Reflections of a Worldly Monk

I grew up a fundamentalist Christian. But by early adulthood, I realized I could no longer believe I was basically evil, or that Jesus needed to pay the penalty for my sin. For me, that was not 'good news.' Then in the early 1980s I met Thomas Keating at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. A winter-long retreat with him transformed my life. He helped me see that my true self is rooted in God, and gave me a contemplative prayer practice that enabled me to drop into the depths of that reality within me. Afterward, I felt called to develop a way of living the monastic life in the world, with a family, a career and a love of wilderness. Over decades of studying the mystics, I reworked every teaching I’d received as a child, finding in the contemplative tradition a Christianity that is warm, liberating, and radically inclusive. This book is a record of that quest.Thomas Merton described contemplation as 'a listening in silence' that uncovers the presence of God first within ourselves and then in the world around us. Such listening is desperately needed today. Rather than dividing the world with competing claims to truth, the contemplative is called - in Quaker founder George Fox’s luminous phrase - to 'walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.' This includes the natural world as much as it does people. Accordingly, my experience of Christ is of a warm, radiant, listening presence whose power comes not from insisting on his own glory, but from awakening the inner riches already present within others. This book is an invitation into that way of seeing.