Cynthia Bourgeault Archive | The Contemplative Society

The Cynthia Bourgeault Digital Archive

Brought to you by:
The Contemplative Society.

Journey with Cynthia Bourgeault

From her early formation as an Episcopal priest and medievalist to her transformative encounter with Fr. Thomas Keating and Centering Prayer at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Cynthia Bourgeault’s path steadily ripened toward a distinctive articulation of Christian Wisdom. After the death of her spiritual companion Raphael Robin in 1995, she accepted an invitation to Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, where she helped found The Contemplative Society and, in 1998, became its resident teacher, gathering a small but dedicated community committed to contemplative renewal. It was in this context that the contours of her Wisdom teaching truly began to take shape, integrating monastic, mystical, Gurdjieff, and interspiritual streams into a coherent path of practice. The Society quickly recognized Cynthia as its founding teacher, and her presence generated a surge of energy and vision that continues to inform the community’s life of prayer, teaching, and retreat.

Within this “seedbed” on Salt Spring and Vancouver Island, The Contemplative Society hosted Cynthia’s pilot Wisdom School in July 1999, an experiment that proved foundational for what has since become a global Wisdom School movement. In retrospect, these early years with TCS functioned as a catalyst for Cynthia’s public vocation as a modern mystic and Wisdom teacher, as her blend of contemplative practice and Christian esotericism took root among students who would carry the lineage forward. After Cynthia returned to the United States, The Contemplative Society (TCS) remained both a home base and “closest partner” within the expanding Wisdom network, even as new hubs and Wisdom Waypoints emerged across North America and around the world. Today, while Cynthia’s primary organizational home is Wisdom Waypoints, TCS continues to steward her teachings through retreats, online offerings, and now this digital archive, honoring its original role as the community that helped launch and sustain her work to revitalize Wisdom Christianity.

This archive is made possible by your generosity. In order to help TCS and the Cynthia Archive continue to grow, consider donating!

Donate

A Note On This Archive

This digital archive has been gathered in the conviction that Cynthia Bourgeault’s work carries real historical significance for the contemporary renewal of Christian contemplative life. The Contemplative Society has long held much of the record of her early years as a teacher (retreats, liturgical experiments, audio sets, and written materials), and this project is a way of tending that trust more consciously, preserving her teachings and legacy with greater care. As the Society transitions to a new web host, this has become an opportunity to be more deliberate about the data in our care and to make these materials accessible not only to long-time practitioners but also to researchers and anyone interested in the unfolding story of contemplative practice in our time.

At this stage, the archive is based primarily on The Contemplative Society’s own records, supplemented by what could be recovered through tools such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and past board members. Wherever possible, materials have been left intact and contextualized rather than reorganized, in keeping with basic archival principles and RAD naming conventions. Users are encouraged to become familiar with the Wayback Machine and similar resources as companion tools in their own explorations of Cynthia’s life and of other contemplative figures. Looking ahead, there is hope that this collection may gradually expand beyond the Society’s years with Cynthia to encompass more of her wider body of work. If this archive is meaningful to you, please consider supporting The Contemplative Society’s ongoing ministry through a donation, helping sustain both the preservation of this legacy and the living contemplative communities it continues to inspire.

A special thank you to Heather Page, Pat Manning, and Mary-Clare Carder who have provided extensive paper materials from the early years of Cynthia's work with TCS, helping us fill in the gaps of our society's history.

*If you are in possession of material related to Cynthia Bourgeault that you think may be of interest to this archive, please email Nicholas at nicholas@contemplative.org