Insurmountable joy series#

Christie is that sure guide, showing us how even wrenching loss can take us to a place of rest and reflection, preparing us for the next stage of the journey.' - Columba Stewart, O.S.B.Rougelike Determination Get ready for a lot of dangerous pathways. We modern pilgrims, who so often have no idea where we are or where we are going, thirst for such wisdom, but we need a guide and interpreter. 'Douglas Christie's meditations on the terrible beauty of darkness, silence, and the limits to human understanding draw from the deepest sources of the Christian mystical tradition. Readers will be grateful to be in Christie's debt for the gift of this book, for all the beauty, insight, trust, and hope it bestows.' - Martin Laird, O.S.A., Professor of Early Christian Studies, Villanova University It probes the loves, the losses, the tender frailties of us all and reflects the author's unflinching conviction regarding the power of darkness to heal, to reveal love that never allows anyone to be lost. ' The Insurmountable Darkness of Love is remarkable not just for its depth of insight and its mining of the rich veins of the contemplative tradition, but also for its piercing honesty. This is a book to be pondered, even savored. The book daringly combines several different genres' - personal accounts of loss and gain meditations on the natural world and its role in spirituality and reflections on the significance of major apophatic thinkers and poets. 'Douglas Christie's The Insurmountable Darkness of Love is a moving exploration of apophatic experience and language in the contemporary retrieval of contemplation. I cannot think of a book with more heart or with such tenderness for our 'apocalyptic psyche.' His lyrical, learned, gentle book holds us to the 'blank, unnamed, empty, unknown,' where 'Love itself is a desert.'' - Lynda Sexson, author of Ordinarily Sacred and Margaret of the Imperfections But it takes a Laozi or a Thomas Merton to map it. 'Maybe the key word in all the world's religions is emptiness. At no time in human history have we needed a prophetic voice like Christie's as we do now.' - Gary Paul Nabhan, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother and author of Jesus for Farmers and Fishers

As our most poetic and compassionate scholar of contemplative practice, Douglas Christie guides us on a most profound journey into the darkness that underlies many mystical experiences, one that is ultimately redemptive. 'With all the tumult, chaos and uncertainty in our world, we need a spiritual compass to navigate the pain and suffering that is part and parcel of being soulfully alive today. It argues that our experience of contemplative spiritual practice can be revitalized by attending more carefully to the darkness that so often surrounds and courses through it, not only as part of personal practice but also as part of the shared work of recovering and deepening what the Christian mystical tradition often refers to simply as 'the common life.' Or what the thirteenth-century Flemish mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp calls 'the insurmountable darkness of love.' This book considers how critical retrieval of this poetry-especially that arising from ancient Christian traditions of the via negativa-can help us engage and respond to our own experiences of loss and absence. Contemplative practice rooted in unknowing reflects a deep respect for the unsayable, but also comes to expression in a rich and varied poetry of darkness that limns loss and absence with great delicacy, grace and courage. The book examines how a sustained, critical attention to apophatic spiritual traditions can help us respond to the gaps, silences, and empty places that have become such a prominent feature of contemporary experience. The primary aim of this book is to reconsider the meaning of darkness within mystical and contemplative thought and practice-especially as the ground and source of love.

Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Health.

Insurmountable joy series#

The European Society of Cardiology Series.Oxford Commentaries on International Law.