Prayer and Original Blessing

Week of 8/25-30/2025: Prayer, Psilocybin, & Original Blessing

8/31/2025

This is a weekly summary of the previous week’s Daily Meditations. Some are penned by Matthew Fox (MF), and some by Gianluigi Gugliermetto (GG). You can click on the title of a DM in order to view the original piece in its entirety. Also, please note, we will continue to offer a video teaching by Matthew each Monday.

August 25, 2025: Joanna Macy on Original Blessing: A Practice in Deep Ecumenism (MF)

On Saturday, there was an online memorial service for Joanna Macy, with over 1000 participating. Matthew shared parts of a letter that Joanna wrote him over 20 years ago about Matthew’s book Original Blessing. She called it “a revolutionary event” in spirituality.

She said: OB reminds me of the Dharma wheel because it brings a similar shift of focus—a radical shift from substance to process. The book suggests that we are not entities to be perfected so much as processes to be valued and enlivened. Matthew concluded his talk with a Buddhism-inspired prayer: May all creatures be happy. May all creatures be saved. May all creatures be acknowledged as original blessings. May we all be grateful for our existence. And act like it. Amen.

The Eightfold Path of Buddhism. Graphic by Sai Pradyumna. Wikimedia Commons.

August 26, 2025: Psilocybin & the Brain: A Doctor Reports on Science & Mysticism (MF)

Last week, Matthew and GG discussed how some clergy had positive experiences when participating in a guided LSD experience.

Matthew is sad that so many in our culture feel they can’t experience transcendence unless they utilize psychoactive substances. Matthew believes that spiritual rituals can achieve the same end, which is one of the reasons why he’s been involved in the Cosmic Mass movement for 30 some years.

However, there can be a place for substances like psilocybin. For instance, one 67-year-old patient, living with metastatic cancer, was very fearful “of nonexistence, of the end.” But “mushrooms taught him how to die.” The patient said it was “the most real thing he’d ever experienced.”

Dr. Michael Hunter says that psychoactive mushrooms can “unhook” the brain, and when that happens “the self softens — and suffering, sometimes, dissolves.”

August 27, 2025: Prayer and the Body, Part I (GG)

Western Christians, when they pray, tend to not be very embodied. But Saint Dominic (founder of the Order of Preachers, aka the Dominicans) modeled many different embodied ways to pray.

Reportedly, Dominic prayed almost constantly. His “nine ways of prayer” are presented in one 13th century booklet. For instance, he bowed profoundly before praying. Often he prostrated himself completely on the ground. Dominic used to genuflect and stand up repeatedly, hundreds of times in a row, while repeating sentences from the Psalms. Often he prayed standing motionless for long stretches of time, sweetly repeating to himself words from Scripture, but also opening his arms in a welcoming gesture. More rarely, Dominic prayed stretching his arms in the form of a cross. He also prayed while walking. There are so many ways to pray!

Saint Dominic with arms outstretched as if on a cross.

Image from the manuscript of De Modo Orandi in the Vatican Library. Wikimedia Commons.

August 28, 2025: Prayer and the Body, Part 2 (GG)

A contemporary of Saint Dominic, even more radical in her bodily prayer, was Saint Christina, also called Christina the Astonishing. Christina was known for climbing up trees and staying there for long stretches of time, immersed in prayer.

Like Dominic, Christina also prostrated herself in grief before altars within churches. Christina threw herself in rivers during winter and managed fire in her hands without getting burned. She ran in the fields and spent long stretches of time alone in the woods.

At times, Christina prayed by spinning in a dervish kind of way. She was also known for her wondrous levitations, and she reportedly accompanied several souls from purgatory to heaven during her out-of-body travels.

Clearly, St. Christina involved body, heart and mind when she prayed.

Saint Christina the Astonishing (Mirabilis) church painting with caption reading “In pestilence, famine, and war, deliver us Lord – Saint Christina for your community intercede.” George Baltus,

Our Lady Assumption, Sint-Truiden, Belgium. Wikimedia Commons

August 29, 2025: Supplications (GG)

Prayer is more than supplication. It can be thanksgiving, contemplation, lament, etc. Matthew likes to call prayer “an openness to life.”

One reader privately took issue with that pronouncement, saying that prayer is more than openness, that prayer can change reality—not necessarily because there is a God who waits to hear supplications, but because the world is made of subtle energetic fields which communicate with each other.

As Westerners, we are going through a paradigm shift. Our understanding of the Divine has changed and will change. Thus, we’ll have even more debates on the meaning and effectiveness of all kinds of prayer in the next few centuries, if we survive our propensity for self-destruction.

August 30, 2025: Two Republican Presidents: “I am not a dictator.” “I am not a crook.” (MF)

This week our sitting president said at a cabinet meeting: “I am not a dictator.” Then he went on to say he could do whatever he wants as president and that “many” Americans want a dictator. His “I am not a dictator” sounds eerily similar to Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”

Unfortunately, the checks and balances that were put in place by our founding fathers are not holding very well with bought justices on the Supreme Court and sychophantic Republicans in Congress who have completely lost not just their spine, but their soul.

The first-ever Republican president Abraham Lincoln believed in democracy and said: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.” We’re getting scarily close. It’s time for all hands on deck to protect our democracy before it perishes.

Banner image: “The Praying Man.” Photo by Aina Vine on Unsplash

Recommended Reading

Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality

Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way.

“Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story

Prayer: A Radical Response to Life

How do prayer and mysticism relate to the struggle for social and ecological justice? Fox defines prayer as a radical response to life that includes our “Yes” to life (mysticism) and our “No” to forces that combat life (prophecy). How do we define adult prayer? And how—if at all—do prayer and mysticism relate to the struggle for social and ecological justice?

One of Matthew Fox’s earliest books, originally published under the title On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear: Spirituality American Style, Prayer introduces a mystical/prophetic spirituality and a mature conception of how to pray.

Called a “classic” when it first appeared, it lays out the difference between the creation spirituality tradition and the fall/redemption tradition that has so dominated Western theology since Augustine. A practical and theoretical book, it lays the groundwork for Fox’s later works. “One of the finest books I have read on contemporary spirituality.” – Rabbi Sholom A. Singer