Join me (Carl McColman) for a special online quiet day of reflection on June 25, 2022. We’ll spend time together in silence, and I’ll share with you some of the wisdom of two of my favorite 20th century theologians: Kenneth Leech and Pauli Murray.
Ken Leech (1939-2015) was a priest of the Church of England, a tireless advocate for social justice, and renowned for his work combating homelessness, racism, and privilege of all kinds. But he was also an authority on contemplative spirituality, one of the leaders of the contemporary spiritual direction movement, and a person of deep integrity and profound prayer. His writing remains one of the strongest voices on the seamless integration of contemplation and action.
Pauli Murray (1910-1985) is renowned as the first woman of color to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church, but that singular accomplishment was merely the capstone of a long and distinguished career. She was an early Civil Rights activist, one of the founders of the National Organization of Women, and one of the first activists to articulate the concept of intersectionality: how different types of injustice can “intersect” to create unique problems (and unique opportunities for liberation). Although she was not a public theologian or spiritual teacher like Leech, her sermons and other faith-based writings reveal a deep interior life that can continue to inspire us today.
Our day together will consist of two ninety minute sessions. During each session, we will enter into the silence through a period of Centering Prayer, followed by an overview of the life and teachings of these two remarkable spiritual guides. We’ll finish our session by letting them speak in their words, feasting on their wisdom as inspiration for our own calling as contemplative activists (or active contemplatives) today.
The cost for this retreat day is $25, but if you are an active patron of this website through Patreon, there is no charge.
The quiet day of reflection will take place on Zoom, on June 25, 2022. The first session will be from 10-11:30 AM Eastern USA time. The second session will be from 1:30-3 PM Eastern USA time. The sessions will be recorded for registrants and patrons.
With what is going on in the world, how do we as contemplatives take care of our spiritual health? I find it more challenging to sit now as there are a lot more distracting thoughts than normal. I’m not anxious about the virus — more about how we are managing it. I get frustrated and really hate the scare mongering by the media. I feel a lot of things are out of my control. I think contemplative practice can help immensely here. What are your thoughts?
My first thought is, you are not alone.
I certainly have noticed that my prayer time seems more distracted than normal — and I tend to be distractible under the most ideal circumstances. I have a feeling I’m not alone. There’s a reason why Buddhists refer to the human mind as a “monkey” — like simians, our egos tend to chatter a lot and swing from tree to tree — i.e., from thought to thought, from idea to idea. It seems that consciousness is like a kaleidoscope: lots of thoughts and feelings and images and memories, jumbled together in an ever spinning wheel of changing awareness.
Silence, in prayer, is a way to pay attention to the spaces between our thoughts and feelings and images and memories, where we hope to obey the invitation of Psalm 46:10: to “be still and know” the God who is present in our hearts (Romans 5:5).
But like Allen, I too “find it more challenging to sit now as there are a lot more distracting thoughts than normal” — and again, I bet I’m not the only one. Indeed, the US Center for Disease Control has a webpage acknowledging that this time of pandemic can be stressful for people, which can include increased feelings of anxiety or exacerbated mental health issues such as depression.
Interestingly, among the many helpful suggestions that the CDC offers for coping with stress and anxiety during these troubled times, one of the suggestions is to meditate.
Which brings us back to the question: “how do we as contemplatives take care of our spiritual health?” To help answer that question, I’d like to turn to two voices in the Christian contemplative tradition, one from the fifteenth century (St. Ignatius of Loyola) and one from the 20th (Kenneth Leech).
St. Ignatius of Loyola
St. Ignatius on Dealing with Times of Desolation
St. Ignatius of Loyola is the author of the Spiritual Exercises, one of the founders of the Jesuits, and probably the principle architect behind what has come to be known as Ignatian Spirituality. One of the hallmarks of Ignatian Spirituality is that it offers plenty of practical advice related to discernment — spiritually informed decision making.
Ignatius invites us to recognize that, in prayer, we can experience times of consolation and of desolation. This is not just a matter of happy feelings and sad feelings, or of feeling close to God compared to feeling far away. Times of consolation are best described as times when we sense ourselves moving closer to God — so therefore, times of desolation are times when it feels as if we are moving away from God. What matters is not the feeling so much as the process that seems to be at work in us. Consolation implies we are growing in grace, in virtue, in a desire for God or for more consciously responding to God’s love. Desolation, by contrast, implies that we are nurturing fear, resentment, cynical or bitter feelings of victimization or unhappiness, or simply a kind of selfish self-involvement.
