In Praise of Thanks

Thanksgiving 2022.  There is much to be grateful for; and much to be concerned about. 

The latter includes global warming and the end of the Earth as humanity has known it for the past 200,000 years of our existence.  GOP22 is testimony to that fact as are the rising seas, the record-smashing heat waves (China included), the dried up rivers from the Danube to the Rhine to the Thames in Europe to the Colorado River and Mississippi River in North America and the Yangtze River in China, called the “most important river in China.” 

The melting of glaciers provides water for much of Asia and Africa and more.  The diminishment of the world’s forests and rainforests, soil and waters.  The heating and acidification of the oceans will forever empty the ocean of many of its living creatures. And so much more.

How many more facts have to come out for humanity to wake up from its “narcissism” (Pope Francis’ appropriate word) and come to its own rescue, drop its insane wars and military budgets, and get to the common task of saving the planet for our own and others species survival?

I propose that a new revolution of thankfulness is the best ‘weapon’ humans possess to bring about this wake up in the midst of emergency.  If we borrow the physics of old, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and add Spirit to it, we have a chance at survival.  If we don’t, our time is very much limited on this planet.

Thanks and Gratitude are the bottom line energies we need today.

Thanks for Earth and its generous hospitality that has welcomed our species, fed it, nurtured it, delighted it, amazed it, and made our existence possible and beautiful.  She is our Mother as all the great mystics of old from Hildegard of Bingen to Francis of Assisi to Julian of Norwich know and indigenous peoples know well.  And that She deserves our praise and our thanks and our eagerness to imitate her and make healing happen.

Thanks for the Air we breathe and can no longer take for granted.  For the healthiness of it, for the miracle of it, breath in/breath out.  For how our lungs are perfectly in tune with the special combination of oxygen and the rest, the miracle that we call Air.  Science tells us that the 4 mile thick cover of air that surrounds the earth is proportionately less than the thickness of the apple skin is to the apple.  Beyond that four mile distance airlessness reigns.

Thanks for Fire, the Sun and the warmth and light it offers us for free every day.  And the photosynthesis that brings us the food we all eat because it is the food all plants and animals eat.  The fire that ignites our souls as well as warms and nurtures our bodies and that many peoples, including those of the Bible tradition, have honored as a symbol of Spirit, Divinity, God or Love.  “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful and enkindle in them the fire of thy love.”

Fire is at the forefront of our survival and interest today because that is what constitutes an “energy crisis.”  How do we get our fire?  From dead plants and animals of millions of years ago that we know as oil and coal and fossil fuels?  We are being asked to change our ways of fire  drastically today if we are to survive.  We need to fall in love with Fire anew other than the fire (energy) of fossil fuels--other kinds of fire such as sunlight and wind and waves.  We are in a “fire crisis” insofar as we find ourselves in an “energy crisis.”   If we are truly grateful for Fire we will choose wisely.

Thanks to those efforts by world leaders, entrepreneurs, scientists and citizens who are demonstrating and demanding new ways to employ fire.  Ways that take us beyond burning trees and forests, coal and oil. 

Fire’s dangerous side is apparent in the wildfires so devastating the Western United States at this time but also happening around the world and especially in Africa.  Another wake up call to tame Fire.

Fire is masculine or yang energy.  So a revolution in fire consciousness is another expression of our need to move beyond excessive patriarchal or toxic masculinity to a healthier version of fire and energy, one that nurtures generations to come with care and concern and sustainability.  More Yin energy.

Thanks for Water.  Who can live without water?  Not just for our drinking, cooking, cooling and cleaning but also for the aesthetic of it, the beauty of it to be found in soothing lakes and rapid rivers and mysterious oceans and awesome waterfalls and gentle rains and wild thunderstorms.  We are a blue planet after all, thanks to the waters.

Buck Ghosthorse, a Lakota teacher, faculty member and friend once said to me, “Do you want to know how sacred water is?  Go without it for three days.”  The increased droughts in dry places and floods and hurricanes in wet places is a sign of our times.  And of global warming.  Water too has its dark and dangerous side.  A fireman once told me that water is more dangerous than fire.

Water is Yin energy, feminine energy.  Here too we can see that too much water on the one hand, or too little on the other, speaks to us of the proper balance we all need, Mother Earth needs, for harmony and peace and survival.  Yin and Yang in balance, Water and Fire in balance.  The sacred and healthy masculine and the divine feminine in balance.  There lies our survival. 

Thanks for Earth, Air, Fire, Water: There lies the political and spiritual and survival agenda for our species today.  We are staring extinction in the face.  Let us return to Thanks.  And then act on that thanks.

