Underhill initiated me into the mystical tradition within Christianity (although she also threw in a few non-Christian mystics as well, from Pagans like Plotinus to Sufis like Rumi). She gave me a language for my own impossible-to-put-into-words experience of the mystery we call “God” and introduced me to so many of the great mystical writers who I continue to cherish to this day: folks like Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, Meister Eckhart, John Ruusbroec, and so many others.
Here’s a quote that really captures Underhill’s wisdom: that mysticism is more than just a theory, but an embodied, experiential reality:
Mysticism, in its pure form, is the science of ultimates, the science of union with the Absolute, and nothing else, and that the mystic is the person who attains to this union, not the person who talks about it. Not to know about, but to Be, is the mark of the real initiate.
Sixteen years or so after discovering Evelyn Underhill, another friend in a different city suggested I read Living Buddha Living Christ. It was a time in my life when I had spent a number of years exploring Neopagan spirituality, and knew I was interested in Buddhism, but I remained deeply in love with the western mystical tradition that Underhill represented. I didn’t know how to put all those pieces together, and barely had anyone in my life with whom I could talk about such things. So along comes Thich Nhat Hanh. It was the first of his books that I read, although certainly not the last. Unlike Evelyn Underhill’s rather intellectual approach to her subject, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote straight from the heart, not bothering with all the philosophical and theological arguments that can e bandied about to affirm (or deny) a bond between the two great world teachers. Here’s just one example of the crystalline clarity of his deeply compassionate vision:
We can touch the living Buddha. We can also touch the living Christ. When we see someone overflowing with love and understanding, someone who is keenly aware of what is going on, we know that they are very close to the Buddha and to Jesus Christ.
Obviously, there have been many books that have made an impact on my spiritual life; a few others that come to mind include Margot Adler’s Drawing Down The Moon, Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything, Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Heart of Centering Prayer, Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, and (for all its many flaws) the anonymous Meditations on the Tarot. And that’s just a start — this list doesn’t even begin to include the great mystical classics of previous centuries! But I think Evelyn Underhill and Thich Nhat Hanh remain two of the most important books in my journey, because they represent the two vectors of my own spiritual path: mysticism and interspirituality.
I wrote The Big Book of Christian Mysticism, in part, as a love letter and thank you note to Evelyn Underhill. So I was wondering the other day, if I were to write a similar “thank you” book in response to Thich Nhat Hanh, what would I want to call it? Naturally, I could just echo his book with a title like “Joyful Buddha, Healing Christ” — embodying two qualities that I believe belong to both of these wisdom teachers, but of Jesus has a particular reputation as a healer, while so many artistic depictions of the Buddha show him smiling or even laughing: hence, joyful.
But I realized I couldn’t stop there. For me, my love for western wisdom is encapsulated in my appreciation of Jesus and mysticism, while my love for eastern wisdom is signified by the Buddha and meditation. But I also have a long appreciation for indigenous, shamanic and pagan spiritualities. And those traditions all seem to have a common appreciation for spirituality as embodied and earthy. and holding all this together: eastern, western, and primal traditions of wisdom — is the heart, increasingly recognized even by western science as a center of intuition, knowing and even cognition that may not have the same kind of neurological density as the brain, but serves as our embodied “center” for deep wisdom at a level beyond mere language and logic.
So suddenly my title is up to five elements: “Joyful Buddha, Healing Christ, Singing Heart, Thriving Body, Living Earth” — whew!
It may not work as a real title for an actual book, but now I was on a roll. Once we weave together the compassionate wisdom of both Jesus and Buddha with the deep knowing of the embodied heart and the stable foundation of the good earth, the natural question (at least for me) is: how do we live such wisdom? And so I found four other principles emerged: “All are One, That You Are, Love is Real, God is Love.”
All Are One: the experiential reality of mystical non-duality: we are not separate from God, nor are we separate from one another. The wisdom of deep silence reveals to us that we are all related, and we are all indeed one.
That You Are: this classic affirmation from the Chandogya Upanishad is the foundational expression of mystical union or radical non-duality: oneness is not just some abstract philosophical principle, it is a lived experiential fact. All things are one with God, and that you are as well: right here and right now.
Love is Real: What do we believe is the moral principle that organizes all things: is it love, or is it power? We know what the likes of Machiavelli and Nietzsche would say — and frankly, the cynicism that thinks love is not real but only power exists is far too prevalent in our culture today. Love understands that sometimes powerlessness is the way to truth, to healing, and to life. But power will never understand this, and to anyone whose life is only about power, love seems to be an illusion: powerlessness, vulnerability, and gentleness are rejected merely as the weak absence of power. But if we give our lives to love, we know that love is real, and we know that love gives us a power that is deeper and more real than the dualism of power and weakness.
God is Love: What does it mean to believe in God? Talk about a question with endless possible ways to answer! But I always go back to the one time in the Bible when God is defined: “God is love.” When we affirm love, we affirm God. Of course, whenever we try to make God into anything other than love: the God of wrath, the God of punishment, the God of fear — we reduce God into an idol of power. Only the God who is love — vulnerable, gentle, yielding, generous love — is truly God, and truly real.
So there you have my admittedly long-winded response to Living Buddha, Living Christ:
“Joyful Buddha, Healing Christ, Singing Heart, Thriving Body, Living Earth, All Are One, That You Are, Love is Real, God is Love.”
It may not be great poetry, but it’s a way to integrate mysticism and interspirituality. And that’s good enough for me.
Here’s the second release in my new series of “Mystical Minute” videos. The topic of this one: “the book that changed my life.”
This is a brief introduction to Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill. After acknowledging that my first copy of the book (given to me by a friend when I was 18) has a hideously ugly cover, I briefly explain why this book matters to me — and why it might be a book that could change your life, too.
Contemplative Outreach Atlanta has just finished their first online 5-Day Retreat. Historically this retreat took place each year at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit; I’ve been a participant on the retreat, and it’s been a wonderful experience. This year, with the ongoing challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the retreat was moved to a Zoom format. The organizer of the retreat, Maggie Winfrey, asked me to lead three sessions of Centering Prayer over the course of the retreat and to provide a reading from one of the mystics to set the stage for the Centering Prayer practice.
Here are the readings I chose — one from the 20th century mystic Evelyn Underhill, one from the living contemplative writer Martin Laird, and one from the medieval visionary Julian of Norwich.
These readings are excerpted from books that, in my opinion, every aspiring contemplative should read. I’m posting this material here not only for your immediate pleasure, but also in the hopes that you will get copies of the books that they are from. Click on each book’s title to visit its page an Amazon or click here to see all three books (if you make a purchase, I get a small commission).
First, the subject of your meditation begins, as you surrender to its influence, to exhibit unsuspected meaning, beauty, power. A perpetual growth of significance keeps pace with the increase of attention which you bring to bear on it; that attention which is the one agent of all your apprehensions, physical and mental alike. It ceases to be thin and abstract. You sink as it were into the deeps of it, rest in it, “unite” with it; and learn, in this still, intent communion, something of its depth and breadth and height, as we learn by direct intercourse to know our friends.
Moreover, as your meditation becomes deeper it will defend you from the perpetual assaults of the outer world. You will hear the busy hum of that world as a distant exterior melody, and know yourself to be in some sort withdrawn from it. You have set a ring of silence between you and it; and behold! within that silence you are free. You will look at the coloured scene, and it will seem to you thin and papery: only one amongst countless possible images of a deeper life as yet beyond your reach. And gradually, you will come to be aware of an entity, a You, who can thus hold at arm’s length, be aware of, look at, an idea–a universe–other than itself. By this voluntary painful act of concentration, this first step upon the ladder which goes–as the mystics would say–from “multiplicity to unity,” you have to some extent withdrawn yourself from that union with unrealities, with notions and concepts, which has hitherto contented you; and at once all the values of existence are changed. “The road to a Yea lies through a Nay.” You, in this preliminary movement of recollection, are saying your first deliberate No to the claim which the world of appearance makes to a total possession of your consciousness: and are thus making possible some contact between that consciousness and the World of Reality.
