Spiritual accompaniment

Book Review: Bourgeault’s Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening

December 24, 2025

Book: Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening — Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening

I have been hearing for several years – mostly through Contemplative Outreach Northwest – about Episcopalian priest Cynthia Bourgeault. She is known for her active, thoughtful leadership within contemplative/mystical Christianity.

I finally got around to reading one of her books: Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening.

I am “beyond thrilled” to have come upon this book.

In 2016, I was gifted with a sustained period of contemplative prayer during which I had a solid sense of God loving me. This was “a gift I didn’t see coming.” The outline of that story is told here. A challenge I encountered was that I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate my experience to people. A real challenge – I was experiencing something profoundly meaningful, but I had no means to talk to people about it (I’ve since seen a couple of other people wander into churches with a similar scenario – each time, a make an effort to “walk with them,” encouraging them as best I can along their journey…..). In time, through church attendance and involvement in Contemplative Outreach Northwest, I started grappling my way toward being more able to discuss the “outer contours” of my experience. A respected friend (who also happens to be Episcopalian, like Cynthia Bourgeault) pointed out that each of us has a different prayer relationship with God and that the best we can hope for is to find a few people with whom can share some basic aspects of our prayer experience in relating to God.

Then, I read Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening.

Actually, I skipped through several “how to” reflection portions of the book – that was information I didn’t need.

Early portions of the book, though, grabbed my attention. When Cynthia Bourgeault encountered “centering prayer” (i.e., how to learn to do contemplative prayer) groups as a priest, she said she immediately grasped the concept based on having grown up attending a Quaker school. I have periodically read about Quaker spirituality – this intrigued me.

Then, I got to later chapters of the book.

While God’s faith path for us within Christianity is a very different realm than the secular study of human psychology, Cynthia Bourgeault has artfully drawn from both in this book to discuss how we experience changes within our inner realm when Christ changes us via contemplative prayer. Of course, Bourgeault discusses within the book the very real differences between “doing Christianity” and “doing psychology.” I am currently reflecting – with an inner joy – upon Bourgeault’s artful communication within the later chapters of this book. It’s as if she put our inner human experience to poetry (I can’t take credit for this statement – I once heard someone else use this analogy in another context). In the next few weeks, I expect to be able to start talking more actively to people – based on this book – about my own inner changes and experience wrought by contemplative prayer.

And, I will be reading more of Cynthia Bourgeault’s books.

(For any reader who is interested, Teresa of Avila’s autobiography is also of tremendous interest regarding contemplative prayer.)

Kim Burkhardt blogs about faith at The Hermitage Within. Thank you for reading this faith blog and for sharing it with your friends. While you are here, please feel welcome to provide support to sustain this blog ($$).

Advent and Christmas: Being Present to One Another

December 23, 2025

I visited a friend yesterday. She’s terminally ill and is aware that “this is probably her last Christmas.” She and I have a storied bond. Our mothers were friends since they were four years old. Then, our mothers brought her and I into the world three days apart. Now that she’s entering the final phase of her life, I’ve thought of something said two or three years ago by another friend – a triplet (two identical sisters and a third fraternal sister). One of the identicals was dying, the other identical said “I don’t know how to do this” (i.e., how to be “alone” – she’s never “not had” her identical). In my own measured way, I understand – I’ve never “not had” the friend who was born three days before me.

I was lying awake in the early hours of this morning, unable to sleep and pondering yesterday’s visit. These ponderings relate to a host of other recent ponderings – there’s a lot to unpack. Bottom line, being present in people’s lives matters.

Yesterday – for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere – was the first day after the Winter Solstice. The day after the shortest day of the year. Yesterday had a brief more amount more of daylight that the day before.

When we are truly present in each other’s lives, that presence matters. Being consciously present brings light and joy into people’s lives.

During this morning’s 2:00 am hour, I laid awake in bed listening to my cat’s breath (she finally sleeps with me, two years after I adopted her). I thought of the times when either someone has been present in my life or when I have been present in someone’s life. All of us remember such moments in our lives. We can all bring to mind stories of people who have present to us and times we have been present for someone else.

