Please note: As Matthew Fox continues to work on his next book, Gianluigi Gugliermetto (often called GG), his friend and colleague, will be filling in and composing the Daily Meditations this week.
May 26, 2025: “The deepest ground of my being is love”
Thomas Merton was a Roman Catholic monk who was an intellectual, a prophet and a contemplative all at once. He was fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War and spoke out against it openly. Matthew Fox had been inspired by Merton and the two corresponded with one another until Merton’s untimely (and suspicious) death. Matthew details some of this in his book A Way to God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey, which GG recommends heartily. In this book Matthew also shares the way Merton so fully embraced the four paths in his life. We will be exploring that this week.
May 27, 2025: Merton and the Via Positiva
“Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life…. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and being.” Thomas Merton’s definition of contemplation is remarkably similar to Matthew’s description of the via positiva. For centuries, Catholic orders had encouraged “mortification of the flesh.” What a breath of fresh air then was Merton’s appreciation for the “sacredness of life.” Among Merton’s journal entries can be found such sentences as this: “My worship is a blue sky and ten thousand crickets in the deep wet hay of the field.” Merton preached a profound and readily available via positiva. Holding back nothing, he admonishes: “Dance in the sun, you tepid idiot…. You fool, it is life that makes you dance: have you forgotten?”
May 28, 2025: Merton and the Via Negativa
As a student of Meister Eckhart and D.T. Suzuki, Thomas Merton was very aware of the teachings about emptiness and the void, both in the Christian and the Buddhist traditions. Merton knew the deep connection between the experience of plenitude and that of emptiness —“the point of nothingness in the midst of being.” GG believes Merton was an “expert” not so much of the via positiva or the via negativa, but of the passing of the one into the other. Merton’s diaries are replete with descriptions of his experience in nature that end with an unspoken invitation — to drop into silence at the end.
May 29, 2025: Merton and the Via Creativa
Thomas Merton was a creative human being with multiple gifts. He had been a poet since his youth, and later also became a photographer and a graphic artist. It is indeed quite remarkable that a Catholic monk in the 1960s would take up the practice of abstract drawings and mix it with Zen calligraphy. As one might expect, Merton’s art was a contemplative exercise, imbued with his spirituality. Matthew, in his book on Merton, quotes him as saying: The function of image, symbols, poetry, music, chant, and of ritual (remotely related to sacred dance) is to open up the inner self to the contemplative, to incorporate the sense and the body in the totality of the self-orientation to God that is necessary for worship and meditation. Surely Merton would have loved Matthew’s cosmic masses.
May 30, 2025: Merton and the Via Transformativa
During his lifetime, the social and political writings of Thomas Merton raised quite a ruckus in the Catholic Church and in the public at large. He was fervently opposed to the Vietnam War, the atomic bomb, racism and social injustice, and industrial pollution. It is easy to recognize Merton’s via transformativa not only because his social engagement was so obvious, but because it was for him an integral part of his vocation as a Christian and a human being. As Matthew points out, Merton knew the prophetic tradition very well. Because he was so outspoken in his condemnation of the ills of society, many believe he was assassinated. In his book A Way to God, Matthew comments, after reviewing the evidence: Perhaps we will never know whether or not Merton died as a martyr at the hands of the American government. But it is very possible he did. I believe he did.
May 31, 2025: Thomas Merton, a Humorous Saint
Reflecting on the meditations this past week about Thomas Merton, Gianluigi says, “While in my experience most people excel in one or two of the four paths, Merton seems to have mastered them all.” Though Merton was worthy of high praise, he was not “perfect,” nor would he have wanted to be. One American Roman Catholic bishop, Bishop Barron, known for his presence on social media, talks about Merton as “surely a master of spirituality but clearly not a saint.” So let’s be imperfect, always fighting for justice, and yet somehow becoming more ourselves in the process.
Banner image: “There is only one thing to live for: Love. There is only one unhappiness: Not to know God.” From Thomas Merton’s journals. Photo by Jim Forest on Flickr.
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
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
Prayer: A Radical Response to Life
How do prayer and mysticism relate to the struggle for social and ecological justice? Fox defines prayer as a radical response to life that includes our “Yes” to life (mysticism) and our “No” to forces that combat life (prophecy). How do we define adult prayer? And how—if at all—do prayer and mysticism relate to the struggle for social and ecological justice? One of Matthew Fox’s earliest books, originally published under the title On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear: Spirituality American Style, Prayer introduces a mystical/prophetic spirituality and a mature conception of how to pray. Called a “classic” when it first appeared, it lays out the difference between the creation spirituality tradition and the fall/redemption tradition that has so dominated Western theology since Augustine. A practical and theoretical book, it lays the groundwork for Fox’s later works. “One of the finest books I have read on contemporary spirituality.” – Rabbi Sholom A. Singer
