Dillard; St. Francis; Art; Evil & Healing

Week of 10/5-10/2026:

Dillard, St. Francis, Art as Resistance, Evil & Healing

10/11/2026

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)

October 5, 2026: Annie Dillard & St. Francis of Assisi: Dual Creation Mystics (MF)

As we celebrate St. Francis of Assisi’s feast day, we also learn about Annie Dillard’s recent passing. St. Francis was a mystic from the early 13th century and Annie was a mystic celebrator of holy creation in our time.

Matthew loves her sassiness and wildness in responding to Nature and science and her irreverence in attempting to name the Creator. How she weaves nature, science, religion and humor into a single whole. Annie once said: I think the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.

St. Francis’s great poem about “brother sun and sister moon” unites the masculine and the feminine, the yang and the yin. He talked of “Mother Earth” as indigenous peoples do, urging us not to take creation for granted. He also, like Annie, had his own wildness, preferring to pray in caves as opposed to churches.

Total Eclipse | Annie Dillard

“Total Eclipse,” an excerpt from Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk. Video by Claire Reads Books.

October 6, 2026: Music & Art as Resistance to Christian Nationalism & Theocracy (MF)

Pete Hegseth is “weaponizing religion.” According to The Guardian, he is “imposing his own brand of religion on the Pentagon, framing the war on Iran as a modern crusade and instituting monthly prayer services.” He has called for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Clearly, Jesus’s admonition to love one’s enemies goes right over his head. Meanwhile, there was recently a “Power to the People Festival” in Columbia, Maryland that lasted ten hours. Organized by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Tom Morello, it gathered rock, alternative, “and hip hop royalty” on two stages “to remind Americans of their agency to change the future and reclaim American democracy.”

A report from Heather Cox Richardson called it “Art as Meditation in Action!”** If art as meditation is the “way of the prophets,” we need artists to enlist the people into action.

October 7, 2026: Susan Neiman on Bringing Back the “E” Word (MF)

Philosopher Susan Neiman has written a succinct but powerful and needed book on evil titled Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era.

She begins this way: How to describe these days of nightmare, when each morning brings another infamy that, not long ago, could have shocked us senseless?

She says: Evil is the most explosive word we have…Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed. Also: Evil isn’t cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary.

And, she rightly asks, since few Americans favor bombing fishermen, shooting protesters, or invading foreign countries, why aren’t more of us in the streets?***

Milley defends democracy, swipes at Trump in farewell address

General Mark Milley defends democracy, swipes at Trump in his farewell address as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Video by the Associated Press.

October 8, 2026: The Trauma of Life (GG)

One book raising consciousness about the pervasiveness of trauma in our lives is The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté (Gabor’s son).

The book is long and filled with true stories of suffering and healing, as well as references to contemporary scientific literature on trauma. GG says that we are called to work on our individual inner situation, expressed externally through our body, as it has been shaped by our individual trauma.

In order to heal, we all need to recognize that our typical responses to stressful situations are directly dependent on our childhood experiences.

Caring for others without working at healing ourselves is unwise. Perhaps unheeded and unhealed trauma is the principal reason for the cruelty that seems to be taking over the world. Maybe when we work on our personal trauma, we can help bring about the healing that the world so badly needs right now.

October 9, 2026: Healing from Trauma (GG)

Gianluigi believes that the road to healing our individual and collective trauma must be spiritual, meaning that it must include attention to both our body and our psyche, yet transcend our bodymind into a higher unity or communion with the divine.

Gabor Maté, a medical doctor who has spent his entire career helping people heal from trauma, describes the main obstacles to healing trauma: crippling guilt; self-loathing and its close cousins, self-rejection, self-sabotage, and self-destructive impulses; and blocks in our emotional memory.

Maté has worked for most of his life with Western medicine. For a long time, he did not care at all about spirituality, but then he discovered the unexpected. Today, Maté quotes Leslie Marmon Silko, saying: The only cure I know is a good ceremony.

October 10, 2026: Counseling as a Spiritual Practice (GG)

Gianluigi shares what he’s learned offering his services as a spiritual counselor. He says: Listening to somebody’s deepest concerns, anxieties, and dreams is one of the holiest activities for a human being, something to be approached with reverence.

GG has also become aware that all the wisdom needed is already in the person who comes to the session. His motto before the start of a session is: “I know nothing, I am just showing up.” It is presence that matters the most.

GG’s fundamental theme is wholeness and integration. Matthew Fox talks about becoming the midwife of midwives. The best we can do for others is help them give birth to their truer self.

Christ as spiritual director: Christ and Abbot Menas. Coptic icon, oldest icon in existence, in the Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons

*Arwa Mahdawi, “Pete Hegseth just took his personal crusade to a new level,” The Guardian, October 3, 2026.

**Heather Cox Richardson, “October 3, 2026.” Letters from an American.

***Susan Neiman, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era.