Now turn this new purified and universalised gaze back upon yourself. Observe your own being in a fresh relation with things, and surrender yourself willingly to the moods of astonishment, humility, joy–perhaps of deep shame or sudden love–which invade your heart as you look. So doing patiently, day after day, constantly recapturing the vagrant attention, ever renewing the struggle for simplicity of sight, you will at last discover that there is something within you–something behind the fractious, conflicting life of desire–which you can recollect, gather up, make effective for new life. You will, in fact, know your own soul for the first time: and learn that there is a sense in which this real You is distinct from, an alien within, the world in which you find yourself, as an actor has another life when he is not on the stage. When you do not merely believe this but know it; when you have achieved this power of withdrawing yourself, of making this first crude distinction between appearance and reality, the initial stage of the contemplative life has been won. It is not much more of an achievement than that first proud effort in which the baby stands upright for a moment and then relapses to the more natural and convenient crawl: but it holds within it the same earnest of future development.
Union with God is not something we acquire by a technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God. Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition. The sense of separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word. This illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera, the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads. For most of us this is what normal is, and we are good at coming up with ways of coping with this perceived separation (our consumer-driven entertainment culture takes care of much of it). But some of us are not so good at coping, and so we drink ourselves into oblivion or cut or burn ourselves “so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside.”
The grace of salvation, the grace of Christian wholeness that flowers in silence, dispels this illusion of separation. For when the mind is brought to stillness, and all our strategies of acquisition have dropped, a deeper truth presents itself: we are and have always been one with God and we are all one in God (Jn 17:21). The marvelous world of thoughts, sensation, emotions, and inspiration, the spectacular world of creation around us, are all patterns of stunning weather on the holy mountain of God. But we are not the weather. We are the mountain. Weather is happening—delightful sunshine, dull sky, or destructive storm—this is undeniable. But if we think we are the weather happening on Mount Zion (and most of us do precisely this with our attention riveted to the video), then the fundamental truth of our union with God remains obscured and our sense of painful alienation heightened. When the mind is brought to stillness we see that we are the mountain and not the changing patterns of weather appearing on the mountain. We are the awareness in which thoughts and feelings (what we take to be ourselves) appear like so much weather on Mount Zion.
For a lifetime we have taken this weather—our thoughts and feelings—to be ourselves, taken ourselves to be this video to which the attention is riveted. Stillness reveals that we are the silent, vast awareness in which the video is playing. To glimpse this fundamental truth is to be liberated, to be set free from the fowler’s snare (Ps 123:7). “Who ever trusts in the Lord is like Mount Zion: Unshakeable, it stands forever” (Ps 125:1). “Mount Zion, true pole of the earth, the great King’s city” (Ps 48:2).
At the same time, our Lord showed me a spiritual vision of his familiar love. I saw that for us he is everything that we find good and comforting. He is our clothing, wrapping us for love, embracing and enclosing us for tender love, so that he can never leave us, being himself everything that is good for us, as I understand it.
In this vision he also showed a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me, ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly have disappeared. And the answer in my mind was, ‘It lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and everything exists in the same way by the love of God.’ In this little thing I saw three properties: the first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God cares for it. But what the maker, the carer and the lover really is to me, I cannot tell; for until I become one substance with him, I can never have complete rest or true happiness; that is to say, until I am so bound to him that there is no created thing between my God and me.
We need to know the littleness of all created beings and to set at nothing everything that is made in order to love and possess God who is unmade. This is the reason why we do not feel complete ease in our hearts and souls: we look here for satisfaction in things which are so trivial, where there is no rest to be found, and do not know our God who is almighty, all wise, all good; he is rest itself. God wishes to be known, and is pleased that we should rest in him; for all that is below him does nothing to satisfy us; and this is why, until all that is made seems as nothing, no soul can be at rest. When a soul sets all at nothing for love, to have him who is everything, then he is able to receive spiritual rest.
Our Lord God also showed that it gives him very great pleasure when a simple soul comes to him in a bare, plain and familiar way. For, as I understand this showing, it is the natural yearning of the soul touched by the Holy Ghost to say, ‘God, of your goodness, give me yourself; you are enough for me, and anything less that I could ask for would not do you full honour. And if I ask anything that is less, I shall always lack something, but in you alone I have everything.’ And such words are very dear to the soul and come very close to the will of God and his goodness; for his goodness includes all his creatures and all his blessed works, and surpasses everything endlessly, for he is what has no end. And he has made us only for himself and restored us by his blessed Passion and cares for us with his blessed love. And all this is out of his goodness.
For episode 2 of my new podcast, Schola Mystica, I tell a brief story about how I first learned about Christian mysticism, beginning with a dream I had shortly after graduating from high school; a conversation with a trusted friend to try to make sense of that dream, and a book that friend recommended to me: Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness.
You can subscribe to the podcast through Apple, Google, Podchaser, TuneIn, or Stitcher. It’s also available via Spotify. And you can always listen to this episode here…
… or, if you’d rather just read the transcript, here it is.
A Dream and a Book
Once, I had a dream that the world was coming to an end. I had this dream in the summer right after graduating from High School, so I suppose in a very real way, my world was coming to an end — just a few weeks later, I would be leaving home to attend college. Because I was very much an introvert, needless to say I felt some trepidation over my forthcoming move.
But even if this dream was just my subconscious letting off some emotional steam — it still was pretty dramatic.
In the dream, I was hanging out with one of my best friends at the time, a fellow named Larry, and we were at the Protestant Chapel at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia, where we lived. That may seem odd, but that’s the church where I was baptized.
Anyway, Larry and I were in the parking lot; it was the middle of the day, then suddenly the sky grew dark. There was a feeling of expectancy in the air, and Larry asked me if I knew what was going on.
With a sense of urgency, I replied, “I think the world is coming to an end.” By that point the sky had become so dark that we could see the stars — and one by one, they started to fall out of the sky.Just like they did at the end of the Chronicles of Narnia.
I said to Larry, “Come on, we need to head home.” We got into my car — a 1963 Corvair convertible — and drove through the midday darkness to my house, where we bounded up the stairs to my room.
By now I felt like a caged animal, and I began to pace back and forth. “I need a Bible,” I practically shouted. Larry looked around my room, and helpfully offered me a book that was on the top of my dresser.
“No, that’s not a Bible, that’s the Bhagavad Gita!” I snarled at him — and just at that point, my vision began to get blurry. “It’s okay,” I said to him, “reality is beginning to dissolve away.”
Then I woke up… and I was a little freaked out by this dream.
It was Sunday morning, so I went to church with my mom and dad, but afterward I drove over to my friend David’s house. David was about ten years older than me, and had been the organist at our church. He had long hair and a beard and listened to Jimi Hendrix and Jazz, so let’s just say he was someone I trusted more than most adults.
He put on some interesting album, like Pat Matheny’s American Garage, and then we sat down and I told him about my dream.
After I was done, he said there was a book he thought I needed to read; he went to his bookcase and gave me a copy of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism. I took the book home and started to read it — I actually didn’t finish it for a couple of years — but I read enough that summer, for it to invite me into an entirely new way of seeing the world.
I had heard of mysticism before — I think in High School one of my English teachers said that the poet William Blake was a mystic, and back in those days people would describe Asian spirituality like Zen or Vedanta as “Eastern mysticism” — but in all my years of both public education and Lutheran Sunday School, no one had ever bothered to suggest to me that there is such a thing as Christian mysticism.
