Customer Reviews

A Spirituality Named Compassion

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Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice. This book was a gift from a dear friend, and what a gift it has turned out to be. I will always be mindful of the difference between climbing Jacob's Ladder and dancing Sarah's Circle. It is such a perfect metaphor for the lives we have built. It is especially poignant to have read this volume and finished it so close to the recent tragedies here in the US on 9/11/01. It makes me wonder exactly how much of the hate directed at our country is due to the Jacob's Ladder world we have created. It is high time that we paid attention to dancing instead of climbing.

Matthew had so much to teach me about compassion - that it is not pity but celebration, not sentiment but making justice and doing works of mercy, and that it is not private or ego-centric but public. Then Matthew helps us to understand how the teachings in our culture, that of ever climbing - the ladders of success or acquisitions - and distancing ourselves from others and how those teachings separate us from compassion, can be a significant cause of pain in our world.

Many of us know the song to which Matthew refers: We are climbing Jacob's Ladder / Soldiers of the Cross. We may not be familiar with the corollary to that song (sung to the same tune): We are Dancing Sarah's Circle / Sisters, Brothers, All. The message of this book - give up being "Soldiers of the Cross," and instead become "Sisters, Brothers, All," is definitely a message for our time.

If one can get beyond the panentheism of Fox's mystical theology, one can hear a brilliant voice making a valid plea. Fox urges that the church free itself from hierarchical posturing and embrace a holistic spirituality that embraces compassion as the heart of life. Fox brilliantly critiques the manner in which modernity has perverted compassion, turning it into a sappy, sentimental virtue rather than a celebration of creation and the communion of humanity. His plea for a holistic spirituality of mystical communion is engaging but will miss the mark for Christians looking for 12-step techniques for spiritual revival. But maybe this is Fox's point: spirituality is inevitably distorted when transformed into a linear "technique."

This is my most favorite book of all times. It it Fox points out that the true definition of compassion is grounded in social justice and notes compassion is an act and not a mushy, impotent feeling. Brilliant! Gotta love this man for turning piousness upside down and nudging all of us toward a better world!

Matthew Fox (born 1940) is a theologian and bestselling advocate of "Creation Spirituality." He became a Catholic priest of the Dominican order, but was removed in 1992, and has subsequently become an Episcopalian priest. He has published an autobiography, Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest.

Fox writes in the Preface to the original 1979 edition, "In many respects this is an off-the-wall book. Its purpose is to get Humpty Dumpty---our psyches, our global village, and our cosmic consciousness---off the wall: the wall of division and separation, of possessiveness, of hoarding. Off the wall and down to earth where we can dance eye-to-eye once again." He further describes this book as "the third in a trilogy" (the others being On Becoming a Musical Mystical Bear: Spirituality American Style and Whee! We, Wee All the Way Home: A Guide to Sensual Prophetic Spirituality (Meditation)).

Here are some representative quotations:

"Compassion leads to works. Feeding, clothing, sheltering, setting free, giving drink, visiting, buying, educating, counseling, admonishing, bearing wrongs, forgiving, comforting, praying: all these acts of mercy are acts indeed."
"For the entire insight upon which compassion is based is that the other is NOT other; and that I am NOT I. In other words, in loving others I am loving myself and indeed involved in my own best and biggest and fullest self-interest."
"But the hopeful news from Humpty Dumpty is this: that the soul we look for now has a home. Its home address is Compassion."