Week of 9/1-6/2025:
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.
September 1, 2025: Labor Day 2025 (MF)
Very much in the news are the resignations and layoffs at the Center for Disease Control. We also saw Robert Kennedy, Jr. fire the director, Susan Monarez, for refusing to go along with his vaccine policy and his demands to fire qualified personnel in the department. We commend her for being a woman with a conscience. Also happening this Labor Day are 1,000 protests in all 50 states on the theme “Workers Over Billionaires.” Work matters. Work is where we most effect one another and leave our imprint on the larger community, and even on history.
Timeline of turmoil at CDC
September 2, 2025: Transforming Work & Academia: A Vision from Bernard Amadei (MF)
Work demands the best of us. It is often where we work out our callings, the very reason we are on this planet for our brief sojourn. In work we commit to the Via Transformativa. Matthew says that as a teacher, “There is no greater thrill than seeing students of mine gift the world by their work.”
He tells us of a former student, Bernard Amadei, who co-founded Engineers Without Borders. EWB works in challenging parts of the world, doing projects such as creating solar-generated wells.
Bernard’s new book is called Engineering for Peace and Diplomacy. He notes that most educational programs fail to address values, and so he challenges readers to imagine “prioritizing a peace-driven industrial complex over a current military-focused one.”
September 3, 2025: Prayer and the Body – Part 3 (GG)
GG says that he’s been hearing more about activists willing to put their body “on the line,” i.e., in the line of fire. He mentions two Christian communities in Gaza who say they will not follow orders to evacuate, putting themselves at risk of getting bombed by Israel.
Meanwhile, the Global Sumud Flotilla, a fleet of small vessels committed to nonviolence, has just sailed from Italy and Spain with the stated aim of bringing aid to Gazans. On board one of the vessels are workers from a union in the port of Genoa.
They say that if the flotilla is stopped or in any way harassed, “not one single nail” will be delivered to Israel anymore. All these people, believers and non-believers alike, are praying with their body, or rather they are bodies-in-prayer.
“Global Sumud Flotilla sales from Barcelona on August 31, 2025. By Aniol – Own work, CC0, Wikimedia Commons.
September 4, 2025: Prayer and the Body – Part 4 (GG)
GG recently led a retreat in the beautiful city of Verona, Italy. Following Matthew’s teaching, GG included part intellectual learning, questioning, and debate (left brain engagement) and part art as meditation, creativity, silence, and prayer (right brain engagement).
At one point, retreatants were asked to walk the Stations of the Cosmic Christ and to choose one station. There, they were instructed to stand and listen for a sentence from the Cosmic Christ. Inside the chapel that night, while walking around, everyone quietly repeated their Christ mantra to themselves. Then GG had them dance. When the body is involved, the wisdom becomes more fully activated and integrated. Body as prayer.
September 5, 2025: The Essence is Very Visible (GG)
Watching China’s recent military parade, it was clear that Western hegemony has come to an end. It was particularly chilling to watch Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator, joining Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Tiananmen Square.
It gave the world a very clear indication that the most cruel methods of government — including labor camps for dissidents and engineered starvation — are now considered acceptable.
But is the West really that different? What about the Epstein horrors? What about the starvation being forced upon the people of Gaza? It has never been so clear that we are fighting a battle for the soul of humanity.
The 2025 China Victory Day Parade was a military parade held on Chang’an Avenue, Beijing, on 3 September 2025 to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. Wikimedia Commons
September 6, 2025: Celebrating a New Study on Otto Rank (MF)
There is a new book: Otto Rank and the Creation of Modern Psychotherapy, by Robert Kramer. Rank is Matthew’s favorite psychologist, and he and Kramer used to teach a course on Rank. In fact, Matthew wrote the foreword to this book. Rank’s book Art and Artist was extremely influential for Matthew and helped inspire his enthusiasm for Art as Meditation as well as body prayer.
Kramer demonstrates how deeply Rank influenced Rollo May and recalls how May, in his book The Cry for Myth, “extols Rank’s feminism.” Contrary to Freud’s theory of penis envy, “Rank believed that what motivates a woman is her ‘emotional and spiritual…craving for expression of her true woman-self in a masculine world which has no room or use for her.’”*
*Robert Kramer, Otto Rank and the Creation of Modern Psychotherapy, Oxford University Press, 2025, p. 252.
Banner image: In indigenous cultures, dance is often an expression of prayer. Here, a woman dances at a powwow in Toronto, Canada. Wikimedia Commons
Recommended Reading
The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time
Thomas Aquinas said, “To live well is to work well,” and in this bold call for the revitalization of daily work, Fox shares his vision of a world where our personal and professional lives are celebrated in harmony–a world where the self is not sacrificed for a job but is sanctified by authentic “soul work.”
“Fox approaches the level of poetry in describing the reciprocity that must be present between one’s inner and outer work…[A]n important road map to social change.” ~~ National Catholic Reporter
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
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