The One You Feed - What Creation Spirituality Means with Matthew Fox

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Matthew Fox is an internationally acclaimed spiritual theologian, Episcopal priest, and activist. He holds a doctor in the History and Theology of Spirituality In this episode, Eric and Matthew discuss his book: Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality. Registration for The Well Trained Mind Program is now open!  Learn the foundations of mindfulness and create a more fulfilling spiritual practice in Ginny’s live virtual program that starts on October 9.  Visit oneyoufeed.net/mindfulness to learn more! But wait, there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you! Matthew Fox and I Discuss What Creation Spirituality Means and … His book,  Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality. Creation spirituality is about the sacredness of nature and our existence Dualism as the fall of humanity How it’s easy to forget to savor the beauty of existence Accepting the “both/and” rather than “either/or: Learning to fall in love the world around us The 4 paths of creation spirituality Creativity is what distinguishes postmodern from modern science The importance of cultivating creativity in a spiritual journey How art can be a meditation How both creating and taking in art is being an artist Compassion is about sharing both the joy and sorrow with one another Hildegard’s tent of wisdom Matthew Fox Links Matthew’s Website Twitter Facebook By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Matthew Fox, check out these other episodes: Matthew Fox (Interview from 2016) Creative Spiritual Practices with Clark StrandSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This mystery of life, death, and resurrection is built into, I think, the cosmic processes. We're discovering that more and more from science today. So there's a tremendous law there about don't think that our suffering or death is the last word. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your

all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Matthew Fox, who's been on the show before. He's an internationally acclaimed spiritual theologian, Episcopal priest, and activist. He holds a doctorate in the history and theology of spirituality. He holds a doctorate in the history and theology of spirituality. Today, Matthew and Eric discuss his book, Matthew Fox, Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality.

I love this quote from the Buddha. The mind, hard to control, flighty, alighting where it wishes, one does well to tame. The disciplined mind brings happiness. Happiness can often feel like an elusive goal everyone seems to strive for and never quite achieves because we seek it outside of ourselves rather than going inward, which is something mindfulness teaches us to do. And Ginny? Yes, Eric? This idea of taming the mind is why you named your program The Well-Trained Mind, right?

Yep, and I'm excited to announce that it's open for enrollment now through October 8th in my live virtual six-week Introduction to Mindfulness program. Whether you're new to mindfulness and meditation or you're looking to strengthen your existing mindfulness practice, I'll teach you the foundations of mindfulness so that you can live with more ease, create a nourishing and fulfilling spiritual practice, discover how to be a friend to yourself, and strengthen your ability to live in a more grounded, connected, peaceful way. To learn more about the program, go to oneufeed.net slash mindfulness. That's oneufeed.net slash mindfulness before October 8th. I hope to meet you there.

Hi, Matthew. Welcome to the show. Hello, Eric. Good to be with you again. Yes, it is a pleasure to have you back on. I don't remember when the last time was. It's been a good number of years ago, but I love that conversation, and so I'm really happy to have you on again. We're going to be discussing your latest book called Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality, which really is bringing together a lot of your writing over the years. And it was great to see it all in one place. And we'll get into that in a minute. But before we do, we'll start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are

always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, it's a wonderful parable, and I thank you for it and naming your program after it, giving it that kind of exposure, which it deserves. You know, it very much parallels the teaching from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, who says that we have two seeds in us, the seeds of violence and the seed of compassion. And you have to water one or the other.

So, you know, that kind of wisdom is abroad, thank God, whether we're East or West. This is human nature, isn't it? That we're capable of great beauty and kindness and generosity and forgiveness on the one hand. On the other, we're capable of, well, look around. Ukraine war or denial about climate change and all this nonsense, our capacity for evil. You know, Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century said, one human being can do more evil than all the other species put together, which I think is an astounding observation because he made it 800 years before Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Putin.

Yeah. But it's saying the same thing, really. You know, don't underestimate our capacity for destruction. And, of course, this is what climate change is all about today. And there are many ways. You know, you don't have to be dropping nuclear bombs. You can go into denial. You can create a whole political life out of denial.

An awful lot of politicians have been doing that in our lifetime. So there are subtle ways of being evil, choosing evil. And of course, if you kind of back up and figure it out, well, why do politicians go into denial about climate change? Well, because power and ego and money and power, which comes with money, is their god, it's their idol. And so it's a form of idolatry, really, to choose that which destroys others. And today, I mean, it's been wrapped up. Destroying the environment is literally putting millions of other species into extinction, as well as ourselves down the line. So it's a simple parable, and it's a grandfather to his grandkid. And that's a

marvelous way to set a parable. But it's so true. And I think we're facing that today as a species. I mean, it's more true today than it was 20 years ago. Extinction is a real possibility for our species at this time. And, you know, I've been struck lately by how they've been uncovering, especially in Southeast Asia, a lot more hominid species, our cousins, like Neanderthal. You know, we knew about them because they were hanging around Europe. But now they're discovering 14 others that they've so far unearthed, and they're going to be more. But the bottom line is every one of these cousins of ours, including Neanderthal and Denison, are out of business.