But Evelyn Underhill introduced me to the mystical dimension of Christian spirituality. And like Robert Frost, I took that road less traveled, and it has made all the difference.
You see, a couple of years earlier, when I was sixteen, one evening when I was at a Lutheran youth conference, I had a pretty powerful sense of God’s presence during the Saturday night communion service. Right there, in the midst of an ordinary worship service, I had a mind-expanding encounter with luminous love and brilliant light. To this day it’s not easy for me to talk about. Back then, it frankly blew me away — and there was no one I could talk to about it.
I tried to tell my pastor about it, and he said I sounded like a Pentecostal — and he did not mean it as a compliment.
Eventually I made some friends among the charismatic Christians in my high school, but they had the kind of theology that saw the devil behind every rock — which just didn’t line up with the resplendent beauty and incandescent love of the God that I had encountered.
So it wasn’t until I discovered the Christian mystics, thanks to Evelyn Underhill, that I truly learned how there is a place in Christianity for a deeply embodied, joyful, expansive spirituality of God’s intimate, loving presence — centered not just in the head, but in the heart.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with having an intelligent, thoughtful, and scholarly approach to faith. In fact, when Jesus instructed us to“love God with your whole mind,” I think that’s what he meant.
Be intelligent about your faith, be honest about what you believe and what you understand — about God, and about the meaning and purpose of life. But Jesus also instructed us to love God with all our heart, our soul, and our strength. So our faith in God needs to be not only intellectually honest, but emotionally satisfying, ethically robust, and most of all, spiritually nourishing.
I think the problem with Christianity today is that too many people — and churches — settle for loving God in just one or two of these dimensions. For example, fundamentalist Christianity can be very emotionally demonstrative, but often lacks intellectual integrity.
On the other hand, I’ve been in too many faith communities where there’s an emphasis on academic rigor, but very little room for heartfelt devotion.
If we can’t even get our head and heart together, how can we ever find the path to Divine Love that challenges us to be our very best, while simultaneously fostering our soul?
Even though it’s been more than 40 years since David handed me that book, I remain convinced that the best models for this kind of holistic, integrated spirituality — that is honest, loving, compassionate, and deeply contemplative — is found in the lives and the wisdom of the great mystics.
Some of the mystics were scholars and theologians of the highest caliber. Others expressed such a deep and profound love for God that their lives shimmered with joy. Still others embodied such a profound ethic of caring for the poor or the sick that we rightfully honor them as saints.
And yet, what all the mystics have in common is this rich, embodied encounter with God. Some describe it as the presence of God in their lives, others describe it as participation in God, and others even use bold language of Union with God.
It’s a heightened consciousness, a supernal awareness, a joyful apprehension of what Evelyn Underhill called “the Real” — with a capital R.
I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating: reading Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism changed my life. Now, it’s an old book — I received it many years ago, and it was an old book then. So while I would recommend this book to anyone, it may not be your cup of joe.
And that’s okay. For that matter, you may not like all the mystics — there are some who leave me cold.
But if you are looking for a path of spiritual wisdom that fires on all cylinders — that combines mindfulness with devotion with integrity with a consciousness suffused with joy — then I invite you to explore the wisdom of the mystics.
Maybe their insights will change your life, too.
Featured image: Langley AFB Chapel, via Wikimedia Commons.
Today I led a day of reflection for the Mary Brewster Committee of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Ridgfield, CT. This committee is tasked with creating a retreat each year for the purpose of supporting women’s spirituality in their community. When they approached me about the retreat we decided on the theme “Wisdom During Difficult Times” to acknowledge what a challenging year 2020 has been, and we selected the fourteenth century mystic Julian of Norwich and the 20th century mystic Evelyn Underhill as two women who could particularly speak to the challenges of our time, since both lived through pandemics of their own: the plague during Julian’s lifetime, and the Spanish Influenza pandemic during Underhill’s.
Here are the slides I created for the retreat, which took place virtually. I’m sharing the slides because I thought you might enjoy reading the many quotes from these two amazing women.
The retreat also included two meditations, based on the teachings of Underhill and Julian. In the morning, we had a “Recollection Meditation” based on the teachings of Underhill as found in her book Practical Mysticism. I also recommended that the participants read Underhill’s Letters.
In the afternoon our meditation was based on the “Hazelnut Vision” found in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love.
I hope you enjoy the slides (and the meditations)!
Dear friends, I have now experienced what it is like to direct a spiritual retreat online.
And while it is certainly not the same thing as a retreat in person (especially at a monastery, surrounded by the atmosphere of prayer and the timeless cadences of monastic chant), it is still a way for us to pause, take a deep breath, and attend to our souls — especially in this time of pandemic and social distancing.
Thanks to Br. Aidan of Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, NY, who invited me to lead this retreat online. The topic he and I chose was Praying with the English Mystics. The retreat consisted of three conferences, exploring the prayerful wisdom of Evelyn Underhill, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing.
In case you missed it, we recorded the three sessions, which you can watch below. Also, below the videos is a link to a bibliography of recommended books by and about our three English mystics (along with a few other suggested titles).
Hope you enjoy this retreat — and that it encourages you to move deeper in your own journey of prayer, meditation and contemplation.
The first conference explored Evelyn Underhill’s teaching on meditation and contemplation from her books Mysticismand Practical Mysticism.
With the second conference we went back in time to the 14th century, where the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich spoke about the spirituality of seeking God, and deepening prayer through generosity and trust.
We finished the retreat by considering an anonymous book written during Julian’s lifetime, The Cloud of Unknowing, which offers detailed instructions for a contemplative way of praying — which in turn inspired the 20th century’s Centering Prayer movement.
It was forty years ago this summer — the summer of 1979 — that I first discovered Evelyn Underhill, the British spiritual author whose writings introduced me to the beauty and splendor of Christian mysticism. To celebrate this personal anniversary, I’m reprinting here a blog post I wrote back in 2007 about her and her writing. I hope you enjoy it.
Evelyn Underhill, Ordinary Mystic
It might be a bit controversial for me to include Evelyn Underhill in my list of western mystics. To the best of my knowledge, she never claimed to be a mystic herself, and her work was aimed more at introducing her readers to the history and theory of mysticism than in asserting any spiritual or mystical authority of her own. In other words, Underhill was a great popularizer of mysticism, similar to how Alan Watts was a popularizer of Zen or Michael Harner a popularizer of shamanism.
But her knowledge of the subject was so vast, her work so thorough and wide-ranging, and her interest in the spiritual welfare of those who corresponded with her or who participated in the retreats she led was both so genuine and so wise, that she deserves to be included in the roster of western mystics at least as much as theologians like Bernard of Clairvaux or Thomas Aquinas, whose claim to mystical fame lies as much in their intellectual achievement as in any personal spiritual experience.
A Twentieth Century Mysticism
Hers is truly a twentieth century mysticism, more democratic than aristocratic in its focus: in other words, she champions not so much extraordinary moments of divine union as experienced by an elite few, but rather a more down-to-earth but no less life-transforming encounter with divine grace that is available to, as she put it, “normal people” — in other words, the ordinary person who may or may not be an ordained minister, a consecrated monk or nun, or an erudite scholar. Underhill introduced the average person to extraordinary spirituality, and in doing so, celebrated the idea that anybody — regardless of pedigree, background, education, or religious vocation — just might be able to scale those visionary heights.
She lived from 1875 to 1941, which makes her a contemporary of Thérèse of Lisieux and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Born into a well-to-do British family, she married a barrister with whom she bore no children, leaving her free to write — and write she did.
Although not as prolific as Thomas Merton, she wrote three novels, as many volumes of poetry, a collection of medieval tales of the Virgin Mary, and over twenty specifically religious books, including collections of essays and transcripts of radio talks she did on the spiritual life.