French playwright Antonin Artaud speaks a stark truth when he says that “It is good that from time to time cataclysms occur that compel us to return to nature, i.e., to rediscover life.”[i]   

Our current extinction emergency is forcing us to return to nature and to basics.  Thanksgiving is basic.  Thanks for existence and therefore creation or nature is basic.  How basic?  Listen to these creation mystics:

Thomas Aquinas: “Religion is supreme thankfulness and gratitude.”[ii]  Notice how for Aquinas thanks is the very essence of religion—not hierarchy, not church buildings, not commandments, not redemption, not escaping hell or grabbing at heaven--but gratitude.  Indeed, supreme gratitude.

And this is the very meaning of worship and of the Sabbath.  As Aquinas puts it, “of all the divine gifts to be commemorated, the first and foremost was that of the Creation, which was called to mind by the sanctification of the sabbath.... The sanctification of the Sabbath [is] in memory of the creation of all things.”[iii]

And of course the very meaning of Christian worship, called Eucharist, is “to give thanks.”

Can the move away from Religion to Spirituality today be a move toward Thankfulness and Gratitude as the bottom line for prayer and authentic religion?  The beginning point for an authentic and deep mystical/prophetic journey?  The Via Positiva as a springboard to Justice and Compassion and therefore survival?

Meister Eckhart tells us that “if the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘Thank you,’ that would suffice.”  This seems to be a stripped down version of what Aquinas teaches above.

Julian of Norwich: “This is the holiest prayer—the prayer of thanksgiving.”   Such thanksgiving leads to actions.  As she puts it, “charged with the quality of reverence and loving awe, we turn ourselves with all our might toward the actions” to which we are guided.[iv] 

The great psychologist Otto Rank, only now being given credit for being the father of humanistic psychology including his influence on Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Rollo May, defines the artist as “one who wants to leave behind a gift.”  Of course, among indigenous peoples, everyone is an artist and this is surely at the heart of the biblical teaching that we are all made in the image and likeness of the Creator. 

We are all “co-creators” and in this Aquinas says lies the deepest meaning of our being called “images of God.”  He writes: “Although a created being tends to the divine likeness in many ways, this one whereby it seeks the divine likeness by being the cause of others takes the ultimate place.  Hence Dionysius says, that ‘of all things, it is more divine to become a co-worker with God’ in accord with the statement of the Apostle: ‘we are God’s co-workers’ (1 Cor. 3:9).”[v]

Isn’t the desire to “leave behind a gift” itself an act of thanksgiving?  We all leave this embodiment of ourselves on Earth.  Few know the time or place, but we do know we are mortal and therefore exiting. Thus we yearn to leave behind a gift.  Gift for gift.  Our Thank You for our having visited this place.  Our thank you for our existence.  Let us praise all those who want to leave behind a gift.

Let us praise thanks and our capacity for thanks.  Thanks is the opposite of Taking for Granted.  Let us all cease taking for granted.  That includes taking for granted Earth, Air, Fire and Water.  And Spirit.

~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 40 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 78 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship (called The Cosmic Mass). His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much-neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. Among his books are A Way To God: Thomas Merton's Creation Spirituality Journey; Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times; Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times;  Order of the Sacred Earth; The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times; and Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic – And Beyond; Original Blessing; The Coming of the Cosmic Christ; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; A Spirituality Named Compassion. To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started DailyMeditationswithMatthewFox.org

[i] See Matthew Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Post-denominational Priest, p. 302.

[ii] Matthew Fox, The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times, pp. 41-44.

[iii] See Matthew Fox, Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, p. 177.

[iv] Matthew Fox, Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic—and Beyond, pp. 101f.

[v] Fox, Sheer Joy, p. 245.

Question & Answer

Q: By A Reader

I am feeling concerned that life may not really matter and question whether my own life has a deeper meaning and will make any real difference in the world.

A: By Brian D. McLaren

Dear Reader,

As I read your brief note, I feel both the personal pain that is unique to you and your situation, and the more general anxiety that resonates so deeply with universal human condition. The most sensitive and reflective among us, those with the highest ideals, seem to feel most acutely the gap between their hopeful dreams and actual reality. And all of us, or nearly all of us, reach low points where it feels that we have ruined our lives and squandered opportunities.

I can’t help but wonder how old you are, because this question has one kind of poignancy among the young who have uncertain years stretched out ahead of them, another among the middle aged whose candle seems half-gone, and another among the elders who look back and wonder what has actually been accomplished after years of effort.

Through my many years as a Christian, I have come to see more clearly something that was incredibly obvious in the New Testament, but that I had been trained, it seems, to not see. 

A friend of mine captured it after a super difficult period of life, when he said, “Life is a gift and love is the point.”

In Paul’s writings, he puts it both negatively and positively. Negatively (1 Corinthians 13), he tells us that our greatest successes in life — without love — are meaningless. In place of a coherent melody, there is only a hollow noise.

Positively (Galatians 5:6), he tells that many things are indeed meaningless, including issues religious people argue about fervently. The only thing that matters, he says, is faith expressing itself through love.