They're all extinct. So we're the last one standing homo sapiens. And, I mean, if that doesn't ratchet up, you know, the stakes that we're living with today, I don't know what can, you know. So I think all these lessons, these parables are really important because they put the spotlight on our capacity for divine compassion on the one hand and for destruction and our participation in evil on the other. And again, we can't underestimate either. Yep, yep. That is a striking quote from Aquinas. I'd never heard that, but yeah,

it seems absolutely true, particularly to come to it at that point. Let's start with talking about what creation spirituality is, because I think it's going to give us a chance to unpack the parable in some other ways also. So let's start there. Well, that word creation, of course, is a really big word. It includes this universe we now know as 13.8 billion years in the making and still growing, and two trillion galaxies. Last time we talked, neither you nor I nor anyone else knew that there were two trillion galaxies,

each with hundreds or billions of stars. It was two or three summers ago that science discovered that. But it's about the sacredness of nature, of creation, of these billions of years, and, of course, of our own existence and of this Earth, which of course makes our existence possible. But to realize how interdependent we are on all these previous happenings, the original fireball, the birth of the original atoms and first galaxy, these very things, and how that thanks to our ingenuity as a species, Webb telescope is beaming into our living rooms and on our computers today.

It's just amazing, really, the human capacity for questing after knowledge and devising instruments that instruct us. So that's the basis of creation is beginning not with the human. See, the modern consciousness began with the human. Descartes, I think, therefore I am. Well, bully for you, but that's not right, Descartes. The reason you are is that 13.8 billion years gave birth to you, to the earth, to the sun, to the moon, to everything humans need to be here. I think, therefore I am. I mean, you know, get out of the room. But this has been the Francis of Assisi, who's the best known, Julian of Norwich, all these great souls. Not one of them began with the human. They began with the universe. Hildegard is painting pictures of the universe right and left because she's listening to the signs of her day. Early in her career, scientists were saying the universe is an egg.

Okay, she goes ahead and paints a picture of the universe as an egg. Then they switched and said, oh, the universe is a circle. It's, oh, okay. So she starts painting pictures of the universe as a circle. The point is that these great mystical minds and souls, like indigenous people, are eager to know our real home, and that we humans, we stand out in many ways, including, as you and I just said, in our capacity for evil, but also our capacity for intelligence. But the point is, we are part of something much bigger, what Hildegard called the web of creation. And of course, so queer spirituality is, is of course a response to this anthropocentrism that has brought about climate change that has brought about the destruction of the planet today this mindset of modern consciousness that puts the human first it's the opposite of that and it's the opposite therefore of a religion begins with sin because sin sin is a human thing. What other species is sinning?

No, every other species is just trying to be their best self, you know, the best dinosaur you can be, the best whale you can be, the best tree you can be. Cool. It's wonderful. It's for humans who have so many choices that we can choose to be unhuman. Other species don't choose to be not themselves. And Rabbi Heschel says that. He says sin is a refusal to become who we are. Of course, humans, we don't know who we are. We get off the track so readily. So we have to keep taking stock and, in a sense, redefine who we are. And I think we're in that kind of crunch time today in terms of history. And there's a lot of depression and a lot of confusion, a lot of chaos and sadness, because I don't think our professions are really honoring our capacities for beauty and for compassion and for a kindness

and for healing. I mean, sometimes it flashes through, certainly in the COVID and all these doctors and nurses and other hospital workers who, you know, literally gave their lives and certainly put themselves in danger. That was a beautiful thing to see, really. That's humanity at its best. And of course, coming up with vaccines in record time is a wonderful thing, too. But still, there there so much of the other going on all around us and making headlines every day so humans have to work at being human yeah there's a beautiful teaching from the miso americans one sentence i just love it says to be human one must make ruin one's heart for the wonders of the universe. That's creation spirituality, that the

world is full of wonders. We are part of that wonder. And it is a grace. It is a blessing just to be here. And everything else flows from that. That is my Strakart said, if the only prayer you say in your whole life is thank you, that would suffice. So we should be saying thank you for our species being here. And thank you for being individuals, you know, in that circle of our species, and then asking, how can we help? You know, how can we assist the next generation to fall in love with life and make things healthy and beautiful for the next generations? I love that Meister Eckhart quote, and the earlier one about being human is to see wonder. You talk about how Western spirituality has two basic traditions, right?

So we've got the first that starts with the experience of sin and develops a fall redemption spiritual motive, and that starts with the experience of life as a blessing and develops a creation-centered spirituality. So here's creation-centered spirituality. So here's creation-centered spirituality over here. The other is the fall redemption model. And you talk about in your book how original sin came about later on in Christianity. And I'm curious if you could share a little bit about other ways of interpreting what we see in the Bible as, you know, known as the fall, right, of Adam and Eve. How do you interpret that story in the sense of creation spirituality

so that you end up with something besides original sin? Well, Ado Ronk was a brilliant psychologist in the 20th century, and he was Jewish, not Christian. And he came up with the term original wound. And I really like that language. It's so much more accurate, I think, a wound. And his theory on the original wound was, when we leave our mother's womb, that is the original wound. Because being separated for nine months, we were very content and very at home. Things went along swimmingly, quite literally, because there's

water in the room. But when we enter this world, you know, usually there's neon lights, you know, in the operating room and you get hit on the butt. I mean, the first thing that happens, and there's noise. Just imagine what a shock that was to all of us. Totally. Yeah. And he goes that the original wound that comes back. It's a wound of separation. And he says the only resolution is the unio mystica. That's the language he uses, the mystical union, which we experience in love and in art, he said.

