A Letter from Cynthia: Spring 2011 Newsletter

May 2011

Dear friends in The Contemplative Society,

What a blessing it was to spend time with you again earlier this spring!

Our three Victoria events—the retreat at Poet’s Cove and my talks at The Lenten Noonday Forum at St. John’s and at UVic -were each in their own way intense, stimulating, and deeply rewarding. It was wonderful to see the creative energy and teamwork percolating! I was also amazed at how intense and provocative my short sojourn at Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver just at the beginning of Holy Week turned out to be (you’ll find links both to my Palm Sunday sermon and to a reflection on our Holy Week Anointing Ceremony on The Contemplative Society website.) As I continue to sense that the Church (if not the entire world!) is fast converging on a tipping point, it was wonderful indeed to recognize that the seeds planted more than a decade ago when we founded The Contemplative Society are bearing fruit in a network of deeply grounded, prophetic, and visionary souls willing and able to carry the best of Christian contemplative wisdom into a world aching for new formats and new beginnings.

Barely a month later, I am at last nearing the end of my annual spring migration. My hermitage on Eagle Island, Maine, is now in striking distance! On Sunday, when the contemplative retreat I’m currently leading in the Hudson Valley comes to its end, I will be underway on the last leg of the journey, and hope by this time next week to be unpacking books and planting the garden. Even for me (“Our Lady of perpetual motion,” as one of my friends dubbed me), the past month has been off the charts, taking me from British Columbia to New Zealand, briefly back to Aspen, then over to Albuquerque for our first ever Wisdom School with Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, then back up to Boulder for a sparkling but again intense weekend exploring the Path of Conscious Love with Ken Wilber and the Integral Life Institute in Boulder. I am indeed ready for some hermitage time!

There’s a still point in all this turning world, however, and even as the rate of outer motion seems to be accelerating, inside I’m paying careful attention to the question of where best to concentrate my efforts. It’s not a simple question of a priority list, for as a lot of old institutional forms are dying out and new spiritual organizations proliferating at a dizzying rate, it’s almost an instinctive sense of which new forms best carry the current, energy, and depth of our received Christian mystical tradition. For the moment, the Wisdom School network (we now have six or seven schools on the books, all over North America, in the upcoming two years) is receiving my full attention, together with the need to develop some powerful contemplative immersion retreats around the chief liturgical milestones of the Christian year: Holy Week, Advent, Christmas, Ascension-to-Pentecost, and All Saints. I am also paying close attention to the chain of events set in motion by my work with Mary Magdalene, and to increasing evidence of an authentic first-century Gospel tradition in France, previously known only by its demonization as “The Cathar heresy” and still little more than a magnet for every possible kind of New Age silliness. But beneath all the bloodline conspiracy, archetypal earth goddess, DaVinci Code hype, is there a living tradition of Christianity taught and lived as a path of Conscious Love? I will be exploring this more during an upcoming semi-sabbatical year, some of it to be spent in research in the South of France.

So that’s the news, basically. People ask me if I’ve got another book in the pipeline, and while the half-completed manuscript on the Trinity is sitting on a shelf back in Maine, I’m not rushing at this point to get another book out. It’s a time for watching and listening, for tending the little networks that have come into being to help midwife this quantum consciousness shift we’re all hovering at the edge of (The Contemplative Society being one of these networks)…and yes, for getting the seeds in the ground and the boat in the water.

I send you all my love and my deep gratitude.

Cynthia

Originally found in The Contemplative Society's Spring 2010 Newsletter