Lisa Colón DeLay

Advent Season is the perfect time to get all high octane spiritually speaking. Read, meditate, pray, and learn from others, and you will be so enriched as you enter the Christmas season.

My favorite undertaker, and writer friend, Caleb Wilde has been blog writing about God and Greek influence. And it struck me how much the Contemplative stream of Christianity may help inform us about things and in places where our finite intellectualizing fails us. The intersection of life and death is one of those spots.

I asked Caleb who and what he’s read from this (as Richard Foster says) “Stream of Christianity”, and he asked for recommendations. So, I thought, I’d offer them to all of you.

Please recommend your favorites too.

My not-by-any-means exhaustive list of favorite Contemplative Stream writers.

By way of a high-qulaity but compact primer I recommend Richard Foster‘s who gives a fantastic overview to each of the 6 Streams of Christianity. His “Streams of Living Waters” book covers the basic 6 traditions categorized as: Charismatic, Holiness, Contemplative, Social Justice, Evangelical,  and Incarnational flavors (if you will) within all of Christianity through the ages since Christ.

Gaining Christian spiritual insights from devoted lovers of God outside your own era and your own experience of a specific faith tradition is an invaluable blessing, and very faith building. Foster outlines major points and people of the Contemplative Stream, starting with the apostle John, in the book you see below:

Classic contemplative standby: Frances of Assisi (1181-1226)

Brother Lawrence (1611-1691) The Practice of the Presence of God (short read, and free online. sweet.)

Frank Laubach (1884-1970)

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941)

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

Thomas Merton “In My Own Words”

Henri Nouwen 1932-1996)

Here are 2 useful previously posted articles on this Stream.
1. Kataphatic and Apophatic Prayer Explained
2.Meditation to Contemplation – Kataphatic to Apophatic Prayer (an prayer exercise/experience)

From Worship by Evelyn Underhill, 1937

Each separate life of worship, whatever its outward expression, in so far as it  is truly cleansed of egoism and bent upon God, is part of this one eternal Eucharistic action of the Logos incarnate in the world: and this fact strips the Christian life of prayer of all petty subjectivism, all tendency to mere religious self-culture, and confers upon it the dignity of the Real.

Evelyn Underhill

In the next few weeks, I’m concentrating my studies on Evelyn Underhill (1875-1942), one of  the most read, and prolific writers in the first half of the 20th century on the topic of Christian mysticism and prayer. Her devotion to God in prayer, and her insights on growth in the spiritual life put her at the forefront of those disciplines in the Anglican Church.

Here is my first fascinating thought from Evelyn, I’ve come across. Chime in with your comments, or insights. Maybe you can Google her, or look up some of her work, and place a quote that strikes you powerfully.

On mysticism:

The soul’s real progress is not toward some mysterious, abnormal, trance-like condition; but rather towards the unspoilt, trustful, unsophisticated, apprehension of a little child.

-Evelyn Underhill