Why today’s spiritual seekers are reviving ancient practices – Broadview Magazine

Some of Paula Pryce’s earliest memories are of meditating. She recalls being around four years old and waking before the rest of her family to creep out into their garden alone, where she would stand under their witch hazel tree and feel the hum of the universe. Then there were the meditation and chant circles her parents and their friends attended; she loved being allowed to sit in with the adults.
Pryce was born into a family where these interests were encouraged. Her mother had grown up Jewish (a faith with its own meditative traditions) and then converted to Anglicanism in adulthood; her Anglo-Indian father, while also a member of the Anglican Church, brought Hindu and Buddhist practices to their household. Their family was part of a community in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia that was tapped into all of these belief systems. She remembers meeting some of the first Tibetan Buddhist monks to arrive as refugees in Canada during the early 1970s; even as a young child, she found them “quite astonishing and amazing.”
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Pryce went on to earn a PhD in anthropology with a specialization in contemplative traditions, later publishing a book on contemplative Christianity in America. In a way, her childhood could be seen as a bellwether of things to come. Then, meditation in a Christian context was mostly the domain of convents and monasteries. These days, while it still might not be mainstream, it’s in line with a certain zeitgeist. Interestingly, much of this trend is taking place not just outside cloister walls, but outside the bounds of institutional Christianity.
On some level, this all makes perfect sense. Canada is becoming an increasingly secular country: over a third of Canadians reported no religious affiliation in the 2021 census, more than double the proportion in 2001. Christianity in particular has seen its numbers dwindle, with more and more people preferring to identify as atheist, agnostic or “spiritual but not religious” (a term so popular it has its own shorthand: SBNR).
At the same time, we are living in a period of increasing turmoil and political instability. Ours is an era of deep anxieties: about our economic future, about the climate crisis, about growing polarities. We also have unrelenting demands for our attention from things like smartphones, social media and a 24-hour news cycle. It’s no wonder that people are yearning for silence and spiritual solace.
Many are finding that much-needed comfort in contemplative spiritual practices. Cardus, a non-partisan Christian think-tank, worked in partnership with the Angus Reid Institute to publish a 2022 study on Canadians’ relationship with religion; in it, they note that several of the faith leaders they interviewed reported a resurgence of interest in “spiritual retreats that include extended periods of solitude or silence,” and an increasing appetite for transcendent experiences. Though there are no hard numbers, “practices that are viewed as offering that experience seem to be on the rise,” they write. Several of those practices are rooted in an ancient Christian tradition refined and codified through the writings of one 1,500-year-old source: St. Benedict.
Known as the father of western monasticism, Benedict of Nursia was born into the death throes of the Roman Empire. Just four years before his birth in 480 CE, the last Roman emperor, a 10-year-old named Romulus Augustus, was deposed by the barbarian soldier Odoacer. By the time Benedict died in 547, the entire Italian peninsula was engulfed in war.
“Benedict grew up in a war-torn, disease- and hunger-plagued land,” says Carmen Acevedo Butcher, religious scholar and author of Man of Blessing: A Life of St. Benedict. “The economy was weakened by this instability, civil wars and betrayals and lawlessness. It was a time of profound uncertainty and suffering for those not privileged; so as we watch and experience the United States’ collapse of democracy, the parallels are there.” She adds that this was “a time in which people were looking, searching desperately for what worked, what really works, what can help me heal.”
Benedict, longing to retreat from the world, spent some years as a hermit before founding a string of monasteries, the last and greatest of which was the Abbey of Monte Cassino. It was there that he composed the influential work that would become known as the Rule of Saint Benedict, a book of instructions for those who want to live a monastic life. Still in use today, Benedict’s Rule covers everything from when and how monks should pray, to the number of hours they should work, to what they should eat and drink (“two kinds of cooked food” at every meal with “fruit or fresh vegetables” when available, as well as a daily ration of a “generous pound of bread” and half a bottle of wine). It also contains what Acevedo Butcher refers to as the DNA of modern contemplative Christianity: lectio divina, or divine reading.
”It is a simple method of reconnecting us with that natural aptitude for the inner life, that simplicity of our childhood, once our adult minds have become over complex and busy,”
A type of prayer that’s more akin to meditation than reading, lectio divina invites the reader to immerse themselves in scripture and enter into a conversation with the divine. After all, the Gospel of John opens by telling us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And while this Benedict-prescribed practice of divine communion has continued in monasteries for the past 15 centuries, an updated version has gained prominence in the secular world in recent decades.
Centring prayer is an accessible form of Christian meditation created by Trappist monks Father Thomas Keating, Father William Meninger and Father Basil Pennington in the 1970s, another time of social, political and religious upheaval.
