Creativity, Wisdom, and Resistance

Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox

Week of 6/23-28/2025:
Creativity, Wisdom &
Resistance in Challenging Times

6/29/2025

June 23, 2025: Art, Artist & Work in a Time of a Collective Dark Night

The Via Transformativa is all about our work, how we usher the spirit into the world. It’s about our vocation, our calling, our purpose. Today we honor, once again, the work of Jennifer Hereth.

In her book my brush—my voice is also a section of paintings entitled “How Hard Women Work in the World.” The artist inside each one of us also calls us to dwell in our deepest values. All this is honored in the practice of art as meditation.

As Meister Eckhart put it, “what is true cannot come from outside in but must come from inside out and pass through an inner form.”

Jennifer Hereth, portrait of an African woman who asked for dancing images to be added to her burden, from “Women Work So Hard.” Used with permission.

June 24, 2025: Moral Imagination, Immoral Imagination & An Energy Breakthrough

Creativity is a powerful force that can be used for good or for evil. Artists and dancers can help transform society for the better. But what about those who design weapons of mass destruction? What about those who employ manipulation and sadism? What about those who are masters of propaganda?

This is why Thomas Aquinas said that one human being is capable of doing more evil than all the other species put together. Potter, M. C. Richards, insists that a “primary goal” of education is to develop imagination and “moral imagination.”

Are we giving imagination the attention it deserves in our educational systems? God bless human imagination. And may it be steered from evil to the true common good.

June 25, 2025: Etty Hillesum on Oneness in Hard Times

With so much horror in the world, it is easy to sink into despair. But then we find inspiration in the form of Etty Hillesum, the Dutch Jewish author killed in Auschwitz in 1943. What is amazing about her is that she was able to “stay human” in the midst of the most unspeakable suffering. She was already interned at a transit camp when she wrote the following: The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down for a chat, the sun is shining on my face – and right before our eyes, mass murder… The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension. And: Living and dying, sorrow and joy, the blisters on my feet and the jasmine behind the house, the persecution, the unspeakable horrors: it is all as one in me. Etty was somehow able to hold both extremes in her awareness.

A 1930 photograph of Etty Hillesum (Wikimedia Commons) opposite a page of her diary (public domain on Picryl). Composite image by Phila Hoopes. Used with permission.

June 26, 2025: Etty Hillesum and Peace-Making

Etty Hillesum volunteered to be among the first Jews rounded up by Germans to go to the Westerbork transit camp. There, she was a counselor and friend to many. Also, we now know, she and a colleague helped smuggle many children out of the camp.

At one point in her diary she writes: Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. This means that once we have done all we can do, in the most creative ways we can, we should not fall into despair because our action has not achieved the results we hoped for.

June 27, 2025: Etty Hillesum on Real Men

‘Boys play with soldiers; girls play with dolls.’ The association of males with violence and females with homemaking has gone on for a very, very long time. So, too, has the notion that what men do is more important.

The ramifications of this kind of socialization is plain for all to see—i.e., an immature leader playing real-life war games, oblivious to the suffering his actions could cause others. A reader responded to last week’s DM on Walt Whitman and quoted Etty Hillesum (which in turn inspired GG’s DMs this week). Hillesum said: Women’s historical task for the future [is] to show the man the road to his own soul through her soul.

Toxic masculinity and war / Iman Hassan

“Toxic masculinity and war” Iman Hassan, Staff Attorney of the Center on Conscience & War. Carl Johan Erikson

June 28, 2025: Resistance: Help Kill the Billionaire Welfare Bill!

The budget being proposed right now reflects the values of the current administration and of Project 2025. And these values are the polar opposite of those that Christ taught.

If this bill were to pass, it would harm most the poorest 1/3 of Americans while billionaires would gain trillions of dollars in benefits. Is that moral? Is that America? Do Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezo, the Trump family, et al really need tax cuts that would result in 16 million Americans losing their health insurance?
Bill Gates doesn’t think so. No one with an ounce of moral integrity would think so. Write and phone vulnerable Republican congresspeople and hold their feet to the fire. Attend town halls. (See the DM for a list of vulnerable Republicans to contact.)

SIGN THE PLEDGE: Boycott pro-Trump corporations. Faithful America.

EngageForDemocracy offers curated trustworthy reporting, educational resources, and action campaigns to hold government accountable to the Constitution and democratic norms.

Etty Hillesum, Etty, The Letters and Diaries, 1941-1943, transl. Arnold J. Pomerans, p. 289

Banner image: “We Need Leaders Not in Love with $” mural in Omaha, Nebraska. Photo by Shelby L. Bell on Flickr. Creative Commons

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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

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society

Visionary theologian and best-selling author Matthew Fox offers a new theology of evil that fundamentally changes the traditional perception of good and evil and points the way to a more enlightened treatment of ourselves, one another, and all of nature. In comparing the Eastern tradition of the 7 chakras to the Western tradition of the 7 capital sins, Fox allows us to think creatively about our capacity for personal and institutional evil and what we can do about them.
“A scholarly masterpiece embodying a better vision and depth of perception far beyond the grasp of any one single science. A breath-taking analysis.” — Diarmuid O’Murchu, author of Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice

In A Spirituality Named Compassion, Matthew Fox delivers a profound exploration of the meaning and practice of compassion. Establishing a spirituality for the future that promises personal, social, and global healing, Fox marries mysticism with social justice, leading the way toward a gentler and more ecological spirituality and an acceptance of our interdependence which is the substratum of all compassionate activity.
“Well worth our deepest consideration…Puts compassion into its proper focus after centuries of neglect.” –The Catholic Register

Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election

Matthew Fox tells us that he had always shied away from using the term “Anti-Christ” because it was so often used to spread control and fear. However, given today’s rise of authoritarianism and forces of democracide, ecocide, and christofascism, he turns the tables in this book employing the archetype for the cause of justice, democracy, and a renewed Earth and humanity.

From the Foreword: If there was ever a time, a moment, for examining the archetype of the Antichrist, it is now…Read this book with an open mind. Good and evil are real forces in our world. ~~ Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Conversations with the Divine.

For immediate access to Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election, order the e-book with 10 full-color prints from Amazon HERE.

To get a print-on-demand paperback copy with black & white images, order from Amazon HERE or IUniverse HERE.

To receive a limited-edition, full-color paperback copy, order from MatthewFox.org HERE.
Order the audiobook HERE for immediate download.