Renewing Ourselves, Our Planet, and Our Church
Keynote Address by Matthew Fox, O.P. at Call to Action Midwest Conference Feb. 3, 1990 in Chicago

 

As I was saying 14 months ago, before I was so rudely interrupted...

Many are being called today. Who is doing all the calling? The earth is calling, from deep places in our memories, in our genes. The rain forests are calling. The soil is calling. The waters are calling, the trees, the air, the species that are disappearing at an unprecedented rate - all these are calling us.

A friend of mine told me that in northern England recently, he saw fishermen fishing in a river so totally polluted that you cannot eat the fish. My friend couldn't understand why they couldn't let go of fishing. I told him, "Are you are aware that human beings have been fishing for probably a million years? There's a deep memory in our bodies to fish." These are the kind of times we are living in.

Mother earth is calling us today. Everywhere I went in my recent travels, I got this message. I got it from cardinals, and from bishops - some of them silenced. I got it from theologians, and from the people of God all over the place.

Today is not an ordinary time for a meeting of those who feel a "call to action". It is 1990 - a new year, a new decade, and the vestibule to a new millennium. A moment for rebirth in church, in our hearts and in society. I was speaking with a poet, Bill Everson, formerly known as Brother Antoninus - long white beard, a wizard of a fellow. He said, "I am convinced a millennium is not just the turn of a page on the calendar. It is a psychic event. Look at history. It is an eschatological moment when a new millennium calls us, a time for much spirit, for vision and for action, a time to stay grounded, but to reach for the stars,"

As Howard Thurman, a great black mystic of our country who knew Meister Eckhart inside and out, and who was one of the teachers of Martin Luther King, Jr., used to put it this way: "The more I relate to the cosmos everywhere, the more I must relate to something somewhere." To be grounded in our community, in our history, in our place, is so important, the more we grow with vision and eschatological hopes.

A millennium is a time when the young shall see visions and the old shall have dreams, and listen to them.

For months we have watched on television some dreams erupt in the so-called Second World. And for several decades, we have observed visions from the so-called Third World. Is it too much to ask that now, the 90's, are a time for us, so-called First Worlders, to wake up?

This is from a letter to the editor in my home newspaper, the Oakland Tribune, on Dec. 4: "Most Americans are conscience dead, while those few who might have been disturbed by the heinous murder of six Catholic priests will quickly have their troubled consciences soothed by corporate-owned media filled with diversions and distractions. Never underestimate the power of the corporate state to condition, confuse, coerce and coopt its citizens. The walls of oppression are crumbling in Eastern Europe. When will the walls of apathy, greed, hypocrisy, smugness and ignorance fall in America?"

Calling implies a caller, but it also implies a listening heart. Do we have the heart to listen? It takes heart to hear a call, and heart is courage. The root of the word "courage" is two French words: "large heart'. When we hear a call, that is our mysticism. It takes heart to respond to the call, and our response is our prophecy. Once we hear the call and respond, because we cannot do otherwise, we become prophets, who in turn become instruments to call others, instruments of the spirit, trumpeters of good news and real peace. The Spirit works through us all as we call one another. We call each other to wake up, to get up, to keep going, to rejoice, to grieve, to create, to celebrate, to do justice that is effective, to be - as Jesus said - compassionate as our Creator is compassionate.

To be called is mysticism, and another word for this is nonaction. To call is prophecy, and another word for this is action. In the creation tradition, everyone is a mystic, and everyone is a prophet, until or unless we forsake this calling, this vocation, until, as M.C. Richards says, "we sell our poetry for power" . Krister Stendahl says there is really only one sin that Paul talks about in his letters: the sin of refusing the call - hardness of heart, refusal to change, a "no" to metanoia.

I want to pursue two themes: first, our call to non-action or mysticism, and second, our call to action, as it applies to our churches today, and to our nation.

