269 - Bringing Matthew Fox in from the Cold

Bringing Matthew Fox in from the Cold

By Wayne G. Boulton

"The theological tilt in Fox's brand of mysticism is toward creation. His aim is not only to be creationcentered in his spirituality, but also to warn the world about any version of Christianity in which creation appears as an afterthought.... While intriguing in itself, the most significant feature of this argument may be that a mystic is making it. Fox's work provides clear evidence that a lively sense of divine creation can block both the sex-negativism and the indifference to public life that has bedeviled the mystic tradition through the centuries."

"There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.... It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.... To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect." - G. K. Chesterton¹

A MINISTER wrote to me recently about a major change in his life. His involvement with the men's movement had led him to experience intimacy in new and profound ways. The image of God in his everyday experience had shifted dramatically from a Being that exercises control and power "above" us to a compassionate Friend who longs for us and for the entire creation with love and gentleness. He is now finding God much more in public events and in relationships than in moments of separation. And he is reading everything that he can get his hands on written by the controversial Dominican priest and theologian Matthew Fox. To my correspondent,

Wayne G. Boulton is professor of religion and chair of the religion department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He has written extensively on the role of myth in the thought of Reinhold Neibuhr, and he is the author of Is Legalism a Heresy? (1982).

¹Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, first published in 1908 (New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 100--101.

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Fox has become one of the four or five essential voices that Christians today need to hear.

The minister is correct. Fox writes so well about so many crucial topics for Christian communities in the modern world that I have difficulty imagining any Christian who would not benefit from an encounter with this peripatetic man of fifty-one years and silver hair. This essay is intended as a midwife to such a meeting. The first part presents what I take to be Fox's message, arguing that most of its apparently troubling features reflect its roots in the Christian mystical tradition.² The second section focuses on the contribution Fox's creation spirituality movement might make to the church. The third part speculates about a possible future incorporation of Fox into Christian orthodoxy, noting that one of the most important years in his life may turn out to have been 1989, when his own Dominican Order sentenced him to a year of public silence.

I

Fox is a theologian, all right, but not a house theologian. He probably never will be. Founding director of the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California, Fox is on the road much of the time giving lectures and leading workshops (called "playshops") around the world. There is a touch of the Russian "fools for Christ" tradition in the man. He does crazy things.

For example, at a peace center in Northern Ireland a few years ago, Fox held a day-long retreat for about sixty persons. Peacemakers in a warring world, the participants arrived exhausted and frustrated. What did Fox do? He brought out the crayons. He drew with the people, imaged with them, shared stories with them. They ended their time together with a spiral dance and other circle dances on the lawn overlooking the ocean. One woman remarked, "This day has put the last twelve years of our sad history into a totally different perspective."³

Fox quotes this woman because she underlines his fundamental project: to change the way we look at the world. Perspective is all. In Fox, we encounter a wonderfully romantic priest, and at the same time, a deeply American one. You will find echoes in his thinking of many of the more prominent Christian mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen, St. Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckhart (Fox's personal favorite), and John Woolman. The echoes are stronger in more modern visionaries such as Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, ecologists such as John Muir and Barry Lopez, social activists like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Daniel Berrigan, and popular writers on spirituality like Thich Nhat Hanh and Thomas Merton. But in his surprisingly

²Here I draw on an earlier article, "The Thoroughly Modern Mysticism of Matthew Fox," Christian Century (April 25, 1990), pp. 428-432.

³Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), p. 32.

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academic personal demeanor, his broad sensitivities to nature and his early difficulties with his own church, the inevitable parallel is to the Sage of Concord. Fox may not have Emerson's originality, but his writing does have clear affinities with that uniquely American tradition of transcendentalism.

And write he has. Fox is the author of twelve books on "creationcentered mystics," ranging from his most foundational (and still probably central) book, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality (1983), to his most theological work, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (1988), to his recent attempt to forge a "spirituality of the Americas," Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth (1991).

