Fourth Way Benedictine

Honestly, I did not set out to create a Gurdjieff/Christian contemplative hybrid. I would not have had the imagination, much less the nerve. It all just sort of unfolded that way, gradually, over the course of a couple of decades. But in retrospect, I can see that the unfolding has been (and I hope will continue to be) a “win/win” for both pathways—not simply a happy accident, but more like a restored polarity. Each path has a piece of the puzzle; when you put them together in the right way, they can be dynamite.

I bumped into both Centering Prayer and the Gurdjieff Work basically in the same year, 1987. That was the year a copy of Thomas Keating’s Open Mind, Open Heart was quietly slipped into my hand during a Holy Week retreat at New Camaldoli monastery in California. Several months later, my on-and-off search to locate a real live Fourth Way group finally bore fruit, and I officially entered the Work in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Both of these new openings grew out of an inner restlessness that had been quietly gaining ground in me in the years following my ordination to the Episcopal priesthood. I was quietly in search of a Christianity that was deeper, fuller, less manipulative, more self-aware, and which was not continuously shooting itself in its foot in the gap between its lofty ideals and its ability to actually live them. I had been deeply struck by Jacob Needleman’s striking comment in his 1980 book Lost Christianity that asking Christians in their usual state of consciousness to follow the teachings of Christ was like asking stones to sprout wings and fly to the sea. The problem lay not in the ideal itself but in the nurturance of those wings. The Work proposed self-awareness, mindful presence. The contemplative path plunged me straight into silence, where, in the words of poet Dylan Thomas, “all your deeds and words, each truth, each lie, die in unjudging love.” Though I did not at the time really know the adab of either path, I caught the fragrance. And I was hooked.

Back in the early 1990s there were as yet no such thing as Wisdom Schools, at least not in the lineage I now tend. I led straight up Centering Prayer retreats following the template developed by Thomas Keating in his Contemplative Outreach network. My Gurdjieff connection I kept pretty much to myself, using it purely and simply for my own inner work; I suspected (probably correctly) that any connection to what was still widely regarded as a “cult” would not play well with my largely conventionally Christian audiences. I was equally tight-lipped with my new Gurdjieff cronies, many of whom already regarded me with a certain suspicion because of my Christian affiliations. But as long as the left hand did not (formally) know what the right hand was doing, I could continue to quietly feed myself with both hands. And so I did.

That worked well enough for a few years. Then out of the blue St Benedict called the question on me.

Well, not quite out of the blue. Gradually my twain paths started to converge; if truth be told, they simply have too much in common NOT to. On the Christian contemplative side, folks in my groups began to grow a bit bored of simply running the Contemplative Outreach programs and Thomas Keating’s “psychologically updated” version of the classic contemplative path. They wanted a deeper immersion in the full-on tradition itself. The Christian monastic template was already in my heart and blood; and thus the Rule of St Benedict quietly entered my teaching mix, a text which for more than 1500 years has given both the outer form and the inner spark to the Christian monastic pursuit of spiritual transformation.

On the outside, the Rule may simply look like a schedule for how a monk is to spend his day. But on the inside, it is an early run up-on what Christian mystical tradition calls theosis, or “divinization,” which really boils down to the transformation of consciousness. Through my Gurdjieffian lens, I could begin to see the Rule through a whole new light, a perspective that still escapes many Benedictine practitioners who often miss the forest for the trees. The Rule is a precocious sixth century handbook for what we nowadays call “conscious evolution.” And at the heart of its transformational formula, as most people know, is Ora et Labora: the intentional, rhythmic juxtaposition of spiritual aspiration and practical work.

Exactly the template I was now encountering in the Gurdjieff Work, which basically relies on this same archetypal pattern, but turns it in a slightly different way, toward honing skills of self-observation and three-centered intelligence. Once the lightbulb went off, I realized that all I needed to do was with my contemplative retreat groups was to shift the daily work chores (like cooking, cleaning up, housekeeping) from a “helpful do-gooder” model to a path of conscious, intentional work with an inner task—and the Wisdom School format was born.

In their overall aim and pedagogy the Gurdjieff work and the Christian contemplative path are pretty much polar opposites. The contemplative path is all about surrender, letting go, sacrifice—which, as Thomas Keating once poignantly explained, means “to give up whatever self you are.” It is a path of pure diffusion, a freewill offering of everything that one has and is. The Gurdjieff path is a path of concentration; the overarching aim is to “crystallize” something in oneself in order to build a permanent individuality that can survive one’s physical death. To avoid at all costs becoming “food for the moon.” Its premier tool is a concentrated and increasingly more masterful wielding of attention, the very tool that Centering Prayer seems to be encouraging us to loosen our grip on.

I always wondered why this did not feel schizophrenic to me. But in fact, it didn’t and still doesn’t. In ways that continue to surprise me, opposites do in fact attract and come together to create a polarity. At very least I find that these two distinct spiritual pathways do tend to knock the worst edges off each other: the contemplative’s to a pleasant, dissociative sort of inner numbness that can become a seedbed for manipulation and sentimentality; the Work’s to anxiety, as people take on so solemnly the full weight of building their own inner self, lest they “die like a dog.” I relish the polarity between them; for me it has been both a respite and a mirroring. Maybe even a leveraging. I guess I would say that in my own case the surrender current runs a little stronger. It comforts me to know that even after my best efforts and all that high striving have come to naught, I can—and eventually will—simply yield myself up and say, “Into your hand, I commend my spirit.” This small measure of ease allows me to embrace the Work as a path of gratitude, not a desperate means to the end. A freewill offering for all that has been laid before me and all that I will hand back (whether actualized or not) when my time comes ripe for it all to “die in unjudging love.”

And to hear Gurdjieff laugh??? To feel the Work playful and joyful like Adam and Eve in paradise? That just might be the most delicious fruit on the vine, although I admit it is still quite rare.