Our Call to Action, or Mysticism

Non-action is the basis of authentic action. Mysticism is the matrix for our prophetic work. Rilke put it well: " The work of the eyes is finished. Now go and do heart work." Heart work is a kind of non-action. It includes awe, wonder, amazement, delight, waking up. He opening of the heart to courage means whatever makes for a bigger heart - ecstasy, strength, prayer, awareness that the kingdom and queendom of God is in our midst. To taste and see how good the Lord is, as the psalmist sings from wisdom literature. All this the creation tradition calls the via positiva, the positive way. And we are being flooded today, especially from English speaking scientists in our own civilization, with scientific creation stories, stories about our own creation. For example, take the story of our blood. I quote from a great mystic work of our time, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book that is comparable to Thoreau's Walden. She has done her homework, both her scientific work and her heart work. She writes:

"All the green in the planet world consists of whole rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyl itself, what you get is 136 atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a single ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now, if you remove the atom of magnesium, and in its exact place, put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood. the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail."

Every time you step outside this spring and see green things, realize: your blood could be green except for one atom switch! How much we have in common with those green things.

The origin of creation is being told by scientists around the world today. Here's just one story: five and a half billion years ago a supernova exploded and gave birth to every element that I just listed in chlorophyl, and every element in our bodies. We are literally stardust five and a half billion years old. We belong in this universe. It is our home.

We are being told that the universe was birthed about 18 or 19 billion years ago in a fireball explosion that grew as the universe expanded over 750,000 years. And we are being told that if that expansion had proceeded at one millionth of a millionth of a second slower or faster than it did over 750,000 years, you and I would not be here today. Earth would not have happened. There would be no home for our kind.

Story upon story. We are being told that if the advance of that fire over 750,000 years had been one degree warmer or colder, we would not be here today. There would be no earth. It's beginning to add up to what Julian of Norwich said in the 15th century: "We have been loved from before the beginning." The unconditional love of the universe is now not just a mystical fact; it's a scientific fact. And there's awe in this. As the poet Bill Everson says, "Awe awakens." How can we be boring again? How can we bored again, with these creation stories tumbling about us?

I spent the last week in a conference with 40 physicists, artists and native people talking about these things. At the close, everyone agreed they had never been to a conference where there was so little ego among so many writers! I said it was because our hearts were there: mysticism, reverence for being here. This is beginning to get home to the human race, and this cosmological story is being birthed right here in the Americas.

Non-action also includes the via negativa, the sinking, the letting go, the holding back of our money, the emptying, the answering of darkness, the letting pain be pain, the admission that our hearts are broken and the cosmos needs to break through to heal. Suffering and laughter too, unselfconsciousness. All this is non-action. It might be called passion, undergoing, undergoing both joy and pain. These are paths one and two of the spiritual journey. We so called First Worlders need to get in touch again with our joy, our passions, our suffering. Then we will understand the sufferings of others.

When I was in Brazil I visited Bishop Casadaliga, a real saint, poet and mystic who works with the Indians in the Amazon basin. (He's been silenced by the Vatican.) He had 80 church workers with him. I sat down with one young Jesuit who had been working there for three years, who said, "I don't know what I am doing here. I don't have anything to give these people." I asked him what was the number one thing he was learning. He responded immediately: "Joy. They experience more joy in a day than my culture does in a year."

We are out of touch with our joy, we so-called First Worlders. Anne Wilson Schaef points out in her work on addiction that the essence of the addictive personality is that we are out of touch with our feelings, both sadness and joy. When we again get in touch with passion, there will emerge true com-passion, and that is what action is about. The action that flows from non-action is always about compassion. As a fellow told me last week, "If you mix anything with compassion, it turns out all right."

Our Call to Action

Now let me turn to the topic of action: putting our creativity at the service of social transformation. I want to give some examples of the "calls to action" that I see happening for the church in our time. I'd like to touch on four principles.

1. First, we have to stand up to fear, fear in ourselves and fear in others. This is a spiritual issue in our time, because the opposite of fear is trust, and trust is the meaning of faith. "Go your way; your trust has healed you." That is Jesus' teaching. All fundamentalism is based on fear.

