Biography
Dr. Matthew Fox presents a fascinating picture of creation-centered Christianity. Father Fox was a keynote speaker at the Chicago Jesus Day 1988 event at Quigley South. Father Fox is the author of many books. The most famous of these, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation-Centered Spirituality, has created great discussion and considerable controversy within the church. The name of his latest book is The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The Cosmic Christ" 
From the Book of Proverbs: Yahweh created me when His purpose first unfolded for the oldest of the Divine works. From Everlasting I was firmly set, from the beginning, before earth came into being. The Deep was not when I was born, there were no springs to gush with water. Before the mountains settled, before the hills, I came to birth. Before God made the earth, the countryside, or the first grains, or the world's dust, when God fixed the heavens firm, I was there. Come drink of my wine, eat of my bread.

There's a story I heard a year ago that I think is very significant. There was a Methodist theologian from Australia who went to lecture in Africa. As he lectured, his talk was translated sentence by sentence into Swahili. He would speak once sentence and the translator would translate, then he'd move on. He came to the climax of his talk and his sentence went like this,"In Sidney, Australia today, the number one spiritual problem is loneliness." The translator went along and then turned, kind of puzzled, and so the speaker repeated the sentence. "The number one spiritual problem is loneliness." The translator went off and huddled with five or six other Africans for ten minutes. He came back to the microphone and said, "Sir, I am sorry, but in our language, we do not have a word for loneliness."

This is a significant story because there is a lot of loneliness, a lot of cosmic loneliness in Western civilization today. But in native peoples, such as native African people or native American people, there is less of this cosmic loneliness, because they are more at home in the universe. They consider the whole universe to be their home, their temple where God dwells. This is the case in the reading I just read from the Book of Proverbs. The scriptures that inspired Jesus and that come out of Israel also thought of the whole universe as God's home. But we have lost this sense of a Cosmos in the west. We have become so centered in the last few hundred years on the two-legged creatures -- that is on the human agenda alone -- that we have missed the beauty, the awe, the wonder, and the suffering of the rain forests, of the soil that is disappearing today at a rate of six billion tons a year in America alone, of the waters, and now of the air, as we learn that the ozone layer has a hole in it over Antarctica as large as a continent. So the suffering of Mother Earth is directly related to the fact that we have forgotten the Cosmic Christ, that is the presence of Divinity in every creature throughout the universe. Every leaf is a Cosmic Christ. Every porpoise and every whale, every drop of water, every star, every galaxy, and we now know we live in a world of a hundred billion galaxies. "Every one of us is a glittering, glistening mirror of God." That's how Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th Century put it. "We are mirrors of God, images of God."

There's a contemporary woman poet in America named Adrienne Rich who puts it this way in one of her poems. She says:

"I would have loved to live
in a world of women and men
gaily in collusion
with green leaves,
stalks.

Building mineral cities,
transparent domes,
little huts of woven grass
each with it's own pattern.

A conspiracy to co-exist
with the Crab Nebula,
the exploding universe,
the mind."

She says she wished she had lived in a world like this, a world with the living cosmos. And I think the most important word in that poem is the word "Gaily." When people live in the universe and not just in our man-made worlds of paying our bills and struggling, when we live in the universe there is play and there is delight and that is why she says, "We could live gaily together with the Crab, exploding with the Crab Nebula and the universe."

The scientist Gregory Bateson, who died just a few years ago, asked in his last book, "What is the pattern that connects things in the universe? What is the pattern that connects the orchid to a lobster, the Crab Nebula to the genes in my daughter's body?" When I first read this I realized that in our Christian scriptures we have an answer. Christ is the pattern that connects. That is what the letter to the Colossians said. Christ is the one who holds all things together in Heaven and on earth. This is the Biblical tradition, that the universe is held together by the smile of Divinity as represented in Jesus, but also in all the creatures that are blessed with the presence of Divinity in them.

So the Book of Wisdom says, "The Spirit of the Lord indeed fills the whole world and that which holds all things together knows every word that is said." That which holds all things together, this is what the early Christians picked up on in the hymns to the Cosmic Christ. The Christ who became incarnate in Jesus holds all things together. And so we don't have to feel either afraid or lonely in the universe. When we feel lonely in the universe we become arrogant. Western civilization the last few hundred years that has lost the sense of the cosmos, making us not only lonely but also arrogant toward other creatures and even toward ourselves.

The Cosmic Christ then is both the pattern that connects and the beauty in every creature. The Catholic Monk Thomas Merton said, "There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun." Well this is our task. We do have to tell this to ourselves, our children, and one another. We have to find ways to bring out the Cosmic Christ -- the Son that is in all of us.