“Fr. Thomas began noticing in the 1960s a surge in the burning desire of spiritual seekers in the United States,” writes Pryce in her 2018 book, The Monk’s Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity. “[He] wondered why so many young Americans streamed past his abbey as they headed to a neighboring Buddhist temple, or why they went to ‘India by the thousands from all over the world…to satisfy their hunger for an authentic spiritual path.’”
Centring prayer has its roots in lectio divina, by way of an anonymous medieval work of Christian mysticism called The Cloud of Unknowing and the writings of 20th-century Trappist monk Thomas Merton; it also incorporates elements of Hindu and Buddhist meditation. Keating has described it as a contemplative technique of silent consent and self-emptying to the divine, in which practitioners choose a single word to use as a touchstone they can return to when their mind wanders. Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault, who was mentored by Keating and later helped found the Vancouver Island-based Contemplative Society, writes in her 2004 book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening that the practice is “a very simple method for reconnecting us with that natural aptitude for the inner life, that simplicity of our childhood, once our adult minds have become overly complex and busy.”
Centring prayer proved to be a hit with Christians of many denominations, as well as people with spiritual leanings but no religious affiliation, and it helped foster a popular practice of contemplation in non-monastic settings.
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It’s challenging to pin down a definition for contemplative Christianity today. Each practitioner experiences it in a different way, so by its very nature, it resists easy categorization. At its core, says Pryce, is an intimacy with the divine — something that can be found in the writings of Christian mystics throughout history, from St. Catherine of Siena in the 14th century, who claimed to have had a mystical wedding with Christ, to St. John of the Cross, whose 16thcentury poem Dark Night of the Soul portrays his union with God as a meeting of “the lover with His beloved.”
“There’s this deep sense of interaction and flow, and it’s quiet. There are exuberant kinds of ecstatic religions that get incredible emotional responses and feelings of connectedness, but this is much more subdued,” says Pryce. She describes the experience as being both inward and outward at the same time. “It’s almost like a receptivity that is emanating, or you might even call it an exchange of energy.”
One of the biggest names in the current movement is Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, author of several works on contemplative Christianity and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, N.M. Rohr has spent decades building on the work of Keating, Meninger, Pennington and others. In a 2019 interview with the Religion News Service, he mentioned that his largest audience wasn’t Catholics, but rather post-evangelicals. “The collectives are emerging outside of formal religion, for the most part,” he said.
“There’s a deep sense of interaction and flow, and it’s quiet. It’s almost like a receptivity that is emanating, or you might even all it an exchange of energy.”
This rings true for Rev. Rob Christ, pastor of Edmonds (Wash.) Presbyterian Church and host of the podcast Real Bible Rob, as well as YouTube and TikTok accounts under the same name, where he has spoken about his interest in contemplative practices. Christ has been a member of the Presbyterian Church his entire life, but while the church where he ministers is on the progressive end of the spectrum, he grew up in a much more conservative, evangelical congregation. He remembers being warned against meditative prayer as a young person in the 1970s and ’80s.
“I think part of that is that they’re very suspicious about the spirit,” says Christ. “You don’t want to have evil spirits come into your mind. They’re very suspicious about things like contemplative prayer, for example, because this idea of emptying yourself means that you’re not guarding against evil influences.”
Christ describes the faith tradition he grew up in as being very rigid, where people are either “in the club or out of the club — saved or not saved.” This means that when adherents begin to question one element of their belief system, it can cause the whole thing to unravel. For those rejecting what Rob Christ refers to as the “binary duality” of saved versus unsaved, the world of contemplative spirituality, which encourages practitioners to ask questions and explore grey areas, can have enormous appeal.
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Re-examining one’s beliefs in favour of contemplative spirituality isn’t limited to post-evangelical Christians, of course. Rev. Therese DesCamp, president of the Contemplative Society and author of Hands Like Roots: Notes on an Entangled Contemplative Life, moved from Catholicism to what she defines as “Christian — broadly so.” She was exposed to contemplative ideas early on, with parents who were Benedictine oblates (people who are affiliated with a Benedictine monastery but who aren’t monks or nuns) and read controversial works of Catholic philosophy by authors like Dorothy Day and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. DesCamp says she might have remained a Catholic herself, except that for as long as she can remember, she’s felt a call to the priesthood — something she fulfilled when she was ordained as a United Church of Christ (U.S.A.) minister in 1993 (transferring her standing to The United Church of Canada in 2011). It’s a call that feels intertwined with DesCamp’s contemplative leanings.
She says she once told a monk, “I can’t stand it. It’s like I have this yearning, and I just can’t stand it.” She recalls his reply: “Well, that’s God’s yearning in you.” Shocked by this insight, DesCamp says it made her realize that her spiritual longing “was something that had been planted in me. It wasn’t just me feeling inadequate.”