She also edited and wrote introductions for a variety of mystical classics, including The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, and an anthology of writings by John Ruysbroeck, her personal favorite of the great mystics. Her masterpiece, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness was released in 1911, when she was only in her mid-thirties; other key works include Practical Mysticism,Mystics of the Church, and Worship. Although her later works tend to be more oriented toward ordinary Christian spirituality than toward “mysticism” per se, all of her writing is imbued with a deep sense of the glory and possibility of a spiritual life wholly given to the love of God and the desire for Divine Union.
A Mystic for Everyone
Born into an Anglican family, her love of mysticism and her work with a Catholic spiritual director (Friedrich von Hügel) naturally led her to an interest in entering the Church of Rome, but she felt repelled by the anti-modernist views of Pope Pius X and, once she married her Anglican husband, decided that it was God’s will for her to remain within the Church of England. This she did for the duration of her life, where in addition to writing her numerous books and essays she also delivered lectures (she was the first woman to lecture on religion at Oxford University), led retreats, and engaged in works of mercy, devoting one day a week to charitable work among the London poor.
Underhill’s writing is literary and elegant; clearly the product of a 19th century British education. She does a splendid job at expressing the miraculous reality of the mystical life and how it can transform “ordinary reality” into a life shimmering with the Divine Presence. Her perspective is clearly Christian, but her own Anglican identity never impedes her vision, and consequently hers is a celebration of mysticism that can be appreciated by all branches of the Christian family tree. I think her work is essential for anyone seeking an authentic Christian mysticism that refuses to be confined by its historical boundary of the cloister.
I’ve been thinking about the relationship between contemplation and creativity.
This is inspired in part by the many contemplatives who are also artists. We see this in the past — think of William Blake, or Johann Sebastian Bach, or of course poets like John of the Cross and Thomas Merton. It often seems that a contemplative personality or philosophy goes hand in hand with a gift for one more forms of creative expression.
Evelyn Underhill certainly understood this. She writes in her brilliant book Mysticism about the essential relatedness of art and spirituality. She writes,
Mysticism, the most romantic of adventures, from one point of view the art of arts, their source and also their end, finds naturally enough its closest correspondences in the most purely artistic and most deeply significant of all forms of expression.
Underhill very much had a neo-Platonic world-view: God is the fountain and source of all goodness, truth, and beauty; therefore any art that deserves the name must in some way be drawing its meaning and splendor and value from this Divine fountain — even if the artist is an atheist. Mysticism, “the art of arts” simply represents those individuals who most fully and consciously are immersed in that sacred source. An artist, to Underhill, was a “partial mystic” — someone who became immersed in the Divine for the purpose of expression or creativity.
A century later, I think we can be a bit less chauvinistic than Underhill and celebrate art and mysticism — contemplation and creativity — not in a hierarchical way, quibbling over which is the “higher,” but rather acknowledging that they both reach deep into the heart of God to bring inspiration, purpose, vocation, and expression into the life of mortals. The pure contemplative is rather like Mary, perpetually rapt at the feet of Christ, whereas the pure artist is rather like Martha, no less in relationship with the Lord but living that relationship in terms of outward creative expression.
But, of course, the “pure Mary” and the “pure Martha” don’t really exist, do they? We are all part-Mary and part Martha. Therefore, it seems to me, to be a contemplative means to be a creative — and vice versa.
Sure, I suppose one could aspire to be an artist without any regard for the elements of contemplation: patience, wonder, silence, waiting, unknowing, embracing the mystery — but I honestly wonder how long this person’s creative fires will burn. It seems to me that art without contemplation would quickly devolve into mere (and uninspired) craftsmanship.
On the other hand, one could be so inspired by a pure vision of seeking Divine Union that any effort to express that vision would be seen as a waste of time. But this sounds like disregarding “love your neighbor” in an effort to more fully “love God” — a misguided, even if well-intended, project. For God calls us to both expressions of love: we love God, in part, precisely by loving our neighbors. And one of the ways we love our neighbors is by communicating with them. And art, at its heart, is communication.
Incidentally, this also applies to art created purely for self-understanding or insight: keeping a private journal, for example. Remember, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. When I create something, even only as an expression of self-care, I am simultaneously exercising love for God.
In our time, we have a number of contemplative poets, writers and artists who in different ways explore the nexus between mysticism and creativity. Mary Oliver, James Behrens, Julia Cameron, Christine Valters Paintner, and Patrick Shen leap to mind. Each one knows that the very practices we need to cultivate a contemplative heart are, at the same time, essential practices for cultivating creativity. If you want to be an artist, do the work of being contemplative. And vice versa.
Jacob Nordby, in his delightful book Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives, includes “mystics” in his categories of weird creative folks. He writes, “Most painters, writers, poets, troubadours, misfits and heretics are mystics to some degree. The act of creation is mystical and we often cannot explain exactly how inspiration comes to us.”
One last thought. I do think there is a danger in seeing either artistry or contemplation in instrumental ways — in other words, “I will practice contemplative silence in order to become a better artist” or so forth. Sure, the practices of contemplation are tools every artist could benefit from — but contemplation is its own end, never a means to another. I think you could say the same thing of art. We are all part Mary and part Martha — let us avoid the temptation of seeing one sister as the servant of the other. Each has her own dignity and purpose, independent of the other. And yet they are sisters: each nurtures the other as well.
It’s no secret that I consider Evelyn Underhill one of the most important Christian mystics of the twentieth century.
She’s nowhere near as well-known as Thomas Merton or Simone Weil or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but her contribution to Christian spirituality is as great as each of those more renowned figures. Evelyn Underhill’s biographer Dana Greene has called her an Artist of the Infinite Life. For Underhill, Christian mysticism is shaped by two key characteristics: artistry and ordinariness.
She recognized that one of the essential features of the contemplative life is beauty: we are drawn to God not only because God is good, and true, but also because God is beautiful.
If God’s truth inspires philosophy and God’s goodness inspires ethics, then God’s beauty inspires art — and mysticism, therefore, is an adventure into reality (truth), holiness (goodness) and glory (beauty). A true mystic is a true theologian, a true saint, and a true artist — an artist of the inner life.
But if all that sounds rarefied, Underhill also was one of the first important figures to champion the humility, ordinariness, and indeed “normalcy” of the mystical life. I still chuckle over the subtitle of one of her best books, Practical Mysticism— “A Little Book for Normal People.” She worked hard to dispel the notion that mysticism only belonged to the super-holy, the super-religious, the super-pious. On the contrary, the contemplative life is the ordinary state for Christian maturity.
In this sense she anticipated by over a half a century Karl Rahner’s famous warning: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.” Underhill provides the hopeful alternative to Rahner’s challenge: Yes, we are all called to be mystics — and it is a life that is within our grasp, for it is meant even for “normal” people like you and me.
If you’re new to Evelyn Underhill, you might wonder where to begin with reading her books. She was a prolific writer, publishing over 25 books in her lifetime with various reissues, collections, and other editions of her work appearing ever since. What’s the best book (or books) to start with?
So today I’d like to recommend my three favorite anthologies — collections of the best writings by Evelyn Underhill. Any one of these serves as a marvelous introduction to her writing and shows how she is a key figure in twentieth century spirituality. Unfortunately, all three of them are out of print as of 2018 — but used copies can easily be found on Amazon, Ebay, or other sources. I’ve linked the title of each book to its page on Amazon, in case you feel inspired to go shopping.
Evelyn Underhill died in 1941, and only a dozen years would pass before the first anthology of her writings was published: An Anthology of the Love of God. Edited by a Scottish bishop along with one of Underhill’s close friends, the selections in this volume include some of Underhill’s poetry, along with a generous array of excerpts from her prose works, all organized around the central theme of Divine Love. “All her books are variations of this central theme,” writes Bishop Lumsden Barkway in his introduction to the volume.