Most of us mere mortals tend to be a mix of consolation and desolation much of the time. We can be moving toward God in some ways and away from God in others. We can get lost in a “two steps forward, two steps back” treadmill. If we persevere in prayer and our hunger to calibrate our lives toward the love of God, that can turn into “two steps forward, one step back” — but if we aren’t careful, we can get lost in desolation and it ends up being “two steps forward, three steps back.”
I bring all this up because, during times of stress or anxiety or excessive mental chatter, we might feel like we’re stuck on a treadmill — or slowly losing ground. It’s possible that, on a very deep spiritual level, we are slowly and steadily growing in grace. But if it feels like we’re moving in the wrong direction, we have to deal with those unhappy feelings.
St. Ignatius has very simple but explicit advice for when we feel like we are stuck in a time of desolation — and I think his advice makes sense whether the “desolation” is just an unpleasant feeling or truly a time of withdrawal from God. In either case, Ignatius’s advice is worth considering: he insists that times of desolation are not times to make a change, especially if it involves abandoning a commitment we made during our happier times of consolation (Spiritual Exercises #318).
With this in mind, my first recommendation for managing prayer and spiritual health during this difficult time is to persevere in the spiritual practices you adopted before the pandemic. If you were practicing centering prayer on a daily or twice-daily basis, do the best you can to maintain that kind of a regular practice — even if your mind and heart seem more distracted than ever. It’s not about doing it “perfectly” but about being as faithful as possible, even given how messy and crazy and imperfect our spiritual efforts may seem.
It’s important to remember that spiritual practices yield blessings over time. Spirituality rewards perseverance — it’s for the “long haul” or as Eugene Peterson so eloquently described it in the title of one of his books, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.
Which means that, even though it feels unpleasant for our efforts to be still and silent before God to be met with a mind that is more frantic and frenetic than ever, it’s helpful to remember that these are extraordinary times and to be gentle with ourselves. After a time of illness, one does not waltz back into a gymnasium and begin working out like an olympic champion. It takes time to get back into peak performance. We call spiritual practices “exercises” because in some ways they’re very similar to working out. Just as nutritionists and therapists are encouraging people to be more forgiving of themselves if they gain weight during the pandemic, so too we need to be gentle with ourselves if our prayer is more scattered than normal. Allow it to be imperfect. Be forgiving of that reality — but try to be keep “showing up” for prayer anyway. If not every day, then at least as often as you can, with God’s help.
Kenneth Leech
Kenneth Leech: Contemplation’s Context
For our second insight into how to care for our spiritual health during these challenging times, let’s turn to the English contemplative author Kenneth Leech, who just died about five years ago. I quote from Ken on this blog all the time, and the following quotation is my favorite words of his, so if you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ve probably seen these words before. But they’re worth reading again and again. They come from his book The Social God.
Contemplation has a context: it does not occur in a vacuum. Today’s context is that of the multinational corporations, the arms race, the strong state, the economic crisis, urban decay, the growing racism, and human loneliness. It is within this highly deranged culture that contemplatives explore the wastes of their own being. It is in the midst of chaos and crisis that they pursue the vision of God and experience the conflict which is at the core of the contemplative search. They become part of that conflict and begin to see into the heart of things. The contemplative shares in the passion of Christ which is both an identification with the pain of the world and also the despoiling of the principalities and powers of the fallen world-order.
Ken wrote these words in the 1980s, and if anything they are more relevant than ever, almost 40 years later. And I think they can be very helpful for navigating the pandemic.
We live in a time of chaos and crisis. Contemplation now, like always, does not exist in a vacuum. When you seek to be still and silent before God, you are bringing your mind and heart and body to God, just as it is, right here, right now. Which means, you are bringing the context of the pandemic, of our political polarization, our widespread social unrest, our economic insecurity, our collective fears and anxieties and grief and depression with you into your prayer time.
Is it any wonder that many of us are finding our prayer time more distracted or jittery than ever?
Ken’s words seem to be saying this: don’t be surprised you have a monkey-mind. Lean into it. Pursue the vision of God right in the midst of your distractions and scattered feelings and memories. Experience the conflict — it is at the core of your search for God, for it is at the core of what it means to be human today. Try to make sense of your jangly, unsettled mind as a subtle way in which you identify “with the pain of the world” but also as a sign that, by praying, by seeking God’s silence and stillness even in the midst of these challenging times, that you embody the very movement of the Spirit toward healing and toward greater intimacy with God.
