This is a summary of the previous week’s daily meditations. You can click on any title to view the DM in its entirety. Also, remember that each Monday DM continues to offer a video teaching by Matthew Fox. Thank you for your loyal readership.
March 2, 2026: Kaira Jewel: The Role of Community in Practicing Resistance & Compassion
Today we feature, with her permission, a shortened version of a recent essay from Kaira Jewel’s Substack.* Kaira Jewel lived for sixteen years as a nun in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village. Now, she and Father Adam Bucko are married and are co-spiritual leaders. She is author of the very timely book, We Were Made for These Times: 10 Lessons for Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption. One question she is often asked is: How do we practice compassion toward those who cause harm, especially when that harm is directed at us or our communities? She replies: This is not a philosophical question. It is lived, embodied, and raw. It touches our histories of oppression, our ancestral grief, and the very real dangers we face today…. In the Plum Village tradition, we are taught that compassion is the best protection. This teaching does not ask us to be passive, naïve, or self-sacrificing. It asks us to be wise, embodied, and rooted in reality…. When we begin to return to our bodies and allow ourselves to feel what has been unfelt, something shifts. We become more present. More human. Less reactive.
March 3, 2026: The Black Madonna, Icon of Resistance, Mother of Chaos
Matthew received an invitation from Christena Cleveland, author of God Is a Black Woman, to offer a blurb about her new book that comes out this fall, called The Black Madonna: Icon of Resistance & Nourisher of Souls. Here is an excerpt of what Matthew wrote: I count this among the most important, substantive, and insightful books ever written on the Black Madonna. It represents a new stage in Marian theology, and appropriately, it comes from the pen of a Black woman who is eager to move beyond a stale, flat, exclusively white and patriarchal version of God.…The Black Madonna, in choosing Christena to relay her story, has chosen wisely and astutely. Christena is a first-class storyteller, and the Black Madonna has many powerful stories to tell.
March 4, 2026: Dorothy Day: An Incarnated Icon of Resistance
In a recent gathering headed by Kaira Jewel and Adam Bucko, they interviewed Orbis editor Robert Ellsberg about Catholic activist, Dorothy Day. Robert lived with Dorothy for the last five years of her life, and when she was slowing down physically, she entrusted him with her newspaper, the Catholic Worker, though he was not yet a Catholic at that time. He cites a phrase he heard frequently from Dorothy that “all my life I was haunted by God.” In his Substack HERE, Adam Bucko offers a powerful summary of Dorothy’s life, He says: For Dorothy, feeding the hungry and sheltering the unhoused were not charitable expressions added onto faith. They were its measure. She believed we are responsible for one another, that no one is outside the circle of concern. Holiness, in her world, meant shared life with those on the margins and a refusal to cooperate with systems that degrade human dignity or sanctify violence.
March 5, 2026: Dorothy Day on Love & Action as a Harsh & Dreadful Thing
Dorothy Day was often arrested and imprisoned for her protesting. And, at least once, her civil disobedience landed her in solitary confinement. While there, she had a lot of time to reflect. She said: Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit—these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me.… I was the oppressed…the drug addict…the shoplifter…. The blackness of hell was all about me. The sorrows of the world encompassed me. I was like one gone down into the pit. Hope had forsaken me. I was the mother whose child had been raped and slain. I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own heart every abomination. Says she: We are not expecting utopia here on this earth. But God meant things to be much easier than we have made them. A man has a natural right to food, clothing, and shelter.
March 6, 2026: Dorothy Day & Thomas Merton on Indigenous Wisdom
Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day were good friends. Merton frequently contributed articles to Dorothy’s newspaper The Catholic Worker, including an essay on “The Root of War Is Fear” in October, 1961. Dorothy Day wrote the Foreword to Merton’s book Ishi Means Man which is a meditation on the Native American plight at the hands of European Americans. Merton begins his essay on Ishi, the last survivor of the Yahi people, this way: Genocide is a new word. Perhaps the word is new because technology has now got into the game of destroying whole races at once. The destruction of races is not new—just easier. Merton praises indigenous ritual for accomplishing a full integration into a cosmic system which was at once perfectly sacred and perfectly worldly….One fell in step with the dance of the universe, the liturgy of the stars.
March 7, 2026: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and the Power of Ritual
Merton criticized missionaries for failing to grasp the beauty of Mayan rituals. He understands that ceremony or ritual should connect the human to the cosmos and how it helps us move from an ego consciousness to a larger awareness, one might say from self to Self. Matthew notes that a sense of belonging seems hard to come by in our time when so much time is spent on computers and so little time in community or community celebration. Also, we have been slow to ritualize and celebrate our connection to the vast universe being discovered in our time.
Banner image: Powwows provide a wonderful opportunity for Native people to gather and celebrate their culture. Photo by Daniel Hartwig on Flickr.
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
A Way To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings in Creation Spirituality.
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation
3 thoughts on “Week of 3/2-7/2026: Community, Ritual & Resistance”
Assume good for the heart y soul
I am blessed by this weeks meditation. Filling my soul with hope and joy. Thank you
I wanted to recommend an excellent spiritual essay by Laura A. Weber, Ph.D., “Teilhard’s Not-So-Hidden God,” found in Fred R. Gustafson’s edited book, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Carl Gustav Jung Side by Side” (2015). She concluded her essay with the following words:
“As his own consciousness was evolving about the sacredness of physicality, so his magnum opus, “The Phenomenon of Man,” reflected this awareness, and celebrated it. “The Phenomenon of Man” took two years to write, and remained unpublished until after his death.
The work explores the meaning and significance of humanity in the cosmic process of evolution, in which the cosmos is ultimately transformed by the power of Love and leads to union. Tracing the evolution of humanity from microorganisms to homo-sapiens, to the advent of the Christ, Teilhard takes on the basic philosophical dilemma of “the One and the many” and postulates that as diverse and multiple as organic matter appears in its various forms throughout the universe, its animating energy forms matter into a collective, complex unity”…
The mystics describe Our Ongoing Eternal Source’s Co-Creation Cosmos as LOVING DIVERSE ONENESS….