So here is what I would encourage you, or anyone wondering about the meaning of their life, to do.

First, think back on the people who have loved you — family, friends, teachers, colleagues, even strangers who have shown you kindness and respect. See yourself as a person who has been loved.

Second, think about the love and generosity that have come to you from other living creatures, even the earth itself… from a cat curling in your lap or a dog wagging his tail to greet you, from the rains and soil, from a ripe summer peach or a plump spring strawberry or a crisp autumn apple, from beauty shining in a shimmering field of wheat or in a frosty window on a winter’s morning. Allow yourself to feel that you were given the gift of life, full of generous gifts like these. 

Third, think about the love you have shown… the people you have cared about, the causes you have been committed to, the work you have done to benefit others. 

Then, perhaps you could reflect upon these words from the New Testament (1 John 4:7-8): “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God… because God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God lives in that person.”

If we listen to the voice of the Spirit whispering up from deep within us, I think we will hear something like this: the measure of a meaningful life is love… receiving love, sharing love.

Even if we lived a hateful life up until this moment, there is good news: the smallest gesture of love that we indulge in today, from giving a cup of cold water to someone in need to sharing a kind word or smile, will not be meaningless. It will mark the turning of our lives toward the light.

Please know that my heart, and the hearts of so many people reading your note, are rising up in love for you today. Your honesty and desire for meaning have stirred up more love in the world today, and that makes a difference.

~ Brian D. McLaren
Read and share online here

About the Author
Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is an Auburn Senior Fellow and a leader in the Convergence Network, through which he is developing an innovative training/mentoring program for pastors, church planters, and lay leaders called Convergence Leadership Project. He works closely with the Center for Progressive Renewal/Convergence, the Wild Goose Festival and the Fair Food Program‘s Faith Working Group. His most recent book is Faith After Doubt.  He is the author of the illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story, The Great Spiritual Migration, We Make the Road by Walking, and Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? And his newest book, Do I Stay Christian?. 

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Part I: The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic

I think it is fair to say that I could not have written this book 25 years ago. For most of my career, I was almost repelled by the Fourth Gospel. It seemed to me to portray Jesus with his humanity no longer intact. In this gospel, he does not appear to suffer. There is no sense of the Jesus who was portrayed in the synoptic gospels as apprehensive in anticipation of his death. John’s Jesus never prays that “this cup might pass from me.” Indeed, he actually rejects that idea with the statement, “It was to drink this cup that I was born!” The Fourth Gospel relates to the cross of Jesus, not as a place of suffering, but as the place where Jesus is to be glorified. From John’s cross the cry of dereliction (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) has disappeared and has been replaced by the triumphant assertion, “It is finished!” Jesus is informing God that the work “Thou hast given me to do” has been successfully completed.

John’s Jesus appears to have no human limits. This gospel seems to claim for him a pre-existent status. “Before Abraham was, I am!” he is made to say and “Moses rejoiced to see my day.” This gospel has God designate Jesus as the son of God not at the resurrection, as Paul appears to do (Romans 1:1-4) or at the baptism by John the Baptist as Mark appears to do or even at the miracle of the virgin birth as both Matthew and Luke appear to do. John’s Jesus was, according to the prologue, the son of God from the dawn of creation. He was “the Word of God” that said “Let there be light” and thus called the world into being. That same “Word of God” simply became flesh in human history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. One cannot, however, be fully human and at the same time be a part of who God is since the beginning of time. The Jesus of John’s gospel seemed to me to be related to God in the same way that Clark Kent was related to Superman. Clark Kent was not really a newspaper reporter, he was Superman in disguise. The Jesus of John’s gospel does not appear to be a real human being; he is God in disguise. In this gospel, Jesus was made to say such things as “The Father and I are one” and, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” To affirm this divine status the author of this book has taken the name of God, “I AM,” out of the story of Moses and the burning bush and has placed it into the mouth of the Jesus of history. So Jesus is made to identify himself with the God “I AM” over and over again in the Johannine text. “I AM the bread of life,” “I AM living water,” “I AM the door,” “I AM the way, the truth and the life,” “I Am the vine,” “I AM the good shepherd” and “I AM the resurrection.” Jesus is also made to claim that he alone is the only way to God and that only when he is lifted up (on the cross) will that “I AM” presence be revealed. Only in that picture of the dying Jesus on the cross will the world see God. Since I could find no way to relate to this non-human Jesus I tended to hope that portrait would go away.

The Fourth Gospel has also, in my opinion, served to feed the anti-Semitism that has stained Christian history through the ages. From the Fourth Gospel it appeared to spread through the church fathers (there were no mothers) culminating in the horrifying genocidal outburst in the 20th century that we know as “The Holocaust.” There are times when this gospel seems to spit the words “the Jews” out of its author’s mouth with contempt. This gospel is the only place in the Bible where Jesus is quoted as calling the Jews “the children of the devil.” Those were some of the reasons I was never drawn to this book and why attempting to study it deeply was not something I would have chosen to do at an earlier part of my life.