Many practitioners of contemplative Christianity describe a similar yearning, and many of them have struggled to satisfy it in mainstream churches. For Pryce, part of the problem is that quite a few Christian denominations have tried to maintain what she calls the hierarchical structure of the Romans, with an intermediary (or multiple intermediaries) between God and laypeople. And while some forms of Christianity that evolved out of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation rejected this hierarchy, those denominations also tended to lean more heavily on belief over practice. Consequently, most mainstream churches haven’t been good at truly teaching people how to foster an intimacy with the divine (though of course there are exceptions — both Pryce and Rob Christ mention the Quakers, whose worship meetings often involve extended periods of silent meditative prayer).
“How do you love your neighbour as yourself?” asks Pryce. “How do you actually do that? There’s not a lot of guidance [in many churches]. You know, they might say, ‘Pray on it’ or something, but how do you pray? So I would say that this is a longstanding problem with centuries of people being expected to fall in line and believe certain tenets and just follow along with what’s going on.”
It can be difficult for Christians who are drawn to contemplative practices to know where or how to begin. On top of that, DesCamp notes the tangible barriers to entering the contemplative world — retreats are expensive and require participants to have free time and the ability to travel. But she stresses that while she’s grateful for what she’s learned at retreats, they’re not necessary for a contemplative practice. Free or low-cost online resources can be helpful, from message boards, apps and Facebook groups to classes and YouTube videos. DesCamp also encourages people to look for in-person groups they can attend — or, if they don’t exist, to create them.
“I live in a community of maybe 500 people, and for the last 17 or 18 years, every month, a group has gathered [to engage in contemplative practices],” says DesCamp, who relocated 20 years ago from the California coast to inland British Columbia. “And that came about because I needed somebody to meditate with. So I just invited people, and then each of us did our own research and we brought our own resources. We brought our own capacity.”
It took time and exploration for Rev. Rob Christ to figure out what contemplative practice looks like for him. He prefers to engage in it through the written word, whether that means reading and memorizing something in Hebrew or sitting with a scriptural passage in the tradition of lectio divina. Early on, he found it beneficial to use a meditation app on his phone — he would set it for 20 minutes and try to sit in stillness, which was a challenge for his active mind. That helped him learn to balance his desire to focus his attention with the acceptance that sometimes his thoughts will wander.
For Pryce, who has tried many different meditation techniques over the years, what works best is centring prayer. “The intention is not to be in a steady state of empty mind,” she explains. Instead, “it’s the letting go. It’s the action of the willingness to let go. Some meditations are all about the focal point. You know, focus on a candle, focus on a word, focus on your breath. This one is about letting yourself release the focal point to allow space for the divine to come.”
To those seeking to develop their own contemplative practice, Pryce suggests walking prayer, a type of meditation where the body’s movement allows the mind to open up, or sitting in silence in a forest. She also recommends returning to the Benedictine motto ora et labora (“pray and work”) and fusing both into one action, an exercise referred to as conscious labour by philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff.
In a recent piece for the Contemplative Society’s website, titled “Whirling Water Dervishes,” Pryce reflects on a retreat where she experienced the trials and joys of manual labour as a gateway to sharpened attention. One fellow participant, Brigid, was near tears in describing her epiphany while slicing a cucumber: how she observed the place where its flesh was neither green nor white but was instead an area where each colour surrendered to the other, the way it annoyed her at first that the slippery slices went everywhere before a flash of insight helped her perceive it as an expression of sacred abundance.
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St. Benedict would surely be tickled by Brigid’s ability to encounter the divine through chopping a vegetable — after all, he spends several chapters of his Rule encouraging monks to “live by the labour of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did.”
It’s been well over a millennium since Benedict first set pen to paper (or rather, quill to vellum), and his ideas are still going strong. For author Carmen Acevedo Butcher, the abiding popularity of Benedict’s Rule can be attributed in part to its accessibility: its pithiness, its simple language, the way it avoids the harsh asceticism dictated by other monastic manuals and instead recommends a sensible daily schedule of work, prayer and rest.
Acevedo Butcher sees Benedict’s Rule as meeting people where they are, whether they’re beginners or advanced practitioners of their faith. In describing it, she paraphrases Pope Gregory the Great’s exposition of the Book of Job, which he said was like a river “which is both shallow and deep, wherein both the lamb may find a footing, and the elephant float at large.” The same could be said of the modern contemplative Christianity movement. While it’s not for everyone — no faith practice is — its many depths and variations put it in reach of almost anyone who feels drawn to contemplation. That’s not to say that it will be easy or immediately gratifying, but it does mean that it’s now much more accessible to those of us living outside monastery walls.
St. Benedict didn’t live to see a peaceful world; even during the period of relative stability when he was founding his monasteries, the threat of violence loomed. Yet he found a way to live through it, and the foundation he laid is still helping people find hope and meaning in difficult times.
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This article first appeared in Broadview’s November/December 2025 issue with the title “Modern Mystics.”
Anne Thériault is a journalist in Kingston, Ont. 
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