It’s not easy when you are in a noisy place and want nothing more than to be silent. But that desire is the golden thread that will lead you, sooner or later, out of the chaos and into the quiet.
To Summarize
Just the simple fact that Allen is asking these questions tells me that he is already committed to nurturing his soul as best he can during these challenging times. And if you’ve read this blog post this far, that’s a pretty good sign that you want to take good care of your spiritual health, too.
Let’s trust the subtle movements of the Spirit in our hearts. We desire silence and stillness, peace and gentleness, the inner spaciousness that only reveals itself when we pay attention to the gaps between our incessant thoughts and feelings. Those gaps are always there, because the silence and the stillness is always there, resting beneath the turbulence of our surface consciousness.
During these troubled times, let’s allow our prayer time to feel a bit more unsettled or distracted than normal — but let’s keep praying. And when we notice just how chaotic or conflicted our awareness seems to be, let’s remember that this is just a symptom of the world at large, and when we enter into silence, no matter how imperfectly, we are praying not just for ourselves but for the entire world. So let’s offer that inner turmoil to God, just as it us. And trust that the Spirit will love us and guide us and lead us by the right road, even though we “may know nothing about it” (as Thomas Merton once prayed).
Let us pray for one another. Let us pray for the world. Let us pray for our nation and for the healing of our political divisions. Let us pray for the triumph of justice and peace, and especially for those who are vulnerable, sick and in need. And finally, let us pray for an end to the pandemic and for a more hopeful tomorrow.
In my book Unteachable Lessons I talk about Kenneth Leech, the Anglican priest who wrote a variety of books on topics related to both contemplative spirituality and the struggle for social justice (if you’re not familiar with Ken Leech, check out Prayer and Prophecy, an anthology of his most essential writings).
I only met Ken on a handful of occasions. When I ran the bookstore in Sewanee (the site of an Episcopal seminary), he came in to the store while he was on campus and we chatted for a bit. Several years later, I had a spiritual director who was an old friend of Leech’s, and so whenever Ken was in the USA he would visit Georgia to see his friend; and on several of those occasions I got to spend some time with Ken as well.
Ken taught me a lot. He was very impatient with spiritual writers whom he saw as succumbing to the trappings of celebrity; he himself tended to shy away from the spotlight, preferring the ordinary work of parish ministry in one of London’s most economically-challenged neighborhoods. Like any seasoned Christian contemplative, Ken tended to value humility, earthiness and ordinariness as the marks of a mature spiritual life.
Kenneth Leech
A Thought-Provoking Conversation
One time when Ken was in Georgia I took him out for breakfast, and as we chatted I must have made a comment about wanting to be a mystic. I don’t remember what exactly I said, but even after almost 25 years, his response is seared into my memory.
“Whatever you do, don’t call yourself a mystic,” he said with typical bluntness.
“Why not?” I asked, brow furrowed. After all, here in America we have this idea that if you want something, you go after it — and naming it is an important step on the way to making it real.
“Calling yourself a mystic would be like calling yourself a saint, or a shaman,” he replied. “If you really want to be such a thing, it’s far more important to live it than to just talk about it. If you are really a mystic, other people will see it. Let them call you a mystic; you don’t need to claim that name for yourself.”
I felt a bit stung by this rebuke, even though it was delivered in a gentle and civilized-British way. But his analogy made sense. If anyone went around proclaiming that they were a saint, most people would see them as foolish at best, if not downright prideful and arrogant.
A real saint doesn’t need PR. You simply live a saintly life. The Catholic Church, which is the only organization I know of that’s in the saint-accrediting business, won’t even consider your cause for canonization until after your death. I’m sure there have been countless people who live truly saintly lives that are now lost in the mists of history. But that’s okay: part of true sanctity is a spirit of humility that doesn’t really mind if it ever gets acknowledged publicly.
It’s so important to keep in mind that Ken was not saying “don’t aspire to be a mystic” or “don’t live like a mystic.” In fact, he was encouraging me to do precisely those things! In schooling me on a basic principle of humility — don’t call attention to yourself — he was, paradoxically, encouraging me to do what really mattered in contemplative spirituality: to walk the walk rather than talk the talk.
There’s a song in The Rocky Horror Picture Show that proclaims, “Don’t Dream It; Be It.” In other words, if you have a desire in your heart, don’t just daydream about it: make it real. Applying this to Ken Leech’s comments: don’t just talk about being a mystic when you can more quietly do the unglamorous work of living a contemplative life.
Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech
Why We Like to Say We’re Mystics
I think a lot of people might like to call themselves mystics because they want a shorthand way of explaining that they are more interested in an experiential spirituality, as opposed to a religious observance that is defined by believing the approved things and conforming to the social expectations of a church. But is mysticism just something we “experience”? I’ve already written at length about why I think the notion of experience sometimes fails us. Just as there is more to love than just the experience of falling in love, so too there is more to the mystical life than just having experiences of God’s presence in our lives.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with experiencing a sense of God’s presence. I wish everyone could have such experiences! But an experience of God is not the goal of mysticism: if anything, it’s just the entry point.
What, then, is the goal of mysticism? Probably the best one-word definition would be the Greek word theosis or its Latin equivalent deification — the goal of the mystical life is union with God, which means living a God-infused life. It’s not so much about what we feel or experience, as how we conduct our lives: in a manner shaped by love, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, mercy, and all the fruit of the Spirit, including joy, peace, patience, gentleness, and so forth.
When I took Ken Leech’s word of caution to heart, here’s what it meant for me: if I’m interested in mysticism (which I was, and still am), what matters the most to me is not “being a mystic” — whether in my eyes, or anyone else’s — but rather living a mystical life. And that, more than anything else, inspired me to begin to take seriously the practices that have for centuries now been associated with mystical and contemplative spirituality: including silent prayer, lectio divina, a regular daily prayer habit, and a focus on cultivating basic virtues such as simplicity, faith, trust, and yes, humility.
Many years have passed since that breakfast with Ken. He passed away a few years back, and I’m sad that he’s gone (he was always gracious enough to answer my letters or emails). Nowadays, from time to time I meet people who describe themselves as mystics. Usually there seems to be more enthusiasm than arrogance in their choice of words, so generally speaking, I let it pass — I figure we all have the right to define ourselves. But at least for myself, I still agree with Ken. If you want to call yourself a mystic, that’s your business — but I tend to be most impressed by people who simply do the work of cultivating a contemplative heart. Do that work, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re a mystic, whether you say so (or feel like it) or not.
Last week I attended a book signing at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Philip here in Atlanta, in which Jon Sweeney promoted his new biography, Phyllis Tickle: A Life. I’ve known Jon for years — we share a love for Cistercian spirituality and he edited my book The Lion, the Mouse and the Dawn Treader. But I wasn’t there just for Jon — I’m also very much a Phyllis Tickle fan, and relished hearing stories about the woman I’ve called “the merry doyenne of the ’emerging church’ movement.”
Phyllis Tickle was a poet and essayist and also the first religion editor for Publishers’ Weekly. But in the decade prior to her death in 2015 she became famous as a writer and speaker who introduced many people to what she called “emergence Christianity” — the efforts among many Christians, primarily evangelicals but cutting across denominational lines, to articulate a vision of our faith that is in positive and creative dialogue with postmodern culture and philosophy.
A decade ago, emergence Christianity or the “emerging church” was all the rage, among writers and thought leaders like Tickle, Richard Rohr, Shane Claiborne, Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Peter Rollins, and numerous others. It’s a label I don’t hear as much these days, and Jon Sweeney had some interesting thoughts as to why that might be.
He bluntly said that Phyllis Tickle was a mystic.
He went on to speculate how the mystical, contemplative dimension of her faith gave depth and perspective even to her commentary on contemporary trends within Christianity, including the so-called great emergence.
Phyllis Tickle was famous for saying that every 500 years or so Christianity held a metaphorical “rummage sale” in which it underwent a kind of transformation. See especially her book The Great Emergence. Five hundred years after the time of Christ came St. Benedict and the rise of the monasteries; five centuries later came the great schism separating western Catholicism from eastern Orthodoxy, and then in the sixteenth century came the age of the reformations, refracting western Christianity into a myriad of Protestant and evangelical communities. It’s been five hundred years since Luther nailed his reformation-launching 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg, and so we are due for another transformation of the Body of Christ.
So, what has happened? Why has the Great Emergence seemed to have lost steam?
I’m sure there are many reasons why movements within the church gain or lose momentum. But Jon Sweeney offered his thoughts on the importance of Phyllis Tickle’s work — and the absence of her voice in the years since her passing — and suggested that the loss of Phyllis’s “mystical” voice might be a clue to why Christianity seems more fragmented than ever. And perhaps it has something to do with how the “emergence” movement (which was as spiritual as it was political in nature) has morphed into the more narrowly focussed “progressive” wing of Christianity.