There’s a Christmas lesson here.

Christ came into the world to be present with humanity. We celebrate this every Christmas (for those interested in liturgical seasons, since we celebrate Jesus’ birthday on December 25 we celebrate Jesus’s conception – the Feast of the Anunciation – nine months earlier on March 25. Further, we celebrate the Feast Day of John the Baptist – who “leapt in his mother’s womb” when Mary came to visit his pregnant mother – on June 24).

We are called by our faith to be present in people’s lives and to bring positivity where we can:

Churches are present in the community by providing social services (soup kitchens, food banks, etc.). We are all called to meet the needs in our communities through active volunteerism.
One of my friends has taken on leading a grief and loss support group – a great service.
We can all find ways to communicate the message of God’s loving presence. Through our baptism, we are called to be “priests, prophets, and kings.”

When I tell stories about being present to other people I become animated (at other times, I am occasionally told that my conversational tone is rather flat or monotone!). I am seeing that other people’s willingness to be present in my life and me being present to other people has been integral to the times when my life has been most transformed.

Please don’t get the idea that I always to do a great job of being present in other people’s lives. This blog post came to be because I am seeing the poignancy – both from being present and from having people be present with me – of how being present transforms lives. All of us have someone with whom we can be present. During this Advent and Christmas season, we can all share the joy of Christ’s love.

Integrating ourselves into our faith

December 11, 2025

Sometimes, multiple threads weave themselves into our awareness such that we come to recognize each thread as belonging to one tapestry.

Such has happened in reference to several books I’ve come across in recent years.

Several years ago, a comment someone made about “stages of faith” led me to James Fowler’s book of that title (Stages of Faith). I learned in that book about the developmental faith stages we progress through as we age and (hopefully!) mature. I come back to that book occasionally.

Since then, I have come across faith-related books such as The Deeply Formed Life and a book called Integral Spirituality (there are actually several books with that phrase part of their titles). While I haven’t yet read those two books, I brought them home to at least ponder their titles and/or topics. This led me to a phrase within Catholicism called Integral Human Development – the full development of each person.

I considered these books and topics as I explored how to fully bring together what then seemed to be disparate (compartmentalized) aspects of my life and the experience of living as a person of faith.

Truly, being a person of faith must mean what I will call “integral faith development.”

To truly be people of faith, we can’t be “church people” on Sunday morning, work people during the week (Monday to Friday, 9:00 – 5:00 – or whenever we work), athletes at the gym or the beach, etc.

Being a person of faith means that our faith must integrate into every aspect of our lives. And, every aspect of our lives must integrate into our faith.

This doesn’t mean that everyone who goes to church should give up their job, their athletic activities, etc. to become “church ladies.”

It means that we can’t compartmentalize our Sunday morning pew from the rest of our lives.

When I first read James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, I came to recognize that the various aspects of my own human development had developed at different rates. I did well academically in school – my mental development was great! The development of my social, emotional, and career aspects were “all over the map” in terms of development. My faith development? I had been away from church for twenty years and had left my faith development in a high school phase. Yikes! I don’t think I’m alone in this. I am calling this a “mountain peaks” approach to “non-integrated human development.” I was born in a mountainous geographic region and now live in another region where we have mountain peaks, several snow-capped (inactive) volcanoes, and an ocean – I notice each mountain peak within a mountain range being a different height. When we live our lives in such a way that each aspect of our development – emotions, mental development, social development, faith development – is in a different age-phase, we are living with differing developmental “mountain peaks” within who we are. Such a non-integrated way of living doesn’t result in personal health, well-being, or maturity. When I recognized that the then-segmented aspects of myself had been developing at different rates, I set out to bring the various aspects of myself into developmental alignment. I reviewed various models of faith and psychological development and “mapped out” which of my own mountain peaks were at higher and lower levels of development. I gave myself a couple of years to bring the lower mountain peaks up to approximately the same age-level of development as the higher peaks. The end result? A more content and more functional self.

