Exploring Masculinity

[Daily Meditations] 6/2/2025: Week of 6/16-21/2025: Exploring Masculinity, Walt Whitman, & Refugees

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Week of 6/16-21/2025:
Exploring Masculinity, Walt Whitman, & Refugees

6/21/2025

Please note: These Daily Meditations will be written by Matthew Fox (MF) on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays; and Gianluigi Gugliermetto (GG) on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Matthew will continue to offer a video teaching each Monday.

June 16, 2025: Report From the “Healthy Masculinity” Summit Gathering (MF)

At this summit, which featured Matthew, there was also an “Elders Panel” which included Matthew at 84 years old, Lee at 74, and Daniel at 71. There were also two hosts, 51- and 39-years-old respectively. In Matthew’s talk, he spoke to the seven archetypes of the Healthy Masculine that he refers to in his book The Hidden Spirituality of Men.

Some points made by the panel include: How a binary way of seeing the world is “antiquated.” How men are cut off from their bodies and feelings. How men obsess about war. How we can embrace aging by having older men as role models. A 51-year-old spoke to how there is an elder hunger in the world today.

June 17, 2025: Four Bad Fathers & The Price Society Pays (MF)

This Father’s Day season, let’s meditate on bad fathers. Example #1: Daedalus, the father of Icarus. He was banished to Crete because he murdered his nephew out of envy. When he and his son, Icarus, had to put on wings to escape prison, he didn’t communicate well how important it was not to go too close to the sun.

#2: Hitler’s father was sadistic and violent with him on a daily basis.

#3: Trump’s father was an active member of KKK, greed was his god, and he had no empathy for anyone.

#4: Musk’s father and grandfather were so excited about apartheid that they moved their family from Canada to South Africa, where they could enjoy the fruits of tyranny and oppression in their business dealings.

How Donald Trump’s father instilled a culture of racism & patriarchy in the family. Mary Trump tells the story of growing up in the Trump family with her uncle Donald Trump and grandfather Fred Trump. Democracy Now!

June 18, 2025: The Male Toddler Archetype (GG)

“Monster boys” are running the world, and a male toddler archetype is among them. You can recognize a male toddler by his tantrums and narcissism. Currently, we have a toddler-in-chief in the White House.

One of the great questions of our time is “Why is there so much violence in the world?” It seems the root is unhealthy masculinity, which is rampant not only in leadership positions, but among everyday people as well. In Italy, for instance, a young teenager smashed his ex-girlfriend with a rock, simply because she refused to continue the relationship. Clearly, we have a long way to go in teaching our young men how to be a healthy man.

June 19, 2025: Walt Whitman as a Spiritual Ancestor (GG)

The book by Matthew Fox and Adam Bucko, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation, ends with an extended reference to Walt Whitman.

Both Matthew and Adam note that Whitman “celebrated the diversity of sexuality in our species.” Whitman is a wonderful contrast to the unhealthy racist, sexist, homophobic men currently in the White House.

Whitman espoused a “spiritual democracy,” at the core of which is a daring, courageous and strong, big-hearted and tender masculinity.

The wild, shamanic side of Walt Whitman is captured in the Arrow Park Cultural Project’s sculpture
by Bruno Lucchesi in Monroe, NY. Photo by Stanley Zimny on Flickr.

June 20, 2025: Making Evil Conscious (GG)

Patriarchy as a social system is at least 4,000 years old. Jungian analyst Steven Herrmann said: The Puritan myth was based upon an unconscious projection of evil onto indigenous people, the life way of the two-spirits and a bi-erotic image of the soul’s wholeness.*

Male Puritans, faced with alternate ways of living, as modeled by the indigenous people, decided instead to demonize their own feminine inner core. This ancestral refusal to embrace wholeness has informed American colonialism, sexual repression, and racism.

If Walt Whitman “makes evil conscious in the American self,” as Herrmann suggests, it is the normative male white heterosexual American self that is at stake.

June 21, 2025: W. H. Auden, Jennifer Hereth on Refugees & Fascism (MF)

Following are excerpts from a moving poem called “Refugee Blues,” composed by W.H. Auden in 1939, when Europe was exploding with fascist fervor.
The paintings are by Jennifer Hereth, a friend of Matthew’s and former faculty member at UCS, from her latest book, my brush—my voice.** She says that “refugees will become the most prominent archetype of the 21st Century.” Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes. Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.…The consul banged the table and said, ‘If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead.’ But we are still alive my dear, but we are still alive.… Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky. It was Hitler over Europe, saying, ‘They must die.’ O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

“Refugees Chaos,” “Refugees on the Move II,” and “Mother and Child Refugee,” by Jennifer Hereth. From her website.

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*Matthew Fox and Adam Bucko, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation, at page 214.

**The pictures here are used with permission from the artist. See Jennifer Hereth, my brush—my voice at http://www.jenniferhereth.com. All profits from her book are donated to “Global Refuge.”

Recommended Reading

The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine

To awaken what Fox calls “the sacred masculine,” he unearths ten metaphors, or archetypes, ranging from the Green Man, an ancient pagan symbol of our fundamental relationship with nature, to the Spiritual Warrior….These timeless archetypes can inspire men to pursue their higher calling to connect to their deepest selves and to reinvent the world.

“Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know.” — Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God

Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation

Authors Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox encourage us to use our talents in service of compassion and justice and to move beyond our broken systems–economic, political, educational, and religious–discovering a spirituality that not only helps us to get along, but also encourages us to reevaluate our traditions, transforming them and in the process building a more sacred and just world.

Incorporating the words of young activist leaders culled from interviews and surveys, the book provides a framework that is deliberately interfaith and speaks to our profound yearning for a life with spiritual purpose and for a better world.
“Occupy Spirituality is a powerful, inspiring, and vital call to embodied awareness and enlightened actions.”
~~ Julia Butterfly Hill, environmental activist and author of The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods

The Return of Father Sky: A Cosmic Mystery for Kids of All Ages

The second book in the Father Fox’s Fantastical Fables series, The Return of Father Sky helps boys and girls to celebrate a new relationship with the masculine by way of Father Sky, whose return excites joy and wonder and possibility that enlarge the soul to welcome others and all creation.

Written in a rhyming Dr. Seuss-like style, this full-color, beautifully illustrated book, written by world- renowned theologian Matthew Fox weaves together modern science and classic spirituality in a whimsical, entertaining format to illustrate important truths to readers aged 4 and up. With artwork curated from illustrators around the world, this book expresses the joy and wonder of all peoples and cultures, planting seeds of respect, cooperation and hope to work together for the healing of our planet.