Current thought leaders in so-called progressive Christianity — folks like Diana Butler Bass, Rachel Held Evans, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Rob Bell — often seem more focussed on the social and political implications of their faith, then on its contemplative or mystical heart. Perhaps the emergence church movement lost its momentum precisely because so-called progressive Christians have increasingly made their political commitments the heart of their faith — instead of the other way around.
I should hasten to add that I believe a similar dynamic is at work on the conservative side of Christianity. The temptation to ignore spirituality for politics seems to cut across all party lines.
If we worship our political views instead of Christ, we are idolaters.
In fact, it seems to me that in the past few years, Christianity in America is running the risk of splitting along the same fault lines of our society at large, where political loyalties become the final arbiter of group identity. Christ mandates that “we all be one” and that we “love one another,” but it seems increasingly that Christians in America are only willing to love the people who vote the same way they do.
Perhaps for Christianity to truly embody its calling as Christ-in-the-world, the church at large (not just Catholic or Protestant, liberal or conservative, but the church as a whole) needs first to be anchored in its mystical life and from there discern how it engages with the world at large.
That’s a messy proposition, because it means that we have to re-learn the art of having conversations with people who see things differently than we do. We have to learn how to find unity in Christ even in the midst of the many ways we experience conflict and tension because of economic differences, racial and gender differences, and ideological differences.
We have to learn how to disagree while remaining in community.
History is not promising here. Catholicism often dealt with disagreement by branding the outliers as heretics, and then persecuting or even killing them. Protestantism simply accepted ever-growing fragmentation as the price of political, philosophical, or theological conflict. Unfortunately, neither the persecution of heretics nor the retreat into smaller-but-purer tribal identities will equip us to solve the problems we are facing.
Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech
To where are we being called?
2015 was a rough year, in that we lost not only Phyllis Tickle, but also Marcus Borg and Kenneth Leech — two other respected Christian writers who had strong political views but always managed to remain faithful to the spiritual heart of Christianity. Indeed, Leech was perhaps the greatest spokesperson for the necessity of approaching politics prayerfully — as the title of his collection of essential writings makes clear: Prayer and Prophecy.
We are now facing the fact that the contemplative leaders of the the last few decades — Cynthia Bourgeault, Joan Chittister, Tilden Edwards, Laurence Freeman, Thomas Keating, Richard Rohr — are getting older (Freeman is the only one in that list under 70). They will not live forever, and so those of us who are a generation (or three) younger than them, need to be reflecting on how we can preserve the heart of their contemplative wisdom — even (and especially) in our polarized age.
I don’t care what side of the political fence you’re on. If your political and social activism is motivated by your faith in Christ, you need to ground your faith — and your activism — in contemplation and mystery. You need silence and stillness. You need time for retreat, for wondering, for reflection. This is not a matter of privilege — this is an essential ingredient for all of us. We need this now, more than ever — because if we abandon the mystical heart of Christianity, then our churches become just more tribes, more political parties, more factions fighting for ascendency in a dog-eat-dog world. That, my friends, is not the call of the gospel.
God bless Phyllis Tickle (and Leech, and Borg, etc.) for understanding this, and God bless Jon Sweeney for reminding us. Now — what are we going to do about it?
Ken offers thirteen points that he considers essential for the ongoing renewal of Christian spirituality. Here are his points with a my reflection on them. Ken’s words are in bold type, my commentary in regular type.
The back cover of the first American edition of “True God” (renamed “Experiencing God”)
A renewed Christian spirituality will be concerned with the recovery of the vision of God in the contemporary world. The key phrase here is “vision of God.” It’s not an abstract, cerebral, disincarnate spirituality, but a visionary, relational, practical embodiment of God’s life, ways, and values here and now. It is a spirituality of beholding the Divine Mystery, not as a set of ideas to discuss, but as a way of living.
It will be a spirituality which is rooted in the experience of God in the life of the Jewish people. Out of the Jewish matrix of western spirituality we discern God’s holiness, God’s passion for justice, God’s desire for mercy and for a covenant relationship with God’s people. It is a spirituality of poetry and praise, of prayer and prophecy, of Sabbath rest and silent reflection, and of community and celebration.
It will be a spirituality which finds its centre in Jesus Christ, seeing in him the fullness of the Godhead dwelling bodily. Jesus of Nazareth put the “Christ” in Christian spirituality, and in Him we find salvation (wholeness), forgiveness, and reconciliation. Our devotion to Christ keeps our spirituality embodied, humanist (in the best sense of the word) and grounded in a spirit of repentance (renewed consciousness), service, and healing.