However, there’s more to this than just a well-developed and well-rounded self. While the outcome I described in the previous paragraph is absolutely beneficial, the pew we sit in at church doesn’t exist solely to be a self-help pew. Sitting in a pew on Sunday and being a person of faith is about “love God and love your neighbor,” fully growing into a relationship with God, allowing God to turn us into the people God wants us to be, being present and lovingly impactful in the lives of God’s children (we are all God’s children – including the driver who smashed up your car, the politician you don’t like, the bully at your child’s school, the operator who accidentally dropped your call, the relative you dislike, etc. and etc.).

We can’t fully live into being a person of faith by compartmentalizing each part of our lives. We have to bring our lives into our faith – our joys, our successes, our athletic activities, our family events, our recent car accident, our difficult boss, etc. We have to bring our faith into all aspects of our lives – finding ways to talk about being a person of faith in the community (even if we live in a secular city), into driving and the crows we hate (I confessed in the confessional once that my irritation with heavy traffic was resulting in angry irritation directed at crows who were in the roadway. I learned to pray the Hail Mary while driving…..), etc.

We are people of faith when we integrate all aspects of our lives. We grow into living the Gospels in our lives.

Entering Advent, Entering Light

December 1, 2025

The life of faith turns our ideas upside down.

As we entered a new church year this past weekend, we moved out of the liturgical color of green. When I sit at traffic light and see the light turn green, I – in my impatience – start talking to the driver ahead of me: “Okay, driver who hasn’t instantly accelerated (thereby slowing down my effort to get where I’m going), green means take your foot off your brake and put your foot on the accelerator. Green means go.”

Instead of getting the green light to go full speed ahead during Lent, we shift into purple.

“Great,” we might be tempted to say. “Purple is the color for royalty. We shift into royal gear.”

Not so fast. During Advent, we are invited to slow down. Further, it is not us who is the royalty.

On the first Sunday of Advent, we heard in the second reading – Romans 13: 11-14 – to waken from our sleep. We heard to throw off the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light. We heard in the Gospel that we know neither the day nor the hour when Christ will return. We await in watchfulness.

For all this upside-downness, turning to Christ and Christ’s royal return really does turn our life upside-down. A right-side-up, as we discover.

“For it is no longer I, but Christ who lives in me”- Galatians 2:20. When we let Christ live in us, he transforms our very being (during this time of both waiting and living anew during the Catholic both/and!). We become a new creation. The light of Christ – during this darkest time of the geographic year (for those of us in the Northern hemisphere) – transforms our very being.

We are a week past Christ the King. It is Christ who is the royalty. We, as servants, must learn to serve. The more we learn to live in faith’s juxtapositions, the more God leads us into the fullness of life that God intends for us. (Also, the people who know me and who read this blog remind me occasionally that I sometimes grow into the concepts I write about slower than I write about them. Humility is good for us!)

Glory be to God

November 14, 2025

Photo of fountain — Fountain at Saint Martin’s University

Yesterday, I was on campus at Saint Martin’s University where I am starting a Master’s in Theological Studies MTS (I took the photo shown above while on campus).

While I was on campus, I joined the campus’s Benedictine monks (and a handful of students) for mid-day prayer in the campus chapel. Several recitations of the The Gloria Patri (Glory Be) were included in mid-day prayers.

The Gloria Patri, of course, is included at mass and in the rosary (“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen). Thus, I’ve orally prayed it countless times. Yet, it specifically captured my attention during mid-day prayers yesterday.

We hear at mass “”Lord, although you have no need of our praise, yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift, since our praises add nothing to your greatness but profit us for salvation through Christ, Our Lord.”

“Sing a joyful song unto the Lord” (a popular hymn based on Psalm 100) is a great way to pray. There’s an adage that “those who sing pray twice.” This doesn’t just apply at church. Praying with joyful praise when we are alone at home is also a great way to pray!

There are plenty of ways to incorporate “joyful praise” into our personal prayer life:

Verbal thanks in prayer expressing appreciation for specific items for which we are grateful.
Prayerful and joyful music at home (uplifting!)
Being joyfully attentive to God in prayer
And…. (there’s no limit to how we can be joyful and praiseful)

Praise to God “profits us for salvation.” How might you regularly incorporate joyful praise into your personal prayer life?

