I wrote these reflections on Matthew
Fox’s ideas after interviewing him for an Australian TV program:

Matthew Fox doesn’t aim to keep cardinals
awake at night, but in matters of theology, spirituality, feminism
and ecology he certainly does that. He remains a Catholic, he
says, because he has both a sense of history and a sense of humour.

We are living in the best of times
and the worst of times. We can run but not hide; so much has to
change so fast.

Theology. For much of Western theology
God is in the sky: for Jesus, the kingdom is among/within us.
Matthew Fox’s magnum opus in Original Blessing. The most significant
thing we can say of or to a human person is not ‘you’re a sinner’
but ‘you are like God.’ Being made in God’s image gives us value,
worth, dignity. As the rabbinic saying has it, ‘Every time a human
walks down the street, that person is preceded by angels exclaiming
"Make way! Make way!"’ Justice is then the acknowledgement
of another’s dignity and worth. Injustice is violating the Godlikeness
of the other. Rosa Parks’ refusal to go to the back of the bus
provided the spark for the American civil rights conflagration.
But it’s our bus too.

Spirituality, for Matthew Fox, is ‘living
in depth rather than superficially’. Spirituality is a Way, not
a religion. Mysticism is returning to our origins, to the essential
reality of everything (when we realize the soul is not in the
body, but the body is in the soul). Everyone can be a mystic:
every young person must have a vision (or they will seek them
in drugs and alcohol). The prophet is the mystic in action.

Feminism. Males are running things
– the church, banks, medical establishments. Males keep their
pain within – that’s the way to grow up violent. Every adult male
should affirm at least two young men every week. The ordination
of women priests is a political and power issue. The majority
of Catholics are in favour. Indeed there were no ‘priests’ in
the modern sense in the first couple of centuries anyway.

Ecology. Revelation comes in two volumes
– the Bible and Nature, said Aquinas. The origin of the universe
is associated, not with guilt or duty, but ‘sheer joy’. The earth
is not dead – all atoms are ‘storms of activity’. Non-western
peoples have known about the living earth for thousands of years.
Native peoples know the creation stories best. They know our home
is the cosmos itself, and they know the importance of ritual and
rites of passage (without them there are no elders – or they are
playing golf or the stock market); the youth are violent and adults
are bewildered. The native peoples don’t carry the whole universe’s
burden on their shoulders: they know they’re guests here. Since
science and religion split the cosmology lost its conscience.
The whole universe is God’s temple. Who is buying and selling
in this temple? Are we selling our children’s heritage for 30
pieces of silver?’ (All the rivers in Taiwan are dead). We have
destroyed the ozone layer not through ignorance, but through arrogance.
Australians are very close to wilderness. There are three ways
of responding to creation, according to Abraham Heschel – enjoy
it, exploit it, or accept it with awe.

Our challenge is not simply ‘jobs versus
environment’, but reinventing jobs.

Art. ‘Nothing is the same as anything
else – trees, us, moments in history.’ Our need is to welcome
artists back home. In the last 200 years, since Newton, we perceive
ourselves living in a machine universe, with little spontaneity
or freedom. Our world-view is that of an industrial age. Bankers
and technicians rule. Artists feel abused, wounded. We need a
paradigm shift to bring artists from the periphery to society’s
centre stage. Modern politics is essentially confrontational:
we need rather imagination and ritual This is not ‘art for art’s
sake’ but ‘art for the universe’s sake’. When society affirms
its artists, there will be no unemployment.

# 60% of the homeless in San Francisco
are Vietnam veterans.

# ‘White worship is boring, quite dead!’
So we committed to ‘ecclesiogenesis’ – birthing the church.

You can find a summary of Matthew Fox’s
creation-centred spirituality in the two articles he wrote for
the SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (ed. Gordon Wakefield)
on Creation- centred Spirituality and Meister Eckhart. Another
place to begin is the little book Manifesto! For a Global Civilization
(co-authored with a physicist, Brian Swimme).