Over the course of the book we see just how nuanced was Underhill’s understanding of Divine Love. Beginning with “the nature of our love,” subsequent sections explore the love of God, the love of Christ, and of the Holy Spirit; the church and the sacraments as fountains of love; the mystics as exponents of love; prayer as the expression of love, and holiness, penitence, discipline and service as the manifestations of love.
About a decade later came the publication of The Evelyn Underhill Reader, published in the USA by Abingdon Press. This collection features some helpful introductory material, including a brief biography of Underhill and a list of all her book published during her lifetime and over the first few years following her death.
The anthology itself is arranged topically: the first section deals with Mysticism, followed by sections on the Virtues, Spiritual Disciplines, Prayer, and Christ, Church, and Sacraments. What I like about this anthology is that many of the selections are lengthy, really providing a good snapshot of the author’s mind at work.
A more recent collection is Radiance: A Spiritual Memoir, published by Paraclete Press in 2004. This book offers a more chronological approach to Underhill’s writing, arranged from “Early Writings” to “Applied Spirituality” to “Understanding Mysticism” to “Mature Insight.” In keeping with its theme of “memoir,” this book offers the most intimate glimpse into Underhill not only as a writer but as a woman of faith, drawing selections not only from her published work but also from her letters and her journals.
So whether you want to understand Evelyn Underhill in the light of one unifying theme, or several topics that were central to her work, or in the light of her own life journey, these three anthologies offer three different but complementary approaches to her work. Get them and read them all. And then you’ll be ready to start tackling her many books themselves, one by one.
Believe it or not, Lent is just over two weeks away.
Which means it is time to select your Lenten book for devotional reading.
Lent is a time for prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. According to the Rule of Saint Benedict, it’s also an ideal time for devotional reading. In The Rule of Saint Benedict we find this mandate:
During this time of Lent each one is to receive a book from the library, and is to read the whole of it straight through. These books are to be distributed at the beginning of Lent.(RSB 48:15-16)
With this in mind, here are two recently published books, either or both of which I would recommend for your Lenten reading. If you’d like a devotional with a Celtic flavor, go for 40 Days with the Celtic Saintsby David Cole. For a more general collection of prayers, check out Evelyn Underhill’s Prayer Bookedited by Robyn Wrigley-Carr.
40 Days with the Celtic Saints
David Cole of the Celtic Community of Aidan and Hilda has written a number of wonderful books on Celtic and contemplative spirituality — and this latest offering is ideal for Lenten devotion (or, as he points out in his introduction to the book, suitable for any time of “preparation,” including Advent). The book is a simple daily devotional, with each entry introducing you to a Celtic saint, including a brief biography of the saint of the day, a relevant scripture passage, a meditation prompt, and a brief blessing.
The saints include the usual suspects: St. Brendan, St. Brigid, St. David, St. Cuthbert — along with a number of lesser known figures, with colorful names like Boisil, Cadoc, and Tysilio. Even the controversial Pelagius is included (with a thoughtful biography that suggests we should not judge Pelagius the man by Pelagianism the heresy).
Although the book simply presents these various saints in alphabetical order, a chart at the end also arranges them according to their feast day (I’m writing this on January 29, the feast day of Saint Gildas the Wise, a Welsh historian who settled in Brittany).
What I love about this book is that it not only functions as a useful daily devotional, but by the time you’ve worked through it you get a very rich introduction to the breadth and variety of the Celtic holy men and women.
Anyone who is at all familiar with my work knows that I simply adore Evelyn Underhill. She introduced me to Christian mysticism, and her work as a lay retreat director has been a direct inspiration for my own ministry.
So you can imagine my delight when it was announced recently that Evelyn Underhill’s two notebooks filled with her personal collection of prayers — including prayers she wrote, but also many collected from other authors throughout Christian history — had been discovered in the library of one of the retreat houses she frequented. These two handwritten notebooks were thought to be lost, much to the chagrin of Underhill scholars, for she often made reference to her prayer books in her retreat notes.
Thanks to a doctoral student, Robyn Wrigley-Carr, doing research at the Pleshey Retreat house, the notebooks finally came to light, and now for the first time they have been published, so we all can a glimpse into the kinds of prayers that Evelyn Underhill loved to share with her retreatants — and, we may assume, the kinds of prayers that shaped her own rich interior life.
And what a treasury it is! Many of the greatest lights in Christian spirituality are included in this collection: saints like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Ávila, Francis of Assisi, along with other luminaries like Eriugena, deCaussade, and John Henry Newman. But a few surprising figures show up as well, like Christina Rossetti or the Sufi poet Rabia; and even a few prayers by friends of Evelyn Underhill’s like Margaret Cropper (not to mention many unattributed prayers, which the editor suggests are probably Underhill’s own work).
Here is just one gem, from the 19th century French Jesuit mystic, Jean Nicolas Grou:
Teach us, O God, that silent language which says all things. Teach our souls to remain silent in Your presence; that we may adore You in the depths of our being, and await all things from You, while asking of You nothing but the accomplishment of Your will. Teach us to remain quiet under Your action and produce in our souls that deep and simple prayer which says nothing and experiences everything, which specifies nothing and includes everything. Do pray in us, that our prayer may ever tend to Your glory, and our desires and intentions may not be fixed on ourselves, but wholly directed to You.
There’s much more where that came from.
I’m finding that when I read a few pages of Evelyn Underhill’s Prayer Book that it has the same effect on me that reciting the daily office has — in other words, it invites me to rest in that vast silent place within, even as I am praying the words of love and devotion that Underhill so carefully curated almost a century ago. It is a superb collection of prayers, and since it is only about 120 pages long, it’s perfectly suited for a Lenten devotional — read a page or two each morning and evening, and you’ll pray your way through Lent.
I hope you will prayerfully consider one of these books for your Lenten reading this year — but get them both! One more tidbit from Saint Benedict, who suggested that for monks, life is a “continual Lent.” For contemplatives that means we are always invited into deeper prayer and devotion, not just during the forty days before Holy Week. So read one of these books now, and savor the other one later. They both will bless you.
December 6 is Evelyn Underhill’s birthday, born this day in 1875.
Not only did she go on to become one of the most important Christian mystics of the 20th century, but she also influenced a number of key figures who came after her, including C. S. Lewis and Thomas Merton. A Trappist monk once told me that her book Mysticism was required reading when he was a novice monk in the 1950s.
A remember talking to a seminary dean, probably 30 years ago now, and telling him I was interested in mysticism. Since I didn’t specify “Christian mysticism,” he asked me a question to clarify where I was coming from. “Are you talking about Shirley MacLaine-style mysticism, or Evelyn Underhill-style mysticism?” That’s how much of a key figure Underhill has been in terms of promoting Christian mysticism for our time.
Evelyn Underhill, perhaps the most important twentieth-century writer on Christian mysticism.
Underhill was the first woman to lecture on religion at Oxford University. She was a leader in promoting retreats as a spiritual practice for laypeople in her time. Indeed, one of the Archbishops of Canterbury said that Evelyn Underhill was the most important figure in Anglican spirituality between the two world wars.
She died in June 1941 after suffering a stroke. She left behind an impressive literary legacy, including Mysticism, Practical Mysticism, Mystics of the Church, and Worship. Her letters are also really important — they’re available in several different editions — in that they reveal her gifts as a spiritual director.
Your humble blogger visiting the grave of Evelyn Underhill in north London.
She was a lifelong member of the Church of England, but seriously considered converting to Catholicism and retained a strong catholic sensibility even when she chose to remain an Anglican. For many years she had a Catholic spiritual director, Friedrich von Hügel, himself a noted authority on mysticism.