There was one other reason for this negativity that comes out of Christian history. The Fourth Gospel was installed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE as the ultimate and final arbiter of what came to be called “Christian orthodoxy.” In that council, the battle not only for the soul, but also for the future of Christianity, was fought out under the watchful eye of the Emperor Constantine, who wanted unified Christianity to be a unifying force in his empire. In that defining debate, the chief protagonists were a priest named Arius and a deacon, soon to be a priest and later a bishop, named Athanasius. The content of this battle was over the nature of Jesus, that is, was he of “like substance” or “identical substance” with God? Arius, using quotations from all four of the gospels, argued passionately that Jesus was of “like substance” with God. Athanasius, quoting only the Fourth Gospel as his authority, argued that Jesus was of “identical substance” with God. When the smoke of the battle cleared, Athanasius was declared the winner and the Nicene Creed was adopted, sealing Athanasius’ victory with these words describing Jesus: He was “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.” This creed closed every loophole used in the debate with Arius and magnified Jesus’ divinity to the exclusion of his humanity. It also opened the door to what became the defining doctrines that we call “Incarnation” and “Holy Trinity,” which were not fully developed until the 5th century. This Fourth Gospel-supported definition became the substance of Christian orthodoxy. In time this definition of Jesus led to religious wars, religious persecutions, heresy trials, the Inquisition and the condemnation of anyone who dared to think outside the box. Thus this gospel came to be associated with everything that repelled me about Christianity and so it had little appeal. That is why I did not have any interest in studying it much less trying to write about it earlier. Well, things change and my latest book on the Fourth Gospel will soon be in bookstores and a new debate of John, I hope, will ensue. How did that change occur? It took two steps.

First, I discovered that the Fourth Gospel had been misread for centuries; that it is a deeply and passionately Jewish book. That insight was initiated when I discovered only a dozen or so years ago, a book written in the 1960’s by an English scholar named Eileen Guilding, herself the academic child of two gigantic New Testament scholars, F.F. Bruce and Austin Farrer. It was as if I had just found a long lost key. Guilding’s book was entitled The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship. I realized then that the Johannine community, which had produced this gospel, was itself a profoundly Jewish community so that when they battled those they called “the Jews,” it was an intra-synagogue conflict between Jews and Jews, one group called “Revisionist Jews” and the other “Orthodox Jews.” Then I searched this gospel for its Jewish base and only when I discovered this could I feel the Jewish pain of their being excommunicated from the synagogue by the Orthodox party, an event that occurred around the year 88 CE. The words expressing this pain were later used in the text of this gospel to castigate all Jews, for these texts were quoted throughout the centuries with no sense of their historical context.

The second step came when I realized that only when the members of the Johannine community found themselves outside the synagogue did they begin to place their Christ experience into a more universal language than the one they had known while still a part of the synagogue. This was when they turned to a form of first century Jewish mysticism to find a new vocabulary inside which they could express their faith.

Jewish mysticism, like mysticism everywhere, understands the limits that words possess. To talk about their transcendent understanding of Christ, they stretched the words they used to the breaking point to make them big enough to capture the Jesus they had experienced as the mystery and the presence of the Ultimate, which they called God. So they painted Jesus in mystical language, not designed to be literalized. Literal words can never carry mystical meaning without being distorted. They then turned what had once been called “miracles” into what this gospel would call “signs.” “Signs” pointed to a reality they could never capture. Thus I discovered that the language of the Fourth Gospel is not the language of the orthodox understanding of incarnation. It is the language of Jewish mysticism. It does not lend itself to creedal formulas or doctrinal debates, but to the processing of mystical experiences. Armed with this gospel’s original Jewishness, recognizing the pain of separation that the Johannine community felt when Orthodox Judaism could not stretch to include them and finally recognizing that what they did was to turn to the inclusive, unlimited vocabulary of Jewish mysticism in order to record their experience of Jesus, I then went back to the Fourth Gospel to read it anew. It was not the same book that once repelled me. Indeed, it captured me as no other book has done before and I devoured it until I was transformed by it. Only then could I write the words that appear in this book’s preface: “Part of my task in this book is to pull anti-Semitism out of Christian history and to pull creedal orthodoxy out of Christianity. I now find this gospel not to be about religion or sin and salvation, but to be about life, expanded life and expanded consciousness. I believe that the Fourth Gospel, properly understood, will lead Christianity into an entirely different direction from the one traditional Christian teaching has followed from Nicaea to this day.” It is now for me a blueprint for a new Christianity for a new world.

~  John Shelby Spong
Click here to purchase The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic

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