Week of 12/15-20/2025: ICE, Jung, Sentimentality & Sustainability

 By the Daily Meditations Team

12/21/2025

In December 15, 2025: Prophetic Responses to ICE: Mangers With a Message & a Non-Sentimental Christmasa Nativity scene at St. Susanna Roman Catholic Parish in Dedham, Massachusetts, the Christ child is missing this Christmas. So too are Mary and Joseph. Instead, there sits a hand-painted sign: “ICE was here.” At another Chicago suburb church located near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility where protesters have frequently amassed, a sign at the manger reads: “Due to ICE activity in our community the Holy Family is in hiding.” St. Susanna’s has supported ten refugee families since 2019, and worked alongside the federal government to do so. It’s not a stunt. We work on a daily basis with refugees….We were always taught: when you’re unsure, ask, ‘What would Christ do?’ 

Jungian analyst Steven Herrmann has gifted us with significant books on topics such as Spiritual Democracy, December 16, 2025: Carl Jung, Murray Stein, Steven Herrmann & Christianity’s Futureng and Meister Eckhart, Vocational Dreams, and much more.* Now he kicks off a new series on Neo-Jungian studies with a book on Murray Stein, subtitled “Individuation, Transformation, and the Ways to the Self in Jungian Psychology.” Stein, an internationally renowned Jungian analyst, combined theology and Jung through 50 years of influential work. How can Jung’s work, updated by Stein and Herrmann, assist the Christian movement as it evolves from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius? Stein recognizes our post-modern times as being infected by a “virus of superficiality.” He says, Perhaps now is the time to listen more intently to the spirit of the depths.**

December 17, 2025: Deep Feeling, Not Sentimentalism (GG)

How can one differentiate between deep feeling and sentimentalism? GG realized at one point, with dismay, that the church is filled with sentimentalism and hypocrisy, and that those two go side by side. However, Creation Spirituality offers a great antidote to sentimentalism.

Matthew Fox was writing as early as 1978 on “desentimentalizing spirituality” in the magazine,Spirituality Today. Compassion, says Matthew in that book, is not only distinct from sentimentalism, but the latter is the utter negation of the first. GG says: There was a time in my life when — partly to escape sentimentalism — I was letting my “thinking function” grow exponentially to the detriment of the “feeling function,” but that was a mistake because the four Jungian functions — just like the four paths — are… indispensable.
 

Last week’s reference to the word “sustainability” sparked a bit of debate. “Sustainability,” December 18, 2025: Sustainability as a New Words GG, is a word that did not exist when he was in high school. It was introduced by the U.N. Brundtland Commission in 1983, which also provided the concept of “sustainable development” in 1987. However, after further research, GG discovered that the word “sustainability” actually existed since 1713 in the German language as Nachhaltigkeit. It applied to the field of forestry. It meant that if you want to harvest trees from a forest, you ought to do it in such a way that the forest does not die, but keeps healthy and grows enough new trees for the next generations. One big problem is this: continued economic growth is not compatible with the life of biological organisms — including humans. The capitalistic economic model has been successful in the short run, but it’s suicidal in the long run.

December 19, 2025: The Face of the Other

Sometimes ecologists are denigrated as “tree huggers.” Such an accusation implies that feelings should be excluded from the ecological issues facing humanity. But, as Matthew Fox has often insisted, values do not originate in the intellect but in deep feeling. Emmanuel Levinas, the French Jewish thinker, has famously grounded ethics in the experience of “the face of the other.” GG says: I claim the right to be emotionally shattered — not just moved — by the face of a starving child in Palestine or Sudan….

The same holds true for the face of Mother Earth, which keeps being violated…. In conclusion, says GG, I want to be able to see in the face of the child Jesus all the children hurt and abandoned by the Herods of our time.

December 20, 2025: A Surge in Loneliness (MF)

Matthew has been noticing lots of articles recently about loneliness, which tends to be more pronounced over the holidays. According to one article, recent studies have found that the loneliest people in America today are middle-aged people between the ages of 45 and 49, of whom 49 percent report loneliness. In a study of university students in the UK, two-thirds of those living in halls or dorms reported feeling “lonely or isolated.” An over-reliance on phones and technology apparently was a large contributing factor.

Samantha Rose Hill, who is writing a book on loneliness, in a guest essay for the New York Times, warned how tech companies promise “relief through connection, but this kind of connection isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.”

*Steven Herrmann, 
Murray Stein: Individuation, Transformation, and the Ways to the Self in Jungian Psychology,
 pp. 23, 13, 36f.
Related Reading by Matthew Fox

Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action (by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jen Listug)

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice

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

Natural Grace: Dialogues on creation, darkness, and the soul in spirituality and science (by Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake)