Review: In the Stillness, Waiting

February 20, 2026February 19, 2026 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

In the Stillness, Waiting

In the Stillness, Waiting, Nicholas Worssam, SFF. Liturgical Press (ISBN: 9798400802317) 2025.

Summary: The wisdom of Eastern Orthodox saints on contemplative discipleship reflected in the Jesus Prayer.

One of the gifts of the Eastern Orthodox churches to the whole of the Christian community is the Jesus Prayer. This is also known as the prayer of the heart. In its most familiar form, it is the single petition, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” One can also shorten it in various ways. It is typical to pray this softly or silently repeatedly, coming to a place of stillness before God. As such, it is an expression of the yearning of our hearts for God above all. Thus, it serves as a kind of doorway into contemplative prayer.

Nicholas Worssam, SSF, a Franciscan friar and theologian, begins from this place and introduces us to the saints within Eastern Orthodoxy. These are monastics for the most part, who explored the frontiers of this prayer and the depths of contemplative practice. Among those the reader will meet Evagrius of Pontus, Syncletica and the Desert Mothers, John Climacus, Isaac of Syria, Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas.

On one hand, each has distinctive insights into the spiritual journey, reflecting his or her own journey. But at the same time, several themes recur: stillness and silence, the solitude of the wilderness, the recognition of bodily passions and how they may distract, and the processes by which the contemplative may come to a purity of heart. Evagrius is of note in his identification of the eight passions, a precursor to the modern Enneagram. There is also the movement from head or intellectual knowledge of God ascending to the wordless love of God of the heart. And when one is filled with the compassion of God this eventuates in compassionate actions in the world.

Each of the chapters includes questions for reflection and discussion. Worssam provides suggestions for further reading. We hear the Fathers (and Mothers!) in their own words. Not only does this instruct in contemplative practice. It also introduces us to their writings, whetting our appetites for me. For all these reasons, this is a valuable introduction to both the history and practice of contemplative prayer, beginning with the Jesus prayer.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Way of Perfection

April 13, 2022April 12, 2022 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

The Way of Perfection (Christian Classics), Teresa of Avila, edited and mildly modernized by Henry L. Carrigan Jr. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2000 (originally published in 1583). [This edition is out of print. Link is to a newer edition from the same publisher.]

Summary: Teresa’s instructions to nuns on the spiritual life of prayer and meditations on the Lord’s Prayer as a way to contemplative prayer.

I have yet to find the Christian who describes prayer as easy. Yet I know many who have persisted, wrestled with distractions, struggled with doubt, and broken through to times of intimacy with God, a sense of being greatly loved by the Father, and have witnessed the work of God in answer to one’s prayers.

In the late sixteenth century, the mystic, Teresa of Avila, gave a series of instructive meditations for the nuns in her order that have been collected in The Way of Perfection, a spiritual classic that has been read to the profit of many others wishing to deepen their own lives of prayer. This edition, sadly no longer in print, has been mildly edited and updated in language, to introduce Teresa’s instructions to a new generation.

Teresa begins by pointing to the role the Church plays in their formation and encourages their prayer for its theologians and priests. She urges them in love for each other, detachment from both family and the world, and humility, whether in quietly continuing in one’s prayers amid minor illness and accepting false accusations. Moments of transcendence in contemplative prayer are transitory, but the call to a life of self-sacrifice is ongoing.

She uses images from every day life to illuminate her ideas. For example, she likens prayer to water that cools, cleanses, and quenches thirst. She speaks of vocal, mental, and contemplative prayer, the latter a wordless resting in God’s presence. Her counsel is to be attentive in praying as we are able. Like many spiritual teachers, she invites us to pray the Our Father. She believes the Lord’s Prayer may take us into God’s presence:

“In case you think there isn’t much to gain by practicing vocal prayer perfectly, I must tell you that while you are repeating the Paternoster or some other vocal prayer, the Lord might possibly grant you perfect contemplation. In this way our Lord shows He is listening to the persons speaking to Him. He is speaking to her, suspending her understanding, and taking the words out of her mouth so she cannot speak even if she wants to.”

Thus, she emphasizes that contemplation is a gift of the Lord. The focus is on Jesus, his indwelling of us and presence walking with us, rather than in seeking an experience.

The latter half of the book is a series of talks focusing on the phrases of the Our Father. C. S. Lewis has written of how we may use the prayer as a structure that we “festoon” with our prayers and petitions. Her meditations are something like this, a reflection, I suspect, of how this has been so in her own prayer life. For many of us, the petition “forgive us our sins as we forgive the sins of others” is perhaps the most difficult. Her reflections on this are particularly rich and challenging, emphasizing that our forgiveness of others precedes, at least in intention, the request for forgiveness.

