THE spiritual life is as prone to vogues as any other. Styles in prayer have moved from the excessively devotional tomes of my childhood — with their emphasis on “me and my soul and my God” — through the brave rhetoric of 1980s social spirituality and its concern for the world’s poor to a still point where contemplation is all.
The play on words of this book’s title is intentional: there is a devotional purpose to Chris Whittington’s writing, but he does not write in a contentless vacuum. Rather, he appreciates that our unruly world needs peace and calm, and his conviction is that a viable route to union with God, with our neighbour and with our own deepest impulses can be achieved when we settle down to some serious contemplation. In this way the traditional strands of oneness with God and with the various communities to which we belong can bear fruit in healing.
The author is the founder of the School of Contemplative Life, which originated in his own experience of the practice of the Benedictine community at Prinknash Abbey, in Gloucestershire. During the Covid pandemic, an online community of people interested in meditation grew into what became formally registered as a charity in 2021. Drawing on a tradition that goes back to the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and enriched by all the right luminaries, from the medieval mystics through to Thomas Merton, Kallistos Ware, and beyond, this is the School’s first foray into print.
A manual for practitioners in the sense that the 43 reflections draw deep on the experience of contemplation, this is both a “how-to” book and also a “why-to” one, as Whittington illustrates how profoundly the practice of contemplation can shape and transform our lives. His frame of reference is wide, as Ruth Burrows, Leonard Cohen, Rowan Williams, St Augustine of Hippo, William Penn, and a host of others jostle for inclusion. He casts the net beyond Christianity, having studied both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Sufi Islam.
The analysis is all his own. It grapples with the usual suspects: how to settle to the practice, how to handle disruptive thoughts, how to rest in God. But I found it curiously disengaged. My own formation in Ignatian spirituality made me want to shout out, “Yes, but . . .”. There is a world out there that is in desperate need of the really missing piece: the engagement of people who want to bring about the Kingdom of God; for surely contemplation has to bear fruit in action. Does this explain the almost total absence of any naming of the Holy Spirit in his account?
This is a book about turning in, “coming home to the boundless love which had held us in its embrace from all eternity”, and many will find it consoling.
Lavinia Byrne is a writer and broadcaster.
The Missing Peace: Meditation as a spiritual path to peace, community and oneness
Chris Whittington
Canterbury Press £12.99
(978-1-78622-679-2)
Church Times Bookshop £10.39