Those are the healing graces that resolve that problem. And it keeps coming up. Let's say you're going through a rough divorce or separation or someone you love dies. You see, separation keeps coming up. It's a motif in human experience. And that whole issue of letting go and letting be that Eckhart talks about, to return to that place of union and communion and peace and so forth, that humans yearn for that. So I find myself very at home with Otto Ranck's naming. Of course, humanity has a problem. Look around, read the news. And of course, it didn't just start with us, with Adam and Eve. Our closest ancestors, the apes, they make war too. In fact, their wars,

we now know, can be horrible. They're very sadistic. They eat each other's fingers. They eat each other's genitals in their wars. And so, you know, violence is part of our family tree. But again, it's like your parable. There are ways you can choose other than the violence, but you have to work on it. Like Thich Nhat Hanh says, you have to water the plants of justice and plants of peacemaking. I think that's a fine way of thinking about our fall. But also, I've talked quite a lot about dualism being the fall. Hildegard paints a picture of Adam where he's sniffing the flowers. And she says this is what Adam's failure, his fall was, that he's sniffing the flowers. And she says this is what Adam's failure,

his flaw was that he only sniffed the flowers, that he didn't stick around longer to take in their full beauty. So she is saying that humanity's struggles are from a failure of eros, a failure to really enjoy the beauty of life. And I think there's so much truth in that, that it's so much easier to go running off and doing our thing rather than to stick around and learn not to take for granted the healthy air and the healthy soil and our healthy bodies and the healthy waters. You know, all this we abandoned to extract from the earth and build up empires and all the rest. And I think that's what Hildegard is saying, that it's easy for us to forget to savor the beauty of existence.

And many people in their deathbeds, you know, Kubler-Ross said there are two ways that people die. One is happily and peacefully, and those remember the joyful times in life. Then those who die kicking and screaming, she says, are those who never really learned to enjoy life at all. So they still haven't learned the deeper lessons. So I think that's another insight. And then the dualism part, well, you know, patriarchy is built on dualism, matter versus spirit, for example. And this whole idea that everything's in competition, that's the reptilian brain. I win, you lose. So I think that the patriarchal consciousness, which has dominated human awareness for at least 6,500 years, I think that's another foundational split that goes on in the human.

We have to recover that sense of both and instead of either or. And that's a struggle for a lot of people and a lot of philosophies, a lot of religion and so forth. But again, it's back to the idea of the circle. In the circle, we're all equal. We can see each other's eyes. We can see each other's suffering and one another's joy. And that's how you mitigate the temptation to be the winner and make others losers. That reptilian brain consciousness that is obviously so prevalent in the world today. We treat the earth that way. Men are often taught to teach women that way today. We treat the earth that way. Men are often taught to teach women that way, or the old teach the young that way. I mean,

there's so many dualisms that we build up. And of course, between religions and all that, that battle that we project onto one another and participate in. So I think all those ways are ways of understanding the flaw of our humanity. The East talks a lot about ignorance and illusion. And that's true. I mean, all those things are illusory, that we're here to conquer others and to be on top and so forth, be number one. That's false thinking. Yeah. Back to this idea of, you know, Adam sniffing the flowers. You say that falling in love with earth and life and all our creaturely companions all

over again and on a daily basis is the first response of spirit working in and through us. And I love that idea of truly falling in love with the world around us. There's a wonderful quote from Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet who won the Nobel Prize for poetry in 1972. He says, the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history. I just love that because it's so realistic. History isn't always pretty, but the world is much bigger than human history, thank God. That's why I talk about cosmology and the earth and these bigger realities that are part of our world and should be part of our history. So we're living through a tough time of history now, but that sentence from Walcott comes back to me all the time.

To fall in love with the world in spite of history. And then the implication is, okay, and then we can remake the world in spite of history. And then the implication, okay, and then we can remake history, we can do history differently. And I think that's what Jesus was teaching, what Isaiah was teaching, what the Buddha was teaching, what Muhammad was teaching. And that is that, you know, we're capable of compassion, we're capable of changing history that way. And time's running out. Yeah. So let's talk about some of the work you did in creation spirituality was defining sort of four paths of creation spirituality. And I'm wondering if we could just talk briefly about each of them. I'm going to read what the four are just so people get the whole picture. And then maybe you and I can sort of deconstruct them one at a time.

The first path you call the via positiva, which is the positive path, positive experiences of awe and delight. The via negativa, which is communing with the divine through silence and loss, suffering. Third path, via creativa. And the last is the via transformativa. I may have pronounced all those wrong. No, you did great. Your Latin is getting a lot better. All right. So yeah, let's just walk through them. I love this idea of thinking of these four different paths. It makes me think a little bit about the four yogas, right? There's some

crossover there also where they talk about the four paths there. Let's talk about the first one, the via positiva. Right. Well, I think in a healthy situation, such as a child with healthy parenting, this comes first, that you excitement the wonder of the universe and of, first of all, your toes and your fingers and all this. I often work with scientists and I love to ask scientists this one question. When did you know you wanted to be a scientist? And there's always a pause and they scratch their head. And I remember one chemist, I asked that question of, here's an old guy. And he said,

why? He said, I haven't thought about this in 20 years. But the same thing happens. Everyone tells me. I asked Rupert Sheldrake, the British biologist, that once. And he said, hmm. He said, I fell in love with a bush when I was five years old. My father was a naturalist. He showed me this one bush.

