2012 Series   |  2013 Series   |  2014 Series

Fresh Perspectives on the Christian Mystic Way
Programme for 2013

All events are on Saturdays from 10.00am - 1.00pm (unless indicated)
in North London. Advance booking is recommended

‘To be contemplative as Christ is contemplative is to be open to all the fullness that the Father wishes to pour into our hearts. With our minds made still and ready to receive, with our self-generated fantasies about God and ourselves reduced to silence, we are at last at the point where we may begin to grow. And the face we need to show to our world is the face of a humanity in endless growth towards love, a humanity so delighted and engaged by the glory of what we look towards that we are prepared to embark on a journey without end to find our way more deeply into it, into the heart of the Trinitarian life. St Paul speaks (2 Cor 3.18) of how ‘with our unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord’ we are transfigured with a greater and greater radiance. That is the face we seek to show to our fellow human being. And we seek this not because we are in search of some private ‘religious experience’ that will make us feel secure or holy. We seek it because in this self-forgetting gazing towards the light of God in Christ we learn how to look at one another and at the whole of God’s creation’.

Dr Rowan Williams address, Rome, October 2012 www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles

Silence should teach you how to love. It is the road to communion as well as its fruit. By it you will learn how to agree with your brothers and sisters and find satisfactory balance between a life henceforth hidden with Christ in God, yet shared as the first way of expressing your mutual love…silence will teach you to build up the inner self which must each day be renewed in the image of its Creator. When you are troubled, tempted or tired, silence will set things right. It will teach you self-control, restraint, self-mastery….….in the crucible of silence you will learn holiness, since silence is the door to humility, contemplation and mercy. By leading you to self-forgetfulness, silence will allow you to discover God, and in the heart of God you will rediscover the world by God’s light.

Rule of Life, 33, 36 and 37, Communities of Jerusalem www.jerusalem.cef.fr