BLOWIN' IN THE WIND:
Reflections by Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault and friends

Dear friends,

Two weeks into this winter hermit adventure, and I’ve already pretty much lost track of what day of the week this is, so at the moment I’m even more clueless than usual about when Ash Wednesday will arrive. Is it next week or the one following? All I know is that at some point in the foreseeable future it will be arriving and the liturgical mood of the church will shift accordingly. Those changes are pretty much irrelevant out here in hermit land. Through seasons of rejoicing and seasons of fasting I still chop wood and lug water (today, with the temperatures well below 0 on either fahrenheit or celsius scale, it’s more like lug wood and chop water.) Continue reading →

Dear friends,

Well, the long-awaited time has at last arrived! After more than ten years in the planning and ground-laying, I have arrived back on Eagle Island for six weeks of winter solitude. Six weeks!!!  I have no official commitments until March 9. And while there will no doubt be trips ashore for groceries and errands, they will be at the dictates of time and tide, not crammed on either edge of a flight-to-somewhere-else that has to be risked, sometimes in marginal conditions, because “the show must go on.” If I’m content to live on macaroni and rice (with mussels gathered from the shore), even these provisioning trips may be few and far between.

Bob Quinn, our island boat captain, brought me ashore yesterday afternoon in a gathering easterly breeze and light snowfall. He drove the bow of his lobsterboat right up onto the beach, and in two quick passes of his dinghy we had groceries, cat, computer, suitcases, and the several canvas tote bags full of books and files that have accompanied me on the latest month-long roadtrip, all safely ashore and under cover at my little house before nightfall. Today, as snow turns to rain and the only sound is the steady drip-drip-drip from a leaky rain gutter overhead, I am tending my woodstove, lugging water from the well, and taking advantage of the still only nine hours of usable daylight to get as far as I can with the unpacking and sorting of mail and awaiting Christmas presents. Continue reading →

BLOG ADMINISTRATOR’S NOTE: Last October Cynthia received a wholehearted endorsement and reference to her book Mystical Hope in a blog entry by scientist, business executive, and entrepreneur Ricardo Levy. Cynthia was delighted at how profoundly the essence of her book was captured in such an unexpected context, that she suggested we re-post here. So thank you to Ricardo Levy for allowing us to share your insights on this blog page. (Please see http://ricardolevy.com/ for the original posting of this entry).

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October 21, 2011

“On a bright, sunny day you can set your course on a landfall five miles away from you and sail right to it. But in the fog, you make your way by paying close attention to all the things immediately around you: the deep roll of the sea swells as you enter open ocean, the pungent scent of spruce boughs, or the livelier tempos of the waves as you approach land. You find your way by being sensitively and sensuously connected to exactly where you are, by letting ‘here’ reach out and lead you. You will not learn that in the navigation courses, of course. But it is part of the local knowledge that all the fishermen and natives use to steer by. You know you belong to a place when you can find your way home by feel.” Continue reading →

Christmastide greetings to you all!

Surprise!!! I have a new home. On the Monday before Christmas I slipped off of Eagle Island in the trough between two storms, and early that afternoon closed on a little house in Stonington, Maine, a picturesque little fishing village about five miles from Eagle. It will serve as the staging platform for my hermit times out on the island, and for my travels and local teaching during the other seasons of my life.

Eagle Island Hermitage

I was as surprised as anyone else that this all dropped into my lap, and I admit it represents a compromise between my dreams of hermit solitude and the lived reality of a life given increasingly to travel and teaching. Getting to and from Eagle Island, even in summer when the mail boat runs daily, is always a bit of a push, and in the off-season when the boat runs two days a week at best (with wind and weather determining which two these will be), trying to schedule teaching and travel commitments made months in advance is simply not sustainable.  The only way to be on Eagle Island in the off-season is to BE here—clear the decks and simply hunker down.  I am planning to do exactly that this coming February and have cleared the decks accordingly. But my intuitions—and now my commitments—have indicated that this will be the exception rather than the rule.

It’s taken a lot of discernment to get to this point. I love this little hermitage I’ve gradually built out here on Eagle, on which I hold a lifetime lease (but don’t actually own.) As I write this, it’s a luminous beautiful, calm night on the first day of the “gaining” of the light. Yep, it’s still functionally dark at 4 pm and pitch black by 5. But each day we’ll be gaining now…And my little Advent wreath burns brightly with its four candles, and I chant the psalms and slip into silence in this magnificent, mystical heart of a Christmas season and am happy to be absolutely nowhere else… Continue reading →

Dear friends and fellow contemplatives,

 We would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a joyous and blessed Christmas – and to share this brief excerpt of Cynthia’s writing capturing how one very special, timeless moment can glow “with the fullness of God.”

