The Corner of Fourth and Nondual

By Cynthia Bourgeault

In The Corner of Fourth and Nondual, a title inspired by Thomas Merton's moment of revelation 'at the corner of Fourth and Walnut' in his celebrated essay 'A Member of the Human Race', Cynthia Bourgeault--internationally renowned retreat leader, and a practitioner and teacher of centering prayer--describes the foundations of her theology: a cosmological seeing with the eye of the heart, and classic Benedictine daily rule informed and enlightened by wisdom from the Asian traditions. She explains the influence of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Teilhard de Chardin, Boehme, Barnhart, Keating, and Gurdjieff, among others in a philosophy built on the cornerstones of the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery, tied by the Trinity as a cosmogonic principle, the fundamental generative mechanism through which all things came into being.

In the My Theology series, the world's leading Christian thinkers explain some of the principal tenets of their theological beliefs in concise, pocket-sized books. There are sixteen titles total.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Jan 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781506484501

Cynthia Bourgeault

Modern day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally known retreat leader, Cynthia Bourgeault, is the author of several books: The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, and Love is Stronger than Death.

Book preview

1

The iCloud of Unknowing

THE FIRST AND most distinguishing characteristic of my work is that it’s practice-based. By this I mean that everything I think, know, or write about emerges out of a daily rule of life grounded in the classic Benedictine rhythm of ora et labora, ‘prayer and work,’ anchored by two daily periods of sitting meditation, morning and evening.

This may not strike you as anything particularly remarkable. I am still probably most widely known a teacher of Centering Prayer, and when you’re in the Centering Prayer movement, that’s just what you do. But in fact, the foundations of this spiritual habit were laid decades before I’d ever even heard of Centering Prayer and actually have less to do with personal devotion than with the hermeneutics of seeing. Centering Prayer is my ‘go to’ practice to keep the lens of perception clear.

I learned the difference between thinking and knowing very young in life through the fortuitous but at the time distinctly uncomfortable circumstances of my early upbringing when I found myself being shoved down two diametrically opposing pathways of spiritual knowledge at the same time. My mother was a faithful Christian Scientist, and from the time I was a toddler until my eighteenth birthday I was a dutiful conscript at Christian Science Sunday School, where we memorized long metaphysical formulas demonstrating the triumph of ‘infinite mind’ over ‘mortal error’. But my mother was also a strong a believer in Quaker education, and somehow funds were scraped together to send me to the local Quaker school for the early years of my education. Meeting for Worship was an unvarying part of the weekly curriculum, and in our corner of southeastern Pennsylvania, the cradle of American Quakerism, that meant silent meeting for worship.

Schoolbooks closed early on Thursday afternoons as the dismissal bell rang a little before two o’clock to announce meeting for worship. The entire student body, ages five to twelve, trooped into the cavernous old meeting house, and we took our seats on simple benches, well-worn from already two centuries of continuous use. I remember gazing up at the light filtering through the clerestory window and feeling a quiet spaciousness opening up inside me. After a while, the fidgeting and restlessness would settle down and the whole room would gradually fall into a sweet and intimate silence, punctuated occasionally by someone rising to offer a small bit of scripture or a prayer. In that enfolding silence, surrounded by the presence of Quakers who’d gone before, I experienced my first taste of what you might call ‘wordless presence’. And I knew I could trust it.

Fast forward thirty years, to 1989. I am by now an Episcopal priest, with ten years of service under my belt. I have a PhD in Medieval Literature, earned nearly a decade earlier and never put to full use, though I have done a fair bit of scholarly writing on the fourteenth-century spiritual classic The Cloud of Unknowing. I have at this point worked in a variety of parishes from Philadelphia to coastal Maine, chiefly in a teaching capacity. My parishioners are by and large well educated, verbal, and contentious. They like to argue about the creeds. I enjoy the intellectual jousts but escape whenever I can to

Reviews for The Corner of Fourth and Nondual

[Ryan Pryor · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant and clear. This is a must read for anyone hoping to incorporate a mystical tradition into a contemporary worldview.