It will be a spirituality which looks to the faith of the Apostolic Church as exhibited in the New Testament. In the New Testament we learn that we are the Body of Christ, we have the mind of Christ. Our community of faith is meant to be the means by which God’s lavish love and mercy is spread freely and fully to a world that is suffering.
It will be a spirituality of the desert. Moses, Elijah, Jesus, and the Desert Mothers and Fathers all turned to the desert for inspiration and formation. The desert teaches us to rely on God, rather than our own ambitions and plans. It teaches us humility, patience, and simplicity. It also teaches us to listen, to trust silence, and to drink deeply from the wells of both solitude and fellowship.
It will be a contemplative spirituality. In the spiritual life we are called to listen, to be silent, to wait, and to trust, even in the face of mystery, of doubt and darkness, of the cloud of unknowing. We surrender all of our images of God before the silence of the Divine Mystery, trusting in the primacy of embodied love over abstract knowledge.
It will be a charismatic spirituality. We are called to celebrate, to rejoice, to dance with ecstatic abandon in glad delight over the God who loves us unconditionally. We seek to be healed and then to be agents of healing for others. We offer our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit so that we may be living tabernacles, bringing God to all who hunger for God.
It will be a spirituality rooted in Word made flesh… a materialistic spirituality. I probably would have said “earthy spirituality” here, but Ken is revealing his political roots. A materialistic spirituality is an earthy spirituality, that loves matter and the body and sexuality and seeks healthy relationships to all of these, received gratefully as gifts from God. To love God means not rejecting the world, but working for its redemption.
It will be a eucharistic spirituality. This means both a spirituality of sacrament and communion, of God really present in our midst; but also a spirituality of thanksgiving and gratitude. We bow down before the Real Presence in the consecrated host and precious blood, so that we may also bow down before the image and likeness of God in all people (especially the poor, the needy, the forgotten).
It will be a spirituality of pain, seeing in the passion and death of Jesus the heart of the gospel. Ours is a spirituality of joy and love, but it is not a spirituality which denies the real suffering and tribulation that so many people must endure in our sinful and broken world. When we encounter those who suffer, who are poor, who are handicapped, who are the victims of racism or injustice, we encounter Christ crucified, and our task is to love and minister to Christ whenever and however we meet Him.
It will learn from the mystical writers to see God as the ground of all reality and of our own beings. It will seek to recover and promote a true Christian mysticism as an integral element in Christian theology. Can I have an “Amen” here? Christian spirituality is mystical at its core. The mystics are our teachers — and they teach us to see what is “hidden in plain sight” — how God, the Divine Mystery, is truly present and we are truly called into Union with God, given to us when we were created in God’s image and likeness.
It will be a spirituality which will take seriously the experience of God in women’s history; the feminine namings of God in Scripture and tradition; and the forgotten or neglected insights of writers who have experienced and described God in a feminine way. Julian of Norwich said it best, “As truly as God is our father, so truly is God our mother.” There is no room for sexism or gender privilege in authentic spirituality. When we listen to the marginalized traditions of our spirituality that embraced the feminine and affirms equality between the sexes — and work to make gender equality a reality in our time — then we are faithful to Saint Paul’s declaration that in Christ there is “neither male nor female.”
It will seek to know and follow God in the pursuit of justice for all people, in the struggle against racism and other forms of domination, in the movement for world peace and for nuclear disarmament, and in the campaign against poverty and inequality. This is simply restating a theme that shines throughout this manifesto, and indeed throughout all of Ken Leech’s writing: spirituality isn’t really spirituality unless it anchors its contemplative, charismatic, eucharistic, mystical dimensions in a practical, down-to-earth commitment to creating and sustaining a world where freedom, justice, fairness, and equality exist for everybody, not just the privileged few. The heavenly banquet only happens when everyone is invited.
The first American edition (now out of print)
May all of us who seek to embody an authentic Christian spirituality learn to seek and foster each of these characteristics in our own faith, life, practice, and relationships.
Incidentally, True God was published in America under a different (and in my opinion, far inferior) title: Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality. I think the American title reveals much of what is wrong with American (mis)understanding of spirituality and spiritual theology.
The current American edition.
