Nearly 20 years ago, in a period of life when my spiritual path had become overgrown with weeds and my inner light dim, I attended a training in Mind Body Medicine. As part of the training, we learned a basic mindfulness meditation practice. In small groups, we sat in a circle and learned to attend to our breath, noticing how this altered our usually frenetic mental patterns.
I immediately sensed that this practice was far more than a stress reduction technique. Sitting in silence and community touched very deep spiritual chords and I wondered if there was some teaching like this in the Christian tradition. It certainly had not been a part of my experience in the mainline Protestant church of my upbringing.
I continued to practice mindfulness meditation and even started to teach meditation as a facilitator of mind body skills groups with cancer patients. This opened my heart to more vulnerability, more compassion, and a greater desire to know why this practice seemed so powerful. When a friend invited me to the Episcopal House of Prayer, I was eager to go and the first time I sat in silent prayer with EHoP folks, it felt like coming home….home to God, home to myself, home to a loving and mature community that understood the path of contemplative prayer, ancient and deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, but new to me.
At numerous EHoP retreats over the years, I have been immersed in the wisdom teachings of the Christian mystics, early Church Fathers (and Desert Fathers), and of poets and contemporary prophets from many traditions. Richard Rohr teaches about the 3-legged stool of the healthy Christian life: tradition, scripture, and personal experience. The practices and teachings I have learned at EHoP have been essential in the delicate process of balancing these 3 legs of my spiritual life.
I believe that humans are called to be contemplatives and I am grateful that the ministry of EHoP is calling us to wake up to this human destiny.
