“Come, are you ready to set out?”

The first chapter of Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God ends with the above words, Cynthia extending her hand to all who want to travel on a path to the wellsprings that lie far beyond the familiar hope for an outcome, resolution of challenge or difficulty, or wish for change. Listening for words we usually connect to hope, I can taste how these belong together. They are of a particular arena—hope as related to something concrete in the world, outside of ourselves, a circumstance, future event or situation. Hoping for or about something, hoping for something to be different than what it is. The journey Cynthia is inviting us to is of another color, a distinct flavor and fragrance.

I love the tradition in the spiritual life of “hints.” Shakespeare described a hint as “an indirect suggestion intended to be caught by the knowing.” As we set off on this journey to a mystical hope, we are given a hint even before turning to the first page of Chapter One, from Symeon the New Theologian, born in 949. His words speak directly to ...

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My heart is filled with gratitude and reverence for the sixteen plucky souls who accepted the invitation to join me for a tiny, on the ground Wisdom School in Stonington this past September 6-10. Officially we broke ground on my new book, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm. On a deeper level we engaged together in the soul-searching work of exploring the pandemic from the standpoint of imaginal causality and attempting to generate some of those missing “spiritual nutrients” in whose absence the heart of our collective humanity has been slowly withering. At the head of the list was an element I call “paschal courage:” not the reckless courage that states “God is on my side; I’m invincible!” but the quietly gathered equanimity of the cross that affirms “Whether I live or die, I am the Lord’s.”

We studied, prayed, chanted, conversed till long into the night, did Gurdjieff movements, practiced Centering Prayer and tonglen, drank in the healing air of Stonington, and released the web of our hearts back into our planet. It was a wonder to be in each other’s presence again.

In this journey into what lies beyond ...

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All of us have lived through those occasions on which someone has asked us about our pursuit of, and interest in, Wisdom. Instead of giving a comprehensive and articulate explanation of Wisdom and our involvement in it, we struggled with how to convey our experience. Why, we have wondered, is this so hard to explain…?    Wisdom is like nothing else we have ever studied or encountered. From our first exposure, we all intuited its life-changing possibilities. And rather than a learning of some completely new field or discipline, our exposure to Wisdom’s teachings has mostly been a recognition of something we had already deeply known, but which we couldn’t ourselves bring forth or quite articulate.    There is no Wisdom curriculum that can learned and then parroted. Wisdom’s way of knowing must necessarily be experientially taken into the whole of our being and lived as our own. But in this process, it is the articulation of this truth and the sharing of this experience that actually feeds and furthers the integration itself.   We must remember that in order for Wisdom to have its full weight and heft, it must be worked through the integrity and authenticity ...

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Dear Northeast Wisdom Community,

Shiftings are afoot!  First of all, with immense gratitude for his years of service, we announce Bill Redfield’s retirement from the Northeast Wisdom Council.  In a recent letter to the Council, Bill wrote:

It is with mixed emotions that I announce that I am stepping down from my work on the Board (Council). Having served since its inception, I have seen the growing stability of our organization in promoting the proliferation of Wisdom in our time. We are serving as an anchor for the various outposts in our greater Wisdom community. I can sense the future growth of our organization in a wider reach that may end up being national and, even perhaps international, in scope.

Because of the demands of my own Wisdom work, I feel unable to give to this post the time and energy it deserves. While relinquishing this board position, I do want to assure you that I remain committed to NEW and will continue to vigorously support it in every way I can.

I offer deep bows of appreciation to Cynthia and her teaching over these many years. She continues to chart a path forward ...

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What Matters

Join us, and Spirituality & Practice, for an online retreat with Cynthia Bourgeault, a crystallization of her work with Father Thomas Keating’s final gift to the world—a small collection of poems created literally in the last year of his life. These words are offered out of his own experience in what Cynthia names as “the last stage of Thomas’s own spiritual journey as he emerged fully into what he liked to call ‘unity consciousness.'”

In the first session email yesterday, Cynthia articulates three reasons why this collection is significant: for what he is giving us to see, through both his knowing “belonging,” “suffused in this oneness;” and the cost, what was taken, when he entered into the dark night of a “wilderness journey.” In regard to the importance of the poems for their relevance to us today, Cynthia speaks to how they illuminate the path Fr Thomas Keating lived as he walked with the transformative fire—words that can accompany us as we walk into and through the upheaval, unrest ...

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Sharing from my notes on Tuesday morning during the Imaginal Wisdom School at Valle Crucis in North Carolina, Cynthia offered an inner task for the day:

 

In a place outdoors and completely alone, take off your mask and draw ten precious conscious breaths of air. Taking in that clear fresh air, standing in our fractured biosphere where we have over sanitized and over protected, engage through your breath—homeopathically—the immune system of our collective body and earth, and on the outbreath offer your own precious gift of breath back to the world.

This morning, Cynthia offered a live transmission of the first part of the “Four Ideals” exercise in morning prayer; and you will find a taste of what she shared there in these pages of the “Four Ideals” commentaries.

This is the third post on the “Four Ideals”—the last of six exercises Cynthia offered as “Pandemic Homework” to strengthen and stabilize our being in service to these times—and part a series of posts which began in March 2020. We suggest you begin the “Four Ideals” with the first and second of these Part VI posts, which you will ...

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