Indeed it was von Hügel that insisted if Underhill was not going to become a Catholic, she should at least be committed to practicing her faith as an Anglican.
Mysticism for Us Normal Folks
Along with Catholic writers like Karl Rahner and Thomas Merton, Underhill was a key voice in promoting Christian mysticism as a “normal” spiritual path for all the baptized. In this way she anticipated Vatican II’s proclamation of the universal call to holiness. We may not all be mystics in the same way, but we are all called to be mystics in some form or fashion. And Underhill’s books do much to show the way.
The Mystical Writings of Evelyn Underhill — an 11-volume ebook from Verbum.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I am particularly fond of a Catholic Bible-study program called Verbum. Verbum is a sister program to Logos, one of the premiere Bible-study platforms for Christianity as a whole. Among other things, Logos publishes a number of Anglican resources, including a collection called The Mystical Works of Evelyn Underhill.
This collection gathers together eleven volumes of Underhill’s books: Mysticism, The Mystic Way, Practical Mysticism, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, Mystics of the Church, Concerning the Inner Life, The School of Charity, Worship, The Spiritual Life, and two books of meditations, The Mystery of Sacrifice and Abba.
Most of these books are available as e-books elsewhere — but like many other authors whose work is now in the public domain, Kindle and other ebook versions of Underhill’s writings are often poorly produced editions with mediocre formatting.
The Verbum collection of Underhill’s writings, by contrast, are meticulously edited and hyperlinked, especially in terms of scripture passages and quotations from other key sources, like Augustine, Aquinas or Plato. Imagine Reading Underhill, and you come to a footnote where she quotes from the Bible (in Latin, often as not), and with one click you’re reading the text she’s citing in its original context? That’s what the Verbum edition offers. And while not every source she cites is hyperlinked that way, enough are to make this collection of her writings the one electronic edition I heartily recommend.
With the Verbum edition of Underhill’s writings, when she cites a mystic like Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite, the reference is just a click away.
Of course, to use The Mystical Works of Evelyn Underhillyou will need Verbum (or Logos), which is an investment — but Verbum reminds the user that Christian study always happens in a communal and contextual way. In other words, with Verbum you will not only read Evelyn Underhill, but first and foremost you will have access to 2000 years of scripture study and commentary, which means that when you read the Bible — or other great authors, like Augustine and Aquinas, Bernard of Clairvaux, all the way down to contemporary scholars like Raymond E. Brown — you are reading it with the wisdom of the entire Christian tradition at your fingertips.
Back to Underhill — I think we need to remember when we read any of the mystics, to read them with an eye to the tradition in which their wisdom stands. It’s been said that the entire history of western philosophy could be viewed as simply so many footnotes to the writings of Plato. Likewise, all the writings of all the great mystics are simply footnotes to Sacred Scripture. I think students of Christian mysticism often lose sight of that essential fact.
Evelyn Underhill’s writings literally changed my life. If you’re not familiar with her books, do yourself a favor and get your hands on some of them. Start with Practical Mysticism and then move on the Mysticism. And keep reading from there. She will invite you deeper into the love of God. And what could be better than that?
Note: if you are new to Verbum, visit this page to learn more about it — and to get a special discount coupon code to save 10% off your Verbum library purchase, exclusively for readers of this blog!
Featured image (Evelyn Underhill Plaque from her home in London) by Edwardx – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.
A Book for All Time: Why Evelyn Underhill’sMysticismStill Matters
For pretty much my entire adult life, if anyone would ask me who my favorite authors are, without hesitation I would say Evelyn Underhill and Thomas Merton. To me, the work of Evelyn Underhill represents the call for the revival of mysticism in our time, while Merton anchored the call to mysticism in the urgent political and social concerns that shape life in America over the last fifty years or so.
Evelyn Underhill (Image: Public Domain)
As a woman and a man, a layperson and a monk, an Anglican and a Catholic, Underhill and Merton together offer a rich, almost stereophonic invitation to the contemplative life for our generation. Of the two, Merton is by far the more well-known author, at least here in America. But for now, let’s set Merton aside. I’d like to tell you a little bit about my relationship with the writings of Evelyn Underhill and with the spirituality that they point to. I’m doing this not because my story is particularly interesting — it’s not — but in the hopes that you might be inspired to fall in love with Evelyn Underhill, and with Christian mysticism, yourself.
When I was eighteen years old, I had a dream about the end of the world. It was filled with plenty of dramatic imagery: the sky grew dark at midday; a silence descended over the world, and one by one the stars fell from the sky. The imagery probably came into my mind from the last volume of the Chronicles of Narnia, as I was reading those books that summer; the emotional content of the dream was no doubt driven by the fact that I had just graduated from high school and were about to leave home for college, so in a very real sense my world really was coming to an end.
While I can easily explain away the psychology of this dream from the safe remove of thirty years’ time; when the dream occurred it was raw, visceral, and frankly, frightening. The next morning, rattled by how vivid and real —or, should I say, unreal — the dream felt to me, I turned to a trusted older friend, a former organist from my church. David was what my parents rather dismissively referred to as a hippie — despite being a church organist, he had shoulder length hair, still rather scandalous in small-town Virginia in the 1970s. He played Bach and Wesley for a living, but his own taste in music ran rather toward John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix. As for his faith convictions, he was a Unitarian, and so he was just as likely to talk about the Buddha or Krishna as Jesus Christ or Saint Paul.
I went to David’s house and told him about my unsettling dream. He listened intently like any good friend would, and then said he had a book he thought I would like to read. He rummaged through on overstuffed bookcase until he pulled out a thick little paperback book with an hideously unattractive cover. He told me I could have the book, and I still have it today, one of my prized possessions. It is, of course, Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism.
I know to say “a book changed my life” is almost a cliché, but in my case, yes, Underhill’s Mysticism changed my life. It did so in two ways. First, it gave me a language for spiritual experience that was not anchored in either Pentecostalism or secular psychology, which were the only two models for the inner life available to me at the time. That was helpful enough. But even more to the point, Underhill introduced me to the great mystics of the past, and in doing so performed a valuable function: she helped me to discover the chain of spirituality that extended from Biblical times to the present day. Growing up a Protestant in the American south, my religious education suffered from a significant defect: the 1500 year period that extended from the close of the New Testament to Luther nailing his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg was never discussed.
It’s as if Christianity were frozen in time for a millennium and a half, except that by Luther’s time those pesky Catholics were up to all sorts of mischief, like selling indulgences and making everybody believe in purgatory. Along came Luther and swept all that trouble away — but it was up to Evelyn Underhill to help me see that those fifteen centuries were not just an extended Dark Ages, but rather teemed with a vibrant tradition of spirituality and the quest for communion with God — and those who were at the forefront of this quest are whom we now celebrate as mystics.
My first copy of Underhill’s Mysticism looked like this. Don’t judge a book by its cover.
The words “mystic” and “mysticism” are troublesome words, contested by Christians on either side of the Reformation divide. The Reformation, at its heart, is an argument about authority, with Catholics defending the absolute authority of the church against the Protestant argument for the supreme authority of scripture. In the midst of that dogfight, mysticism — with its emphasis on the authority of personal experience, an authority that is by its nature decentralized and not conducive to ecclesiastical obedience — soon fell under suspicion on all sides. The rise of modernity and the scientific way of thinking about the cosmos and anthropology marginalized mysticism even further.
Evelyn Underhill realized this, and if one looks at all her books chronologically, we can see that the more deeply she became immersed in the life of the Church of England, the more she replaced language of “mysticism” with the far less threatening alternative of “spirituality.” Indeed two of her most accessible books clearly reflect this: Practical Mysticism was published in 1914, and offers an approach to mystical prayer for “normal people,” which is to say those of us who are not clergy or monastic; whereas in 1937 a similar short and accessible book, drawn from several radio talks Underhill gave, was called The Spiritual Life.
