Penance after a Mental Block

Admitting What I Learned about Contemplation from Evangelicals…

It’s amazing how illogical our blind spots can be. When I’ve written about the many contributors that there have been to my understanding and appreciation of contemplative practices, I think freely of monks like Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington, John Main, Laurence Freeman, or, of course, Richard Rohr (and associates connected with CAC like Cynthia Bourgeault, James Finley, Barbara Holmes). Or I even dip into ancient monks like Evagrius, John Cassian, or priests like Isaac the Syrian.

I might think of Buddhists like Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön or Jack Kornfield, or Sufi poets like Rumi or Hafiz. I certainly think of Quakers like Parker Palmer or Thomas Kelly. And my sources can get quite varied: I’ll occasionally recall Howard Thurman and Anthony de Mello and even Catherine de Heuck Dougherty, Dorothee Soelle, Abraham Heschel, Wayne Muller, Morton Kelsey, Henri Nouwen, and Evelyn Underhill. I see contemplation everywhere except behind my Mental Block.

Then, the other day, I heard someone refer to their contemplative practice as their “quiet time” and, out of the blue, my Mental Block cracked open just enough to get a piece of my attention. Of course, I knew that when Evangelicals talk about “having devotions” or “prioritizing a quiet time,” a part of my brain knew that they were talking about practices that are clearly within the realm of “contemplative practices.” But I tucked that all away behind my Mental Block where I could ignore it. Associations with Evangelicalism have felt so frought in recent decades, that I didn’t want any of that taint on the love I have for contemplation.

I need to explain a bit of background. I grew up surrounded by Evangelical influences. I minimize that influence by emphasizing (honestly) that, growing up Mennonite, my main influences were quasi-Evangelical or “differently Evangelical,” but a lot of mainstream Evangelical language and practice were all around me. You might recall reading in a post a while back that, though my commitment to the nonviolent Anabaptist roots of my tradition kept me on the margins of Evangelicalism (even after being reluctantly drawn into the Vineyard movement for a time), it wasn’t until the build-up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 that I drew the line and disowned contemporary Evangelicalism. I wanted nothing more to do with a movement so divorced from the intention of “following Jesus” that they could not only accept but lead the way in championing the cold-hearted foolishness of war in Iraq.

Since that time, I have tried to honour all my roots and traditions, but I’ve continued resisting the typical cultural trappings of Evangelicalism – consciously and unconsciously. This has resulted in “the Mental Block” – my denial of the plain truth that Evangelicals taught me contemplation first. I need to come clean, starting with being honest with myself. This public expression is my penance.

I was a weirdly spiritual kid. I bought into the need for “daily quiet time” from an age so young I can’t remember, but I do know that when the Gideons gave me a New Testament in grade 5 (and the next year my Sunday School gave me a whole Bible), I read it every night. Maybe I was won over by the fact that my bus-driving dad would get up a half hour early every day (at 4:30am!) in order to have a quiet time with his Bible before starting his early shift. Within a few years I had developed a practice of reading every night (no early mornings for me) until I had underlined at least one passage – some idea that struck me as significant for life, that I could keep in mind for the next day. (I had unknowingly stumbled on a simple lectio divina.) And then I would say the Lord’s Prayer slowly, trying to mull over each line in something resembling a daily Examen. This was a time in my life when I had a more disciplined contemplative life than I would ever find later in life! And, yet, I have kept screening all this out when I think of my turn to contemplative Christianity during the past few decades. So much so that in my last post on contemplation, there was not the slightest hint of what Evangelicals taught me.

So, for example, I never mention how important it was for me to read C. S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer or John White’s The Fight and recall how these deepened my practices.

And, more strikingly, I’ve ignored how transformative it was when Richard Foster, in Celebration of Discipline, intentionally bridged the divide between classical Christian spirituality and the Evangelical church. I ate that book up as a young adult! I wanted all the disciplines, though by the time I was reading this I was married and having kids and never would find the discipline that had come naturally to me as a pre-teen.

And alongside these significant books were the more marginal reads of Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines, Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, J. I Packer’s Knowing God, or A. W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God, books that didn’t resonate a lot for me but probably still left a mark.

But the point is that a solid foundation for a life of contemplation was laid down for me long before I turned my back on Evangelicalism and set out for what I found to be the more life-giving classical forms of contemplative Christianity. And I have to be both honest about that and grateful. Early devotion to “quiet times” helped significantly in forming my character – a mixed influence for sure (a little too much guilt and too narrow of a focus on biblical text), but much that was good. Most directly, I would say that I experienced that there was a real meeting place between my spirit, the Spirit of God, and the sacred text, and that this meeting place could centre my life. Important as it’s been for me to find broader and deeper roots, I must set aside my Mental Block and admit this gratitude to myself and others.

Now, I can only hope and pray that any Evangelicals who still practice their own quiet times today, could find in that meeting place a potent call to the Spirit of Jesus even in the cacophony of noise in 2026 - and maybe that they would join me and many others in finding the riches waiting for them in a broader contemplative tradition.

[This is part of a series of posts exploring a contemplative pathway to healing/maturing that I call “a compassionate consent to reality.” For an introduction to the project, you may want to see this post here, or perhaps better, a summary here.

I’m so grateful for your interest and for any comments that you may have!]