Dear Friends,
As we announced in yesterday’s DM, we are beginning the eighth year of Daily Meditations this week and celebrating seven years of bringing our “pray the news” reflections free to the public. Today and tomorrow, we will be reminding you about this anniversary and inviting your donations to help keep the DM serving others.
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I woke up this morning with a hangover still from the obscene SCOTUS decision to cavalierly throw out the 1965 Voting Rights Act. An accomplishment that cost the life of Dr. King and 39 other people of spirit and courage and many thousands of others who marched, filled jails, underwent police beatings, fire hoses, and attack dogs to see that the Jim Crow era came to an end.
As I wrote in my DM the day following, the current perverse unsupreme court chose to piss on the graves of these martyrs rather than support a better America, one that lived up to the values enunciated by our founders but rarely implemented: That “all men and women are created equal” and share “inalienable rights” including the right for all Americans to be represented fairly and for their vote to count.
Instead, we now have a deluge of laws being passed by the confederate south bent on expelling representation equally from all sectors of America. A rotten antichrist smell arises from this unsupreme court. Thank you, Chief Justice Roberts.
Creation spirituality has something to say about these times. The final chapter of my book, One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths—is named “Spiritual Warriorhood.” I thought I had finished the book with the previous chapter on “Service and Compassion (including Justice and Celebration),” when it came to me that there can be no justice and compassion without inner strength, spiritual warriorhood.
And that is where we find ourselves today after SCOTUS’s infamous decision covered over as usual with legal gobbledygook and BS. The Virginia decision by four judges to override 1,604,000 voters who sought to fight fire with fire when it came to overt gerrymandering adds to the misery.
Ours are times demanding the healthy masculine response of warriorhood. All spiritual traditions underscore the importance of arousing and employing the spiritual warrior in each of us.
The Jewish medieval mystical work, The Zohar, says: Now since a person’s real work in this world is the work of the Blessed Holy One, he or she must be as strong as a lion on every side so that the Other Side will not overpower him or her or be able to seduce him or her.
One wonders how many current court justices have been seduced by lies and financial bon bons to make the decisions they have made.
Thomas Berry comments on the role of spiritual warriorhood among Native Americans. The Indians have never accepted human life as ordinary, as something that can be managed in a controlled or painless manner. They realized that life tests the deepest qualities with the human personality, qualities that emerge in heroic combat not merely with others, but also with oneself and with the powers of the universe. The sacred function of enemies was to assist one another to the heroic life by challenge, even by the challenge of death.
St. Thomas Aquinas frequently invoked the teaching of the prophet Jeremiah, “the Lord is with me like a brave warrior.” Aquinas’s favorite virtue was magnanimity which urges us to “brave great dangers for great things, for instance the common welfare, justice, divine worship, and so forth.”
Rabbi Heschel calls on all people to be prophets: To do justice is what God demands of every person: it is the supreme commandment, and one that cannot be fulfilled vicariously.
Indeed, in Judaism the spiritual warrior is identified with the Messiah and in that vein, Christians apply that biblical term to Jesus in the Christmas midnight liturgy: When peaceful silence lay over all,…down from the heavens, from the royal throne leapt your all-powerful Word: into the heart of a doomed land the stern warrior leapt.
May we all be stern warriors and other Christs standing up for justice in these trying times.
Banner Image: The Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963. Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
Are you developing your “strong lion” and prophetic vocation at this time of increased antichrist energy vis a vis gerrymandering to expel from congress as many people of color as possible? Is your “brave warrior” alive and well and advancing in moral imagination and finding allies and community to work with?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths, pp. 404, 406, 408f., 411f.
“Spiritual Warrior” in The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors To Awaken the Sacred Masculine, pp. 77-104.
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ
Sins of the Spirit, Blessing of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision For a New Generation
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