In his books, Fox performs an invaluable service to the Christian community. He subjects a vast amount of ancient, inchoate, and esoteric material called "mysticism" to a searching modern critical examination. What makes this examination "modern" is Fox's almost religious appreciation for twentieth century science.⁴ To be sure, the examination has a theological tilt that we may choose not to embrace in all respects. But the great value in Fox's restatement of the Christian mystical tradition lies chiefly in the fact that he clearly loves what he is writing about. He writes out of his own experience and not solely about the experiences of the others. As Evelyn Underhill warned regarding critiques of mysticism: "Only by inflicting the faithful wounds of a friend can we save the science of the inner life from mutilation at the hands of the psychologists."⁵

What is mysticism? Fox's definition is marked by a commendable range together with a democratic stress on ordinary experience. Mysticism is that form of religious practice centering on firsthand experience of the divine. Protestant "theologies of the Word" tend to be suspicious of such dependence on religious experience. Yet mystic practices belong to all religions, for believers retain vital belief in a transcendent reality only as long as they can communicate with that reality by direct experience. Insofar as everyone is potentially religious, one could say that there is a mystic in all of us.

The practice of mysticism, Fox argues, has two essential elements that correspond to two meanings of the Greek word mystikos: to "shut one's senses" and to "enter the mysteries." The rhythm in all

⁴Fox regards science through the appreciative eyes of a romantic. What he likes most is its this-worldly, visionary quality; what modern science has given us-he never tires of saying-is a "new creation story." On the other hand, he has no use for the anti-mystical, skeptical, secularizing side of the scientific enterprise, which he terms "the Enlightenment." He is not easy to place, therefore, in the contemporary theological discussion. In terms of William Placher's categories, for example, he is more "revisionist" than "post-liberal," but he clearly has a foot in both camps. William Placher, Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989).

⁵Evelyn Underhill, The Essentials of Mysticism, first published in 1920 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1960), p. 2.

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mysticism springs from the fact that these two meanings are related. To be more open to the mysteries requires the purification or shutting down of one's senses-turning off the television, walking on the beach, calling a halt to marathon reading. The mystic shuts down the senses not because they are evil, but because they are such blessings that they deserve a periodic rest and cleaning to be renewed and restored.

But today, the mystic sensibility we all share is repressed and has become the shadow side of the modern secular personality. According to Fox, there is a dangerous denial of the mystic in the contemporary West. We have come to believe that God is separate from our world, that the sacred is out of reach. One of Fox's co-authors, Brian Swimme, speaks thus of the modern attempt to desacralize the cosmos and see it as inert matter:

Nothing could be further from the truth. The universe oozes with power, waiting for anyone who wishes to embrace it. But because the powers of cosmic dynamics are invisible, we need to remind ourselves of their universal presence. Who reminds us? The rivers, plains, galaxies, hurricanes, lightning branches, and all our living companions.⁶

Fox's view of the sacraments seems expressly designed to counter contemporary secularism. He focuses on what he calls the "primal sacraments" of sea, wind, land, fire, life-the universe itself. The great passion of the mystics, Fox states, is to enter into the awesome mystery of the universe and of our existence within it. He hopes to return sacramental liturgy to its proper setting, to the source of its energy. In the process, Fox the prophet wants to remind the church that its own tradition points to natural mysteries no institution could possible control or manage.

The theological tilt in Fox's brand of mysticism is toward creation. His aim is not only to be creation -centered in his spirituality, but also to warn the world about any version of Christianity in which creation appears as an afterthought, versions he calls "fall /redemption" or ascetic spirituality. While intriguing in itself, the most significant feature of this argument may be that a mystic is making it. Fox's work provides clear evidence that a lively sense of divine creation can block both the sex-negativism and the indifference to public life that has bedeviled the mystic tradition through the centuries.

In 1988, it became clear that Fox's mysticism was generating a new quest-not for the historical Jesus but for the Cosmic Christ.⁷ The new quest is for the divine pattern that connects, say, the crab nebula in the sky with crawfish on earth-personalizing the connection by grounding it in the joy and suffering of the historical Jesus. For Fox, this is the Christ of Colossians, "the firstborn of all creation in him all things in heaven and earth were created in him all things hold together"

⁶Brian Swirnme, The Universe is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story (Sante Fe: Bear and Co., 1985), p. 151.

⁷Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988).

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(Col. 1:15-17). This is the cosmic ruler to whom "every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth" (Phil. 2:10). Only the quest for such a Christ, Fox argues, can free the church from its captivity to a truncated, anthropocentric "personal savior Christianity."

