Matthew Fox - The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine

MATTHEW FOX WAS A MEMBER of the Dominican Order for thirty-four years. He holds a doctorate (received summa cum laude) in the History and Theology of Spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris. Seeking to establish a pedagogy that was friendly to learning spirituality, he established the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality, which operated for seven years at Mundelein College in Chicago and twelve years at Holy Names College in Oakland, California. For ten of those years at Holy Names College, Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), as the Catholic Churchs chief inquisitor and head of the Congregation of Doctrine and Faith, tried to shut the program down. Ratzinger silenced Fox for one year in 1988 and forced him to step down as director. Three years later he expelled Fox from the order and aborted the program. Rather than disband his amazing ecumenical faculty, Fox started the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, where he was president for nine years.

He is currently a scholar in residence with the Academy for the Love of Learning in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is working with others to create a new educational experience for inner-city youth called YELLAWE (Youth and Elder Learning Laboratory for Ancestral Wisdom Education). He lectures, teaches, writes, and serves as president of the nonprofit he created in 1984, Friends of Creation Spirituality. He is the author of twenty-eight books and lives in Oakland, California. His website is www.matthewfox.org.

I WISH TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE MANY CONTRIBUTORS , silent and not so silent, to these pages men and women who have taught me and challenged me over the years. In addition to those to whom I have dedicated the book, allow me to thank all those authors I invoke in my footnotes for teaching me by way of their thoughts and wonderful language. A camaraderie of thinkers continually feeds me good and nourishing intellectual food. Each chapter has focused in a special manner on a particular theme, and within each I have drawn in a special way from a few of those thinkers, whether they are Anderson and Hicks on the Green Man, or Primack and Abrams on Father Sky, or Chia and Deida on Sexuality, or Diamond and Ehrenreich on HunterGatherers, or Masson and Sanders on Fatherhood, or Muktananda on the Blue Man, or Rabbi Schachtner on the Grandfather Heart and eldership.

I also give special thanks to those men who came out of the closet to speak their hearts on masculine spirituality through interviews, including KJ, Professor Pitt, John Conger, Jim Miller, Mark Nicholson, and Christian de la Huerta.

I want to acknowledge the groundbreaking work of Robert Bly, Joseph Jastrab, and others in the first generation of male liberationists who began this work with dedication and commitment and on whose shoulders I precariously balance. And I thank Jim Roberts and Brother Joseph Kilikevice for their inspired work with men.

I want to thank my editor at New World Library, Jason Gardner, and also editor Jeff Campbell. Thanks also to my book agent, Ned Leavitt. A special thanks to Fred Gustafson for letting me adapt my article on the Black Madonna from his fine book The Moonlit Path. And to Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Ests, Aaron Stern, Philip Harmonn, Marvin Anderson, and Lama Tsomo for their encouragement along the way. And Dennis Edwards, Mel Bricker, and Debra Martin for their assistance in upholding my daily responsibilities, and Tom Christian for his research assistance. I am also grateful to the Academy for the Love of Learning for their support and encouragement, and to Debra Martin for introducting me to the Blue Pearl and the Blue Man.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the authors and publishers for the use of the following material. Every effort has been made to contact rights holders of quoted material. If notified, the publishers of this book will be pleased to rectify an omission in future editions.

Pages Father Earth, copyright 1970 by Clarissa Pinkola Ests, used

by permission of Clarissa Pinkola Ests, excerpted from La Pasionaria. For

permissions requests: .

Pages Matt Henrys essay and lyrics to Matter of Time and While

You Let Me by Matt Henry, used by permission of Matt Henry.

JUST AS WE WORK OUT OR EXERCISE to make our bodies stronger, so some working out and exercising may prove necessary to deepen the ten archetypes named in this book in order that the Sacred Masculine can find a home in us. Following are some suggested exercises. I encourage you to add to them by developing your own.