Phileena Heuertz - Mindful Silence: The Heart of Christian Contemplation

WHAT AN HONOR to offer this foreword to Phileenas fine new book. Mindful Silence is an excellent example of how quickly and clearly the transmissionand that is what it isof contemplative teaching is occurring in our time. These pages well illustrate how even younger people are rediscovering the older Christian tradition in ways that both continue the past wisdom and even add to itbecause of the access we now have to global sources, travel, and other disciplines that previous times did not enjoy.

All I can presume is that God is becoming very impatient to spread the contemplative mind into our suffering and divided world. The process of transmission seems to be clearly accelerating while also broadening and deepening. What took centuries to clarify now comes to us with new conviction, precisely because we know that these are not new teachings, these are not just our thoughts or teachings; but we can now know by much easier access to universal sources that we are building on the Perennial Tradition that has been taught, lost, found, and refound again and again, both in the East and in the West.

And this is another finding! Phileena writes here with such simple clarityand easy readabilitybecause she knows she does not need to prove, convict, or defend anything. Mindful Silence contains not just her wisdom but the spiritual wisdom of the ages that is again standing the test of time and showing itself in the fruits of incarnational holiness. It is the Great Tradition of action and contemplation again showing itself.

G. K. Chesterton, the English writer and lay theologian, believed that tradition is democracy extended through time. He goes on to say that I cannot even separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition. It seems to me they are the same idea. And wouldnt it make supreme sense that God would make access to God completely democratic and available? How could holiness possibly be understood or practiced only by scholars, monks, recluses, celibates, or formal theologians?

As Evagrius Ponticus, that early Syrian deacon, put it, If you pray truly, you are a theologian, and if you are a true theologian, you will pray. It always comes back to the authenticity of this inner dialogue that we call prayer. Then we are all theologians in the way that matters and heals.

Without such inner hearing, and at least tentative responding, I suspect we are all merely the apostle Pauls gong booming or cymbal clashing (1 Corinthians 13:1). Without Martin Bubers inspired guidance about the possibility of an actual I-Thou relationship, most religion and even spirituality remains a lesson memorized, a mere human commandment as both Isaiah says (29:13) and Jesus quotes (Matthew 15:8). This is what so much of the world is nowrightlyrejecting. It is a time of perhaps necessary iconoclasm and rebellion.

But this is not what Phileena is offering you here! Instead she places us back into the Great Conduit that has always been flowing for those who will allow the Flow. As Jesus says on the last and greatest day of the festival... If any person is thirsty, let them come to me, let them come and drink (John 7:37). We hope it is not yet the last day of the divine festival, despite the immense suffering of our times, but here you are being offered a very satisfying drink from the fountain of living water (7:38) that never ceases to flowand not in spite of the suffering of our timesbut in some very real ways, precisely because of it.

Phileenas wisdom, so well represented in the pages of this excellent book as well as integrated in her work at Gravity, a Center for Contemplative Activism, could not have become so clear and so compelling if she and her cohorts were not also in deep caring about the immense suffering of our timeplanetary, political, human, animal, and elemental. This holistic response is the unique way of Jesus and his followers, no matter what their formal religion. Nothing smaller will work anymore.

So lets not be asleep, as others

arelets be awake and sober!