An homiletic treatise of the 1st century C.E. presents a list of ancestors who trusted in God since the origins of the world. All together they are called a νέφος μαρτύρων ὄγκον, that is, a great cloud of witnesses/martyrs (Hebrews 12:1), who are surrounding and supporting the present believers.
The word νέφος is usually translated as cloud, but here it is used to denote that one cannot see the edge of the cloud by which one is surrounded. This cloud, therefore, is better understood as a swarm of people who trusted in God throughout the centuries: there are so many of them that one cannot count them or even see through their throngs, provided that one is inside.
This image of the cloud/swarm has been foundational for the doctrine of the communion of saints. These are not only the deceased ones, or the very well known ones, let alone those elevated to the honor of the altar by some ecclesiastical authority.
There are plenty of living saints today by whom we should feel encouraged and supported.
Here is a list of saints that I haven’t met, except through the internet, and who are active today as we speak:
Sam Stein is a young New York Jew who grew up as a Zionist. He spent his gap year in the illegal settlement of Efrat, where he started to see the reality of the occupation with his own eyes. Since then, he moved to Israel, acquired Israeli citizenship, and became an anti-occupation activist. Since September 2024, he has chosen to live full time in a Palestinian village on the West Bank to offer physical help and a protective/witnessing presence, as he is the only Jew and Israeli living in the village.
Grace Lolim is a middle-aged Kenyan woman who decided to take matters into her hands in the year 2000 when the Borana people and Somali people were fighting in a region where her family members were at risk. She proposed herself as a peace mediator. Soon enough she started to employ teachings from both the Bible and the Quran in her peace work with regular people in her region as well as abroad (Rwanda). In 2013, she founded the Isiolo Gender Watch, an organization in the town of Isiolo, which promotes the rights of women, especially their presence in politics and all decision-making settings.
Mairead Corrigan Maguire is an elder who was awarded the Nobel Peace Price in 1967 for her effective peace work in Ireland, which began after three of her sister’s children were killed. Along the years, she has been active for peace causes in Myanmar, Turkey, China, Iraq, and beyond. As a Nobel Peace laureate, she protested and defended whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange; she was arrested in the U.S. at peace protests and has been harrassed by U.S. authorities on several occasions. At 81 years of age, she supported the March to Gaza of June 2025 with unwavering commitment and strength.
These three are regular people who started to act when something happened, hitting close to home. Just as regular people are those who push out of their own neighborhoods those pathetic ICE soldiers dressed in war gear. There are plenty of videos bearing witness to such resistance events, and the video-makers themselves are regular people.
My point is that we are surrounded by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We are not alone, we are surrounded by a great swarm/cloud of amazing individuals. When they see injustice, they don’t start a debate, they act. The edges of the cloud we cannot even see, if we start feeling each of them, and if we live inside the cloud itself.
When I feel alone in the battle, I start looking for them around me, as well as on the internet. I need to be embraced by them. With the first group, I connect and I try to create some local action; with the second group, I read their stories, listen to their voices, and I imbibe myself with their courage. This is the cloud of which I breathe the moisture, and that makes me alive.
See Matthew Fox, Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action
And Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation
And Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
And Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet
And Fox, Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality
And Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Banner Image: Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the angels and blessed souls in highest Heaven. “Paradiso,” Canto XXXI in the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri; illustration by Gustave Doré, 1892. Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you feel the cloud? If not, what can you do to feel it?
Recommended Reading
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action
By Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jen Listug
In the midst of global fire, earthquake and flood – as species are going extinct every day and national and global economies totter – the planet doesn’t need another church or religion. What it needs is a new Order, grounded in the Wisdom traditions of both East and West, including science and indigenous. An Order of the Sacred Earth united in one sacred vow: “I promise to be the best lover and defender of the Earth that I can be.”
Co-authored by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jennifer Berit Listug, with a forward by David Korten, this collection of essays by 21 spiritual visionaries including Brian Swimme, Mirabai Starr, Theodore Richards, and Kristal Parks marks the founding of the diverse and inclusive Order of the Sacred Earth, a community now evolving around the world.
“The Order of the Sacred Earth not only calls us home to our true nature as Earth, but also offers us invaluable guidance and company on the way.” ~~ Joanna Macy, environmental activist and author of Active Hope.
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation
Authors Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox encourage us to use our talents in service of compassion and justice and to move beyond our broken systems–economic, political, educational, and religious–discovering a spirituality that not only helps us to get along, but also encourages us to reevaluate our traditions, transforming them and in the process building a more sacred and just world. Incorporating the words of young activist leaders culled from interviews and surveys, the book provides a framework that is deliberately interfaith and speaks to our profound yearning for a life with spiritual purpose and for a better world.
“Occupy Spirituality is a powerful, inspiring, and vital call to embodied awareness and enlightened actions.”
~~ Julia Butterfly Hill, environmental activist and author of The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
In A Spirituality Named Compassion, Matthew Fox delivers a profound exploration of the meaning and practice of compassion. Establishing a spirituality for the future that promises personal, social, and global healing, Fox marries mysticism with social justice, leading the way toward a gentler and more ecological spirituality and an acceptance of our interdependence which is the substratum of all compassionate activity.
“Well worth our deepest consideration…Puts compassion into its proper focus after centuries of neglect.” –The Catholic Register
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
Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality
Matthew Fox renders Thomas Aquinas accessible by interviewing him and thus descholasticizing him. He also translated many of his works such as Biblical commentaries never before in English (or Italian or German of French). He gives Aquinas a forum so that he can be heard in our own time. He presents Thomas Aquinas entirely in his own words, but in a form designed to allow late 20th-century minds and hearts to hear him in a fresh way.
“The teaching of Aquinas comes through will a fullness and an insight that has never been present in English before and [with] a vital message for the world today.” ~ Fr. Bede Griffiths (Afterword).
Foreword by Rupert Sheldrake
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
