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[caption id="attachment_4631" align="alignleft" width="387"] Looking Down the Ravine[/caption] It was an out-of-the-box idea, but one that I thought was worth trying—a virtual Holy Week retreat. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought this would interest so many—and from all over the world. Providing three recordings each day as well as a Zoom gathering that broke participants up into small groups, this online program provided choices for participants based on their needs and their time availability. This successful first run will be followed by future programs—even Wisdom Schools—online. Also, this Holy Week program will return next year and will be expanded into a full Lenten retreat. Stay tuned! Rather than try to explain the intricacies of the week, let me instead share some of the results. Bill and Sarah said, "Our journey through Holy Week with you was breathtaking, even from the Imaginal. The day before the week began, I was in the car, listening to Bill Bryson’s account of climbing Mt. Washington, including his description of emerging at the summit, exhausted, to find all the auto-road tourists. The very next day I’m back on Mt. Washington with you!  "There is so much to comment on. I was going

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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. [caption id="attachment_4583" align="alignnone" width="375"] Cows Bathing in Preparation for Pongal Festivities[/caption]   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

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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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"I was delighted to receive this wonderfully creative exploration of imaginal reality by my student Josh Tysinger. Aside from simply his completely singular and wondrous mind itself, Josh’s claim to fame around our Wisdom network is that he was the one who stepped forward to journey closely with Beatrice Bruteau during her last few years of her life and the one who expedited getting her archive safely delivered to Emory University. Josh is her direct lineage bearer, and you will hear a bit of her voice and sparkle speaking through this mind-bending (to say the least) imaginal rhapsody." ~ Cynthia Over the past months, our teacher Cynthia Bourgeault has articulated her pioneering and breath-taking research into perspectives on the imaginal realm. Invigorated by her beautiful meditations on this most sacred of spaces, I broach this subject with only the most humble of intentions of initiating dialogue onto how it plays out in daily life. These are my personal beliefs inspired by her musings on the imaginal – ones I hope are in step with Cynthia’s own views on the matter. ~ Joshua To begin, I perceive the imaginal as connected with an intermediary flow-through area existing between the unconscious and

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Bruno Barnhart brought me right into life in the world when he opened the second chapter of The Future of Wisdom with the words, "Wisdom begins in wonder. Something profound awakens when a child opens a book and finds its pages full of light, the words radiant even though their meanings remain indistinct." He ends this first paragraph of the second chapter, entitled, "Movement I: The Sapiential Awakening," saying: "spiritual wisdom… is always a beginning… a simple, luminous fullness" and that, in the "cold clarity of the modern West, it is often the poets who catalyze the awakening of a sapiential consciousness." Bruno leads us on a spiral journey through the Christian sapiential tradition, beginning with three quick, broad strokes. The first—the Awakening! above—speaks to the reader directly and personally, and comes out of his own spiritual awakening as a young person. It sets the tone, alerting the reader that this is about a living Wisdom, not a concept, or shell of an idea. The second stroke takes us from poets and children, enchantment, eager spirits and new discoveries to the event of Christ as "the coming of the divine Wisdom to humanity as a human person." This, is real.

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For the next five months Northeast Wisdom will be posting responses to Bruno Barnhart's new edition of The Future of Wisdom in conjunction with the 'Year of Bruno Barnhart' and the Northeast Wisdom study groups that will begin this month. These groups will meet monthly, the first group on the Second Friday evening and the second on the fourth Wednesday morning, from February through June. There are a number of local study groups that are happening simultaneously, community organized, and we welcome any sharing that comes out of these groups on Breaking Ground. We hope to bring a different voice each month to these blog posts, addressing the five chapters in conjunction with the study groups. The first contribution below is Bill Redfield's response to the Introductory first chapter. Enjoy! While maintaining that a Sapiential or Wisdom Christianity has been an integral part of the Christian tradition from the beginning and generative through the first twelve centuries, Barnhart cites our present age as the time of its restoration and renewal. In this introductory chapter Barnhart illuminates the essential inner movements of a Sapiential Christianity (an Eastern turn, a Western turn, and a global turn) as well as the contextual and

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[caption id="attachment_4366" align="alignleft" width="292"] Photo Dharma from Sadao, Thailand[/caption] As the year 2018 came to a close, the board of Northeast Wisdom met several times to discern into the coming year. We noticed a number of things. The creative initiative and growth in the individual and local group lives of the greater Wisdom community is clear. In 2018 we had seen the first publication of Cynthia's current and immediate talks and writings. The further embodiment of the practices community-wide is telling, as is the growing participation of younger generations. We noted a stronger Northeast Wisdom website, welcoming community participation, and new forms of gathering platforms and materials, coming to the fore as groups study and practice together in their communities and in cyberspace. More Wisdom Schools and retreats are being offered around the country by emerging postholders; and explorations where related Wisdom traditions meet are taking place. A conversation is beginning that is discussing the lineage more directly, without unbending fixation, in small groups and larger retreats. These are but a few of the impulses that were bearing new fruit in 2018 and promise to deepen and grow into 2019. Our work is to support these creative endeavors, and help

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