I made a vision-quest this past year, a native American retreat in the mountains. I learned this piece of wisdom from native peoples: God does not make evil spirits. Humans make evil spirits, and human institutions make evil spirits. And the doorway to evil spirits is a fearful heart. I learned that if we can face fear with strong prayer, the fear will never overcome us. All religions today are beset by fear. Fundamentalism is alive in Islam, in Judaism, and in Christianity - both in the form of the book and in the form of Vatican literalism. The tone of all fundamentalism is one of condemnation. The tone of fear is one of total righteousness, a reluctance to surrender, or to share, or to redefine power. What I sense lacking in all fundamentalism is the non-action that mysticism is about. Hence the inability to listen with a listening heart. In contrast, I look at the Gospel. At Christmastime I meditated on the first word of the angel, that cosmic visitor, to Mary: "Fear not!" And Isaiah and all the prophets who looked forward to the Messiah kept saying, "Fear not!" Redemption, I realized, is redemption from fear, That is Jesus' promise. Fear is put down by the cosmic Christ. In 'John's epistle we hear: "Love drives out fear." But where fear rules our institutions, there is a shortage of love. Rabbi Heschel says: "The prophet casts out fear." Where there is authentic prophecy, fear is cast out.

Fascism in its many forms builds on fear. Martin Luther King warned us: "We must love something more than we fear death if we are to live fully." Jesus tells us to judge spirits by their fruits. If the fruit of the patriarchal structures in religion around the world today is fear, then that religion is inauthentic. People of faith must resist, with big hearts, with courage. Courage does not drive out fear. It does not repress fear, for terror and beauty go together. They are part of a universe of at least 200 billion galaxies. But what courage does is create a big heart so that we can be truly present to one another's fear.

Look at the martyrs of the church in our time, especially in the Americas. One night during my visit with Bishop Casadaliga in the Amazon basin, they had a simple liturgy on the theme of 11 our martyrs." Everyone came forward and lit a candle for a martyr or two, someone they had worked with who had been tortured and killed. After the service one person told me, "The hardest part was limiting it to one or two names."

My friends, we must carry these martyrs in our hearts. Carry one martyr in your heart -just one of those Jesuit priests or one of those women killed in El Salvador - and that will make your heart grow bigger. The communion of saints is here to build our courage. Tell their stories in song and dance, and our hearts will grow. And remember: we cannot do heart work without art work. We make our hearts grow through imaging and dancing and music.

Once during the past year I put on a disguise and sneaked into Rome Oust to see how things were going there). I visited the catacombs where a very unhappy priest led us on a tour and talked about "our martyrs". One reason he's so unhappy is that all of "his martyrs" come from the second century! And he's still living back there. A lot of the Roman church is this wounded child, still living out the catacombs and coliseum experience. But the living experience of today's martyrs is in the Americas, where the blood is still warm. We must respond to these martyrs, not live a nostalgia for a past age that brings no joy and does no one any good.

2. A second principle is what Leonardo Boff calls "ecclesiogenesis". We need to be about birthing a new church. Boff put is this way: "The Spirit births the church in ever new ways, for the history of the church is genuine history, the creation of never-before-experienced novelty. Our situation will have to be understood in the light of the Holy Spirit." And let me stress that it is the Holy Spirit that births the church, not the church that births the Holy Spirit! Our energy must go into the people's church, the base church - a church committed to defending the rights of humans and non-humans. Base communities, base movements, churches where the gospel news of action and nonaction is truly happening.

Let me give a few examples of base communities happening in our so-called First World or overdeveloped world. Certainly woman-church is such a place. Certainly Dignity is such a place. Some small local parishes are such places - like Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ here in Chicago, where only 125 people gather, but they are committed Christians, and they work the good news into the culture. As the Vatican renders more Catholic parishes to be either gigantic or very, very small, we know that there will be Spirit coming from those base communities.

