Embracing the Call to Spiritual Depth: Gifts for Contemplative Living, and: Valuing and Nurturing a Mind-in-Heart Way (review)

In 1966 Karl Rahner famously predicted that, “the devout Christian of the future will be a ‘mystic’ . . . or will cease to be anything at all.” In short Christianity will only flourish if this mystic element, a genuine experience of God, is fostered. For the last thirty-five years, Tilden Edwards, co-founder of the ecumenical Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, has furthered Rahner’s aspiration by encouraging contemplative awareness and a variety of practices to support it. His authorship includes multiple texts—some now classics in spiritual direction—but also the programmatic work of the Institute and a substantial body of Institute alumnae/i. His books on spiritual direction and friendship, simple living, Sabbath time, and living in the presence represent a portion of his contributions. In Embracing the Call to Spiritual Depth, his eighth book, Edwards draws from cumulative experience of contemplative awareness to expound upon its implications for a global world in extremis. As the text minimizes specialized religious and theological terminologies, its prose stretches within the reader to invite a “spacious” reality that every person can “lean into and touch.” As such, the work is well-suited to undergraduate, seminary and divinity school contexts, and practice-communities, though its epistemology can be seen with a much wider circulation in the human sciences today.

Edwards is above all a practitioner, one of the earliest to hone in on contemplation as a means of changing lives, what he calls a “process of conversion to our full being and community with God.” The thousands who attest to his influence have provided a working community, in which he has experienced the transforming power of contemplative awareness, and have allowed him to track the ways his transforming power spills over from their lives into religious and global institutions.

Edwards acknowledges rationality as an important human capacity, but views it as limited to the perspective of the external observer. Knowledge of reality requires fragmenting rationality and splintering it. Full human development involves both rational and contemplative awareness, the latter certainly giving direct and holistic apprehension of reality. Both these faculties must be activated and function in relationship, one to the other. Borrowing from the early desert elders, Edwards offers the metaphorical description of one living with “the mind in the heart.” Understood in this way, a precognitive, direct awareness is allied with cognitive apprehension. It is the former, however, that has been neglected for centuries. Preserved by the mystical tradition, contemplative awareness is now being revived. Edwards’ intent is to encourage the reader to reclaim its gifts in order to live the fullest life.

Edwards’ beginning point is this claim that each person has a pre-interpretive faculty, a capacity for intuitive, direct, unmediated awareness. He describes this awareness characterized by a freedom from illusion, an intimacy and trust and a sense of belonging to an inclusive community. Although it may appear only episodically, this awareness can be strengthened to infuse all aspects of life. In this sense Edwards’ understanding is reminiscent of other contemplatives like Evelyn Underhill who also suggested that each person has a capacity for a reality she called God. When developed, it leads to a spiritual life she described as “a life in which all that we do comes from the centre where we are anchored in God.”

Like Underhill, Edwards insists that the whole of life can become an arena in which contemplative awareness operates. In order for that to happen both the neophyte and the experienced practitioner must cultivate this awareness. He offers several practices toward this end. What is particularly helpful is his discussion of the implication of contemplative awareness for the individual and for intentional faith communities. Reinterpreting traditional religious concepts in a more inclusive manner, Edwards suggests that when the individual “opens the...