And then he said, oh, my God, I never thought of this. I did my doctorate thesis on that bush. And then he said, oh my God, I never thought of this. I did my doctorate thesis on that bush. But every time they say, I fell in love with a star, I fell in love with a worm. I remember a woman scientist said it when I was six, she said, it's a love affair. And so love comes first. I mean, how important is the love affair with the bush when you're five, and then your life becomes a life of a biologist and all the wonderful work that Rupert Sheldrake has done as a forward-thinking biologist. I mean, it's amazing that our vocations come from falling in love. So our capacity to fall in love is there from the beginning. And, you know, with good parenting, you know, you are encouraged to follow your loves and your interests and to develop the skills for the rest, you know. And, you know, at different ages, there's sports or there's flowers or there's cameras or ideas.

There's study, there's interacting with others. I mean, there's such a wonderful diversity of human interests. But the point is that we do fall in love. I say the first commandment in the creation tradition is to fall in love at least three times a day. And that takes falling in love outside the circumstance of anthropocentrism. It's not just about finding your mate till death do you part. That phrase, falling in love, is a big concept. And you can fall in love with

wildflowers. You can fall in love with planets. You can fall in love with poetry and with music and with trees. And there's no limit to it. That's our capacity for goodness. And so that's what the via positiva is. It's about coming face to face with goodness. And love and goodness and joy, they're like a trinity. They go together. You fall in love with something you perceive as good and the good speaks back to you. Yeah. And then joy happens.

So there's a wonderful relationship that goes on in the Via Positiva. Now, Rabbi Heschel talks about awe as the beginning of wisdom. And awe is very important for him. And it's interesting, he defines awe in one place this way. He says, awe is the human mind encountering the universe. It is the act of the human mind encountering the universe. Well, I love that, because once again, we're back to that cosmic awareness, back to creation, that this capacity to fall in love is built into us. We're hardwired for the via positiva. And you have to return to it when things get tough, when there is grief, and when there is suffering, you have to keep reminding yourself. I say it's

like being a camel. You have to store up on the via positiva as you head out into the desert. And there's plenty of desert in life. And you have to call on that big hump, that source of water that you're carrying with you, which is the via positiva, the love of life, as you come across struggles and challenges along the path. And we all do. So that's the via positiva. the path. And we all do. So that's via positiva. Well, that makes me think a little of the Walcott quote you just said, which is not only do we fall in love with life and the world in spite of history, right? It's important to fall in love with life in the midst of our own suffering. You know, I fall in love with my two dogs three times a day easily, right? But that's because I'm consciously, I mean, A,

they're adorable, but B, I'm consciously cultivating that. That idea of falling in love three times a day is similar to gratitude practices or appreciation practices or lots of different things, which are all about simply saying, look, all of it's here. Let me try and train my brain to look for the beautiful. Because there's a poem I'm memorizing right now. And the last line of it is, as if this day with its tentative light were not enough, as if joy were not strewn all around, you know, that's always the case. Yeah, exactly. But as Mary Oliver says, you got to pay attention. Yes.

You know, that's just what you're doing, as you're saying. But I love that phrase, train my brain to look for the beautiful. Yeah. It's so true. And in theological language, that's training your brain to look for God. Because the beauty and God are the same things. According to the mystics, Aquinas says, God is the most beautiful, the super beautiful, and all beings participate in the divine beauty. So the quest for beauty is the quest for God. Joy too, Aquinas says, sheer joy is God's and this demands companionship. So the whole idea

for him then is that the universe exists because of joy. And we're here together because there's a built-in hardwire to share the joy. You know, that is a different way to look at the world. Yeah. And it could change a lot of things. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner

and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love.

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Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I could stay on the Positiva all day because who doesn't want to stay there, right? It's a lovely place to be. But we got four paths, so let's keep moving here. The second path, the Via Negativa. Well, as you pointed out in your brief naming of these paths, there are two parts to the Via Negativa.

One is silence itself. So this is what meditation does, for example, teaching us to let go of noise and input and just be still. And there's that line from the psalmist. Be still and learn that I am God. So this invitation to stillness is what a lot of meditation is about. And it's a wonderful thing. And of course there are practices, especially the East is very rich in these practices. But there's also ways to find stillness.

For example, I think a lot of men go hunting and even fishing for the stillness of it, for the contemplative experience. They don't tell anyone that. They, I'm going out to catch a big fish or I'm going to shoot a deer or something. But really, they want to go out to get away from the everyday noise of life and work and all the rest and the household to experience this deep connecting in silence with the silence of nature. Meister Eckhart says, nothing in all creation is so like God as silence.

So that too is a tremendous affirmation of our capacity for stillness and silence. And again, all traditions say that this is a door, it's not the only door, but it is a door into the divine. And to still the mind, as I say, the mucky mind and the busy mind, you know, that we're often in a state of problem solving. And silence is kind of forgetting the problems for a while, and just to be with being. And we have to find how we do that. And as I say, there are practices that get you there, but there are also other ways to put yourself in a circumstance. And sometimes it just comes to you. Even awe, we talked about awe in the via positive, but awe itself, when you think about it, awe shuts us up.

By definition, when you are awestruck, you shut up. There's a great story in the book of Job that says that. Job was talking on and telling God what he should be doing. And then God said, where were you, Job, when I created the earth and the foundations of the earth? Were you there? Did you teach the mountain goat how to make love and all this stuff? He goes on and on. And then the Bible says, Joe put his hand over his mouth.