D. H. Lawrence, the American poet, says, "This is the definition of immorality: it is only immoral to be dead alive, sun extinct, and busy putting out the sun in others." That is immorality, our business at putting out the sun in one another. Alice Miller is a contemporary psychiatrist who is working a lot with the wounded, drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and terrorists. And in her work she asks this question, she says, "How is it that Jesus turned out so well? How is it that Jesus became the mystic and the prophet that He was meant to be?" And her answer is, "because He had a father named Joseph who treated Him as if He was the Son of God." Then she asks, "What if every parent treated their children as if they were the son and daughter of God? What if all our adult institutions, education, government, religion, treated the youth as if they were the sons and daughters of God?" That's the Cosmic Christ tradition and that is what Jesus preached when He said that the Kingdom and Queendom of God is here and is among us.

As Meister Eckhart, the 14th century mystic who understood the Cosmic Christ so well, put it, "We are God's sons and daughters, but we do not realize it yet." It's that realization we have to wake up to -- how we all bear the image of God within us, each in a unique way. We are all so unique because God is so full of diversity and beauty and humor that She had to make each one of us different. God wakes up in the morning, looks at us because we are the Divine Mirror, and laughs and has a good day -- hopefully.

This is the tradition of the Cosmic Christ. Remember in the Book of Exodus when Moses experienced God and asked God, "Who are You? Who shall I tell the people You are? What is Your name?" God said, "I Am Who Am." Or it's sometimes translated, "I Am Who Will Be." This is the Divine Name, "I Am." But it's also the name the Jesus picks up on in the gospels. For example, in John's Gospel Jesus says, "I Am the Door, I Am Eternal Life, I Am the Good Shepherd." I had a realization about this gospel just a year ago when my father died and I preached the homily at his funeral.

We took the readings from John's Gospel, "I Am Resurrection and Life." And I realized that Jesus did not come here to earth to draw attention to Himself. He came to draw attention to all creatures and to us. The question in my father's life was this, "How was he Resurrection and Life for other people? How was he a door for other people? How was he Eternal Bread for other people?" And that's the question for our lives. How are we the Christ? Jesus said that He would send His Spirit, the spirit of the Christ to allow us to understand more truth, and to do works even greater than He. This then is all the tradition of the Cosmic Christ -- that we are livers of the Divine Image, capable of compassion and of awe and of wonder.

Gregory Nazianzen from the 4th Century, a theologian, said, "Christ exists in all things that are." That is the tradition of the Cosmic Christ. Christ exists in all things that are. That is what John 1 also says.

Now I have to tell you about some wonderful news emerging today thanks to science. And it's the dove-tailing of science and religion that I think contains the greatest hope for Mother Earth today, because this coming together of science and religion gives us our cosmos back again -- it give us back the sense of the Cosmic Christ. It's Einstein, a Jew, who has launched this movement of mysticism in our time and has, without perhaps even knowing it, invited religious believers back into the tradition of the Cosmic Christ. How does he do this? Well, for the last three hundred years we have become Cosmically lonely because the scientist Newton taught that the universe was a machine. In a machine there's no room for mystery. There's no room for Divine Grace. And so you might say Mysticism -- the experience of the Cosmic Christ -- was closed down. A very renowned theologian of our time, Jaroslav Pelikan, a Lutheran theologian at Yale University, says that the enlightenment -- which is the last three hundred years of Western philosophy -- deposed the Cosmic Christ and made the quest for the historical Jesus necessary.

So what's being said is that the Cosmic Christ was deposed. We lost this sense of the universe during the Newtonian era. But Einstein is like Moses. Einstein, being a Jew, had a deep belief that the universe contained mystery and the Divine Spirit from the Book of Proverbs, which was a deeply Jewish, mystical, cosmological book. Einstein teaches that the universe is not a machine. The universe is an organism. For 19 billion years we've been told the universe has been making decisions on our behalf. For example, in the first second of the fire-ball when the universe began about 19 billion years ago, a decision was made that the fire-ball which was the size of the universe would expand as the universe expanded for 750,000 years. But if this expansion had been at a rate of 1 millionth of a millionth of a second slower or faster than it was you and I could not be here today. Earth would not have evolved as a hospitable place for our species or for the other wonderful species with which we share this amazing planet.

Also in this 750,000 year period at the beginning of the universe the temperature was determined such that if the overall temperature over that vase amount of time had been one degree warmer or colder you and I could not be here today. Now there are story after story like this coming out of the new scientific understanding of the creation of the world -- the ongoing creation of the world. All of them add up to the same lesson. It is a lesson that the mystic Julian of Norwich taught in the 15th century when she said, "We've been loved from before the beginning." That we have been loved from before the beginning is now not only a mystical fact, it is a scientific fact. When you bring mysticism and science together the Cosmos comes alive again. The Cosmic Christ comes into our lives again within our hearts because we're filled with awe. That's what mysticism is all about. It was Einstein himself who said, "Mysticism is the basis of all true science." And he says, "Anyone who cannot stand wrapped in awe is as good as dead." That's his definition of mysticism -- to stand wrapped in awe.