Book Review: The Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church

November 9, 2025

This book – The Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church: A History (author: Joseph E. Kelly) – is anything but a dry read.

More than just a book for religious historians, this book provides wide details and context on how church leaders came together – and sometimes didn’t come together – over the centuries to debate and articulate Christian theology.

I count myself among the bibliophiles who believe that every word of a book should be read to consider the book as having been read. In the case of this book, there is so much historical detail about each council, and historical context surrounding each council, and absorbing trivia that I am finding myself selectively choosing how much to summarily read about each time period the first time through this book (I may satisfy myself with selectively reading the book once through and keeping it a reference book). “Really?,” I found myself pondering. “A, B, X, Y really happened at this or that council or during this or that period in Church history?!?!?” As I read, I am scribbling trivia on sticky-notes to tell friends and fellow church folk about what I am learning about the history of the Christianity’s twenty-one ecumenical councils. As many of us know, the first council was the Council of Nicea in 325 through to Vatican II in the 1960’s.

Just this afternoon, I learned that an Empress was involved in the second council of Nicea in 786/7. Some councils were more ecumenical than others – in some cases, the councils were more heavily attended by bishops from the east than bishops from the west; today, individual denominations decide for themselves which of these historical councils were “ecumenical” (of note, the book’s author provides a listing within the book of which denominations consider with councils to have been ecumenical).

For non-historians, reading this book seriously will take the reader into reading additional books to learn more about the history and context of what was happening at the time of each council.

There’s plenty in this book for both historians and fans of religious trivia. It’s a book that really needs to be read over time so as to really absorb the content covered for each time period.

Faith resources – tools, not straight jackets

October 24, 2025

The ways through which we travel our faith journey – church attendance, types of prayer, etc. – are meant to nurture our faith journey. If anything we participate in feels as though it is constricting our faith journey, either something is amiss or we are ready for additional or different faith activities. Being attentive to any sense of constriction is an opportunity to look to adapt either ourselves or our situation. It is entirely good when we notice that we need to adjust – such observations mean we are engaged in our faith journey (or, sometimes, that we need to become more engaged). Our faith journey has developmental stages just as we experience stages in other aspects of our human development – stages in cognitive development (academics), stages in psychological and social development, etc.

By way of example, I am starting a Master’s in Theology in January (a “Masters in Theology Studies” or “MTS” for lay people rather than a Master’s in Divinity for pastors-in-training). At a recent meeting for registered MTS students, we were provided with the first of our faith formation sessions. We were told that Masters in Theological Studies degrees typically cover four academic subjects – scripture, ethics, systemic theology, and historical theology. In addition to academics, MTS programs – ours, at least – include the faith development of enrolled students (faith formation) because the degree should include our faith maturation in addition to a focus on academics (a whole person approach). During that day, we were instructed to start participating daily in Liturgy of the Hours (Divine Office) – the daily prescribed prayer life of the Church.

In recent years, my prayer life has principally been one of contemplative prayer – both at home and in small prayer groups via Contemplative Outreach. There are as many ways to pray as there are people; contemplative prayer has been personally fruitful for me. In contemplative prayer, I encounter periods of time in which I experience God loving me – which has been freeing me from difficult aspects of “the human condition.” As with anything else, I do also experience occasional dry periods in my experience with contemplative prayer. Therefore, I am now open to also praying Liturgy of the Hours (Diving Office).

Prior to being recently instructed to start participating in Liturgy of the Hours, I viewed the Divine Office remotely (“from afar”) as the prerogative of priests and avowed religious – a respected activity distant from my daily life. When we were recently told to start participating in this daily activity for the MTS program, part of me was intrigued. Another part of me was also relieved when we were told that Liturgy of the Hours is “a tool to help us pray, not a straight jacket to keep us from praying.” I am enjoying the journey into the Divine Office.

Book Review: An Immigration of Theology

October 20, 2025

Book Cover: An Immigration of Theology — Book: An Immigration of Theology

I recently came upon An Immigration of Theology by Fr. Simon Kim and am intrigued with what the author has done with this book.

