A conversation with Matthew Fox and Andrew Harvey

Interview of Matthew Fox by Andrew Harvey regarding the New Book Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality (Orbis, 2022) edited by Charles Burack.

Andrew Harvey: Hello.  It is a very great joy for me to be here with you to celebrate the extraordinary book that has just come out, Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality, with an excellent introduction by Charles Burack, who oversaw the book.  Matthew, this book is essentially a compendium of everything that you have devoted your life to.  You have been, for me, not just a very great friend and not just a great mentor, but you’ve been in your vast fierceness, your unified burning life, someone who constantly enkindles me and irradiates me and so many others, with the flames of your blazing charity.

The publication of this book, my friends, is far more than just a new book and spiritual event, it is nothing less than the distillation of a lifetime’s passion for love and truth and justice.  And it comes to us at a moment in our tragic and burning world when we need its clarity, its grounded joy, and its summons to sacred action on behalf of the whole glory of creation.

So thank you, Matt, so deeply from the bottom of my heart.

Matthew Fox: Thank you and congratulations on your new book, Love is Everything: A Year with Hadewijch of Antwerp, coming out just this very day, also a special moment.

Andrew Harvey: Hadewich invites us to listen to the great voices of the sacred feminine Christ which is returning.

Matthew Fox: Yes, and you are a perfect megaphone for that important shift in consciousness from the patriarchal version of the masculine to a balance of the healthy sacred feminine along with a healthy masculine, so this is a very special day and I might add that I was honored to write a very short Forward to that book as well, so I feel part of it.

Andrew Harvey: And what a wonderful way to begin, because one of the extraordinary contributions of your book is a new vision, both of the sacred feminine and the sacred masculine.  This enables us to enter the sacred marriage of transcendence and Immanence that really does birth in us the fullness of who we can be and what the full vision of what the creation is.

One of the things you say, and it’s such an arresting and thrilling formulation, is that we need to reimagine the sacred marriage as a fusion of the Green Man and the Black Madonna and it came to me last night reading Hadewich how to reach and thank her for this extraordinary journey that I’ve been on.  That the authentic sacred feminine is also a marriage of the green woman and the Black Madonna of Mary and Kali have someone totally in her being radiant with the freshness and vitality of what Hildegard of Bingen calls be viriditas or “greening power.”  They align themselves with the fierce energy of compassion and the molten sacred energy for transformation of the world.  So with your formulation you’ve changed the whole conversation.

But I want to begin by asking you. Where are we?   This book is coming out in a terrifying moment for the whole human race.

Matthew Fox: That is true, of course, we are literally facing extinction, you know. People are acting up and acting out, and nations are doing so nations led by authoritarian leaders or authoritarian wannabe leaders and climate change, above all, is bearing down on us.  Just this week, as you know, Europe set records everywhere for heat and, of course, where I live here in northern California, we’ve got the Yellowstone Park on fire like never before, and these wildfires are happening all around the world and hurricanes and floods that go with them and the droughts with all the implications for agriculture, so severe.  And, of course, the melting of the glaciers and ice.  Where will we be getting our water in the future?  So this is truly a time to meditate on extinction, at the same time that we do what hope really is as defined by David Orr: “Hope is a verb with the sleeves rolled up.”

We have to go to work, and that includes an inner work which, as you alluded to earlier, includes the balance of the sacred masculine and feminine, but it includes a lot of things and includes a renewed commitment to justice and to carrying on the fight whether we’re talking racial justice or economic justice or gender justice or eco-justice–all these issues are on the table.

And, of course, all this is familiar to readers of Tikkun magazine because Tikkun itself stands for a healing of the of the world and that is the Jewish understanding of redemption–it’s not about some private salvation thing, where you get to heaven climbing on other people’s backs–it’s about the survival of the whole–of the Community, and today the Community is homo sapiens’ version of humanity.

Let us include in our vision of humanity all these striking dangers that face us, but at the same time, we want to embrace what our strong points are as a species.  Yes, we’re discussing our shadow; that’s not a surprise—it appears in 90% of the headlines of our papers and on the Internet every day, but also let us welcome, for example, the Webb telescope–what a marvelous accomplishment as a species!  What other species has done this, that we can bring back into our living rooms and our personal computers the first galaxy and the first stars from 13.8 billion years ago?  From way back then the very universe is speaking to us.  Just that alone is an amazing accomplishment of our intelligence and our curiosity and our willingness to pursue it.

Of course, it was created by people from, I think, over 30 countries and thousands of scientists have contributed to it, so it shows that the human community with a guided and shared purpose can accomplish an awful lot.  So we have to meditate on the good things that our species has brought forth, including the courage and wisdom of Gandhi or Mandela or King or Dorothy Day or Sojourner Truth or Isaiah and Jesus, and the other prophets of the world including Black Elk. Our species is such a mixed bag.  Here we have the Pope going to Canada to confess the sins of the Catholic Church and indigenous children ripped from their families and culture and put into white schools–a horrible, horrible story that is finally coming out.  So we do have to pay attention to the suffering of the world and how are we going to contribute to healing it.  And to survival if that’s still possible given climate change.  If we don’t get honest about it and pull out of denial about what’s really facing us, we will go extinct.

I think that among things we have things going for us is the return of the feminine and the women’s movement has brought that forward and women scholarship for sure and like you say, the recovery of the great women mystics and mysticism itself, by men and women, is a real contribution to bringing forward to what has been a patriarchal era for thousands of years, bringing a balance back.  Like Dorothy Soelle says, mysticism itself is the language for healthy religion and for feminism because it deconstructs the notion of simply a vertical relationship to an all-powerful divinity.  So, our capacity for creativity cannot be underestimated–that’s why I don’t count our species out yet–we are capable of massive transformation, but it’s got to begin in the inside it’s got to begin with a revolution in values; and this, I think, is what mystics offer us and prophets the world over, and certainly Jesus was about that.  So were the prophets who preceded him and those who have come after.  So don’t cut our species out yet if we can see that the handwriting is on the wall if we still have time.  Scientists are saying we have seven years.  If we still have time, we can change our ways profoundly out of necessity–I do think nothing moves the human species like necessity, and the necessity is there, so that’s the kind of time we’re living in and I think we have to dig deep into our souls. Continue reading “Interview with Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality” →