Alone man

REDISCOVER COMMUNITY: Matthew Fox on the end of loneliness

Last updated: November 8th, 2018

One way to understand a spiritual term is to first know its opposite. One of my favourite stories about community, or its opposite, is this:  A few years ago an Australian theologian was lecturing in Africa and his words were being translated to the audience in Swahili. At the culmination of his talk he said, “The number one spiritual problem in Sydney where I live is loneliness.” The translator asked him to repeat the sentence and then huddled with five of his African buddies. He finally came back to the microphone and said to the theologian, “I’m sorry, sir, but in our language there is no word for loneliness.”

No word for loneliness! What’s wrong with these people? Where have they been? We in Western industrial society have been basking in loneliness for at least three hundred years. It’s one of our exports and it’s really catching on lately. So what we should really be asking ourselves is what have we done? What has the modern era done, in effect conveying the message for three hundred years that matter is dead and inert, that atoms are in a constant battle for survival, fighting each other, and only a few win out? This has been the myth of modern science, and it has rendered us cosmically lonely.

When you enter into community with the trees, the bushes, the flowers, the four-legged creatures, the winged ones, the finned ones, the stars, the galaxies, the moon and the sun, you are not lonely. It is true that sometimes those on two legs will disappoint you. But if you go to Mother Earth, she’s there. If you go to Father Sky, he’s there. This is what it means to live in a cosmology, to live in the sense of a universe that embraces us. When you think about it, it is an absolute miracle that our strange species has emerged on this planet after 13.7 billion years of this universe’s journey. It is an absolutely astounding development that calls for praise and generosity, and it certainly calls for community, along with the realization of what has been lost by our having cut ourselves off from ourselves, from the earth and from the universal whole.

A deep part of community is the dance, the dialectic between solitude and group. We always need to cultivate solitude because without it we don’t move out of our reptilian brains into newness and true creativity. A healthy community has to dance the dance of action and contemplation, or what they call in the East, action and non-action. Action must emanate from non-action for it to be authentic and do no harm to others. German philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart wrote that we should worry less about what we do and more about what we are. How true, because if your being is just, your ways will be just; and if your being is joyful, your ways will be joyful. So it is obvious that the right relationship between action and contemplation springs from being, being in touch with being. And the latter requires solitude.

Community also has to do with friendship and tolerance, embracing diversity and learning to delight in it. Some of the people that we start out with just tolerating may actually end up as our friends, and some who were initially our friends may end up at the level of tolerance. But all are included in community and we learn to celebrate the diversity that community brings.

Today’s physics has moved from the idea of discrete, individual atoms to atoms that actually link up, creating molecules that link up, creating cells that link up, creating organisms that link up, and all of this reveals communities. In other words, we now have a physics that holds or undergirds the sense of interdependence that is the basis of all community. This recognition can expedite our movement from cosmic loneliness to authentic community, not only in our local bio-levels but also in the grander scheme of things.

The etymological meaning of community is cum-munio, i.e. to share a common task together, to work together. This applies to both outer work and inner work. Particularly at this time in history the inner work is vital; without it we’re lost, but with it everything else gains brilliance. As Meister Eckhart put it, “The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward work can never be great or good if the inward is small or of little worth. The inward work always includes in itself all size, all breadth and all length.” He also declared that when we return to our origin—which is the purpose of inner work—we learn that our work “draws all its being from nowhere else but from and in the heart of God.”

Now that post-modern science has taken the lid off the mechanical universe we can speak openly and candidly of beings other than human that may be supporting us: angels, spirits, whatever you want to call them. And of course the ancestors—always with us, challenging us. In fact, in the Middle East the predominant concept of history is not like a train where the ancestors are in the caboose. Their notion of history is more like a caravan of camels where the ancestors are out front, leading and urging us on.

You don’t honour the ancestors by looking back. You don’t focus on what Martin Luther King did in the 1960s or what Francis of Assisi did around 1200. You ask, “What kind of courage and insight would these leaders be offering now in the year 2012?” I think they would be just as controversial, as wild, as off-the-edge in this time as they were in theirs, because they had a sense of being called, just as we are called to express the same kind of greatness today to meet the issues of our time. We have the responsibility to roll up our sleeves and go to work with whatever talents we’ve been given, whatever communities we’ve gathered to encourage us, and whatever artists and spiritual leaders there are to inspire us and activate our creativity.

The following words written by Thomas Berry, one of the great eco-philosophers of our time, powerfully evoke something of the community that is supporting, challenging and embracing us: “The human venture depends absolutely on this quality of awe and reverence and joy in the Earth and all that lives and grows upon the Earth. In the end the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration, an exuberant expression of existence itself…. A way is opening for each person to receive the total spiritual heritage of the human community as well as the total spiritual heritage of the universe. Within this context the religious antagonisms of the past can be overcome, the particular traditions can be vitalized, and the feeling of presence to a sacred universe can appear once more to dynamize and sustain human affairs. We must feel that we are supported by the same power that brought the Earth into being, that spun the galaxies into space, that tilt the sun and brought the moon into its orbit.” The end of loneliness—community at so many levels.

[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]Matthew Fox, once a member of the Dominican order within the Roman Catholic Church, was expelled from the order in 1993. His beliefs and teachings of “original blessing” were seen as heretical to the Catholic view of “original sin.” Embracing the teachings of early mystic visionaries such as Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, Saint Francis of Assisi and others, Fox became an influential proponent of what he calls Creation Spirituality, which also embraces Buddhism, Judaism, Sufism and Native American teachings. Fox became an Episcopal priest. The “Techno Cosmic Masses” he created, based on raves, are designed to connect younger worshippers to a more ecstatic and body-centred celebration of spirituality.

image: lonely man via Shutterstock