He shut up because there are a lot greater things going on than our busy little minds and our opinions on things. So that's part of the via negativa is silence. But the second part that you spoke of briefly is, of course, suffering and grief. And they have something in common, silence and suffering. What they have in common is letting go and letting be. So think of being sick in the hospital. Let's say you're usually busy and accomplishing a lot, and then you're sick in the hospital, and maybe you don't even know, you know, how long you'll be there or if you're going to get well again or what. You learn to let go. You adjust to being in a hospital where someone

has to feed you. Maybe you can't do a thousand things you usually do for yourself. I mean, that's just an example of how real letting go and letting be can be. Or, of course, you lose a friend to death or to sickness or you have a breakup with a friend or something. All these are experiences of letting go, of course. So suffering itself is not something we need to manufacture. It happens to us. And how do we respond? That's the question, you know. What should I say? Do we go into shame and beat ourselves up for it? For example, you know, in the 15th century, there's the great bubonic plague, much worse than our recent coronavirus. And they had no science to do with everything. But many men created flagellation clubs. They went around beating themselves from village to village.

Why? Because they said it must be their sins that have brought on this destruction. It's really kind of weird, but that's how people can be. We flatter ourselves. I think we think that we can bring on a coronavirus. But there were so many of these men's clubs doing this, the Pope had to say, hey, chill, this is not going to solve our problem. hey, chill, this is not going to solve our problem, you know. So there's just many ways in which the human imagination goes overboard in beating ourselves up and wallowing in shame and guilt. And this, too, is part of letting go and letting be,

that suffering is a reality, all beings suffer, as the Buddhists like to remind us. And, of course, as you know, having two dogs, dogs suffer, too, you know. And, of course, as a caretaker, you don't want to see us. And of course, as you know, having two dogs, dogs suffer too, you know. And of course, as a caretaker, you don't want to see that. You want to do everything you can to relieve it. But how to deal with suffering, that's part. And of course, the grieving. And today we're in great grief as a species. Of course we are. I mean, just this week we saw pictures of the Rhine River drying up and the Danube River and the Thames is drying up and the Colorado River in America is drying up. And in China, the Great Rivers are drying up. I mean, it's scary and it's shocking. And of course, it does come back on us as to what we're doing about climate change and

not doing. So the suffering of the world and our own suffering is a teacher for us. And that's part of the via negativa. And of course, in the Christian world, the cross is an archetype of that. Because here was an innocent man, a good man out there preaching compassion and working with the poor. And he ends up being not just killed, but tortured and killed because that was the purpose of the cross by the Roman Empire. tortured and killed because that was the purpose of the cross by the Roman Empire. That's just an archetype of how, in fact, as bad as Good Fridays can be, as bad as our destruction of our souls and egos can be, it's not the last word. That death itself gets recycled in something like resurrection. And that's really a cosmic habit we can see, because suns live full lives

and burst and all this, but then they too die. But they send on, this is stars, they send down their elements to feed other beings. And this happens with supernovas. It's this mystery of life, death, and resurrection is built into, I think, the cosmic processes. We're discovering that more and more from science today. So there's a tremendous law there about don't think that our suffering or death is the last word. And that allows one, I think, to go through it with some grace. Of course, the Buddhists talk a lot about suffering and how all beings suffer and how practices of meditation and so forth allow you to not dwell overly much on the suffering itself, but to move through it. Yeah, I think so much of that working with suffering sort of leads us to the third path

in a way, right, which is the via creativa. To me, one of the things is how is suffering transformed, right? How is it transmuted into something beautiful or at least less negative? So talk about via creativa, which is one of my favorite things that you've really unearthed as part of these four paths. I really love making this a central part of the spiritual path. I'm glad. Maestro Eckhart, the great 14th century Dominican mystic said, I once had a dream. Even though a man, I jumped, I was pregnant. Pregnant with nothingness.

And out of this nothingness, God was born. It's a powerful, powerful dream. That's like a Zen koan. Yeah. The via negativis takes us into nothingness. We become that emptied by all these difficult experiences in life. But as you say, the next step is creativity. That's what Eckhart is saying. a negative. It doesn't end with death or with nothingness. In fact, this is a beginning for new life. And so creativity becomes all important. And notice what he's saying. We actually give birth to the Christ. We give birth to God. In a Christmas sermon, he said, what good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Christ 1400 years ago, and I don't give birth to the Christ in my own

person, in my own history, in my own time and culture. And then he says, God is always needing to be born. We are all here, we are God-birthers. We are all mothers of God. And this is a man talking. What an affirmation of the work of the artist. And he applies the story of the Annunciation, of the angel telling Mary she was going to have a child, to every person and every artist. He says that we all take in the Holy Spirit when we commit to our creativity. Aquinas before him said that the same spirit that hovered over the waters at the beginning of creation hovers over the mind of the artist at work. It's so beautiful that, you know, this is how powerful creativity is. We are tapping into, this is co-creation,

we're tapping into the powers of the universe. And of course, this is scientifically supportable today. One cosmologist, Brian Swim, says, you know, the fireball burned out after 750,000 years. But in fact, it is present in the light waves in our brains. And when we get into a creative state, the light in your brain is really shooting away. And so we are literally the inheritors of the original fireball, physiologically speaking. So I find that the fact that the four paths put creativity at the center