If the Cosmic Christ is so evident in the New Testament, why do so few modern Christians think of Jesus in these terms? Fox's answer is the Enlightenment. The individualism of the Enlightenment and the industrial age, together with Sir Isaac Newton's theory of a descralized, machine-like universe, convinced Christian theologians that they should put aside their living cosmology, their Cosmic Christ, and focus on the historical Jesus and personal salvation. The Enlightenment's quest for the historical Jesus was a great advance, Fox concedes; it is now time, however, for a new quest that builds on the old, but goes in a different direction. The task now is to reimagine a living cosmology for Christians in our time. Fox writes: "The holy trinity of science (knowledge of creation), mysticism (experiential union with creation and its unnameable mysteries) and art (expression of our awe at creation) is what constitutes a living cosmology."⁸

The implications of this approach for the training of Christian pastors are immense. Science courses would be mandatory, because to understand the dynamic character of the Cosmic Christ we must first understand scientific revelations about the creative and vibrant nature of our universe. Sustained attention to the spiritual disciplines and to mysticism in the broadest sense would become integral to the curriculum. We could not teach theology adequately without art as meditation or without laboratories in painting, music, dance, poetry, and other activities that Fox claims allow students to listen to the cosmos within and around them, and to give birth to a creative theology.⁹

Though he uses psychology in his work, Fox is not at all happy with the overt dependence on psychological data in Christian ministry courses.¹⁰ He sees "psychologism," or the reduction of spirituality to psychological categories, as a pathological pseudomysticism rampant within American seminaries today. Psychologized religion is religion that has lost its mystic center. In seminaries, where more attention is given to clinical pastoral education than to mysticism, Fox argues, an entire generation of potential spiritual leaders is often sacrificed to the God of counseling.¹¹ To use a Foxian image, perhaps it is time to back huge moving vans up to our seminaries, load up all those "practical theology" books and pamphlets cluttered with psychological jargon, and channel our educational resources in a different direction.

⁸Ibid., p. 78.

⁹With Nicholas Berdyaev, Fox believes that the primary mode through which we reflect God (imago dei) is our creativity, not our rationality, our freedom (autonomy) or our relationality. See Original Blessing (Sante Fe: Bear and Co., 1983), pp. 175-200.

¹⁰Cf. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 120-121.

¹¹Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, pp. 78-79.

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II

The great virtues of Christian orthodoxy, as Chesterton noted, are balance and richness. Sometimes the orthodox community regains its precarious balance by allowing itself to be "pushed" or "pulled" by a new prophetic perception of an imbalance in the Body of Christ. The creation spirituality movement carries such a perception. Some of Fox's more radical friends are so distant from orthodoxy that their ideas may never reach the church¹²; and a few of their notions, perhaps, should not. Fox himself is a different story, however. He has made a number of proposals the church ought to hear. For example:

(1) The renewal of western worship. Nowhere is Fox more suggestive than on the subject of worship.¹³ His primary concern is to arrest "the anthropocentric deterioration of worship in the West" through renewed attention to the Cosmic Christ. Fox finds that worship among non-Christian peoples often possesses a trait Western churches need: a cosmological sense. Native peoples do not worship anthropocentrically. In their dances, ceremonies, and rites, they see themselves as members of a mysterious and sacred universe. For Fox, the recovery of this lost cosmic sense and unity is-always and everywhere-the work of the Cosmic Christ.

A huge problem in worship today is that, though our minds are active, our bodies (our "first environment") are too still. The Cosmic Christ wants to dance, to respond bodily to the good news and to cosmic grace. Why not put more processions into our worship? Fox reminds us that our ancestors had more of an athletic sense about worship than we do. They processed around the church, through the church, through the village, into the countryside to cemeteries and back again. Processions move us together into a shared sense of community care and celebration.

(2) The religious significance of pain. Another deficiency Fox finds in modern worship (particularly Protestant worship-without-confession) is its alienation from profound grief, suffering, and pain. So often people come to church covering up their suffering because no lamentation time is provided. But this suppresses the heart of worship:

People who cannot share their cosmic pain cannot worship together. Worship is the emptying of all we have, and pain and suffering are deep within us all. In worship among black people or native people, pain is not covered up. It is spoken out, it is chanted out, it is sung out, it is danced out. In short, it is connected to the rest of our lives and to the universe itself.... This is what worship ought to accomplish. Otherwise, we spend our lives concealing our pain and wasting immense energy in doing so.¹⁴

¹²For example, see Thomas Berry's electrifying The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988).