I want to mention in particular a movement in Holland. I visited Holland last year because I have always been impressed by their record of resisting Nazism during the Second World War, and by their creativity in the church, taking the Second Vatican Council seriously. Several years ago the bishop of Rome visited Holland. Progressive Catholics wanted to dialogue with him about their particular issues. The local bishops, recently appointed by Rome, said the only ones who could have access to the Pope were "loyal Catholics". So the progressives organized their own rally to coincide with the papal visit on May 8. They expected 1,000 people, but 10,000 came! Leaders of the green eco-movements, feminist movements, and the peace and justice groups throughout Holland came. Now every year this "Eighth of May Movement" has another meeting, and they call themselves "the other face of the church". Last May the meeting drew 15,000 people.

They have found that they can no longer do theology at the University of Nijmegen. Father Schillebeeckx has retired, and every theologian put up to replace him has been castigated by the bishops. So the Dominicans responded creatively. Since they can't do theology creatively in academia any more, they have created a theological think tank, funded by the Dominicans, with two feminist theologians, two married-priest theologians and two regular priest-theologians. They take the agenda from the large annual meetings of "the other face of the church", spend the year doing research on the questions raised by the people, then feed their research back to the 15,000 for distribution and teaching among their constituencies. We met with the think tank one month after the Eighth of May meeting. And what were the first three issues on this year's agenda from the people themselves? Cosmology and liberation. Feminism and liberation. Feminism and spirituality. All issues that we and others in this country have been working on for the last 15 years. Call to Action in this country must link up with the Eighth of Day Movement in Holland. What if every May 8, not only the Dutch church, but the North American church, and the Brazilian church, also expressed that "other face of the church" that is truly beautiful and worth hearing from?

3. A third principle: there are two churches today, the people's church and Rome's church. We met with Ernesto Cardenal when we visited Nicaragua last year. The huge Mass celebrating the tenth anniversary of the revolution featured three bishops, but they were from Brazil, not Nicaragua. Meanwhile I know priests working with the people who have been locked out of their churches by other priests aligned with the Vatican loyalist hierarchy. I asked Cardenal about the two churches in Nicaragua, and he laughed at me. "It is the same everywhere," he said. "Holland, even the United States. It is just clearer here, because we are so poor."

It's true. I found the same thing in New Zealand and in Australia last month. My friends, we must get out of denial, and admit that there are two churches. A bishop of Brazil put his arm around me and said, "An epoch is ending for the church. Put your energy into the new church. Let go of that former epoch.

Now we know that the old church needs perestroika, needs glasnost. And there are some that will still feel called to attempt that healing, and that is a worthy vocation. But I recall what Thomas Merton wrote in his diary in 1964:

"The mystique of infallibility, joined with conservatism and power politics, may lead to a colossal crisis of order and obedience throughout the whole church. When will it really break? I don't know. How badly we need a real spirit of liberty in the church. It is vitally necessary. The whole church depends on it. There is an appalling scandal in the way in which the whole idea of the church's authority is undermined by church politicians. Ibis even raises once again serious questions about my own vocation. Certainly I do not doubt providence, but just as certainly I cannot let a strict political and juridical answer be the final word, and prevent me from doing what I believe God wants me to do. I foresee that our principal energy vis-a-vis church should be in the direction of ecumenism with other Christian traditions, all of whom are split like our church is by fear today.

The Anglicans are split. I was told in Australia: there are two churches here, split down the middle. The issue is women's ordination. I said: "The issue is not women's ordination. The issue is sexism and misogyny. But it is split."

All the churches are split. Let's admit it. And then let's ask: what do people do when they're split? I learned something this past week from Joe Meeker's fine book on comedy and tragedy. He finds that both comedy and tragedy begin with splitness. Romeo and Juliet ends in tragedy, because it ends in a funeral. But comedy always ends in a wedding. Think of the Marriage of Figaro, or Dante's Divine Comedy. You go through hell, then purgatory, but you get to a wedding! I have a dream that in the 1990's there are going to be many, many church weddings. Those who believe that justice is a constituent element of the gospel both in society and in the church, those who believe there is no peace without justice whether in society or in church - these people, be they Anglican or Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, or Roman Catholic, are going to start weddings!

(Speaking of Roman Catholic, I want to ask a question that grew on me this past year. Is "Roman Catholic" an oxymoron?)