of the spiritual journey is so important in our time, because we're living in this postmodern time. And Newton, he thought the universe was this one galaxy, and he thought it was done, and we just had to fit in. Whereas Einstein broke that open, of course, when he talked about the expansion of the universe and all the rest. So creativity, I think, is what most distinguishes postmodern from modern science. And here we have our mystical tradition saying that creativity is a linchpin between the mystical experience of the via positiva and via negativa on the one hand and prophetic experience of compassion and justice and healing which is the work of the via transformativa and but creativity is the bridge because it is about imagination isn't it moral

imagination to think of a better world to think think of, say, inventing ways to defend us against disease and all the rest. All that is imagination at work, but with a purpose, the purpose being to heal one another and make life more livable for more people. So via creativa is the real bridge. And William Hawking says the prophet is a mystic in action. And the prophet is via transformative work. So we are all mystics. We all go through positiva via negativa and learning to love life and to let go. But we're also all here to serve one another and to interfere, as Rabbi Heschel says,

with the forces of injustice and evil that we're all exposed to. So creativity is at the heart of things in this tradition, and I love it. I think it's very apt for a postmodern understanding of the world. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls, and I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag,

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or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say that art as meditation becomes the basic prayer or practice in the creation spirituality tradition. But just a minute ago, you gave some examples of creativity that are not the usual definition of art. And so I'm curious for people who are, you know, focused on their spiritual growth and development, do you recommend some sort of what we would traditionally think of as a creative practice, whether it be music, drawing, painting, but what we would traditionally think of as some sort practice, whether it be music, drawing, painting. But what we would traditionally think of as some sort of artistic practice. Do you think that's an

important thing for people to cultivate as part of their spiritual journey? Absolutely. There's a good book done on meditation in the 70s by Naranjo and Ornstein, two psychologists on the psychology of meditation. And they talk about two kinds of meditation introvert and extrovert introvert is the kind of sitting meditation where you empty your mind of thoughts and which has this place but what they call extrovert meditation i've renamed as artist meditation because when you do pottery for example like mc richard wrote a classic book called centering and she was a potter and it's book, and that's exactly what we mean by artist meditation. In the act of dealing with clay on a wheel, you're learning to center things, as she calls it, centering. But the key is focusing, and you do that whenever you do art.

It's a focusing project. Many writers have to turn off the radio and all the rest to focus on their writing and to listen to what's inside of them. The same is true of painters and the rest. So it is meditation. It calms the mind and it puts you in a state of creativity very often, where you get carried away. As I say, if you've just said, where did the time go? You've just had a mystical experience. And I know artists, painters who stay up all night, never look at their watch once because they're just in a flow. And that's meditation in the highest sense.

It is co-creating. You were working with the Holy Spirit, if you would use that theological language. Eckhart has a wonderful sermon about a line from the psalmist who talks about the Holy Spirit as a great rapid river. And I love that image because my experience of creativity is often that you're on a river, on a raft without oars, and you're being carried along. And that's what creativity is. You know you're being carried along with something worthwhile and something bigger than yourself. So people have these states of consciousness like this when they're being creative. And the key, though, is to realize that we're always being creative, that all day long we're making decisions. It may be about what meal to cook or, you know, how to dress the kids or

something, how to balance your checkbook. The modern consciousness has shrunken the meaning of art. But pre-modern thinkers, art is everything. In fact, many Native American languages do not have a word for art, because they just presume that we're all here to make beauty. And you're supposed to be doing this all day long. We do do it all day long, you know, even combing your hair or what clothes to wear. So the whole idea that art is just for professional artists is really materialistic and capitalistic. It carries a lot of the weight and the boredom of modern consciousness. Aquinas talks about the art of riding a horse, the art of sailing a ship. the art of riding a horse, the art of sailing a ship. So his pre-modern understanding of art is just so broad. It's indigenous, like the indigenous. It's not this modern version of art.

And of course, David Paladin, a wonderful Navajo painter, said one day, he said, I'm sick and tired of hearing white people tell me they're not artists. If you can talk, you're an artist. You're translating your experiences into language. That's art. So, you know, get over it. Step up to the plate, you know. So I think this is a postmodern way of looking at the world and a premodern way. It's certainly not modern, though.

Yeah. So I think this is a big contribution. And I think when you look at Western history, that artists have given us so much and still do, whether it's music or poetry or architecture and so forth. three, four hundred years after Mozart, and we can still be sitting in a hall of 2,000 people and being touched and moved profoundly by it. How can we put art off in the corner? And of course, we love to watch young artists on YouTube and all the rest, and see our young people grow up and express themselves that way and create new art forms. So art is really how you can define the human being. I wrote a book on creativity, and it begins with the whole idea that the anthropologists, when they're looking for our ancestors, they don't like to find just a biped, but a biped with

artifacts next to them, like jewelry and stuff. Then we know they're our ancestors. So the human being is a biped who makes things. It's not that no other species make things, but're our ancestors. So the human being is a biped who makes things. It's not that no other species make things, but we go overboard. We make lots of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are prolific. And that beauty that you talked about earlier. We're in hot pursuit of beauty and wanting to share it. Yeah.