¹³The major proposals are summarized in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, pp. 211-228. Mystics have always been our natural worshipers, so one might reasonably expect significant contributions on this topic from Fox.

¹⁴Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, p. 22 1.

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Fox stresses the profound biblical notion that we are not saved from pain but through pain.¹⁵ The so-called "penitential psalms" of the Old Testament bear witness to the significance of giving voice to our pain before God. By acknowledging our grief and our suffering, we are saved, that is, healed. By refusing to bottle up grief inside us, we make healing possible. We allow an entrance into the wound to take place.

(3) Deep ecumenism. Because the Cosmic Christ is rooted in the witness of the New Testament, this Christ permeates or at least lies dormant in all churches and groups that call themselves Christian. But there is more. The Cosmic Christ connects Christians to all people ("in him all things hold together") and can be discerned in the wisdom traditions of all world religions. Fox terms the movement to unleash this wisdom for the common good "deep ecumenism." The heart of the cosmic Christ is the figure of Jesus as Sophia or Wisdom-for Fox the perfect bridge between Christianity and other faiths.

But why, one might ask, should we expect a deeply ecumenical era to begin now? Sustained and often mass contact between Christians and other religions has been going on for some time. If the Cosmic Christ has been there all along, why hasn't this era already begun? Once more, Fox's answer is simple: the Enlightenment has been too successful. The West is thoroughly out of touch with its own mystical heritage. The Western church cannot engage in dialogue with the East about mysticism or wisdom when it does not know its own mystical roots. Yet authentic and profound contact between Christianity and other religions may be just ahead of us. We must remember that the great encounters between Christianity and native peoples and between Christianity and Eastern religions have occurred only during the past few centuries-during precisely that period when Newton, Descartes, and the Enlightenment deposed the Cosmic Christ.¹⁶

(4) Giving birth to God. There is only one literal mother of God, and that is Mary, the mother of Jesus. But Mary's great salvific teaching, according to Fox, is the nonliteral meaning of motherhood. "By her example the good news comes upon us that we, too, are mothers of God whenever our birthings bear the fruit of wisdom or compassion, as hers did in the person of Jesus Christ."¹⁷ The great shock and mystery of the incarnation is that now all persons find in Mary their true vocation: to birth, to birth compassion, to birth God. For Fox, the birthing of our life as a life of beauty and a work of art is necessarily a birth of imago dei in the cosmos.

(5) The greening of the religious life. In biblical language, Fox is anticipating a new Pentecost, a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the entire human race. He believes the color of the coming religious transformation will have to be green. For in and through the

¹⁵This is near the center of what Fox calls "Path 11" of his creation spirituality: via negativa. Original Blessing, pp. 129-172.

¹⁶Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, pp. 228-244.

¹⁷Fox, Original Blessing, p. 205.

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Cosmic Christ, everything in heaven and on earth is created. And Mother Earth is dying before our eyes.

From the Mediterranean to Alaska to the Soviet Union to the Persian Gulf, we encounter news of ecological disaster. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Topsoil is being destroyed around the world at an alarming rate-six billion tons per year in North America alone. The world's forests are fast disappearing-largely to satisfy First World appetites-and in these forests dwell incredibly diverse species of plants, animals, and birds. As forests go, species go. Some believe that the only parallel to this pace of extinction is found in the geological and climatic upheavals of the ancient past.

In this global crisis, Fox warns, political programs and voluntary activity will not be enough. A spiritual response is also required-one that uses the enormous resources of our religious heritage. The earth continues to bestow its blessings of soil, forest, and rain, but are we responding as we ought-with gratitude, restraint, appropriate reverence, and the proper rites?

III

"Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?... Let anyone with ears to hear listen!" (Luke 14:34-5). 1 hope the church has ears to hear this salty message from one of its prodigal mystics, for it helps Christians regain and keep their balance in an ecological age. Like most thinkers, however, the ideologically young Fox is more dependable in what he affirms than in what he denies. Christian orthodoxy, in Chesterton's sense, may be in a position to help here. In fact, one might look forward to the coming ecclesialization of Matthew Fox. Let us see why.