How shall we understand the difference between mysticism and spirituality? Aside from the obvious etymological distinctions — one word reminds us that God is the ultimate mystery, while the other points to the Third Person of the Trinity — I think the case can be made that mysticism is a subset of spirituality. All mysticism, at least all Christian mysticism, is spiritual, but not all spirituality is mystical. Underhill defines the spiritual life as “soaked through and through by a sense of His reality and claim, and self-given to the great movement of His will.”
In other words, spirituality can be anchored in faith rather than in the necessity of experience, and it is oriented toward conformity with God’s will rather than communion with God’s nature. This may seem to be splitting hairs, but I think it is important for a number of reasons. Some people find mysticism intimidating, while others are uncomfortable with its emphasis on such things as darkness as unknowing. Karl Rahner may have been right when he insisted that the Christian of the future must be a mystic in order to exist, but I think in the economy of God’s love, many Christians will choose to walk a lowly path of spirituality before being called to the higher mountains of mysticism.
By orienting herself toward spirituality in her maturity, Underhill did not repudiate the important work she did in making mysticism accessible and attractive to a modern audience; rather, she continued to support mysticism by inviting her readers to take the all-important first steps of embracing spirituality in a broad and general sense.
Evelyn Underhill died 30 years after the publication of Mysticism, which means this June will make the 70th anniversary of her passing. In those 70 years the church has seen a veritable explosion of interest in the spiritual life. Underhill’s work bore fruit in the continued growth of interest in key mystics like Julian of Norwich, The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross. The very same year that Underhill died a young man from New York entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, and when his autobiography was published seven years later, Thomas Merton became what in our time we might call a “rock star mystic” — a spiritual writer whose vision and authority was met with worldwide celebrity.
Meanwhile, other visionaries were beginning to connect the dots between spirituality and other areas of inquiry: Teilhard de Chardin looked at the relationship between mysticism and science; Dorothy Day articulated a political vision informed by the Catholic faith; the Second Vatican Council encouraged an entire generation of both Catholic and Protestant seekers to study the ancient writings of key Christian thinkers, including the mystics; and Merton himself was among the first of several important writers who began to explore the possibility of fruitful engagement between Christian spirituality and the wisdom of other faiths. Within a few short decades of her passing, Evelyn Underhill’s legacy had blossomed into an extraordinary rebirth of spiritual hunger, not only among “professional” Christians but even, and especially, among the laity.
To what extent did Underhill contribute to the spiritual renaissance of our time? Did she influence it, or merely anticipate it? Perhaps there is no real way of answering this question. We know that Merton was familiar with her work, C. S. Lewis was a fan of hers, and that even the hippie mystic Alan Watts acknowledges her place as an authority on the mystical life. But Underhill was a laywoman, affiliated with no religious order; she never held a faculty chair, and left behind no movement, institution or organization. Her influence, while amplified by the ongoing success of her writing, is really not so different from how most of us live out our calling to “Divine fecundity” — she quietly influenced those who knew her, who corresponded with her, who encountered her through her words. In other words, her legacy is a humble and quiet one. And given how knowledgeable and, I believe, advanced she was in her own mystical practice, I suspect that is just how she would have wanted it.
A newer edition, with a much more pleasant cover design.
Seven Ways to Think About Evelyn Underhill
What I’d like to do now is to suggest seven ways that we can think about Evelyn Underhill and her legacy for our time. I hope that if you are not familiar with Underhill’s writing, that you will purchase a book or two of hers and use them as part of your personal devotion. These seven dimensions of Underhill’s legacy might help you to approach her, in a way that might particularly speak to you. For me, all seven of these ways of thinking about Underhill matter. I suspect that the more you read Underhill, the more you will find value in each of these approaches as well.
Evelyn Underhill as initiator — she ushers us into the mysteries.
If we trace the concept of mysticism back to its origins among the pagan Mystery Religions of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, we see that an essential concept related to the mysteries is initiation, or being ushered into a new dimension of spiritual reality. Christianity has its own rite of initiation — baptism, and to a lesser extent, confirmation. Initiation means to be brought into something new, and in terms of Christian mysticism, this means a new depth and reality to our relationship with God. Throughout her long and prolific career as a writer, spiritual director, and retreat conductor, Evelyn Underhill devoted her entire ministry to helping others undergo this kind of spiritual initiation. For me, reading Mysticism when I was 18 years old meant being ushered into an entirely new way of understanding the love of God and how God can make a difference in our lives, and it is not overstating the case to say that this “initiation” changed my life.
Evelyn Underhill as inspiration — her writing is elegant and lovely.
Evelyn Underhill is a writer’s writer. Her books are a delight to read, for her style, while at times showing the limitations of the formalism of her generation, is for the most part limpid yet poetic, erudite yet accessible, intelligent yet never burdened by an excessive cerebralism or academic stuffiness. Although part of the delight of Mysticism lies in how generously she quotes from an astonishing number of the classic mystics, the quotations she selects are always both relevant to the point she is making and interesting in their own right, marking her as a brilliant editor as well as writer. It is rare to find an author whose work simultaneously appeals to the scholarly community as well as the general public, and the fact that Underhill found respect both as an invited lecturer at Oxford as well as a popular retreat director speaks not only to the importance of her message but her skill in delivering it.
Evelyn Underhill as spiritual director — she teaches the path of discipleship.
One of the most important dimensions of authentic Christian spirituality is that it is relational and communitarian in nature. As Christians, it is knit into our DNA to care for one another, nurture each other, and bear one another’s burdens. Underhill exemplifies this in both her public and private writings. While she is an advocate for mysticism and spirituality, she never diminishes her message by resorting to mere boosterism. She is always careful to point out the potential dangers, snares, and blind alleys that can derail the spiritual life at any stage along the journey. She brings an astute, perceptive understanding of topics that we often are not very comfortable considering: such as sin and the human tendency to reject or resist what is best for us. For Underhill, the spiritual life is never just a cozy cuddle-party with God; it is always a demanding challenge to let the Spirit completely remake us according to the stern yet beautiful demands of love.
Evelyn Underhill as soul friend — her warmth and optimism are encouraging.
Perhaps I am repeating myself, for what is a good soul friend but a spiritual director? But there is a subtle difference here, and my point is that Underhill embodies both the most challenging demands of a classically stern spiritual director, but also the warmth, familiarity and gracious encouragement of a dear spiritual friend. Her letters are particularly instructive here, for it is in those personal and often informal missives that we catch a glimpse of the affection and kindness that she brought to bear on the many people who turned to her for spiritual guidance. Because of her keen awareness that, for Christians, the Holy Spirit is the only true director of souls, she brought a sanity, a sense of proportion, and even a sense of joy and humor to her work helping others to grow in grace.
Evelyn Underhill as mystical historian — she reveals the tradition to us.
Part of what makes Mysticism such a delight to read, and continually relevant today, is the wealth of direct quotations from mystics throughout the history of Christianity. Underhill quotes over 100 different mystics — a stunning achievement in its own right. Clearly, she worked hard to grasp the rich history of mysticism as part of her research to write about this topic. Thankfully, this means that reading Underhill — especially Mysticism, but also her 1925 work The Mystics of the Church — is to be ushered in to a literary museum in which the history of experiential Christian spirituality comes vividly to life. Underhill understood not only how mysticism evolved over time, but also what made each of the many Christian mystics special and unique. She honestly assesses which mystics are truly great, and which ones made lesser contributions, and she understands that every individual mystic is a unique personality, which means that she often would point out the unique, charming, or even oddball characteristics that sets each individual mystic apart. History can be a dry and dull topic in the hands of a mediocre writer, but with Evelyn Underhill, the treasures of the past come vividly to life.
