MATTHEW FOX IS A COSMIC PRIEST
SUBJECT
Matthew Fox
OCCUPATION
Priest and theologian
INTERVIEWER
Nathan Scolaro
PHOTOGRAPHER
Angela DeCenzo
LOCATION
Benicia, US
DATE
January, 2020
For more than 50 years, Matthew Fox has been studying and writing about the great Christian mystics through history, gleaning from them something much richer and more truthful about what it means to live a holy life than the Roman Catholic Church he was intimately connected with. At age 19, Matthew entered the Dominican Order of the Church and took an alternate route, earning a doctorate of spiritual theology from the Institut Catholique de Paris and becoming a champion of the Creation Spirituality tradition, which puts the sacredness of the Earth and cosmos at the centre of Christian life, and draws inspiration from social justice, science, Indigenous wisdom and other world religions. Importantly, Matthew recognised what many mystics before him had: that the origin of life doesn’t begin with sin, as the Catholic Church teaches, but rather with blessing.
In the early ’90s, Matthew was silenced by the Vatican and later expelled from the Dominican Order for failing to fall in line with the Church teachings. The papacy came at him with a list of wrongdoings, including referring to God as “Mother,” supporting homosexuals, working too closely with Native Americans, and emphasising the concept of “original blessing” over “original sin.” He wasn’t hindered, and continued to develop and teach his programs on spirituality which incorporate intellectual and intuitive ways of learning. In his efforts to renew forms of ritual and worship for young people, he developed what have famously become “Cosmic Masses,” a blending of meditation, VJ, DJ and dance, and after having designed Masters programs and even a university on Creation Spirituality through the’80s and ’90s, he founded the holistic education organisation YELLAWE (Youth and Elder Learning Laboratory for Ancestral Wisdom Education) in 2005. Today, Matthew continues to write and run workshops on eco-centred mysticism in action, giving people, as he’s always intended, the resources, concepts and—most importantly—experiences that enable them to be in relationship with the Divine.
MATTHEW FOX: Our hearts are going out to you all in Australia right now, watching these devastating bushfires. The loss of life and of course the frustration at the lack of leadership. We are with you and are feeling it here on the other side of the world.
NATHAN SCOLARO: Thank you. Actually I was heartened by something I read on your website this morning, because obviously there’s lots of talk here about this feeling apocalyptic, people are scared about what’s to come. But you wrote that a time of apocalypse can be a time for genuine breakthroughs, for maturing and coming of age. And this is something that really resonates with me. I feel like this is a time for us to grow up. Do you want to speak to that maybe, this framing of the word apocalypse?
Yes. The word apocalypse in Greek can be translated as revelation. It could be a moment of revelation about the depths of our species. Our capacity for creativity and compassion could come forward because we’re in so much trouble. And the old adage is that necessity is the mother of invention, nothing changes until it has to—that humans don’t
