An Excerpt from Wrestling with the Prophets: Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life by Matthew Fox
Matthew Fox has written essays on deep ecumenism, ecojustice and art as meditation. Here is an excerpt on openness..
"The question that arises about the Spirit is not so much where is the Spirit — for the Spirit is everywhere. A more pressing question is how do we make an inner journey into the Spirit. How do we access the Spirit depth? I believe that the most accessible route to the Spirit, the least elitist, and the most available route, the deepest and most authentic route, is that of art as meditation. Through art as meditation, we come in touch with our own experiences of depth — our experiences of joy and our experiences of suffering. But we do not stop there — rather, by accessing the depths of the experience we also access the means out of the depths of awe and grief into the light of day, namely creativity. By journeying into our experience by way of art as meditation we come in touch with our images once again and our power for imagery: this is empowering. It gives us our souls back, and our responsibility to express them. In the process, the Spirit returns — through our imaginations and through our hands, bodies, voices, songs, color, clay, words of poetic truth. As Eckhart puts it, 'the truth does not come from outside in but from inside out and passes through an inner form.' We get in touch with the truth through art as meditation and we also get in touch with a form by which to express our truth.
The ecumenical aspect to all this is the discovery that all truth is one — that 'my truth' is 'our truth' at the level of spiritual experience. As the fifteenth-century Indian mystic Kabir put it, 'now beyond caste or creed am I!' No one owns such breakthroughs of Spirit; they are universal, for no one owns the Spirit and no religious tradition has a monopoly on it. Indeed, the Spirit far exceeds any one tradition, and that is why all practitioners need to have their hearts open for the Spirit to enter in and tell us truths — some of them new and some of them ancient — that we all need to hear today."
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