Ritual and Doxa

Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox] 6/14/26: Week of 6/8-13/2026: Ritual and Doxa

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Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox

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Week of 6/8-13/2026: Ritual and Doxa

By the Daily Meditation Team

6/14/2026

This is a summary of the previous week’s daily meditations. Some are written by Matthew Fox (MF) and some are written by his colleague, Gianluigi Gugliermetto. (GG) Y

June 8, 2026: Recovering Creation, Gratitude and Ritual (MF)

Matthew, feeling energized by GG’s DM about the rituals practiced at the retreat in Sardinia, expounds further on the topic. He said that rituals are primarily an opportunity for public or community Gratitude. What are we grateful for? For existence, the universe, the cosmos, the earth, our breath, our bodies and our breath.

For “isness” (Meister Eckhart’s word: “Isness is God,” he says.) In his brilliant two-volume series on Science and Spiritual Practices and Ways To Go Beyond and Why They Work, British scientist Rupert Sheldrake underscores the role of gratitude and ritual in the history of our species.

It is a wonderful thing that scientists are beginning to explore the meaning and power of ritual.

The covers of Rupert Sheldrake’s Science and Spiritual Practices and Ways To Go Beyond.

June 9, 2026: Ritual: When self becomes Self Uniting to the Universe Awakening Joy (MF)

Matthew loves this quotation by Teilhard de Chardin: The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as humanity found itself facing the frost, the sea, and the stars.

And since then, we find evidence of it in all our experience of the great and unbounded: in art, in poetry, and in religion. It connects us to the Universe and to ALL our ancestors.

Matthew laid out “six steps to redeeming worship in the West” in his book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ and developed them anew in The Reinvention of Work.

Matthew says: Gather together—you and your communities—in the context of the great, cosmic community to rejoice and give thanks. To heal and let go. To enter the dark and deep mysteries, to share the news, to break the bread of the universe and drink blood of the cosmos itself in all its divinity.

Healthy ritual connects the self to the Self. Big joy and deep transformation occur.

June 10, 2026: Why Ritual? (GG)

Among the comments that were received about the recent series of DMs on ritual, two critiques caught GG’s attention:

(1) Ritual for ritual’s sake is meaningless

(2) What matters is social action, not ritual action.

GG responds: I wholeheartedly agree that a ritual that is not conducive to social engagement, that does not energize the prophet in each of us, is a dead ritual. GG imagines that those who voice these criticisms have likely never experienced the kind of ritual that Matthew and GG speak about–one in which there is a holy connection with God, the Universe, with creation, with gratitude.

GG tells us that ritual is, by definition, a communal activity. Even the most individual rite, he tells us, is celebrated within a cosmic frame.

Ritual is not about dogma. It is about celebration and gratitude and grief and community and transformation.

“Jumping the fire” is a tradition in rituals in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Here, people jump the fire in Tehran, in 2015, during a celebration of Chaharshanbe Suri. It is a ritual of purification and renewal, and is of ancient Zoroastrian origin. Photo by Tasnim News Agency. Wikipedia, Creative Commons.

une 11, 2026: Why Jesus Christ? (GG)

GG realizes he was lucky to be orignally trained in Catholic theology, which understands beliefs and practices that predate Christianity to be valid forms of religion.

That is much healthier than the Protestant belief that everything that predates Christianity was and is simply wrong. One of the retreats that GG periodically offers is called “Historical Jesus, Cosmic Christ: An Immersive Seminar for Believers, Non-believers, Atheists, and Agnostics.”

Some participants come to realize the kind of feisty individual Jesus really was. Others learn for the first time how the early Christians perceived God’s Wisdom embodied in each living creature—thus especially, but not exclusively, in Jesus Christ.

GG asks himself: Can I be somebody whose spirituality is based on ritual and Jesus Christ as two separate yet both important halves of a whole? He answers, “Yes I can.”

June 12, 2026: Doxa, Glory, M.C. Richards: A Good Way to Start the Day (MF)

Matthew has the painting (below) on a wall in his bedroom. It’s by M.C. Richards, his good friend and former faculty member at both the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality (ICCS) and the University of Creation Spirituality (UCS).

She is best known for her iconic book, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person, which Matthew loves because it mirrors his pedagogy of Art as Meditation. M.C. took up painting at 70 years of age, saying, “It’s too late for technique,” but loved the color and shaping of forms.

Her painting (below) tells us that the whole earth and cosmos are busy birthing the doxa of the divine. Therefore, it is a painting embodying Creation Spirituality.

“Madonna and Child.” Painting by M.C. Richards. Photo taken by Matthew Fox and used with permission.

June 13, 2026: Why the Mass? (GG)

At its essense, the Mass is a celebration of life.

It is feast, thanksgiving, memorial, communion, compassion, cosmic joy. Its history goes back to the actions of Jesus, as well as to the earliest communities who remembered his life and death.

GG says that he is sad when people say that Mass is boring. The Mass is not just a Roman Catholic ritual. It is celebrated as Divine Liturgy by the Orthodox Christians and has been kept by the Anglicans and the Lutherans after the Reformation.

Unfortunately, modernity took its toll on the Mass, making it become more and more a bunch of words printed on a page, and less and less a time for silence, aesthetic enjoyment, deep reflection, and union in communion.

Theologians say that the divine life of Jesus is infused in the believers as they eat the consecrated bread and drink the consecrated wine. Jesus was dead, but now we become him, alive.

Banner Image: A traditional Ghost Ritual blessing of the rice fields to protect the rice from being eaten by the birds. Photo by M Joko Apriyo Putro. Wikimedia Commons.