4. A fourth principle: we must revitalize worship through recovery of cosmology, the cosmic story, our bodies. Who will lead us? The native peoples. I say it is time, and overtime, for the Church to declare the native peoples a rite in their own right. I think 500 years of waiting is long enough. And it's time that the Afro-American tradition be declared a rite in its own right, and from this we will all be blessed in a revitalization of worship, and even Europe will learn and grow from it.

We have to admit what we are missing in our worship. We are missing passion, and mysticism, circles, bodies, capacity to grieve and lament. I've been told that in Europe today only two percent of Christians - Protestants and Catholics - are practicing. We are living in a post-European Christianity. We have to get on with budding it. Let the churches of Brazil, the United States and Holland team up, and see what we can give birth to. One result would be a model of First World - Third World interaction. Perhaps lay synods would lead the way. The first thing we would learn from the church of Brazil is bravery. And what they are already learning from us is cosmology. Leonard(, Boff told me, "The mystery of the church I've been writing about for 20 years. But the mystery of the universe is something else. I am learning English in order to study cosmology, because that's where the future is." And Ernesto Cardenal, in the midst of revolution and oppression in Nicaragua, has just finished a 500-page poem called Cantico Cosmico, the cosmic song. And he took me into his bedroom with the excitement of a four-year-old child and showed me his new telescope. "I don't know how to use it yet," he said, "but it's my next project."

Are we ourselves learning the cosmic story, or are we too addicted to the idols of our civilization to hear the good news happening all around us?

The Call to Our Nation

I turn now to the call to action vis-a-vis our nation. The spirit alive, and alive Christians, can imbue a continent, can bestow upon it unique spiritual gifts. We need to think beyond nationhood to continent-hood. Let me throw out four principles.

1. First, a very radical idea. I think we need in American something called free elections. In the last presidential election, 47% of our people did not vote. H. L. Mencken once said, "America has a free press, for the person who owns one." Or for the multinational corporation that owns one. This helps to explain how ignorant we Americans are about our own history in Nicaragua, or El Salvador, or Guatemala.

Here is one statistic from the fine book, "The Best Congress Money Can Buy." A few years ago AT&T gave $1.4 million in PAC money to elect congressional candidates. The result? A tax loophole that saved AT&T $25 billion. A pretty good investment,

The television airwaves do not belong to the corporations. They belong to the people, and we should demand free air time for our candidates, and outlaw all paid political ads. Good politicians have been sucked in by the savings and loan fiasco because they were so addicted to raising money for the television ads.

2. In this country, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Just one example: under Reagan the richest 20 percent of American families gained $25 billion in income, while the poorest 20 percent lost $6 billion. And the poorest have the least to lose. What are we doing about it? We need an economic system that is truly democratic, and that is based on earth wealth, not human wealth. We need to learn from Nicaragua how to teach literacy to our people. Like Nicaragua we could take our teenagers who are looking for something serious to do, and send them out to teach people how to read.

3. 1 think we of the Overdeveloped World need a new relationship to the so-called Third World. I would propose that we need a Marshall Plan for "tin America. Let's let Europe put Eastern Europe on its feet, and why don't we assist Latin America in getting on its feet? If we took the $100 billion we could save every year from pulling our military away from Europe, and put it into creating work in Latin America, what might be the happy result?

4. Finally, the year 1992 is coming up, the 500th commemoration (not celebration) of Europeans landing on this soil. This landing brought about within 50 years the demise of 70 million of the native peoples. There were 80 million when Columbus arrived. 50 years later there were 10 million in the Americas. What has been lost? We need to grieve the losses - losses of the native peoples and their ways, even the losses of the trees. Are you aware that 75 percent of American trees have disappeared since Columbus landed? We need to grieve, and to ask forgiveness, to plummet the depths of our spiritual tradition as Americans. This means to fall in love with the land. That is our great gift to the world. Think of our great poets: Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Frost, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez. These people all celebrate the sacred that is in the land. This is our gift back to the European peoples.

