy, art, and music. Author Matthew Fox writes in Hildegard of Bingen about this amazing woman and what we can learn from her. In an era when women were marginalized, Hildegard was an outspoken, controversial figure. Yet so visionary was her insight that she was sought out by kings, popes, abbots, and bishops for advice. A sixteenth century follower of Martin Luther called her “the first Protestant” because of her appeals to reform the church. As a writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, healer, artist, feminist, and student of science, Hildegard was a pioneer in many fields in her day.

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.

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

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

*See J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, pp. 180-182.
Banner image: “A pair of mating lions, male and female, spotted in Phinda Private Game Reserve.” Image by Fr Lawrence Lew, OP. Flickr.