Goodreads summarizes this book, in part, with the following: “The theological reflections of Virgilio Elizondo and Gustavo Gutiérrez are examples of the ecclesial fruitfulness of the second half of the twentieth century. Following the directives of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, [they] present the Gospel message in relevant terms to their own people…. Inspired by this moment in Church history, while at the same time recognizing the plight of their people….. [they] discovered a new way of doing theology by asking a specific set of questions based on their local context. By investigating where God is present in [their local context], both theologians have uncovered a hermeneutical lens in rereading Scripture and deepening our understanding of ecclesial tradition…. a theological method that takes seriously the contextual circumstances of their locale. By utilizing the common loci theologici of Scripture and tradition in conjunction with context and their own experience, [they] illustrate…. how every group must embrace their own unique theological reflection.”

I find this interesting – there seems to be the option in this book of stating that we must make theological concepts relevant to our own circumstances while also stating that theological principles are universal. What I am hoping to read in this book – now that I have it sitting on my coffee table – is that theological principles are universal in principle and also local in adaptation.

Book Review: In the Heart of the Desert

October 13, 2025

Book: Heart of the Desert — Heart of the Desert by John Chryssavgis

In the early centuries of Christianity, Christians seeking solitude and a focused relationship with God would sometimes head into the desert in small groups or as individual hermits – particularly into North Africa and Palestine. Enough ascetics did this at the time that non-hermits in villages and cities knew of this phenomenon. People would sometimes head into the desert to seek spiritual counsel from the desert dwellers. Some desert dwellers graciously provided this spiritual counsel. In other instances, visits from people seeking counsel (counsel of even just one word!) would drive the desert-living ascetics deeper into more isolated regions of the desert to more fully find the isolation they sought.

As people sought desert wisdom from the ascetic monastics, word spread throughout the region of the wisdom communicated by the self-isolating followers of God who were living in the desert. Quotes and phrases were shared and quoted by visitors to the desert monastics that developed into something of a a collective body of wisdom.

I discovered in reading In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers by John Chryssanvgis that any number of books have been written over the subsequent centuries about the lives, faith, and wisdom of these ascetic desert dwellers from early Christianity. In this particular book, Goodreads aptly describes the books’ content as “Words of spiritual counsel from the heart of early Christian monasticism.” For readers interested in reading more about desert mothers and fathers, In the Heart of the Desert provides a useful bibliography directing readers to additional books on this subject.

As an aside, one of my previous blog posts pondered the perceived relationship between types of geography – such as deserts – and how we perceive spiritual pursuits. That blog post can be read here.

Salvation history, the universe

September 5, 2025

I have lately been pondering how the grand scope of the universe – the many number of galaxies, etc. – factors into what God pays attention to.

When we think of God – with the finite perspective of people – we tend to think of God in terms of God’s relationship with us humans. About humanity’s “salvation history.” We humans are created in God’s image – we are loved by God so much that God gave his only son for our salvation. We humans are infinitely loved by God.

For much of Judeo-Christian history, humanity’s understanding of the universe – and the size of the universe – was much smaller than the understanding we have now. It was much simpler, in a sense, to think of God solely in terms of God’s relationship to our salvation history.

We now know so much more about the grandeur of the size of the universe.

To think of us now in terms of being made in God’s image and for us to be God’s children takes on a perspective of a very different scale.

God is infinite enough to love us and “know us by name” and “know the number of hairs on our head” AND simultaneously be engaged in the astro-physics/geology of a VERY LARGE universe. Wow. We now receive photos of galaxies far beyond anything people knew in previous centuries. Amazing. And, this makes God even more amazing to us – that God can “know the number of hairs on our head” and simultaneously know the full geographic scope of all the galaxies that exist. Does God watch in wonder at the colors and contours of various galaxies?

Yet, we with our human limitations struggle with the comparatively finite question of how to do a better job of “love God and love our neighbor.” Back to earth….. What can we do today to be good to our families, friends, neighbors?

Accompanying you in your faith journey