In Saturday’s DM, we reflected on “Keeping the Heart Bright in Times of Heavy News,” and in Monday’s DM and video, we considered how to “Keep Our Hearts & Souls Alive, Fresh, Young, Green & Inspired amidst Dark Times.” In doing so, we shared practices of responding to life by way of the Via Positiva, Negativa, and Creativa.
Today, let us consider how the Via Transformativa is our prayer also, for it too is a “radical response to life,” and is born from our depths and ground. The VT gathers, of course, the previous three paths of Joy and Gratitude, silence, emptying, and entering into grief and loss, and our creativity.
All four paths constitute a radical response to life and, taken together, are the response we give on encountering the “Ground of being” and the “Ground of our own being.” Meister Eckhart tells us, “God’s being and mine are the same”: in encountering one, we encounter the other.
All this is the mystic at work in us; we taste the divine—sometimes as Light and sometimes as Darkness. The darkness names not only pain, suffering, and grief but also the mystery and silence and apophatic divinity–a “superessential darkness” so deep that it “has no name and will never be given a name.” (Eckhart)
We bring all these experiences with us to the Via Transformativa, which names the prophet coming to birth in us. “The prophet is the mystic in action,” as William Hocking puts it. The prophet is “one who interferes,” as Rabbi Heschel put it.
All of us are meant to be prophets, just as all of us are meant to be mystics. Growing up spiritually means being true to both our mystical and our prophetic vocations. It is in our prophetic vocation that we “pray with our feet,” as Rabbi Heschel explained to his young daughter after returning home from marching with King and others at Selma.
Praying with our feet is what the nineteen Buddhist monks currently trekking for peace on their 2,000-mile march from Texas to Washington, DC, are doing.
Praying with our feet includes marching in memory of Renee Good and protesting against ICE, who are disrupting our communities and murdering our citizens in a wild spasm of deporting citizens and non-citizens alike.
Praying with our feet also means walking into the library to learn more about protest and non-violence in American history, past and present.
Praying with our feet also means to run for office from school boards to mayorships to congress and senate—and supporting those who do and holding them to account for values that matter, such as respect, justice, truth-telling, compassion, non-violence, and kindness. And what an oath to support the Constitution means.
Praying with our feet means to make incarnate the son and daughter of God found in all of us to bring about a new kind of “kingdom” or democracy that actually works for all and not just the richest few. A government, therefore, of, by, and for the people, where “people” does not mean just the two-legged people but all God’s people, all creatures with whom we share this planet Earth, our common home.
To protest is to pray; to resist is to pray; to say “No!” in the most creative and effective ways possible is to pray. It is to say “thank you” for the earth and air and soil and sunshine we have by defending it. Our “No!” comes from a very deep place. It calls for courage and bravery and community sharing from which we get ever more strength and courage to take on powers that be, and speak truth to power.
A Catholic sister I know told me her most profound prayer was being carted off to prison for protesting non-violently at a nuclear weapons factory.
The Via Transformativa comes from a very deep place–as do the other three paths. It is just as much prayer as contemplation. And just as demanding. In dark times like ours, one does not have to invent ascetic practices in the basement. Just to stand up and be counted is demanding enough to bring the depths and Ground out of oneself.
Banner Image: Some of the signs seen from the street at the Palm Springs rally of 1-11-26 against ICE and their tactics against immigrants. Photo posted by Don Barrett on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
How do you resist and interfere and practice your “No!” as a prayer?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
“Jesus and Democracy,” in Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ, pp. 31-50
Prayer: A Radical Response To Life
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality, pp. 250-306
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision For a New Generation by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox
Hildegard of Bingen, A Saint for Our Times: Unleashing Her Power in the 21st Century
Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Time
2 thoughts on “Resilience, Resistance, Interfering & Practicing Our “No” As a Prayer”
I must admit that being an elderly person, the fourth Via Transformativa is the most challenging on my personal spiritual journey, because it’s mainly an ongoing deepening of my inner spiritual transformation of Being open to the Sacredness of the Divine Spirit/Flow of LOVE~LIGHT~LIFE… PRESENT within and around me in my humanly mundane but Sacred eternal spirit daily life alone and With Other Spiritual Beings in All physical/nonphysical dimensions of Our Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth and Evolving Co-Creation ETERNALLY LOVING DIVERSE ONENESS COSMOS….
Thank you. We will need all of our strength and courage to keep showing up in whatever way is possible., and we need a community to help support us in performing radically loving and peaceful actions. I wish we could bring back the flash mobs around the areas that ICE is targeting. But this would probably be too risky for the performers and the crowd?