Evelyn Underhill and the
“Mysticism of Ordinary Life”
Evelyn Underhill has long been recognized as a pioneer in the retreat movement in the Church of England, and as a highly regarded spiritual director and writer. The author of more than twenty-five books, she was the English language’s most widely read writer on prayer, contemplation, spirituality, worship and mysticism in the first half of the 20th century.
That is the outward, public face of her life and work.
What we explore in this quiet day is the more private aspect of her faith journey—the remarkable way her own spiritual growth, lived out in the context of her “ordinary life,” followed the pattern of the mystic’s development outlined in her most famous scholarly work Mysticism about the soul’s movement from restless surface to quiet depth, to reemerge in heroic “divine fecundity.”
We also compare the shape of this inner journey with the 11th century Camaldolese Benedictine wisdom of the “three-fold good” of the monastic life (experienced as monk in community, hermit in solitude, missionary in the world) and ponder how our own God-ward paths might be seen in that light.