So I think one of the things that's interesting about art as a spiritual practice is that we so easily get hung up on the thing that is being made versus the process of making. I think this is where so many people get shut down is because if I sit down and start working on a symphony, my experience up till date tells me I'm not going to produce a Mozart quality symphony. I play guitar and I love doing it, but I'm not going to be anybody's professional guitarist. And for me, I've done a lot of internal work on trying to reclaim the guitar for myself as simply something that I love to do for what it brings to me internally. But to your point about capitalism, I mean, so much today, like if you become even marginally good at anything, your friends suddenly start going,

you should start a Netze shop. You know, we're constantly encouraged that if it's either a not really good or not sellable, that it's not worth doing. And I think that blocks a lot of people using art as a spiritual practice. lot of people using art as a spiritual practice. 100%. 100%. Now, I have always taught spirituality in my programs. And I had programs, master's and doctorate, and then inner city high school kids for over 45 years. And we all have artist meditation. And sometimes you have people there with real talent and experiences and mostly you don't and in fact i remember when one talented artist came and he was questioning well which course should i take i said take the course that scares you the most he said you mean i can't do my photography i

can't do my painting yeah what scares you the most he said dancing he said i have two club feet when it comes down i said take dancing so he. So he did. And it changed his life. The rest of his life, he's been teaching circle dancing and so forth. But the point is that I have seen conversion after conversion happening with people taking clay as meditation or dance as meditation or painting as meditation who never painted or never did clay and so on. And as you say, that's not the point, because the point is the process and what happens to you in the process. And if you produce a product, that's secondary. And again, a capitalist version of art is to produce something that's saleable, as you say. Art as meditation is not about that. It's about centering. It's about communing with clay,

communing with colors. I remember the very first year I taught the master's program, a 42-year-old Franciscan sister came to me in the spring, and she said to me, this is the first spring of my life. I said, what? You're 42 years old. What are you talking about? what? You're 42 years old. What are you talking about? She said, I took this painting class. And she said, it so opened me up to shade and color and everything I haven't seen before. This is the first spring of my life at 42. This conversion happened just by painting. That's what I'm talking about. And there were a million stories like this. So again, we have to step out of the capitalist version of art and recover art as a spiritual practice, as a spiritual experience. And I want to point out what Gabriel Marcel, a wonderful French philosopher, says. He says, art is not

just producing a painting or a song or dance. It's those people who look at the painting and listen to the music. They are artists too. When you're taking in beauty from others and other people's art, you are being an artist too. So the artist is both giving and receiving. And again, that is not taught us in a capitalist version of art. So I think all this is, I'm so glad we're talking about it, because I know this is transformative, that people get radically changed through artist meditation. Here's one concrete example. A 41-year-old guy came to me in our program,

and he was taking massage as meditation. And he told me that he was sexually abused by his aunt. Every Friday, she would come over and abuse him for a year when he was six years old. And he didn't know this until the massage class. Imagine how much energy his psyche and body put into covering that up for 36 years. And then he graduated about a month later. And I swear he lost at least 15 years in our program because that truth came out of his body. And that's the thing. All art is bodily, and it carries our experiences within it. And of course, our bodies literally carry the history of

the universe in them. Our bodies are 13.8 billion years old, literally. They're carrying the original hydrogen and helium atoms from the fireball. So this guy had this amazing conversion and awakening. And without having to go to a psychiatrist, just because his body was listening and was being called on to let the truth out, It was, you know, an amazing experience. I remember the day of graduation, I looked at him from afar, and it was like he was skipping back into life again, you know. He was like a child again. It was so beautiful. And of course, that's part of the artist, too, is recovering the child. I'd like to practice other people massaging me as meditation. Can I do that? Is that a spiritual path?

Of course, right? It works both ways, as Gabor Mirchel says. All right. Now let's move on to the fourth path, the via transformativa. Talk to me about that. Well, that is the way of compassion and healing and justice and celebration. It is the community coming together and are working for that coming together because it's injustice that keeps us apart.

And one thing I'm struck by is how all the religious traditions agree on so many important things. And one of them is this word compassion. So the Dalai Lama says, and this is a quote, we can do away with all religion, but we can't do away with compassion. Compass the Dalai Lama says, and this is a quote, we can do away with all religion, but we can't do away with compassion. Compassion is my religion. Well, Jesus in Luke 6, be you compassionate as created in heaven is compassionate. And of course, he's Jewish and he got that from the Jewish tradition. In the Jewish tradition, compassion is the secret name for God. And Jesus was compelled to let the secret out of the bag, if you will. And then Muhammad, the Quran, more frequently than any other adjective for Allah in the Quran

is Allah, the compassionate one. So there's teaching of compassion. It's everywhere. But it's a big hurdle. It's not easy. Compassion isn't easy. And Meister Eckhart says compassion means justice. So he's not separating compassion from the social structures that we have to critique continually and improve on continually. And of course, we're going through that as a country at this time, of course, with the latest news about how terribly the Native American children were treated in government schools and religious schools, and in Canada too, of course, which the Pope flew over for a week to try to apologize for. And of course, the truths of slavery and so forth. And there's backlash now.

We actually have states telling teachers they can't teach them that there's racism in American history or something. You know, it's just beyond the pale. But this is a live issue, of course, today. And it's not easy to hear that our founding fathers so hallowed had slaves, many of them, and made other big mistakes and had clay feet. Oh, but that does make them human because we're all humans. So the point is, though, in taking down the Confederate statues and all this stuff. So this is a big deal at this very moment in history.

And of course, to realize how many sins the churches have committed over the centuries, such as the Discovery Doctrine, which two popes came up with, publishing three papal bulls in the 15th century, which gave carte blanche to Christian kings, beginning with the Portuguese king and queen, to go to Africa and take slaves and go to the Americas and do whatever they want, because these continents were not, quote, Christian, part of the Christian empire. And I mean, the whole idea that Christ wanted an empire is about as close to heresy as you can get. So anyway, I mean, the sins of our fathers are kind of being headlined these days. It's not easy to live with.

