Dear Friends,
We hope that you are safe and well!
Today's Meditation features Matthew Fox comparing Celtic and African spiritualities seeing the universe as already sacred. He points out that this has important implications for how we act in the world.
We invite you to join us as we commit ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in healthcare, in the workplace, in the Church--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.
In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that in God’s economy of abundance, when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.
We hope and pray that you and your loved ones experience genuine peace of mind and heart, and remain in good health during this challenging time.
As Summer unfolds, may you find peace, healing, hope, and the infusion of joy in your life!
With our love and care,
Ron & Jean
MEDITATION 404: Matthew Fox: African and Celtic traditions teach us: the Universe is already Sacred
The Creation Spirituality Lineage Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers
Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox
Celtic and African Creation Stories
June 26, 2021
We have been considering creation stories from the Bible, Hindu, Buddhist and Celtic sources, the latter embellished richly by the Catholic, Celtic monk Thomas Merton.
Of course, the Celtic tradition nurtured the Rhineland mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi (the Celts settled into northern Italy after all), Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich.
Francis, lover of all creation. Detail of mural, Saint Francis of Assisi Church, Coyoacan, Federal District, Mexico. Photo by Enrique López-Tamayo Biosca , Wikimedia Commons.
We find a parallel understanding of the "sacrament of nature" in African spiritual traditions. African-American philosopher Dona Richards lays out the African experience of Creation this way:
The African universe is conceived as a unified spiritual totality. We speak of the universe as ‘cosmos’ and we mean that all being within it is organically interrelated and interdependent…. The essence of the African cosmos is spiritual reality.*
The 2014 Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition African Cosmos: Stellar Arts was the first major exhibition to explore African cultural astronomy and its intersection with traditional and contemporary African arts.
She astutely points out the differences between this ancient and holistic worldview and that of European philosophies when she writes that
…both spiritual and material beings are necessary in order for there to be a meaningful reality. Enlightenment and the acquisition of wisdom and knowledge depend to a significant degree on being able to apprehend spirit in matter.
This crucial difference in European and African thought helps to explain the specialness of African spirituality.
Of course, when she is speaking of dualistic European philosophers she is speaking of the dominant, patriarchal philosophical and theological tradition. She is not speaking of the creation-centered tradition that took on the dualism of Plato, Augustine, and others. Hildegard, Francis, Aquinas, Eckhart and Julian stood up to dualism and found the sacred and the ‘ground of being’ within creation itself.
Clearly there are deep connections to be made between the Celtic and creation-centered spirituality of the West and the insight and wisdom of the African lineage.
In the African tradition, the universe is already sacred and its holy Creation continues to unfold. Says Richards:
African #Spirituality Explained by Zimbabwean culture expert Pathisa Nyathi. Video by EYEGAMBIA.
The spiritual is the foundation of all being because the universe is sacred. The universe was created (is continually ‘recreated’) by a divine act.
The fact that the universe is continually created and recreated, is intrinsic to today’s science and to all those traditions that do not stand on dualism.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. intuited how racism and injustice stand on a foundation of dualism when he wrote this:
In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: ‘Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.’
President Barack Obama introduces the first Martin Luther King Day of Service. Video by The Obama White House
And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other-worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.
Notice how King lays the notion that the gospel is not concerned with social issues at the feet of a dualistic theology that separates body from soul and sacred from secular. To ignore the body is to ignore the body politic and the suffering in the body politic. King rightly points out that these dualisms are "un-Biblical."