There is a bit of “stream of consciousness” in her writing, probably reflecting the turns of her mind. This warrants the re-reading meditatively of what she has written. I wonder whether perfection, even of contemplation can be attained in this life. There is a strain of that here, but Teresa tempers this with encouragements to practical self-sacrifice, and faithfulness in praying as we are able.

My own experience is that I have learned more about prayer by being in the presence of those who have lived lives of prayer, as I have listened to them pray and talk about their prayer life than by books. While we cannot pray with Teresa, we overhear her prayers and her instruction as one who prays. Little wonder this book has stood the test of time and speaks to us over four centuries later.

Review: Mindful Silence

January 24, 2019January 23, 2019 / rtrube54 / 4 Comments

Mindful Silence, Phileena Heuertz (Foreword by Richard Rohr, OFM; afterword by Kirsten Powers). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press/Formatio, 2018.

Summary: Part narrative, part instruction, this work traces the author’s experience of “deconstruction” and how Christian contemplative practice enabled a deeper relationship with God and knowledge of herself.

Phileena Huertz and her husband worked with a humanitarian organization dealing with the victims of war in Sierra alone, encountering horrors that challenged everything she believed. God seemed silent. She was introduced to Father Thomas Keating, and through him, to the practices of contemplative prayer and the long Christian tradition behind these practices. She describes her experience as one of awakening from sleepwalking, and in turn dying to a false self, to enter into the resurrection life.

This led Huertz eventually to found her own ministry, Gravity, a Center for Contemplative Activism. In the book, Huertz traces her journey, with practices for the reader to engage at the end of each chapter:

Withdrawing to Engage: She describes her time at Gethsemani Abbey, the writing of Thomas Merton, and how solitude reveals the false self. Practice: Breath Prayer
Finding Liberation by Discernment: She writes about the Ignatian exercises, how we hear God, and experience Him in our bodies, through the scriptures and the consolations and desolations in our lives. Practice: Examen
Discovering Darkness is Light: She introduces us to St. John of the Cross and The Dark Night of the Soul and how we may move from talking to God to Being with God to Being one with God. Practice: Lectio Divina
Exploring a Deep Well: On a visit to Assisi, she discovers Clare, the contemplative “deep well” to Francis’s “raging river” and how the two together show the power of linking contemplation and action. Practice: Labyrinth
Dying for Life: She narrates a meeting of contemplatives with Father Keating as he was dying, and work with the dying with Mother Teresa. Practice: Welcoming Prayer (where one welcomes and then lets go of each of the sensations and emotions of the body).
Unknowing to Know: She discusses The Cloud of Unknowing and the practice of Apophatic prayer, that is prayer without words, describing at type of “knowing” that “is about analyzing less and loving more.” Practice: Centering Prayer.

The concluding chapter is an invitation to wake up, through contemplative practice and concludes with encouragements to unplug, get out into nature, and to adopt a puppy! On this last, Huertz movingly describes the impact of owning a dog has had in her life.

The power of this book is addressing the challenge of “deconstruction” many of us face, often at mid-life when our spiritual beliefs and practices no longer seem to work. We want to know and commune with God, and not simply know about God. We want to find the inner resources to sustain our lives, particularly as we age. We discover that we need to listen to our bodies. The discussions and practices in this book engage all these issues and I would say that a number of these have proven meaningful in my own journey.

At the same time, I find myself unable to fully endorse this book because it seems to me to depart from the center of Christian orthodoxy to embrace a more eastern worldview. A key passage that was concerning to me was this:

“In direct contrast to a widely accepted theory of atonement, I was led to let go of redemptive violence in exchange for redemptive suffering. This sheds great light on the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion and how it applies in our daily life. The cross reveals a way to hold the tension of pain, suffering, paradox, and evil. In this way, we learn how to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21). When we hang in the tension between good and evil, we are stretched, and it feels like a psychological and spiritual crucifixion. But this alone is what will bring forth resurrected life–the kind of life that in the face of pain, suffering, and evil can genuinely extend hope, healing, and love.” (p. 143)

The author doesn’t name it, but it seems she is repudiating the idea of substitutionary atonement (with an interesting rhetorical turn of language describing it as “redemptive violence”). As I read and re-read this passage, it seems that Jesus dies only to offer a way of living in the tension of suffering and evil, an example of living with (and dying with) unresolved pain. Furthermore, there is a discussion of “oneness” or even “at-one-ment” that seems very different that biblical ideas of our union with Christ. The oneness of this book is oneness of body-mind-spirit, oneness with the world around us, and oneness with God that seems to this reader more the oneness of pantheistic monism than Christian theism. Is the cross even necessary for such oneness?

What troubles me is that contemplative spirituality as it is cast in this book (and I have not found this true with all writers in the Christian contemplative tradition) seems to suggest a way of salvation apart from the cross of Christ. Kirsten Power’s afterword seems to confirm this when she says, “But you don’t need to be a Christian, or a believer of any kind, to benefit from this teaching. Contemplative spirituality is for everyone.” (p. 176). I’ve been similarly concerned about some of the more recent writings of Father Richard Rohr (for example, Falling Upward, reviewed here). Rohr is one of Huertz’s mentors and writes the foreword to this book, and I fear Huertz evidences similar tendencies in her own thought.

