Thousands of questions are silenced as if dissolved. There are neither doctrines nor heresies. The possibilities are endless, [living] creatively in me. ~ Paul Klee, 1916   Chennai, the city we used to call Madras, splays itself along the southeastern edge of India, fully exposed to the surging foam of the Bay of Bengal. We arrived on the festival of Pongal, lights whirling, colours strewn, bonfires glowing in the night forests like perforations to the earth’s inner core. India. Massive, effervescing, filled with a life energy that cannot be easily quieted. The first day some of us picked our way across hot sand to the shore where cows were not altogether happy about their baths in the sucking waves, ablutions to give festal thanks for the growing season’s first fruits.   Each of us had our reasons to join Rev. Matthew Wright and Br. Aidan Owen, OHC, on this pilgrimage to the land of St. Thomas, Ramana Maharshi, and Fr. Bede Griffiths. There in Tamil Nadu, South India, we would sit before Thomas’s tomb and climb into the cave where the apostle lived and taught; we would rest at Saccidananda ashram, devoted to inter-religious expressions of Advaita Hinduism and Christianity;

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Not a mistake. Not a disaster. Not over. This summarizes my reflection on Bruno’s analysis of the Western Turn in the re-emergence of Christian Wisdom in our time. I begin by noting that for those of us who are not scholars or academics, or who are old enough to have forgotten most of what we learned in our Western Civilization courses, the term “modern” calls up notions not much longer ago than the last hundred years or so: the age of automobiles and airplanes; of instant and constant communication through radio and television, email and internet; of quarks and quanta and other things we don’t really understand. That observation is perhaps a commentary on what is often perceived as the audaciously arrogant character of the West. But Bruno situates the modern Western turn as beginning nearly a thousand years ago, and he sees within that millennium the radical unfolding of the Christ-event in the arc of history of Western civilization. More particularly, it is precisely in, rather than in spite of, the predominantly horizontal-axis trajectory of that history, that he finds the deepening descent of the incarnation—of God coming into this world in ever-wider immanence and universality. He calls out

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When people gather in silence, a deeper kind of collective, synergistic, numinous knowing unfolds. And that’s the only knowing that’s worth a damn, particularly when you’re working with the infinite.     ~ Cynthia Bourgeault On February 25, 2019 Cynthia was interviewed for a podcast on the Encountering Silence website, hosted by Carl McColman with Cassidy Hall and Kevin Johnson. These recording are available in two parts, as Episodes 58 and 59: Encountering the Heart of Silence: A Conversation with Cynthia Bourgeault (Parts One and Two). You will find all the links to these podcasts at the end of this post. All thanks to Cynthia and to the folks at Encountering Silence for this delightful interview! Encountering Silence describes the interview in this way: “Cynthia shares how her love for silence originated with her early education in Quaker schools, where she recognized silence as a “liturgical expression and mode of divine communion.” There she discovered silence not merely as the absence of noise, but as a sacred container of presence. For her, after a long meandering journey from Christian Science to Episcopal ordination, she became (in her words) a “Trappist junkie” as she began to study centering prayer with Fr. Thomas

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Each month, a Northeast Wisdom voice is offering a reflection on a chapter from Bruno Barnhart’s The Future of Wisdom.  This month, it’s my turn with Chapter 3, “Movement II: The Eastern Turn.”  I admittedly found Chapters 1 and 2 a bit of a slog (somewhat overly academic and technical in language), but not without enough incandescent gems scattered along the way to keep me turning the pages.  For me, Chapter 3, however, hit the ground running! Here, Bruno brings the experience of nondual consciousness front and center, and (fascinatingly) ties it to baptismal identity (of all things!).  When I first read this book over a decade ago, this linking didn’t make much sense to me—it felt strange and forced, and left me scratching my head.  Reading it now, the same idea lit up for me beautifully.  "Little by little..." they say.  I’ll summarize and comment on some of Bruno’s main points from this chapter as we go. Bruno begins by looking at the 20th century encounter of Christianity with what he calls “the Asian spiritual traditions”—Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism.  He points out that this encounter has significantly altered the way Christians think of “meditation”—less as “a process of reflection

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Participation in Mystery Schools and Wisdom Schools both as a student and as a teacher has attuned me to the impact that holy days of all the traditions have on the energy field of our planet—and, therefore, on each of us. Intentional participation in the remembrance of these times not only draws us into their power and mystery, but also gives us an opportunity to deepen their effects. The marking of the Christian Holy Week—that period between Palm Sunday and Easter—can open us more deeply to power of sacrifice, liberation, and abiding love. The marking of the Christian Holy Week—that period between Palm Sunday and Easter—can open us more deeply to the power of its deepest meaning. The deep streams of betrayal, abandonment, death, love, fidelity, and sacrifice all flow together into a great river of confluence in our marking of Holy Week. Riding the currents of this great river, we are brought to a deeper understanding of what was being manifested and transacted in the Passion Mystery and of what is being asked of us in our lives. I am excited about this upcoming Holy Week Virtual Retreat and am particularly enthused about this program drawing together people who

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