Gaza, Shame, & Lion’s Energy

Week of 8/11-16/2025

8/17/2025

This is a weekly summary of the previous week’s Daily Meditations. Three of them are penned by Matthew Fox (MF), and three by Gianluigi Gugliermetto (GG). On Monday, we will also continue to offer a video teaching by Matthew.

August 11, 2025: World Lion Day 2025 (MF)

World Lion Day was August 10th, and Matthew believes lions are worthy of being celebrated. Lions represent nobility, beauty, grace, but they can also be fierce and terrifying.

Matthew had a rather profound experience while present at Joanna Macy’s deathbed. While standing there, he invoked many holy beings: the Buddha, the lineage of Dalai Lamas, Thich Nhat Hanh, St. Francis, and Hildegard. When he got to Hildegard, Joanna rose from her bed with a shout.

Intuitively, Matthew added, “Hildegard, a lion….” Then he told Joanna that she was one, too. In both Joanna and Hildegard, there was a deep strength and purpose that would not be deterred. The lioness is a symbol of the Magna Mater, the Great Mother.* Surely Joanna and Hildegard were about the Magna Mater as well.

Lionesses on the hunt. Photo by Jeff Lemond on Unsplash.

August 12, 2025: Evil on the Rise and on the Table: A Call for Lion Energy (MF)

In yesterday’s DM, Matthew referred to Hildegard of Bingen as a lion. This is why: She didn’t mince words, even when talking to emperors, popes, abbots and archbishops.

Matthew shares 50 of them in his book, Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works plus Letters and Songs. She told the emperor he was “infant and a madman.” She said that the greedy were “snakelike” and “hellish.” We need this kind of courageous lion energy today as we fight the great evil afoot in our world.

August 13, 2025: Flaming Torches and Flickering Lights (GG)

In the heat of the summer, GG often retreats to his furnished basement in order to do his work. While there, he found that he couldn’t stop thinking of the people in Gaza, living in scorching heat, running from one place to another in order to get food to survive, without clean water to drink, and hoping not to be killed in the process.

It has been calculated that the level of destruction in Gaza surpasses many times that caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many prominent Jewish and Israeli intellectuals have said that Israel is killing itself while committing the most horrific crimes.

Ariel Toaff, professor emeritus of history at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel, wrote a few days ago: I am not going to talk of the moral image of Israel, because it has been long lost. Gaza might become the tomb not of Netanyahu and his crazy followers, but ours. And we did nothing to stop him. We are, in fact, his accomplices.

The right yet cruel punishment will reach us eventually. The dead in Gaza, the women and the children, will run after us with their flaming torches right to the gates of hell.

August 14, 2025: Awareness of Tragedy (GG)

Tragedy is a strong collective archetype that, when it takes hold of a group of people, is very hard to budge. Evil people who are keen on taking advantage of others will exploit any weakness and lead that group toward destruction.

In a tragedy, before the final catastrophe, there are mostly frightened people who try to figure out how to get out of the trap, but fear hampers their ability. That’s why the help from outsiders who are compassionate people can be very valuable.

In the early 1900’s, many Zionists earnestly believed they were going to create a new society free from persecution and oppression. Most of them had not a clue about the colonial and racist nature of this project. Today, as always, our job as moral and spiritual people is that of taking sides against injustice.

August 15, 2025: The Role of Shame (GG)

As we reflect on the state of the world, we cannot help but address the situation of Donald Trump. Many psychologists and psychiatrists have asserted that his words and behaviors clearly and unmistakably show that he suffers from malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

Narcissists repress feelings of guilt and shame and instead project them outwards in a desperate effort to free themselves from them. The question, of course, is how was such a broken man allowed to gain so much power? GG’s friend, Fr. Richard Rubin, points to the dynamics of shame and guilt, and how Christianity could be understood as an attempt to “lift the shame” (the inappropriate kind of shame) from people’s hearts.

Dying on a cross in Roman times was a shameful death, but GG is convinced that early Christians “appropriated” such shame. By consciously placing “the crucified” as the foundation of their community (see 1 Corinthians 1), they proclaimed that the most humiliated are actually more than worthy.

Full-page ad published in the New York Times by 225 mental health professionals on the dangerous psychopathology of then-candidate Trump. From George Conaway’s X feed.

The Gaza Horror and Israel’s & America’s Decline in Morality (MF)

Israel is not today the country it was in 1961, when Adolf Eichmann, often called the “architect of the Final Solution,” was captured, in spite of all the horrors that he perpetrated, there were elements of humanity in the way he was treated.

But there is NO humanity present in the way Israel is treating the citizens of Gaza—avenging the killing of 1,250 Jews by killing 64,000 Palestinians. The oppressed have become the oppressors. And the United States is complicit.

Not only Donald Trump but President Biden, too, failed to check Netanyahu’s revenge in Gaza in any meaningful way. It is our duty, as people of conscience, to speak up.

*See J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, pp. 180-182.

Banner image: “A pair of mating lions, male and female, spotted in Phinda Private Game Reserve.” Image by Fr Lawrence Lew, OP. Flickr.

Mystic-Warriors at the Roof of the World

In Monday’s DM, we shared the story of Marianne Grosspietsch and the Shanti Leprosy Aid organization of Nepal: faced with the loss of food from USAID, her community is planting thousands of fruit trees to nourish the hungry in the region while mitigating the effects of climate change.

We invite you to consider supporting this work HERE (US$) or HERE (€ and other currencies).

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