When we talk about spirituality in terms of “experience” rather than “truth,” I worry that we may be abandoning objective truth in favor of subjective experience. Which is not to say that spirituality has no place for the embodied encounter with the Living Mystery, but that it is always something much bigger, deeper, vaster, and truer that mere personal “experience.” Let’s go back to the British title of this important book, please.
What do you think of Ken Leech’s manifesto? Is there any other elements of a renewed spirituality that you think needs to be addressed? Please share your thoughts — in a comment below, or on social media. Thank you!
I have learned of the passing of Father Kenneth Leech, who died on September 12, 2015 after a long illness.
He was born in 1939 and grew up in a secular home in the north of England. As a youth he was inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre (later famous for his renowned study of postmodern moral theory, After Virtue) who helped him realize that it is possible to have a critical, inquiring mind as a person of faith. He embraced the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Church of England and was ordained a priest, and served most of his ministry in the same neighborhood of the east end of London, where over the course of his ministry he engaged with a variety of challenges, including homelessness, drug abuse, racism and religious prejudice (his neighborhood became a home for immigrants, particularly from the Muslim world).
Throughout his career Ken was a prolific writer; his early books dealt with topical issues like the drug problem, but early on he recognized that the youth culture of the sixties and seventies had a strong interest in spirituality, which led him to begin writing about the treasures of the Christian tradition. Perhaps his most significant book, Soul Friend, about the ministry of spiritual accompaniment, was published in 1977. He followed it up with True Prayer, True God, and probably my personal favorite, The Eye of the Storm: Spiritual Resources for the Pursuit of Justice. Many other books followed, with a splendid career-retrospective anthology published just a few years ago, Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech. If you’re new to Ken’s writings, that’s the book I suggest you start with.
Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech
Prayer and Prophecy: those two words really sum up Ken’s ministry. He could effortlessly write about Julian of Norwich in one paragraph, and how the Church of England neglected the poor in the next. As an Anglo-Catholic, he stood unapologetically in a sociopolitical “left of center” context. Indeed, his Wikipedia page describes him as a “Christian socialist in the Anglo-Catholic tradition.”
But his context is important: Ken’s tireless work on behalf of the poor, the homeless, the addicted, the victims of racism or religious prejudice, was always anchored in his faith in Jesus Christ and his unwavering belief that the Church, the community of faith, is called to be a countersign to the “principalities and powers” of our world (which includes oppressive economic and political systems which keep some people marginalized even as they benefit those with privilege). Ken called himself a “community theologian,” recognizing that the best theology comes not from the ivory tower, but from the gritty realities of life on the street. Yet as a person of prayer and prophecy, Ken always understood that prayer came first.
Longterm readers of this blog will recognize the following amazing quotation from Fr. Ken, because I quote this all the time. But it’s so beautiful, so true, so important to my own understanding of contemplative spirituality, that it deserves being posted yet again. This comes from Ken’s book The Social God but you’ll also find it in Prayer and Prophecy.
Contemplation has a context: it does not occur in a vacuum. Today’s context is that of the multinational corporations, the arms race, the strong state, the economic crisis, urban decay, the growing racism, and human loneliness. It is within this highly deranged culture that contemplatives explore the waste of their own being. It is in the midst of chaos and crisis that they pursue the vision of God and experience the conflict which is at the core of the contemplative search. They become part of that conflict and begin to see into the heart of things. The contemplative shares in the passion of Christ which is both an identification with the pain of the world and also the despoiling of the principalities and powers of the fallen world-order.
I only met Father Ken a few times; we met briefly at a seminary bookstore by chance in the early 1990s; but a few years later when I was receiving spiritual direction from Emmett Jarrett (another Christian rabble-rouser), I had the chance to spend some time with Ken on a couple of occasions. Emmett had studied with Ken and the two were friends, so when Ken traveled in America he usually would stay with Emmett, who always made sure I had time to connect with this man whose work I admired so much.
Ken very patiently answered my many questions not only about Christian spirituality and justice, but also about writing; and when my first book was published in 1997, I was thrilled and humbled when Ken wrote it a very nice endorsement. Then in 2010, he endorsed my Big Book of Christian Mysticism, with such warm words that I actually find his praise almost embarrassing.
Carl McColman has both studied and practised the Christian mystical tradition, stressing its earthiness and ‘ordinariness’. Like Thomas Merton, Michael Ramsey and others, he holds that mysticism is not an esoteric realm, reserved for the very holy, but is what all Christian life is about. I strongly commend this book.
Over the past five years I would occasionally write to him and he would always respond, patiently and gracefully answering whatever question I posed to him.