Today we are receiving from science an awesome creation story and it's awakening the Cosmic Christ in all of us and in people of all religions and of all lands. This creation story from science is being believed in India today and China and in Russia and in Europe and in Africa and Latin American and Australia and North America. And what's so interesting in the history of the human race, is that every tribe has been kept together by the Creation story. Now we're getting one creation story in this time in history precisely when we need to understand ourselves as one tribe. No matter what diversity we have of races, nationalities, religions we are all sons and daughters of one Divinity. So the Cosmic Christ tradition celebrates this awesome story.

In our scriptures there is much celebration of the Cosmic Christ. In researching my newest book on the Cosmic Christ, I have been stunned to learn how much there is there that no one ever told me. Let me give you a few examples. Of course the scriptural piece with which we began this lesson is Cosmic Christ. That's Wisdom talking about being with God before the earth was born. And in Proverbs we hear a similar tale where Wisdom says, "I was playing with God day after day, ever at play in God's sight; delighting to be with the sons and daughters of the human race." Remember I talked about gaiety, quoting Rich's poem, the sense of delight and play that is part of a living Cosmic Christ experience. We are here to play together in the universe and to make justice happen so that play can happen among all people. The kind of play that the Cosmic Christ teaches is not the play of the elite or comfortable, it's the play of the simple, the play of the child. Jesus is always teaching us adults to turn and become like children. That means to become playful in the universe.

Another example of the Cosmic Christ is found in the scripture stories of the birth narratives of Beth- lehem. Here at this season of Christmas, it might be good to take a look at these. In the first century when the New Testament was written and Jesus and Paul lived, all around the mediterranean sea, the number one scientific question of the day was this: Are the Angels our friends or our foes? It was believed that angels are the ones who made the universe go round, who made the elements of the universe happen. This is why in all the Cosmic hymns it is said that Christ has power over angels and archangels, thrones and dominions. It's telling people to relax and be at home in the universe, that no matter what is happening in the universe that we don't know -- no matter what the invisible angels are doing -- the smile of God represented by Christ has power over all of it and therefore there is no need for Cosmic Loneliness, Cosmic Anxiety, Fear or Arrogance.

Every time we read the New Testament and see angels, we should think Albert Einstein. Now why do I say that? Because Einstein was asked in the 20th Century, "What is the most important question you can ask in life?" And his answer was, "Is the universe a friendly place or not?" It's the same question that was asked in the 1st Century about the angels. Therefore every time there are angels in the New Testament we should think in terms of the Cosmic Christ, just as we do when we are when we understand Einstein.

Now take a look at Luke's story of the birth of Jesus. An angel comes to Mary --that means the cosmic forces come to Mary -- and tell her that she is going to bear a child. And "The Spirit will overshadow you," we are told. That same word, "overshadow," is used in the Transfiguration in Luke's gospel. The Transfiguration story is a perfect story of the Cosmic Christ because it is about the moment when Jesus went to the mountain top with three friends. For the first time they realized Jesus was not just a good friend and a wonderful fellow, but He was the Christ, the "I Am," and that He was calling all of us in some way to be.

Now back to the birth narrative. What happens when the child is born? Angels go to the shepherds, armies of angels we are told. And who are shepherds?

Shepherds are people who live close to sheep. I've lived with shepherds, maybe you have. They're very, what should I say, "sheep-like." The time of the day is determined by the sheep. When you eat is determined by the sheep. You smell like sheep, you get down on the earth close to the sheep. It's a celebration of the non-two-legged ones, of the whole universe -- sheep are four-legged and they are close to the earth. The angels say to the shepherds, "The glory of the Lord shines upon you and there will be peace to people of all good will." You see, it's a universal story that all people will celebrate the Christ Child. Then the shepherds run to the manger, and what is a manger? A place where animals feed. This comes from Isaiah 1:3 where we are told, "The ox has known its Lord and the donkey knows its Lord, but Israel has not known me." In other words, the non-two-legged ones, the other animals, can be closer to God than we are.

All of this is a celebration of the Cosmic Christ. There's a Cosmic Christ in the animals, in the donkey, in the ox, in dogs and cats and porpoises for sure. So this perspective of Cosmic Christ allows us to re-read our scriptures with great excitement in this time. What emerges is the story that we are meant by the universe to be here, that it is a friendly universe, that the spirit of God truly fills the whole world and the Spirit of God has been sent in a special way by Jesus. In terms of the Cosmic Christ, this Spirit of God wants to, yearns to, work through all of us to celebrate, to heal, to make justice happen.

