In this sense, acedia and arrogance go together. Acedia’s indifference and coldness and uncaring—what Hildegard of Bingen called “drying up” and “carelessness”—flows from a rejection of the sounds of others—their dignity and stories as well as their cries for help. Ignoring their dreams, their despair, their rage, their hopes—all this settles in when humans succumb to acedia.
By Matthew Fox, Sept 10, 2021 Racism, Arrogance and the First Chakra, SINS OF THE SPIRIT, ARROGANCE
The arrogance that comes when humans isolate themselves by nationality or religion, race or class, gender or sexual orientation, is evident everywhere in our world.
Racism is one example of arrogance. Wendell Berry writes about racism’s roots in an essay on “The Hidden Wound” and says, “the root of our racial problem in America is not racism” so much as
…our inordinate desire to be superior—not to some inferior or subject people, though this desire leads to the subjection of people—but to our condition. We wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything—of ourselves of each other, or of our country.
We enslaved Africans in order to be free “of the obligations of stewardship,” and that made them economically valuable.
Berry is saying that our arrogance or feelings of superiority stem from our hostility to the earth and the ways of the earth and universe. First we made the earth a slave and then we justified the enslavement of other races to work the earth that we had already learned to hate and put down.
Dispossession occurred in particular when African Americans migrated to cities and lost their family farms (as did many white families). In 1920, black farmers owned 916,000 farms in this country, totaling 15 million acres. By 1988, Blacks owned 30,000 farms totaling 3 million acres. Small farms were sucked into the industrial agricultural machine in the twentieth century, which made a few people and corporate farmers very rich but the land and the waters and small farmers very poor and dispossessed.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society, p. 203. From the book description:
Fox draws together the wisdom of East and West on the subject of human destructiveness by taking Thomas Aquinas’s definition of sin as “misdirected love” and ushering us through parallels between the Eastern teachings of the seven chakras and the Western teachings of the seven capital sins. In doing so, he responds to Martin Buber’s call to “deprive evil of its power” not by “extirpating the evil urge, but by reuniting it to the good.” Psychologist M. Scott Peck has said that humanity’s naming of evil “is still in the primitive stage.” With this book, Fox ushers us beyond rudimentary naming and places our capacity for evil in the fuller context of our touching the natural beauty of our physical world, the complex texture of our emotional lives, and the splendid depths of our spiritual center. In Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh Matthew Fox has created his most ambitious and profound book. The text crackles with his intelligence and wit, deftly moving the reader into an examination of our world and our perceptions about it and ourselves, expanding our minds and showing us paths of thought that you would swear were not there before you turned the page.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you sense an “inordinate desire to be superior” has become a condition of human beings in relation to the earth as well as to other humans? Is this path of homo sapiens at all sustainable? What can we do about it?
Miracles
Walt Whitman – 1819-1892
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the
ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
This poem is in the public domain.
** Arrogance, a Second Sin against the First Chakra, by MATTHEW FOX, SEPTEMBER 9, 2021, SINS OF THE SPIRIT, ARROGANCE
The healthy first chakra, as we have noted, potentially picks up the vibrations and sounds of the entire universe. It is our grounding ourselves in the cosmos and the earth since “ecology is functional cosmology” as Thomas Berry teaches us. Therefore, to wander off center from the first chakra brings up two “capital sins,” one being acedia and the loss of energy that we have been discussing in our recent meditations and which is so much a sign of our times that we have created a new word for it, couchpotatoitis.
The second capital sin associated with the first chakra is: Arrogance. (A much more accurate word than “pride” which was often used in the past—healthy pride is an important virtue that parents, schools and culture itself should be teaching children.)
Racism and sexism (one sex superior to another), colonialism and heterosexism, adultism and ageism (one age superior to another) are all species of arrogance and all connected to the first chakra. It is this unhealthy pride or arrogance (what the Eastern spirituality calls “ego”) that is the basic problem.
In this sense, acedia and arrogance go together. Acedia’s indifference and coldness and uncaring—what Hildegard of Bingen called “drying up” and “carelessness”—flows from a rejection of the sounds of others—their dignity and stories as well as their cries for help. Ignoring their dreams, their despair, their rage, their hopes—all this settles in when humans succumb to acedia.
“O human,” St. Hildegard asked, “Where is your passion, where is your blood?” Again, a call for the red stuff—for blood. Red is the color of the first chakra.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society, p. 202.
To see the transcript of Matthew’s video teaching, click HERE.
For Contemplation: Do you agree that pride is a virtue we should be instilling in our young? And that the word “arrogance” better names the capital offense against the promise of the first chakra to be inclusive and reach for the “whole,” for the cosmos and all of creation?
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society
Visionary theologian and best-selling author Matthew Fox offers a new theology of evil that fundamentally changes the traditional perception of good and evil and points the way to a more enlightened treatment of ourselves, one another, and all of nature. In comparing the Eastern tradition of the 7 chakras to the Western tradition of the 7 capital sins, Fox allows us to think creatively about our capacity for personal and institutional evil and what we can do about them.
“Crafting a blueprint for social change, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh points the way toward a deeper and more compassionate way to live while eloquently revealing the means to confront evil both within and without.” ~ Progressive Christianity
