Please note: These Daily Meditations will be written by Matthew Fox (MF) on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays; and Gianluigi Gugliermetto (GG) will write those on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Matthew will continue to offer a video teaching each Monday.
June 16, 2025: Report From the “Healthy Masculinity” Summit Gathering (MF)
At this summit, which featured Matthew, there was also an “Elders Panel” which included Matthew at 84 years old, Lee at 74, and Daniel at 71. There were also two hosts, 51- and 39-years-old respectively. In Matthew’s talk, which preceded the panel, he spoke to the seven archetypes of the Healthy Masculine that he refers to in his book The Hidden Spirituality of Men. Some points made by the panel include: How a binary way of seeing the world is “antiquated.” How men are cut off from their bodies and feelings. How men obsess about war. How we can embrace aging by having older men as role models. A 51-year-old spoke to how there is an elder hunger in the world today.
June 17, 2025: Four Bad Fathers & The Price Society Pays (MF)
This Father’s Day season, let’s meditate on bad fathers. Example #1: Daedalus, the father of Icarus. He was banished to Crete because he murdered his nephew out of envy. When he and his son, Icarus, had to put on wings to escape prison, he didn’t communicate well how important it was not to go too close to the sun. #2: Hitler’s father was sadistic and violent with him on a daily basis. #3: Trump’s father was an active member of KKK, greed was his god, and he had no empathy for anyone. #4: Musk’s father and grandfather were so excited about apartheid that they moved their family from Canada to South Africa, where they could enjoy the fruits of tyranny and oppression in their business dealings.
June 18, 2025: The Male Toddler Archetype (GG)
“Monster boys” are running the world, and a male toddler archetype is among them. You can recognize a male toddler by his tantrums and narcissism. Currently we have a toddler-in-chief in the White House. One of the great questions of our time is “Why is there so much violence in the world?” It seems the root is unhealthy masculinity, which is rampant not only in leadership positions, but among everyday people as well. In Italy, for instance, a young teenager smashed his ex-girlfriend with a rock, simply because she refused to continue the relationship. Clearly we have a long way to go in teaching our young men how to be a healthy man.
June 19, 2025: Walt Whitman as a Spiritual Ancestor (GG)
The book by Matthew Fox and Adam Bucko, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation, ends with an extended reference to Walt Whitman. Both Matthew and Adam note that Whitman “celebrated the diversity of sexuality in our species.” Whitman is a wonderful contrast to the unhealthy racist, sexist, homophobic men currently in the White House. Whitman espoused a “spiritual democracy,” at the core of which is a daring, courageous and strong, big-hearted and tender masculinity.
June 20, 2025: Making Evil Conscious (GG)
Patriarchy as a social system is at least 4,000 years old. Some scholars date it back even further. Jungian analyst Steven Herrmann said: The Puritan myth was based upon an unconscious projection of evil onto indigenous people, the life way of the two-spirits and a bi-erotic image of the soul’s wholeness. A God based on the principle of wholeness was not to be found among early settlers of the USA.* Male Puritans, faced with alternate ways of living, as modeled by the indigenous people, decided instead to demonize their own feminine inner core. This ancestral refusal to embrace wholeness has informed American colonialism, sexual repression, and racism. If Walt Whitman “makes evil conscious in the American self,” as Herrmann suggests, it is the normative male white heterosexual American self that is at stake.
June 21, 2025: W. H. Auden, Jennifer Hereth on Refugees & Fascism (MF)
Following are excerpts from a moving poem called “Refugee Blues,” composed by W.H. Auden in 1939, when Europe was exploding with fascist fervor. The paintings are by Jennifer Hereth, a friend of Matthew’s and former faculty member at UCS, from her latest book, my brush—my voice. She says that “refugees will become the most prominent archetype of the 21st Century.” Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes. Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.…The consul banged the table and said, ‘If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead.’ But we are still alive my dear, but we are still alive.… Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky. It was Hitler over Europe, saying, ‘They must die.’ O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.
* Matthew Fox and Adam Bucko, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation, at page 214.
Banner image: “REFUGEES” in Atwater, CA, at the site of the former Castle Air Force Base. Photo by David Meyer. Flickr.
Recommended Reading
The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine
To awaken what Fox calls “the sacred masculine,” he unearths ten metaphors, or archetypes, ranging from the Green Man, an ancient pagan symbol of our fundamental relationship with nature, to the Spiritual Warrior….These timeless archetypes can inspire men to pursue their higher calling to connect to their deepest selves and to reinvent the world.
“Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know.” — Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God
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
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.