The standard criticisms of mysticism-it is egocentric, antiinstitutional, subjectivistic, quietistic, esoteric, elitist, only marginally biblical-simply don't stick to Fox. The reason is that Fox has successfully redefined the mystic journey as it has been understood in the West. Derived from Plotinus (C.E. 205-270), the traditional definition of mysticism is an approach to God comprised of a threefold path: preparation, illumination, and union. Fox finds Plotinus to be a better interpreter of Plato than of the Bible. As a result, the traditional approach leaves out delight in creation, omits a concern for justice, and, consequently, turns the devotee away from the earth and all that relates us to it.

Fox radically revises the traditional approach into Four Paths.¹⁸ Path I is the via positiva, countering the flight from creation in ancient mysticism with an affirmation of the created world drawn largely from the Old Testament. Path 11 is the via negativa, stressing the fact that pain, emptiness, darkness, and suffering are constitutive of everyone's

¹⁸These are displayed in greatest detail in Original Blessing. Perhaps for Jews and Calvinists, he translates the Four Paths into Four Cornmandmews in Creation Spirituality, pp. 18-23.

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spiritual journey. Path III is via creativa, where we witness both promise and danger in the "volcano" of our own creativity, and we recognize that, in our generativity, we co-create with God. Path IV is the via transformativa, which announces that the supreme test for distinguishing authentic from inauthentic mysticism is justice-making and compassion as Jesus taught.

IV

There is no question that this redefinition of the mystic journey is an achievement of considerable proportions. Yet problems remain. The main difficulty I have with Fox is that, in Christian terms, he is not mystical enough. He presents us with a Christianity so worldly, so wedded to his own time and definitions, so confident of the superiority of post-Enlightenment categories, as to be almost religiously incoherent. The New Testament, after all, is hardly silent about heaven and the afterlife, about a severe judgment on this world, and about the contrast between redemption and glorification. Fox is silent about these things, for creation spirituality (as he defines it) excludes them. As with Emerson, there is nothing approaching world-suspicion in the man-a trait common among Christian mystics from St. Anthony in the third century to T. S. Eliot in our own.

Also Fox's ecumenism. needs to go deeper on the question of evil. In fact, he has yet to hear from that branch of Christendom that broke with Catholicism largely over this issue: Protestantism. On the one hand, I admire his candor. Since 1983, Fox has been completely open about his intention to shift dramatically the traditional Christian paradigm from original sin to original blessing. Fox's target appears to be the Manichean notion of sin without creation, the idea that we came into this world despised, worthless, ugly, and powerless. This state of low self-esteem is then easily and too often displaced onto a scapegoat, such as racial minorities, women, or homosexuals. Such a mindset is indeed a worthy target of criticism.

But, Fox throws out too much. There is an insular quality to Fox's Catholicism; it is as if the Reformation never took place. Though he rejects Augustine on every other page, one is never certain of the quality of Fox's encounter with the North African. What is certain is that Fox has never met Luther or Calvin.

Precisely this is what must be arranged, for creation spirituality needs a more profound sense of sin. Without it, Fox's grasp of evil is severely compromised. Without it, some of my students who read him will continue to suspect that he is a bit too much of a dreamer. Without it, creation and redemption will continue sliding a little too close together in Fox's work. Without it, the very brilliance of his insights into cosmic pain and anguish will mask what Luther called "the sinfulness of sin," its chosen and voluntary (in spite of its mysteriously inevitable) character. This may be one reason why Luther was so interested in the devil, and why Fox is not.

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Matthew Fox has more range and creativity than any other mystic writing in English today. The church needs him. It is also the case that Fox needs the church, and in more senses than the heavy hand he encoutered-and obeyed-in 1989. The crazy poise and richness of that "reeling heavenly chariot" of orthodoxy may provide just the right corrective for a tendency toward imbalance and narrowness in Fox's current position.

At the end of his recent book, Fox mentions the fact that, while in New Zealand and Australia, he had invited aboriginal people in each of these lands to speak to his creation spirituality workshops. (In this respect, Fox anticipated the agenda of the World Council of Churches meeting last February in that continent.) He was struck by what the Maori and aboriginal leaders told him: that they were moved and honored just to be invited to teach.¹⁹

The church needs to make more use of this man. Surely he would be moved and honored to be invited to seminaries. Fox has much to teach us. And as he does, then perhaps he, too, will learn.

¹⁹Fox, Creation Spirituality, pp. 149-50.