Evelyn Underhill as artist — she clearly understood beauty as a central category of the spiritual life.
Underhill recognized that the Platonic categories of goodness, truth, and beauty are essential elements of authentic Christian spirituality. But where theology is the discipline concerned with truth, and ethics explores the question of goodness, the heart of spirituality as lived experience is very much a quest for the beauty of God. That she understood this is clear when we consider how important art itself is to Underhill’s explanation of mysticism. She repeatedly stresses that artists are those who come the closest to understanding and living the contemplative life, and so it is not surprising that she repeatedly uses illustrations from the world of art to explain and illuminate the mystic way. To be a mystic is to be an artist, working not with paint or words or music as one’s medium, but with the soul itself. The beatific vision is the vision of ultimate and eternal beauty, and in her writing and her thinking, Underhill repeatedly commends such beauty to those who would follow her on the mystical journey.
Evelyn Underhill as peacemaker — the culmination of her life’s work was to take a stand for nonviolence as a central mandate of the Christian life.
“My peace I leave with you,” Christ promised his followers. At the summit of her life’s journey, Evelyn Underhill took the courageous and risky path of affirming this aspect of the Christian faith, even in the midst of the beginning of World War II. After a lifetime of studying not only the gospel but the witness of saints like Francis of Assisi and Julian of Norwich, Underhill came to the recognition that Christianity is a path of reconciliation, not aggression. She stood for peace quietly but firmly, and as such can be an inspiration for anyone who wishes to follow the Prince of Peace, even in an environment that seems wholly ordered toward war.
Reflecting On Underhill’s Legacy
I’d like to conclude by sharing with you just a few thoughts on Evelyn Underhill’s legacy, by pondering this question: why does mysticism, and specifically Christian mysticism, matter today? After one hundred years, does it still make sense for us to read Underhill’s book on this topic, not just as an academic exercise, but as a means of nurturing our soul?
Another edition.
I can only answer this question with as enthusiastic a “Yes” as possible. Mysticism matters, because here in the twenty-first century, mystery matters. Over the last century we have seen the emergence of the postmodern world, thrown into being by its birthpangs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and given a framework of meaning through the internet and the triumph of media. When Mysticism was published, the great threat to society was war, as exemplified by the horrors of the Great War, or what we now call World War I. Fifty years later, “threat” was understood in ideological terms: in the west, we felt most threatened by communism. Today, our primary threat is terrorism, which brings to mind those words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: the main thing we have to fear is fear itself.
But as our world has grown smaller and our sense of what threatens us has become more abstract, we who identify as Christians have discovered that our world view is only one among many, and that other ways of seeing and understanding the cosmos deserve our consideration, if not our respect. A mere fifty years ago, when Thomas Merton began studying zen, this was thought of as idiosyncratic, if not heretical. But today, interreligious dialogue is becoming increasingly widespread not only among theologians and church leadership but indeed among ordinary clergy and laypersons like you and me. Here in Atlanta, for example, we have a vibrant interfaith community in which events regularly occur drawing not only Christians but Muslims, Jews, Vedantists, Buddhists, and adherents of other faiths. Christianity in the twenty-first century is now a faith that, for the first time really, has to learn how to be a good neighbor.
Meanwhile, the world of science continues to impact the way we understand theology. Sometimes this is a hostile encounter, as exemplified by the critique of religion by “celebrity atheists” like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. But others, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to Raimon Panikkar to John Polkinghorne, offer a more friendly conversation in which the empirical truth of science and the revelation and theological tradition of Christianity come together, but leaving neither unchanged. At its worst, science insists that Christianity be limited to a system of moral and ethical inquiry. But at its best, the dialogue between science and religion brings us to the frontier of human knowledge and understanding, where the propositional declarations of our faith shade off into the mystery of unknowing, where God is no longer a philosophical problem to be solved, but an ineffable presence to be encountered — and loved.
So in a time when Christianity must be a good neighbor to the great faiths of the world, on the one hand, and to the splendors of natural science on the other, the old catechisms suddenly seem shrill and inadequate. I don’t know many Buddhists or educated atheists who are going to be swayed by Campus Crusade’s Four Spiritual Laws. But in the challenges of our time, we Christians have essentially three choices: we can abandon our faith, which as we know many of our brothers and sisters are doing. We can retreat into a reactionary fundamentalism, but I suspect I do not need to detail the many reasons why this is a fundamentally unsound option. But if we neither abandon our faith nor armor ourselves with a naïve anachronistic theology, we are left with the invitation that Karl Rahner issued some thirty years ago: we are invited to become mystics.
Embracing Mysticism Today
We are invited to join in the work of people like Ken Wilber and Father Thomas Keating, a Buddhist-influenced philosopher and Trappist monk who explore the relationship between contemplative practice, interfaith dialogue and the science of human consciousness. We are invited to join in the work of Benedictine and Cistercian leaders like Mary Margaret Funk and David Steindl-Rast, who under the auspices of the Monastic Interreligious Dialog have engaged in meaningful dialogue with contemplatives from other faith traditions. Even here in Atlanta, there is Ben Campbell Johnson, who after a distinguished career as the professor of Christian Evangelism at Columbia Theological Seminary discovered the riches of the contemplative tradition, which immediately impelled into a new career as a leader in the interfaith community here in our own town, engaging in numerous programs designed to bring Christians and the members of other faith communities together.
I’m not suggesting that contemplation is necessarily linked to interreligious dialogue; that is a personal passion of mine, so naturally it is something I would highlight. But my point is that contemplative practice, with its roots deep in the history of Christian spirituality and yet with a thoroughly contemporary emphasis on mystery, unknowing, the love of God, the practice of silence and listening, and a faith grounded in optimism, community and reconciliation, is a dimension of Christian spirituality uniquely appropriate for the needs and demands of our time. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism matters because we need a spirituality grounded in mystery and contemplation now more than ever.
So I hope that you will consider Evelyn Underhill’s invitation to explore the rich history and contemporary practice of experiential spirituality, not merely as an interesting footnote in the history of twentieth century Anglicanism, but as a meaningful invitation for all of us today. Underhill understood that there is a great diversity in the world of Christian spirituality and mysticism. For some, the life of prayer means a rich, almost sensual experience of falling in love with the Source of Love. But for others, it is a profound and mysterious journey into the farthest reaches of consciousness, into a realm of darkness, unknowing, uncertainty, and doubt that can only be navigated by the most vulnerable type of faith. Is mysticism the sacred marriage as described in the Song of Songs? Or a silent, dark, almost agnostic experience of meditation, like what is documented in The Cloud of Unknowing? Underhill understood that mysticism is both these things, and much more. That here is diversity in the heart of God and in the practice of Christian spirituality.
There is no one right way to be a mystic or a contemplative. But the important thing is to step out, in the mystery, and begin the journey. A Carmelite friar named William McNamara, writing in the 1980s, said “The mystic is not a special kind of person; each person is a special kind of mystic.” Evelyn Underhill would have understood this, and agreed with him. So for you and me, here in the opening years of the third millennium, mysticism represents an invitation to find our unique and true identity — in God. Like Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, John Ruysbroeck, and many others, Evelyn Underhill speaks to us from the past, but offers timeless wisdom that can illuminate and even transform our spiritual lives today.
Underhill’s English Heritage Plaque, at her London home where she lived for most of her adult life. Photographed by Gwynhafyr. Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC 4.0)
This paper, in a slightly different form, was first presented at the Evelyn Underhill Conference sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta’s Institute for Ministry and Theological Education, February 19, 2011, to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Underhill’s Mysticism. To purchase a copy of the book, click here. Or, click here to purchase it for your Kindle.