There is a word in English that I think we should meditate on together. The word is, "To Belong." To belong comes from the word, "To Long to Be," to long to be part of, to yearn to be part of. The loneliness of our civilization the last few hundred years that has rendered us arrogant toward other species, toward the earth, toward rain forests, toward the air and the waters and toward our children and youth, comes from the fact that we long to hear a story that we are part of something big. This is the story of the Cosmic Christ. This tradition in our faith is returning with power today.

Let us pray together. Oh God, You who are the Creator of all things, You who are Creator of the Cosmic Christ in every creature, every galaxy, every atom and every one of us, bring forth from us the spirit not of alienation and loneliness and separation, but the spirit of making connections. May we too be patterns that connect like Jesus was and like Jesus taught us to be, especially at this time of Christmas, this time of Good News. The whole universe, all the angels and all the scientists and all the artists and all the simple people and all the suffering yearn to hear this good news that we all belong. We belong to one another, we belong to You and we long to make this happen. Amen 

Interview with Fr. Matthew Fox
Interviewed by Dave Hardin

Dave Hardin: When you were in Chicago, you started the Institute for Culture and Creation Spirituality at Mundelein. Then you moved it to Holy Name College in Oakland. What is your goal? What are you trying to achieve in the Institute?

Fr. Matthew Fox: Well, we are trying to make happen what I spoke about earlier, actually. What Thomas Merton said, "to bring out the sun in everybody." So we try to bring together contemporary science and mysticism and art. I think when you can do this you can excite people about their place in the universe and you empower them to feel creative again and alive again and contributing to the transformation of our society and our species. This is so necessary if the earth is going to survive.

Hardin: What you're really hoping they'll take away as a gift is knowing they are part of creation, that they are in God's eyes. Would that be fair?

Fox: That's right, including the struggle for justice toward not just two-legged ones, but all of God's creatures. There's creative power in all of us, that's what it means to say there's Cosmic Christ in all of us. And this has to flow -- it's been bottled up by a lot of education, and by a lot of woundedness we undergo in life. This bottles our creativity up. We have to unleash that creativity, and part of the creativity is our capacity to heal our own wounds.

Hardin: I know that one of the parts of the faculty is to bring in the Eastern as well as the Western point of view, to make some connections with both kinds of spirituality. Is this similar to the kind of thing that Thomas Merton was doing in his visit to Asia?

Fox: It is. And also we bring together the Native American. I have a Native American spiritual teacher on our faculty who has built a sweat lodge and leads us in those kinds of ancient prayers that people have prayed for 50,000 years on this soil that we call America. When you get to this level of mysticism -- this is what Merton found -- you have what I call deep ecumenism, the coming together of all world religions around the area of our experience of divinity in the Cosmic Christ. There's a Cosmic Christ tradition in Buddhism, the tradition that every flower has a Buddha -- you see has Buddha nature -- every baby has Buddha nature. That's the same tradition as the Cosmic Christ tradition in the West. You discover these wonderful likenesses are precisely at the level of spirituality, not the level of theological position papers but the level of meeting together in sweat lodges and praying together.

For example, there was a man from mainland China in our program a couple of years ago, a young man, and his grandmother had taught him the Taoist ways of meditation in China. And he came to our program and he understood Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen and these great Christian Mystics. I said, "How is this possible because he doesn't know the Bible from which these come?" But a line from Eckhart came to me where he said, "God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop." There's one Divinity, there's one underground river, there are many wells into the river. And there is a Taoist well and a Jewish well and a Christian well and a Sufi well and the Native American well and everyone is responsible for plummeting their well, but when you do that you realize you are encountering the same river.

Hardin: As westerners, we sometimes have trouble meditating and yet I sense that meditation is a very important part of building our spirituality, connecting more with Jesus.

Fox: It is, but we have in our program forms of meditation that I think are more western than eastern and we call it "Art as Meditation." And so we do things like clay as meditation, painting as meditation, massage as meditation, circle dancing as meditation. It's fun! Meditation should be delightful, it should bring the child out again to play in the universe. It's not just sitting and not thinking -- that's one kind of meditation. It's not just sitting and looking inside -- that's one kind of meditation. Those have their place. But we find that the most important and useful and practical kind of meditation has to do with creativity.

Hardin: Who were some of the spiritual mentors in your life?

Fox: Father Chenu, who is still living. He's a ninety three year old French Dominican who named this Creation Center tradition for me. He's a very beautiful man and he's one of the Father's of Liberation Theology as well. Rosemary Radford-Reuther and other women theologians of our time have been important to me. Adrienne Rich, whom I cited earlier, this fine feminine poet of our time, is another. The poets and musicians have been terribly important to me because they have never forsaken the tradition of the Cosmic Christ.