This is a weekly summary of the previous week’s Daily Meditations. Some are penned by Matthew Fox (MF), and some by Gianluigi Gugliermetto (GG). You can click on the title of a DM in order to view the original piece in its entirety. Also, please note, we will continue to offer a video teaching by Matthew each Monday.
August 25, 2025: Joanna Macy on Original Blessing: A Practice in Deep Ecumenism (MF)
On Saturday, there was an online memorial service for Joanna Macy, with over 1000 participating. Matthew shared excerpts of a letter Joanna sent him over 20 years ago about Matthew’s book Original Blessing. She called it a revolutionary event in spirituality. She said, OB reminds me of the Dharma wheel because it brings a similar shift of focus—a radical shift from substance to process. The book suggests that we are not entities to be perfected so much as processes to be valued and enlivened. Matthew concluded his talk with a Buddhism-inspired prayer: May all creatures be happy. May all creatures be saved. May all creatures be acknowledged as original blessings. May we all be grateful for our existence. And act like it. Amen.
August 26, 2025: Psilocybin & the Brain: A Doctor Reports on Science & Mysticism (MF)
Last week, Matthew and GG discussed how some clergy had positive experiences when participating in a guided LSD experience. Matthew is sad that so many in our culture feel they can’t experience transcendence unless they utilize psychoactive substances. Matthew believes that spiritual rituals can achieve the same end. And that’s one of the reasons Matthew has been involved in the Cosmic Mass movement for 30 some years. However, there can be a place for substances like psilocybin. For instance, one 67-year-old patient, living with metastatic cancer, was very fearful “of nonexistence, of the end.” But “mushrooms taught him how to die.” The patient said it was “the most real thing he’d ever experienced.” Dr. Michael Hunter says that psychoactive mushrooms can “unhook” the brain, and when that happens “the self softens — and suffering, sometimes, dissolves.”
August 27, 2025: Prayer and the Body, Part I (GG)
Western Christians, when they pray, tend to not be very embodied. But Saint Dominic (founder of the Order of Preachers, aka the Dominicans) modeled many different embodied ways to pray. Reportedly, Dominic prayed almost constantly. His “nine ways of prayer” are presented in one 13th century booklet. For instance, he bowed profoundly before praying. Often he prostrated himself completely on the ground. Dominic used to genuflect and stand up repeatedly, hundreds of times in a row, while repeating sentences from the Psalms. Often he prayed standing motionless for long stretches of time, sweetly repeating to himself words from Scripture, but also opening his arms in a welcoming gesture. More rarely, Dominic prayed stretching his arms in the form of a cross. He also prayed while walking. There are so many ways to pray!
August 28, 2025: Prayer and the Body — Part 2 (GG)
A contemporary of Saint Dominic, even more radical in her bodily prayer, was Saint Christina, also called Christina the Astonishing. Christina was known for climbing up trees and staying there for long stretches of time, immersed in prayer. Sources explain her behavior by saying that she could not tolerate the stench of sin — both literally and figuratively. Like Dominic, Christina also prostrated herself in grief before altars within churches. Christina threw herself in rivers during winter and managed fire in her hands without getting burned. She ran in the fields and spent long stretches of time alone in the woods. At times, Christina prayed by spinning in a dervish kind of way. She was also known for her wondrous levitations, and she reportedly accompanied several souls from purgatory to heaven during her out-of-body travels. Clearly, St. Christina involved body, heart and mind when she prayed.
August 29, 2025: Supplications (MF)
Prayer is more than supplication. It can be thanksgiving, contemplation, lament, etc. Matthew likes to call prayer “an openness to life.” One reader privately took issue with that pronouncement, saying that prayer is more than openness, that prayer can change reality—not necessarily because there is a God who waits to hear supplications but because the world is made of subtle energetic fields which communicate with each other. As Westerners, we are going through a paradigm shift. Our understanding of the Divine has changed and will change. Thus, we’ll have even more debates on the meaning and effectiveness of all kinds of prayer in the next few centuries, if we survive our propensity for self-destruction.
August 30, 2025: Two Republican Presidents: “I am not a dictator.” “I am not a crook.” (MF)
This week our sitting president said at a most unusual cabinet meeting: “I am not a dictator.” Then he went on to say he could do whatever he wants as president and that “many” Americans want a dictator. His “I am not a dictator” sounds eerily similar to Nixon’s “I am not a crook.” Unfortunately, the checks and balances that were put in place by our founding fathers are not holding very well with bought justices on the Supreme Court and sychophantic Republicans in Congress who have completely lost not just their spine, but their soul. The first-ever Republican president Abraham Lincoln believed in democracy and said: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.” We’re getting scarily close. It’s time for all hands on deck to protect our democracy before it perishes.
Banner image: “The Praying Man.” Photo by Aina Vine on Unsplash
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
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
Prayer: A Radical Response to Life
How do prayer and mysticism relate to the struggle for social and ecological justice? Fox defines prayer as a radical response to life that includes our “Yes” to life (mysticism) and our “No” to forces that combat life (prophecy). How do we define adult prayer? And how—if at all—do prayer and mysticism relate to the struggle for social and ecological justice? One of Matthew Fox’s earliest books, originally published under the title On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear: Spirituality American Style, Prayer introduces a mystical/prophetic spirituality and a mature conception of how to pray. Called a “classic” when it first appeared, it lays out the difference between the creation spirituality tradition and the fall/redemption tradition that has so dominated Western theology since Augustine. A practical and theoretical book, it lays the groundwork for Fox’s later works. “One of the finest books I have read on contemporary spirituality.” – Rabbi Sholom A. Singer
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.
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
2 thoughts on “Week of 8/25-30/2025: Prayer, Psilocybin, & Original Blessing”
Namaste to All my Sisters & Brothers and spiritual beings/living creatures in All spiritual dimensions in the Sacredness of the Present Moment! 💜🙏
Amen. And thanks again to Matthew and GG for their wisdom and inspiration.