An Excerpt from Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest by Matthew Fox
Matthew Fox traces 50 years of his spiritual adventures in this memoir. Here is an excerpt on yearning.
"Rabbi Heschel says that "holiness is the most precious word in religion." Indeed, a new era like our postmodern one cries out for new meanings of holiness and new ways to get there. As Frederick Turner puts it bluntly: 'Twentieth-century culture is full of an angst, an unsatisfied and inexplicable yearning, which we can now identify as a thirst for things like glory, sanctity, conscience, and heroism, which were forbidden to us by the doctrines of existentialism.' So we have repressed greatness, and in its place we suffer great longing. In place of stories about holiness, we have substituted drugs: 'As the doctrines of materialism triumphed first among intellectuals, then among the population at large, so did the use of opium, cocaine, mescalin, and cannabis.' But drugs cannot do our transcendence for us—they 'destroy the tension and the hunger and thus the process of transformation.'
"Terms like holiness, sanctity, and saints all correspond to the third article of faith that Luther named but that so few Protestants even got around to talking about—that of our 'sanctification' or 'divination.' This lack of development of a theology of holiness is a principle reason why Protestantism verges on the soporific. It so easily becomes flat and bland and boring; and Catholicism, to the extent that it ingests the Protestant principle in itself and fails to develop its own catholic principle, renders itself equally flat and bland and boring. Protestantism, to the extent that it only protests, has little to offer of a positive nature (other than 'positive thinking')—little challenges to adventure beyond the status quo that culture offers us. Such a religion, whether appearing in Protestant or Roman Catholic guise, has no sense of extreme. Sainthood is about extremes and the holiness that that entails. Another way of putting this is that in modern Western religion, wildness and wilderness are tamed, excluded, fenced in, domesticated. When religion becomes domesticated, it worries the individual soul about its redemption in the next life—but it has little or no adventure to offer the soul in this one. Then, of course, it is set up for becoming a kept religion, one that hangs around just to legitimize social institutions and the status quo. And the big issues become: Shall we allow a public prayer at a school graduation? Who will marry us? Who will bury my loved one? Who will baptize my baby? Little or nothing is made of the development of consciousness and the means to do that—via meditation practices and healthy encounters with great mystics, for example. In short, religion takes over and spirituality dies.
"Poet Bill Everson testifies to the reality of sanctity and extremes when he writes about the vocation of the poet: "It is in the order of imagination, the order of poetry, that the possible exceeds itself, is sanctified in excess. In the extremes of imagination the poet and the saint concur." Sanctity has to do with imagination and with excess. This "pushing the envelope" seems like a necessary task in a movement from the modern to the postmodern. Again, it is not altogether jettisoning the envelopes we have inherited; but it is pushing them, reinterpreting them, reinventing them. Somehow, this effort is a great one; it takes some greatness. Thus, it is the making of heroes or saints. It calls forth our greatness, our magnanimity. Ours is a time — the postmodern era is a time — for greatness and saint-making that is very close to soul-making and has nothing in common with ecclesial political efforts to canonize dead people provided the money is there to get the job done in style.
"Holiness is everybody's business. And the way we define it is everybody's business. That is to say, the meaning of holiness lies at the substratum, the very basement, of our collective definition of community, of why we are here together and what sacrifices we are willing to make for a future generation. I think that is the single greatest difference between fundamentalism and creation spirituality: our definitions of holiness."
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