So now he has gone, released from this mortal life into the silence of eternity. I’m sad that he’s gone, admittedly for selfish reasons: I’m sad that he’ll never answer another of my letters or publish another insightful and inspiring book. Thankfully, he left behind an amazing body of writings, and I hope I can repay him for all he did for me by striving to make my own writing worthy of his inspiration. And one thing I can do (and I suppose is the ultimate point behind this blog post) is encourage all of my readers to get to know Ken’s work.
Like many forward-thinking, visionary writers, Ken never became a household name (he himself struck me as averse to the trappings of celebrity), so now that he’s gone his writings might have difficulty finding new readers; indeed many of his books are already out of print.
Dear readers, please make the effort to find, purchase, read books by Ken Leech. You will not be disappointed. I know of no other writer who so eloquently made the case for the integral unity between Christian spirituality and social action.
Even if you don’t agree with all of Ken’s political positions, his powerful proclamation — that the breathing-in of contemplation is essentially linked to the breathing-out of working for justice and mercy — shines boldly and powerfully in his writings, as it was beautifully embodied in his own life and ministry.
The world has lost one of its great contemplatives. We are the poorer for it, but let us rejoice in his passing into eternity and resolve to continue to embody our own faith-filled lives where prayer and prophecy unite in an integral act of love.
Ken with his wife Julie in 2013. Photo by Jacqueline Schmitt.
A couple of years ago Rob Bell wrote a book with the title What We Talk About When We Talk About God. I haven’t read the book, but I love the title. So I suppose this blog post could be called “What we talk about when we talk about contemplation.”
If that seems funny to you, I admit I’m being ironic. Why talk about something that takes us — or at least invites us — to a place beyond language, beyond words, beyond grammar? But as silent as contemplation is, the reality of being human is that we love to talk about, well, everything. We talk about God. We talk about love. We talk about mystery. And yes, we talk about contemplation.
So for today’s post (and next Wednesday’s as well), I’m sharing with you two sets of six quotations, both from sacred scripture and from other writings that I have found useful, that function as a set of “guiding principles” that help me to remain focused on my understanding of contemplation. It’s a total of twelve quotations: six today, and six next week.
I hope you will read over these quotations, and reflect on their meaning, and how they can provide us with a kind of trellis on which we can hang our understanding of this deeply silent way of beholding God and all things. Yes, I know it’s a paradox, and I know that the best way to understand contemplation is simply to do it (which means being silent rather than chattering on about it).
Nevertheless, since it is human nature to think, and to reflect on what gives life meaning, I hope you will reflect on these principles. Just don’t do it until after you’ve spent some time in silence.
Silence is praise. (Psalm 65:1 translated literally) Contemplation is not a practice or a technique; it is a way of seeing, of listening and of paying attention, that is grounded in silence. Silence is more than just the absence of sound, it is the presence of the open present moment, where we make ourselves available to attend to God. This attentiveness is an actual form of praise, of worship.
Know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:19) Contemplation begins in love and takes us beyond thought or knowledge, leading us to that place where we recognize God’s presence in our lives, empowering us to love God and one another, to find meaning in suffering, and to remain grounded in hope and joy.
The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist. (Karl Rahner) We are all called to contemplation. Silent prayer is not just for nuns or monks, priests or ministers, saints or visionaries. It’s for all of us. Christianity is in crisis today at least in part because the church has abandoned its contemplative heritage. It is vital that we reclaim that heritage for ourselves and for the future.
Contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. (Archbishop Rowan Williams) Contemplative living provides an alternative to the forces in life that foster consumerism, materialism, low self-worth, and environmental degradation. Contemplation helps us to create a happier, healthier life. It is a spiritual discipline, but even more than that: it is a way of putting our faith into action, with practical, and even social, ramifications.
Contemplatives explore the waste of their own being. It is in the midst of chaos and crisis that they pursue the vision of God and experience the conflict which is at the core of the contemplative search. (Kenneth Leech) Contemplation is not an escape from the messiness of life. Rather, it is a fearless entry into life’s “chaos and crisis” so that we might foster healing, renewal, and wellness for our selves, our relationships, and our world.
Contemplative practice is not a technique but a surrendering of deeply imbedded resistances that allows the sacred within gradually to reveal itself as a simple, fundamental fact. (Martin Laird) What Orthodox Christianity calls theosis is the summit of the spiritual life: the recognition that “God and I are not two” and that our destiny as children of God is nothing less than union with God.
