THEOLOGIAN AND MYSTIC (15 JUNE 1941)

To go up alone into the mountains 
and come back as an ambassador to the world, 
has ever been the method of humanity’s best friends. 

The windows of Christ’s Mysteries split the [Light] up into many-coloured loveliness, disclose all of its hidden richness…make its beauty more accessible to us…And  within this place we too are bathed in the light transmitted by the windows, a light which is yet the very radiance of Eternity.

Evelyn Underhill was born in 1875 and grew up in London. Her friends  included Laurence Housman (poet and brother of the poet A E  Housman) and Sarah Bernhardt (actress), and Baron Friedrich von Huegel, a writer on theology and mysticism. Largely under his guidance, she embarked on a life of reading, writing, meditation, and prayer. From her studies and experience she produced a series of books on contemplative prayer. The list includes the following (I have starred the ones that seem to be most widely read or highly regarded): 

 1902 The Bar-lamb’s Ballad (poetry) 
 1911 Mysticism ** 
 1913 The Mystic Way * 
 1913 Immanence (poetry) 
 1927 Man and the Supernatural 
 1936 Worship *** 
 1938 The Mystery of Sacrifice

Miss Underhill (Mrs. Hubert Stuart Moore) taught that the life of contemplative prayer is not just for monks and nuns, but can be the life of any Christian who is willing to undertake it. She also taught that modern psychological theory, far from being a threat to contemplation, can fruitfully be used to enhance it. In her later years, she spent a great deal of time as a lecturer and retreat director. She died on June 15, 1941. 
 
 

by James Kiefer

“This is a very noisy era. I believe the volume is directly related to our need to be listened to. In public places, in the media, we reward the loudest and most outrageous. People are literally clamoring for attention, and they’ll do whatever it takes to be noticed. Things will only get louder until we figure out how to sit down and listen. Most of us would welcome things quieting down.

 We can do our part to begin lowering the volume by our own willingness to listen.”

An Excerpt from Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future by Margaret J. Wheatley

The morning was amazingly still as I walked out to pick up the Times. I felt as if I were piercing its silence. But the quiet was good, holy and sacred, for it invited me to look at God’s world anew.  Awakened to God’s creation around me, I began to see with fresh eyes.

It was then that I noticed how many different varieties of flowers surrounded me, how many songs the birds were singing, how many trees were reaching skyward, their budding branches swaying in the gentle breeze. God’s invitation beckoned all the more as my skin warmed in the splendid light that fell equally on each and every member of God’s creation. Despite all the differences before me, the multiplicity of God’s garden, all basked in the same light. The morning sun united all.Mornings are always welcome. We awaken to discover the promise of a new day, a new beginning. Yet many of our days are spent without promise.  We  are so pre-occupied as we rush to pick up the paper and hurry off to our morning tasks that we fail to notice God’s very presence in our midst.

Yet when we stop long enough to enter the silence and  stillness of the hour, we find ourselves immersed in God’s promise. It is in that place that we “welcome happy morning” seeing “earth her joy confess[ing], clothing her for spring.”   

 Today, the light of new day has come. With the newness of this Easter, we find ourselves basking in the hope and life that comes in the Resurrected Christ. While the rest of the world marches on, failing to notice all that is breaking forth, I hope you remember to pause, reflect, and enter into God’s passion for you. 

Let the song of the bird, budding of the flower, and sunlight of a new day come to you as you walk into God’s garden. Let your life be more than a series of days numbered upon the earth.  Let it be a part of God’s creation, always budding forth in the morning, full of promise, grace and mercy through Christ. For “all that now is fallen [will rise] to life again; bring again our daylight: day returns to thee!”

Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Michael Sullivan, Explore Faith

Holy Saturday

Today is the day that most people miss in the liturgical year of the Church. Crowds do not gather at most parishes for the short service appointed on this day. But in the infinite wisdom of the Church fathers and mothers of centuries past, they knew that today was important. They knew that this day of waiting had to be marked.

Waiting with Jesus in the tomb is not easy, for in that place, our demons and darkness come out. Most of us don’t want to wait with him in that place of death; for we know if we do, we will have to address things we deny.

But when we go to that place of stillness and quiet, we discover a peace that is absolutely amazing. When we go into the silence of this day, we find not just darkness but the greatest of hope.

Find a place of stillness where you can go today. Sit there. Say nothing. Let the quiet invade your soul and imagine what it would be like to wait with Jesus in the tomb. In that place, begin to pray.

Let your heart and soul express the fullness of who you are, and trusting in Christ to sustain you in midst of darkness, know that the greatest of light is coming.

God of the tomb, in stillness and quietness you wait with me. Show me the path toward honesty with you, that sharing in this time of waiting, we may come to know your joy. Amen.

Michael Sullivan

David Whyte’s book is, as he puts it, “a midnight conversation” on the union of work and soul, yearning and satisfaction. Here is a cogent passage on how speed can become an obstacle to expressing the best that is in you.

“Speed in work has compensations. Speed gets noticed. Speed is praised by others. Speed is self-important. Speed absolves us. Speed means we don’t really belong to any particular thing or person we are visiting and thus appears to elevate us above the ground of our labors. When it becomes all-consuming, speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal.

So we don’t stop, and the faster we go, the harder it becomes to stop. We keep moving on whenever any form of true commitment seems to surface. Speed is also warning, a throbbing, insistent indicator that some cliff edge or other is very near, a sure diagnostic sign that we are living someone else’s life and doing someone else’s work. But speed saves us the pain of all that stopping; speed can be such a balm, a saving grace, a way we tell ourselves, in unconscious ways, that we are really not participating.

“The great tragedy of speed as an answer to the complexities and responsibilities of existence is that very soon we cannot recognize anything or anyone who is not traveling at the same velocity as we are. We see only those moving in the same whirling orbit and only those moving with the same urgency. Soon we begin to suffer a form of amnesia, caused by the blurred vision of velocity itself, where those germane to our humanity are dropped from our minds one by one. We start to lose sight of any colleagues who are moving at a slower pace, and we start to lose sight of the bigger, slower cycles that underlie our work.

We especially lose sight of the big, unfolding wave form passing through our lives that is indicative of our central character. On the personal side, as slaves to speed, we start to lose sight of family members, especially children, or those who are ill or infirm, who are not flying through the world as quickly and determinedly as we are. Just as seriously, we begin to leave behind the parts of our own selves that limp a little, the vulnerabilities that actually give us color and character. We forget that our sanity is dependent on a relationship with longer, more patient cycles extending beyond the urgencies and madness of the office.”