In Saturday’s DM, we meditated on the role of the artist in naming our deepest concerns. We invoked the poetry of W. H. Auden writing about refugees on the cusp of WWII, and shared paintings by Jennifer Hereth naming the plight of refugees in 2025.
Included in Jennifer’s most recent book called my brush—my voice is also a section of paintings entitled “How Hard Women Work in the World.” For example, a picture of a woman from Guatemala with a “big red bag on her head like a huge heart.”
We encounter an African woman with a huge bundle on her head and a Mexican woman performing her daily task of peddling goods.
It is a wonderful thing to honor one another’s work! And one’s own. The Via Transformativa is all about our work. Our work is how we usher the spirit into the world, into history. What is our vocation, our calling? Why are we here? What are we leaving behind?
Otto Rank defines the artist as “one who wants to leave behind a gift.” Do you want to leave a gift behind? Then you are an artist.
What about the gift we leave behind as citizens? To be adult is to be a citizen—not just of one’s country but of the world. But our work and gift-giving begins locally. We are part of larger social circles that need good laws so the people and the common good may thrive rather than just a few powerful ones who call all the shots.
Abraham Lincoln called that a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” We the people need carefully chosen leaders who themselves work for the common good.
In all this, artists assist us insofar as they call us, whether by poetry, painting, stories or any other means, to our better selves, our deepest and truest selves.
The artist inside each one of us also calls us to dwell in our deepest values. All this is honored in the practice of art as meditation. First, as French philosopher Gabriel Marcel reminds us, just to respond to art is itself to be an artist. To listen to music, or read or hear poetry, or enter into a painting, is itself an artistic act.
But art as meditation is also to get in touch with what is deepest within ourselves and to give birth to it. This kind of centering process is part of being a prophet, as psychologists Ornstein and Naranjo point out in their work on the Psychology of Meditation. Art as meditation “is the way of the prophets,” they declare.
As Meister Eckhart put it, “what is true cannot come from outside in but must come from inside out and pass through an inner form.” Rabbi Heschel, in his classic book on The Prophets, says: The empathy of the prophet is “the opposite of emotional solitariness….Not mere feeling, but action, will mitigate the world’s misery, society’s injustice, or the people’s alienation from God.”
Prophets speak less from an inner peace and calmness than from being “charged with agitation, anguish, and a spirit of nonacceptance.” Is that energy not prevalent today?
Taking on evil demands a burning heart. The source of evil is not in passion, in the throbbing heart, but rather in hardness of heart, in callousness and insensitivity…We are stirred by their passion and enlivened imagination….It is to the imagination and the passions that the prophets speak, rather than aiming at the cold approbation of the mind.
Nietzsche talks about a “kind of consecration of passion” that the prophet undergoes.
See Matthew Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet.
And Fox, “Deep Ecumenism, Ecojustice, and Art as Meditation,” in Fox, Wrestling with the Prophets: Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life, pp. 215-242.Pa
And Fox, Original Blessing, pp. 188-200.
And Fox, The Reinvention of Work.
And Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
And Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click HERE.
Banner Image: Jennifer Hereth, portrait of a Guatemalan woman at work, from “Women Work So Hard.” Used with permission.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you “consecrate your passion” with the help of art as meditation as other prophets do? How does art, your own and others, keep you alive and vital and involved in a positive way in times of evil onslaught and dark nights of society and our species as well as our souls?
Recommended Reading
Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet
Because creativity is the key to both our genius and beauty as a species but also to our capacity for evil, we need to teach creativity and to teach ways of steering this God-like power in directions that promote love of life (biophilia) and not love of death (necrophilia). Pushing well beyond the bounds of conventional Christian doctrine, Fox’s focus on creativity attempts nothing less than to shape a new ethic.
“Matt Fox is a pilgrim who seeks a path into the church of tomorrow. Countless numbers will be happy to follow his lead.” –Bishop John Shelby Spong, author, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Living in Sin
In one of his foundational works, Fox engages with some of history’s greatest mystics, philosophers, and prophets in profound and hard-hitting essays on such varied topics as Eco-Spirituality, AIDS, homosexuality, spiritual feminism, environmental revolution, Native American spirituality, Christian mysticism, Art and Spirituality, Art as Meditation, Interfaith or Deep Ecumenism and more.
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
The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time
Thomas Aquinas said, “To live well is to work well,” and in this bold call for the revitalization of daily work, Fox shares his vision of a world where our personal and professional lives are celebrated in harmony–a world where the self is not sacrificed for a job but is sanctified by authentic “soul work.”
“Fox approaches the level of poetry in describing the reciprocity that must be present between one’s inner and outer work…[A]n important road map to social change.” ~~ National Catholic Reporter
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Fox’s spirituality weds the healing and liberation found in North American Creation Spirituality and in South American Liberation Theology. Creation Spirituality challenges readers of every religious and political persuasion to unite in a new vision through which we learn to honor the earth and the people who inhabit it as the gift of a good and just Creator.
“A watershed theological work that offers a common ground for religious seekers and activists of all stripes.” — Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice.
“I am reading Liberating Gifts for the People of the Earth by Matt Fox. He is one that fills my heart and mind for new life in spite of so much that is violent in our world.” ~ Sister Dorothy Stang.
Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality
Selected with an Introduction by Charles Burack
To encapsulate the life and work of Matthew Fox would be a daunting task for any save his colleague Dr. Charles Burack, who had the full cooperation of his subject. Fox has devoted 50 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship. His more than 40 books, translated into 78 languages, are inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and have awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. Essential Writings begins by exploring the influences on Fox’s life and spirituality, then presents selections from all Fox’s major works in 10 sections.
“The critical insights, the creative connections, the centrality of Matthew Fox’s writings and teaching are second to none for the radical renewal of Christianity.” ~~ Richard Rohr, OFM.
