In his book, Reimagining the California Missions: A Former Franciscan Friar’s Search for the Truth, award-winning journalist and ex-Franciscan Mark Day has composed a valuable, readable, succinct but substantive summary of much of the rich scholarship that has emerged in our time to tell the truth of the California Missions.
This truth has been covered up to serve the interests of those making money on the tourist postcard version of history propagated by capitalist propaganda, religious lies and dangerous theology.
Day draws on a mountain of evidence from serious sociologists, historians, fact finders and leaders of the California tribes to tell the authentic and tragic story of the Missions.
Day offers many concrete ways that non-Indians can support the Indian cause including asking them to take over the missions so that the truth can finally be told and sentimentalisms be put to rest. He publishes Governor Newsom’s public apology to the native peoples for this “genocide, pure and simple.”
All Californians and indeed all Americans should know the truth and the price paid for the colonization that the mission system wrought. Someone once said, “only the truth will make you free.” Let us learn from the sins of our fathers in order not to repeat them.
The late contemplative and prophetic monk, Thomas Merton, who most likely died a martyr, had plenty to say about the genocide toward indigenous peoples in America—and the friars’ role in it all. 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.
The year he died, 1968, Merton wrote a major poem, The Geography of Lograre, where he spoke of “Redneck captains with whips/ Fire in their fingers.” And this:
Friars behind every rock every tree
Doing business
Bargaining for our souls
Book burners and hangmen.
In his book on Ishi Means Man, which included a forward by Dorothy Day, Merton celebrates the wisdom of the indigenous peoples including their ceremonies of Sun Dancing, fasting and vision quests.
And how their ceremonies celebrate the full integration “into a cosmic system which was at once perfectly sacred and perfectly worldly…that taught people a kind of ‘self-realization’” that consisted not of ego dominance but of a “network of relationships in which one had a place in the mesh.” Where “one fell in step with the dance of the universe, the liturgy of the stars.”
He criticized the “reservation existence” which Native people were subject to as being “as close to non-existence as we can get him without annihilating him altogether.” Colonialism teaches that native peoples are “squatters on land which God had assigned to us.”
Merton gets to the heart of the matter when he reports that “we have not understood their playful modes. We have fought Eros.” Yes, Western culture and religion have been fighting Eros forever. It is afraid of the Via Positiva, forgetting that our Bible defines wisdom as Eros– “This is wisdom, to love life.” (Eccl. 4:12)
Patriarchy and capitalism indeed fight Eros reducing Eros to pornography, carrying on sadism and cruelty such as current campaigns, rounding up immigrants of color and dumping them in Dachau-like containment camps in Florida.
And God knows where else now that a supine congress has passed a bill promising $45 billion for more such detention camps. Sort of déjà vu, isn’t it?
See Matthew Fox, A Way To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey, pp. 195-200.
And Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society.
And Fox, Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election.
And Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.
And Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
And Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
Banner Image: Indigenous People’s Day, 2020, Mission San Rafael Arcángel: local Coast Miwoks and allies rallied in front of the statue of Junípero Serra at Saint Raphael’s Catholic Church in Marin County, CA, calling for the removal of the statue and acknowledgment of Serra’s brutal legacy. Photo by Peg Hunter on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Does your spiritual practice culminate in “falling in step with the dance of the universe, the liturgy of the stars”? Do you sense that much of today’s politics nationally and internationally is one of “fighting Eros”? Do you agree with the biblical teaching that wisdom means loving life (and Jesus: “I come that you may have life and have it in abundance”)?
Recommended Reading
A Way to God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey
In A Way to God, Fox explores Merton’s pioneering work in interfaith, his essential teachings on mixing contemplation and action, and how the vision of Meister Eckhart profoundly influenced Merton in what Fox calls his Creation Spirituality journey.
“This wise and marvelous book will profoundly inspire all those who love Merton and want to know him more deeply.” — Andrew Harvey, author of The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society
Visionary theologian and best-selling author Matthew Fox offers a new theology of evil that fundamentally changes the traditional perception of good and evil and points the way to a more enlightened treatment of ourselves, one another, and all of nature. In comparing the Eastern tradition of the 7 chakras to the Western tradition of the 7 capital sins, Fox allows us to think creatively about our capacity for personal and institutional evil and what we can do about them.
“A scholarly masterpiece embodying a better vision and depth of perception far beyond the grasp of any one single science. A breath-taking analysis.” — Diarmuid O’Murchu, author of Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election
Matthew Fox tells us that he had always shied away from using the term “Anti-Christ” because it was so often used to spread control and fear. However, given today’s rise of authoritarianism and forces of democracide, ecocide, and christofascism, he turns the tables in this book employing the archetype for the cause of justice, democracy, and a renewed Earth and humanity.
From the Foreword: If there was ever a time, a moment, for examining the archetype of the Antichrist, it is now…Read this book with an open mind. Good and evil are real forces in our world. ~~ Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Conversations with the Divine.
For immediate access to Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election, order the e-book with 10 full-color prints from Amazon HERE.
To get a print-on-demand paperback copy with black & white images, order from Amazon HERE or IUniverse HERE.
To receive a limited-edition, full-color paperback copy, order from MatthewFox.org HERE.
Order the audiobook HERE for immediate download.
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
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.
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