There was one evening, almost eventless in its own right, that somehow stands out in the constellation of my Rafe memories like a first-order star. It was late October, about six weeks before Rafe’s death, with the first real snowfall of the season. Earlier that week he had brought his tractor and woodcart up the mud-slicked road for a major run-up on getting the winter wood in. We’d spent the afternoon together working in the woods, but I was dragging and a little sick, and although he was not in much better shape himself after an afternoon of chain-sawing in the snow, he insisted on bringing me down the hill. He fired up the tractor, dusted the snow off; then, carefully laying an old poncho in the cart for me to sit on, he boosted me in, and we took off down the hill. Somewhere around the first bend, we both became aware of something extraordinary going on, as if this little voyage were suddenly trekking across the face of a far vaster deep.

Twelve hours later, the vividness still only barely receding, I tried to capture some the feeling of it in my journal: Continue reading →

In early December Margaret Haines, founding president of The Contemplative Society, slipped peacefully from this life on her beloved Salt Spring Island, surrounded by family and close friends. She was 86 years old.

Margaret was my mentor and my midwife. She entered my life at a critical point in my own spiritual journey and with her signature combination of clarity, honesty, and tough love pushed me through. Virtually everything I have learned, accomplished, and brought into being in these past fifteen years I owe to her.

Margaret Haines and Fr. Thomas Keating, 2007

When she first walked into my life back in late spring 1994, it was actually Thomas Keating she was looking for. The Anglican parish of Salt Spring Island, of which she was a loyal member, was at that time wrapping up its ambitious expansion of the church in Ganges Village, and Margaret had decided that a proper inauguration of the new facilities would certainly entail a spiritual dedication as well, led by no less than Fr. Thomas Keating himself. This was not entirely a fantasy, since she was at the time one of Thomas’s most dedicated students, in regular correspondence with him. But Thomas, overcommitted and in poor health, eventually convinced her to accept me as his substitute, and that is how I first made the acquaintance of both Margaret and the Anglican Parish of Salt Spring Island. Continue reading →

One of the things I most love about the line of work I’ve fallen into—writing books that push the Christian theological envelope—is that it brings me into conversation with so many fascinating people around the world. The majority of these folks belong to the general category of what I’d call “heartbroken Christians:” thoughtful, prayerful, sincere spiritual seekers, often deeply committed to other spiritual paths, who have found in my books permission to re-open their own deep questions and take a second look at Jesus and the Christian path. At any given time, I’ve probably got a half-dozen of these conversations going on. I particularly enjoyed the following one last week with Robert Perry in New Zealand, who has graciously given his permission to reproduce it here.

Dear Cynthia,

Your stunning book, The Wisdom Jesus, which I purchased only three weeks ago, has had a profound effect on me, and the opportunity to ask you a few questions about it directly has felt like an important thing for me to seek.

I understand that you receive a lot of email and that you may not be able to reply straight away – no problem. I also want to clarify that, contrary to possible appearances, when I ask the questions below, I am not “in my head”. I’m thirsty for clarification on a heart level more so than on the level of intellect.

Before I begin with the questions, I just want to add that I met you a few years ago when you spoke at St Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace in Wellington. I certainly don’t expect you to remember me, but, as a Gnostic-Christianity-loving Buddhist, I was inspired by your emphasis on the wisdom aspect of Jesus’ teaching, and the practice of kenosis, so essential to Buddhism under a different name. This talk of yours, and your book, have provided a doorway for me into a more mature take on Christianity which my heart has always known to exist and been in love with, but has, for thirteen years, had a great deal of trouble finding.

So here are my questions: Continue reading →

Helen Daly, one of our Wisdom students in Brattleboro, Vermont, emailed me last week to ask if I could write a couple of paragraphs by what I mean by the “Fall Triduum.”  Aha! A question! Happy to oblige.

Triduum, of course, is the name applied in Catholic liturgical circles to those great three days that form the heart of the Holy Week celebration: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the great Vigil of Easter (Triduum means “three days.”) The solemn passage through this sacred space is experienced not only as a set of external observances, but as a journey deep within the interiority of our own hearts.

Many years ago, it occurred to me that the fall also offers us a Triduum in those great three days encompassing Halloween (October 31), All Saints Day (November 1), and All Souls Day (November 2). Though Halloween is by and large celebrated only as a secular holiday and All Saints and All Souls are relatively unknown beyond monastic circles, they do in fact comprise their own sacred passage, which is not only authentic in and of itself, but also a powerful mirror-image of the energy flowing through the spring Triduum.  For several years now I have led silent retreats at the time of this fall Triduum, most recently for the monks and lay community of  Our lady of the Holy Spirit Abbey in Conyers, Georgia. The original “Fall Triduum” retreat was pioneered—as with so much else in my life—with The Contemplative Society, at a retreat house on Vancouver Island.

Continue reading →