The Four Paths of Creation Spirituality are themselves spiritual practices that lead to bringing compassion into the world. Not compassion understood as pity or handing crumbs from a table, but compassion understood as playing out the habit of the universe we call “interdependence.”
As Meister Eckhart put it, “what happens to another, whether it be a joy or a sorrow, happens to me.” Today’s science fully endorses that statement of interdependence, insofar as interdependence is seen as a “law” or habit of the universe. It’s how things work and hold together.
Eckhart also says, speaking from the prophetic tradition, that “compassion means justice.”
Spiritual practices that lead up to compassion and justice include the Via Positiva—falling in love with existence, its joys and beauty, wonder and awe. To “fall in love at least three times per day.”
The Via Negativa includes practicing emptying and silence and stillness. “Be still and learn that I am God,” as the psalmist puts it. In the stillness we hear the Word or Wisdom or Divine or Christ speaking to us.
Grief too is part of the Via Negativa, so we need many ways to enter into the grief of our times instead of running from it by incessant entertainment or distractions.
The Via Creativa is also where the Divine and the human meet. This happens in the depths of our and our community’s souls and whether we be the agents of creativity or the receivers of the same. As Gabriel Marcel points out, creativity does not just belong to the doer but also to the receiver of art: To behold or take in a painting, music, dance, film is itself the work of an artist in all of us.
Consider how this painting calls up the music and dance memories of our lives by recalling the work of Miles Davis. His album, Kind of Blue. for example. Putting blues to music. Putting grief to music. Jazz does the same. Howard Thurman makes clear the same truth in his book on Deep River and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life And Death.
Or putting grief to poetry as Norbert Krapf has done with his collection of poems recalling his sexual abuse as a boy at the hands of a Catholic priest when he was an altar boy growing up in a small town in southern Indiana. It took him 60 years to tell his story, and he did it through the medium of poetry in his book, Catholic Boy Blues. He told me it was the blues that contributed to his healing as a child.
Or the recent painting of the Annunciation that I shared in the last two DMs on the occasion of the Feast Day of the Annunciation. One can approach the story not as religious dogma, but as art that stirs hope. Why have so many artists through the centuries painted such powerful paintings of that story? Because it speaks to them as hope and hope matters for human survival.
The story is a story of imagination and possibility: That new possibilities are possible even when things are dour. It is possible, as Derek Walcott put it, “to fall in love with the world in spite of history.”
All this practice of the Via Creativa feeds the practitioners of the Via Transformativa, which calls all of us to be spiritual warriors on behalf of compassion and justice. Another practice: To turn history around through protest and resilience and solidarity and truth telling and resistance. Now. Before it is too late.
See Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
And Fox, Creativity: Where the Divi.ne and the Human Meet.
And Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
And Fox, Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times.
And Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.
Banner Image: Finding strength together. Photographer unknown, Shopify Photo
Queries for Contemplation
Do you recognize the Four Paths as a spiritual practice in themselves? How do you employ them in a creative and personal as well as communitarian way?
Recommended Reading
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.
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
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
Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Time
While Matthew Fox recognizes that Meister Eckhart has influenced thinkers throughout history, he also wants to introduce Eckhart to today’s activists addressing contemporary crises. Toward that end, Fox creates dialogues between Eckhart and Carl Jung, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rabbi Heschel, Black Elk, Karl Marx, Rumi, Adrienne Rich, Dorothee Soelle, David Korten, Anita Roddick, Lily Yeh, M.C. Richards, and many others.
“Matthew Fox is perhaps the greatest writer on Meister Eckhart that has ever existed. (He) has successfully bridged a gap between Eckhart as a shamanistic personality and Eckhart as a post-modern mentor to the Inter-faith movement, to reveal just how cosmic Eckhart really is, and how remarkably relevant to today’s religious crisis! ” — Steven Herrmann, Author of Spiritual Democracy: The Wisdom of Early American Visionaries for the Journey Forward
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
