: Phileena Heuertz
: Pilgrimage of a Soul Contemplative Spirituality for the Active Life
: IVP Formatio
: 9780830889334
: 1
: CHF 15.70
:
: Christentum
: English
: 208
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
You can only go so far for so long before you find the limits of yourself. For Phileena Heuertz that moment arrived, mercifully, around the same time as a sabbatical to mark her twelfth year of service with an international organization working with some of the most vulnerable people in the world.Activists often see contemplation as a luxury, the sort of thing necessarily set aside in the quest to see the world set aright. But in Pilgrimage of a Soul we see that contemplation is essential-not only to a life of sustained commitment to the justice and righteousness of God, but to the fully human life that the Holy Spirit beckons each of us to. Tracing seven movements from a kind of sleepfulness to a kind of wakefulness, Phileena shows us that life is a journey that repeats itself as Christ leads us deeper and deeper into our true selves and a truer knowledge of God. This revised edition includes practices with each chapter, as well as questions for group discussion and individual reflection.

Phileena Heuertz is the author of Pilgrimage of a Soul and a founding partner of Gravity, a Center for Contemplative Activism. For nearly twenty years she and her husband, Chris, codirected an international nonprofit. Spiritual director, yoga instructor, public speaker, retreat guide, and author, Phileena is passionate about spirituality and making the world a better place.

Introduction


Darkness. If you’ve experienced it, you know what I’m talking about. Darkness sets in long before we’re old enough to recognize it. It begins with anguish. We’ve been hurt, sometimes tragically, and we don’t know what to do with that injury. The safest thing seems to be to hide the pain, perhaps behind a mask. We seek to be safe by any means necessary. We learn to cope. And we achieve for ourselves a form of love, security or power that the wounded part of us desperately needs. But these coping mechanisms rob us of fullness of life. To really thrive in life, our soul needs to be transformed—over and over again. This is the work of the spiritual journey. Exercising the courage to embark on the journey postures us for radical transformation.

Many of you who are reading this book are probably persons of faith. You may feel as if you’ve been on the spiritual journey for quite a long time. But the spiritual journey is subtly different from our faith conversion. According to Father Thomas Keating—a Cistercian monk—at the time of conversion we orient our lives by the question, “What can I do for God?”1 Seems appropriate, right? But when we begin the spiritual journey our life is dramatically altered toward the question, “What can God do for me?” This isn’t a narcissistic, exploitative question toward a disempowered God. It’s the exact opposite. This is the central question of a humble person who has awakened to their true self and to the awe-inspiring adoration of an extraordinary God.2

One of the things we desperately need God to do for us is to transform us from what we are today into what God intends us to be. In a world where leaders of nations are making war and preparing to defend their sovereignty by proliferating nuclear bombs, where religious fundamentalists kill innocents under the guise of righteousness, and where the average American citizen contributes daily to the destruction of our ecosphere, it is clear that we are a people in need of transformation. All of us are subject to self-deception. We commit evil and call it good. We commit violence and call it social justice.

Like the blind man Bartimaeus, when we awaken to the reality of our desperate condition we can hear Jesus asking us, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:46-52). If we surrender and cry out, “Jesus, have mercy on me!” we have begun the spiritual journey.

Whether or not we’ve realized it in the depths of our being, we are people who need to ask what God can do for us.You are a person who needs to ask God, “What can you do for me?” The spiritual journey invites us into the process of radical transformation, and nothing prepares us as adequately for transformation as Christian contemplation.

The Christian contemplative tradition navigates our path toward a posture of receptivity to the One who can save us from our chaos and destruction—whether that is on a small, personal and social scale or on the grand landscape of global politics. All we have to do is submit to the process. That’s it. Submit. Surrender. Dare to approach God with humble adoration. But since the beginning of time, it seems that surrender is the most difficult of post