Barry Lopez writes a brilliant essay called "The Passing Wisdom of Birds", about how when Cortez came to Mexico City it was filled with parrots and beautiful birds in everyone's back yard. Then Cortez got angry at the native people, so he wiped out the entire city - including an the birds. Lopez asks what we lose when this happens to our souls. He says, "We stand to lose the focus of our ideals, our sense of dignity and compassion, even our sense of what we call God. The philosophy of nature, we set aside 8,000 years ago in the Fertile. Crescent, we can, I think, locate again and greatly refine in North America. The. new world is a landscape still overwhelming in the vigor of its animals and plants, resonant with mystery. It encourages still. We find a sense of resolution we have been looking for, I think, for centuries."

I have a thought that Roman Catholicism might do some symbolic gifting to the native people of the Americas in 1992. When I was in Rome I listened to a tour guide describing the interior of St. John Lateran, a huge fourth century basilica. She said, "Look at the ceiling. The ceding is gold from Peru." Then I went to another huge fourth century basilica, Maria Maggiore. Again, the gold there is from the Americas. Now we know how much the Vatican writes about justice and cares for the Third World. Wouldn't it be a great symbolic gesture to give the gold back to the native people of this continent? Also, let the Vatican invite native American elders into the basement of the Vatican Museum to let them see what else is there that belongs to their people, and to return it' That's the least that can be done, in addition to asking for forgiveness.

A post-European Christianity will be earth-centered, and it will do spirituality, and we will learn much of this from native peoples.

Conclusion

Thomas Berry says our civilization is autistic. We don't hear, or see, or feel. But you people are rendering yourselves vulnerable to a call. You are choosing to resist that temptation to autism, and to respond to the many calls of our times. An eschatological vision awaits us all and is calling us. It is already here. It is about deep ecumenism. It is about creation - loving it enough to cherish it and to fight for it. it is about women's wisdom, so long forgotten or repressed. It is about native wisdom. It is about our own western wisdom in the Celtic tradition, so cruelly destroyed by Rome once before. It is about Hildegarde and Eckhart, and the Cosmic Christ. Creation spirituality holds hope in a time of eschatology.

I'll never forget the last series of talks I gave before my year of silence. It was in San Diego, and an different groups brought constituencies. A man with a white beard stood up at the last talk and said, "I'm 63 years old. I've been involved in radical politics here in San Diego all my life. But I have never experienced this kind of coming together of such diverse groups: the feminist movement, the ecological activists, the peace and justice people, and the church groups." Creation spirituality is an oasis, an umbrella under which many can meet, because we all sham creation, our awesome love for it, and our concern for it.

How call all this happen? Our listening to the wisdom of the mystics - and the mystic in all of us, learning to let go. To let go of our servitude in the First World, our addictions, our codependencies in family, society or church. We have to stand up and be counted.

How will the 20th Century be remembered? I think it will be remembered as the century of war. That is what we did best and most in this century: we made war, and we created war objects. We have made war against humans, but also against the earth. Now we are waking up. There is a demilitarization happening in Europe, and a demilitarization happening in our souls. As they are saying today in Germany, the wall must come down: the outside wall and the inside wall!

I want to say thank you to the organizers of this event, and to all those who put together the marvelous document, "A Call for Reform in the Catholic Church." It's so simple, straightforward, non-rhetorical and true.

I want to end with a brief line from an Irish poet from Chicago, a saucy, sassy lady who wrote, "Many are called, but most are frozen." Let our generation not be found among the frozen ones. Let there be genuine action from an authentic space of non-action. The ecclesial and political choices facing us today are unparalleled in the past, because with today's ecological crisis, we will be given no second chance. In the next ten years, irreversible decisions will be made about the health, and therefore the wealth, of this planet, our species and all the species with whom we share this planet. Let us not be put off the track by former agendas. We must be brave like our sisters and brothers in Latin America and in the Second World. We must risk our reputations, perhaps our jobs, our comfort, our status, our retirement, our security. But our sacrifices, though real, are small in comparison to those of our sisters and brothers in the Third World. Let us join our hands and hearts with them, and we shall have a rebirth of the Spirit.