And this is why many people are saying I'm spiritual but not religious. The religion has often had a shadow side to it that is immense. All this is part of the story of the Via Transformativa. It begins with truth. Like Gandhi said, my religion is truth. The meaning of Hinduism to me is a pursuit of truth in a nonviolent way. And notice how much falsity is in the air these days and on the air in the social media and the other media, lies upon lies.

So we have to begin to know the truth about how dangerous we've been to one another. And of course, the Holocaust. And of course, now the truths about what we've been doing to Mother Earth and her creatures. All of this comes out. And so the struggle against evil, it goes on in all of us. That's your parable story we begin with here, isn't it? And we can all be participants, even unconsciously. We take it for granted. That's what privilege means when it's being used in a political way, that we don't realize the suffering of other groups, groups that are different from us. And of course, the whole rise of rights for gays and lesbians, that's a minority too, that for centuries has been abused and forgotten about. And yet science

has now declared as of the 70s that it's not abnormal. It's about 8% of any human population everywhere is going to be gay or lesbian. So, you know, give them a break and let's get on with more important things than condemning one another. And we found 464 other species have gay and lesbian populations. So, hey, it's not unnatural to a minority. So, you know, we can grow in awareness, and that's a beautiful thing. And I think that's what working for justice means. And of course, compassion is not just about sharing one another's suffering. It's also about sharing one another's suffering, it's also about sharing one another's joy. Meister Eckhart says, what happens to another,

whether it be a joy or a sorrow, happens to me. That is a succinct and beautiful definition of compassion, that we are part of one another at the deepest level, at the level of joy, and at the level of suffering, via positiva and via negativacy. And that's what you bring to celebration. Celebration is a gathering of our wounds and of our joy at being here. And that's why celebration is 50% of compassion. Suffering is 50%. Let's relieve the suffering that we can and back up if we're making suffering on others,

but also let us celebrate that we're here. That's where I think Eckhart just nails wonderfully the real meaning of compassion. And so the Via Transformativa is a big path. And it ranges from being jailed for nonviolent disobedience to creating rituals for celebration and for healing and for grieving together and bringing in all the artists and so forth, which is what real ritual should be about. Wonderful. Well, I am happy to have gone through the four paths. I think they are really beautiful. I thought near the end here, we could talk for a couple of minutes about some of the mystics that you love. You've beautifully layered them in through this conversation. But I wanted to talk about Hildegard. And you say that she

pictures our life's journey as a struggle to set up our tent of wisdom. And I just love that metaphor. Talk to me about what she had to say about our tent of wisdom. It is a wonderful metaphor. I prefer that to Jung's language about individuation, setting up our tent of wisdom. She says that we're born with original wisdom in us, but we're so tiny that it's a small tent. But that life's journey is setting up that tent, and she paints the picture of it. There are demons along the way. There are obstacles along the way. She has a little cartoon figures and about six different pictures where the soul is trying to set up its tent. But at the end,

it is triumphant. It sets up this tent and demons are outside. They don't get in, but they're still outside shooting arrows at the soul. So it is about life's journey. She actually gets that image from John 1, the first chapter of John's gospel, but that gets it actually from one of the Hebrew Bible books, where it says that God has wandered the earth wondering where to set up the tent, and set up the tent among the Jewish people. And then John 1, who is Jewish after all, all Jesus' disciples were Jewish and Jesus was himself. And then he applies it to Jesus, that the Christ is also an expression of having set up a tent. But, you know, a tent is a marvelous image, you know.

It's a home. It's a shelter. But it's portable, you know. You know, it's not a mansion. Take it on a camping trip maybe or something. It's fragile in a way. It's temporary, you know. But that we all have this tent of wisdom. And that wisdom is, of course, one of the divine, feminine incarnations of the divine. Wisdom is feminine in the Hebrew Bible.

Chokmah, the Hebrew word, is feminine. And Sophia, the Greek word, is feminine. Bible, Chokmah, the Hebrew word is feminine, and Sophia, the Greek word is feminine. And the East too, Kwanian is wisdom, and she's feminine. So it's an affirmation of feminine wisdom. And feminine wisdom includes a whole, it includes cosmos. And in the Hebrew Bible, in Proverbs, we hear that wisdom was by God's side, playing with God. And that's that Eros again, playing day after day. She's there whenever there's creativity, like Hildegard, the same Hildegard we're talking about. She says that wisdom is involved in all creative works. And Hildegard herself, of course, was a genius musician.

She was a painter. She painted many paintings in her mandalas, her visions. She was a herbalist and a healer. She was involved in so many art forms. So she knew what she was talking about when she said that wisdom is part of all creative work. So all that is encapsulated in her wonderful affirmation that we're all born with this tent of wisdom in us. Life's journey is setting up the tent.

It's not easy to set up this tent. There are obstacles along the way, but we can do it. I think it's a beautiful image, beautiful parable. I agree. Well, Matthew, that is a great place for us to wrap up for today. So thank you so much for agreeing to be a guest on the show, for coming back on. Thank you so much for agreeing to be a guest on the show, for coming back on. Thank you so much for your work. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can find you and your work.

But again, thank you so much. Thank you, Eric. And thank you for your work and having a platform like this to talk about fun and important things like we've been talking about. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our

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