I regret raising these issues because there is much of value in the traditions and practices Huertz advocates. Huertz believes in linking contemplation and action but seems to oppose contemplation and theological acuity, a divide that seems prevalent in the separate circles of theological reflection and contemplation. I would propose a tripod of contemplation, theological reflection and activism as a far more powerful paradigm. Might that be possible?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Cloud of Unknowing

November 28, 2018November 27, 2018 / rtrube54 / 5 Comments

The Cloud of Unknowing, Anonymous (translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher). Boulder: Shambala Publications, 2018.

Summary: A classic on contemplative prayer in a new modern translation.

The Cloud of Unknowing is perhaps one of the greatest works on contemplative prayer. We don’t know the author but it was written in the 14th century in Middle English. This edition is a re-publication of a 2009 translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher in an inexpensive paperback format.

It seems that many of the spiritual classics we read come to us in stuffy, Victorian English. Butcher’s translation strives for a simplicity and informality of conversation between a spiritual director and a directee, and this is one of the most winsome aspects of this work.

To give you both a sense of the work and the significance of the title, here is a brief passage in which the author describes the experience of beginning to contemplate:

“The first time you practice contemplation, you’ll only experience a darkness, like a cloud of unknowing. You won’t know what this is. You’ll only know that in your will you feel a simple reaching out to God. You must also know that this darkness and this cloud will always be between you and your God, whatever you do. They will always keep you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your intellect and will block you from feeling him fully in the sweetness of love in your emotions. So be sure to make your home in the darkness.”

One of the critical themes running through the work, true to the apophatic tradition out of which it comes, is that God cannot be known with our minds but only in our love–“we can’t think our way to God.” Contemplation is best pursued according to this author by simple reflection on a single word–“sin” and “God” are the two commended to us. He discourages trying to attain an experience of God through the senses, and encourages dismissing both our thoughts and feelings into a “cloud of forgetting.”

What I found attractive in this work is its wisdom and sense. We are assured that longing for God is enough, as this will open us to a deeper understanding of God. He discourages strenuous physical exertions that enervate and weaken us. He stresses the value of pursuing our contemplation accompanied by a spiritual director. He identifies four stages of spiritual maturity, with no sense that one is “better” than another, but only reflect a progress in love for God:

The ordinary which is our active life in the world
The special, where one continues to live an active life but also longs for God and begins to contemplate.
The singular is where contemplation becomes the focus of one’s life, praying without ceasing in love toward God.
The perfect, where we are with God, as we pass from this life into God’s presence.

The work itself consists of 75 brief “chapters” often connected to one another, that seems especially fitted for devotional reading of one or a few chapters a day.

Butcher’s translation includes an introductory essay and recommendations for further reading, including renderings in the Middle English, works on English mysticism and Christian mysticism more broadly, as well as reference resources. Her notes also offer explanations for her translation and other helpful background.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Jesus Prayer

May 27, 2014May 27, 2014 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

The Jesus Prayer by John Michael Talbot
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Jesus Prayer is an ecumenical event! It is written by a Catholic monastic who returned to faith during the Jesus Movement of the 1970s. It is written about the Jesus Prayer, which has its origins in Eastern Orthodoxy beginning with the 5th century St. Hesychias (from whom hesychastic prayer, a form of contemplative prayer gets its name). And it is published by InterVarsity Press, a publisher most closely associated with thoughtful evangelical scholarship.

The book is an extended meditation and primer on praying the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Each of the brief chapters takes one word, or at most one phrase of the prayer and engages in a theological reflection upon that word, and then concludes with an exercise in praying the prayer. The book concludes with practical encouragements about praying the prayer daily (he suggests at least one 20 minute time of prayer) and helps regarding place, the role of community, the value of “fathers and mothers” or spiritual directors and the relation of the Prayer to the church and sacraments. Following the conclusion is an Appendix that goes deeper into the roots of the prayer.

What I appreciated about this book was how deeply theological this book was even as it was teaching a practice of contemplative prayer. Talbot is not interested in by-passing the head to reach the heart. He weaves this theological reflection into personal ministry narratives that bring the awesome truths of the incarnation, the Trinity, the work of the Spirit and more down to every day life.

I mentioned the ecumenical character of this book and this may either be winsome or off-putting, depending on how you think about such things. Talbot is unabashedly Catholic as he talks about Mary or the Eucharist, and yet his writing is irenic, framed in such a way to emphasize agreements and commonalities, while aware of historic differences. I found myself thinking that if ever the historic divisions in the church were healed, it would no doubt be through individuals like him, and perhaps Christians across these different communions who met together to pray the Jesus Prayer.

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