‘A Spiritual truth to which our culture and society have so successfully numbed us is that the contemplative life is not a luxury or a quaint pastime but a matter of grave spiritual, social, and now even planetary urgency.’ Vincent Pizzuto, Contemplating Christ: The Gospels and the Interior Life, p90
There are countless reasons why the Church (understand the people of God, the Body of Christ in the world) is in need of reclaiming and renewing the contemplative life as a normative part of the life of faith. In this paper I focus primarily on one reason among many, though they are, undoubtably, all interconnected. And that reason is the need to resist the tyrant in troubled times. In order to resist the tyrant abroad, that is beyond oneself, one first must resist the tyrant at home, that is within oneself. The contemplative life enables this resistance in both directions.
And so I want to share with you something of my journey, into an understanding of contemplative resistance, which for me is only just beginning. I don’t speak with particular expertise, or depth of knowledge, but with a heart seeking an authentic contemplative response to the world in which I live as both a human being and as a parish priest.
After introducing myself and my context, this paper will briefly touch on the interior and exterior dynamic of contemplative resistance, before seeking to introduce and attend to contemplative voices of resistance from recent American history. I do this, in the hope that we may find in those voices some wisdom, or at least a way of walking in the world, that may speak to people desperately wondering what on earth we do in the midst of our current social, political and global turmoil. Such turmoil is perhaps always current, but feels new to each generation.
I am an American and naturalised British citizen who has spent more than twenty years living in the UK and ministering in the Church of England and Church in Wales. In these years I have been journeying more deeply into a contemplative understanding of life. Here I am understanding the contemplative life very broadly as a life-long process of seeking to become evermore attentive to the presence of God in all things and the fundamental unity of all things in God. I left the USA shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11 in 2001 when George W Bush was president; and I returned to the USA to minister in a small Episcopal church in New Hampshire in the spring of 2023 during the middle of Joseph Biden’s presidency. With all that has transpired in the life, culture, and politics of the USA in the twenty or so intervening years, it is as though I have returned as a stranger to my own country of origin.
I have returned to an America whose long present deep political and social divisions seem to have become an uncrossable chasm. The beginning of the second administration under Donald Trump in 2025 has brought with it radical change and upheaval, both domestically and globally, around issues of immigration, human rights, voting rights, environmental policy, economic policy, foreign policy, education policy, health policy, tariffs, taxes, executive branch power, checks-and-balances… the list goes on and on and on. On one side of the great divide some are encouraged, optimistic and hopeful. On the other side people are seized with existential fear, anger and distress. Others perhaps, find themselves in the depths of the chasm wondering at what has happened and where we go from here. And while this may in some ways be the way it has always been, in many ways it feels more extreme than ever before.
In the midst of it all, I have found myself wondering what it means, as a priest of God, to minister and to lead a congregation of mixed political persuasion. New Hampshire is a very ‘purple’ state, and my congregation a very ‘purple’ congregation. The Diocese of New Hampshire and the colleagues among whom I serve might be considered decidedly ‘blue’. Christians on both sides of the divide, whether ‘red’ or ‘blue’, I am sure would suggest that we are not in fact defined by political colours, but by the demands of the gospel of Christ as we understand them.
Many of my congregation members support the conservative agenda, if not all the particular decisions and actions of the current administration. Many others are attending protests, rallies and seeking a way to resist what feels like the systematic dismantling of democracy and the implementation of radically unjust and inhumane policies. Those who stand in opposition recall the days of the Civil Rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War and Nuclear Weapons, where faith leaders stood at the front of those marches and allowed their voices to be heard in various ways. Or they recall the cautionary story of the complicit silence of the German church under Hitler. These reflections drawn from past history perhaps simplify and pass over the complexity of the reality of those times, and yet the questions they raise in this present moment are critical and urgent. Many are asking what is the ‘church’ to do to resist the tyranny of today? Those who stand in support of our current direction as a nation believe that this is the work in which they are already engaged.
How do we resist the tyrant in troubled times?
As I have been wrestling with these questions I have wondered how the contemplative life, which is so much a part of my way of being, as well as ministering, in the world, is relevant as a lived response to the current context in which I live.
I found a launching point into the exploration of this question in one of the chapters of Vincent Pizzuto’s book Contemplating Christ. In itPizzuto introduces the Herod of the Slaughter of the Innocents as a paradigm for the resistance of tyrants in the contemplative life. Pizzuto calls his readers to recognize that the tyrant of Matthew chapter 2, is a tyrant that lives within each of us; that is the false-self who seeks survival at all costs. And unless we are able to recognize, address and resist the tyrant within, we will be unable to resist the tyrants without, whatever they may be, without becoming a tyrant ourselves. This is resonant with the common pattern of contemplatives, stretching back to the desert fathers and mothers of Egypt… and to Jesus, who went out into the wilderness to ‘wrestle with their demons’. This is part of the work that gets done as part of the contemplative life.
There is so much more to unwrap on this point — but I only want to set it out now as an important initial marker on the journey of discovery as to why the contemplative life is indispensable, and certainly not ‘a luxury or a quaint pastime’ when it comes to the resistance of evil. In a world in which finger-pointing, indignation and condemnation of others is part of the air we breath in social media, mass-media, as well as in our coffee shops and dining table conversations, this ability for self-reflection and self-knowing which the contemplative life enables is perhaps a pre-requisite for holy resistance. Here we learn where and how to stand in the world.
A Journey into Contemplative Resistance
As I continued to wrestle with my own response and responsibility as a priest and was beginning to consider what contemplative resistance might mean, I did what we do with every question we have these days. I googled it. Specifically I googled ‘Contemplative Resistance Books’. I wanted to see what others had to say. One of the ‘hits’ at the top of my search was James Douglas’ Resistance and Contemplation. I had not heard of James Douglas before, but it turns out his was something of a seminal book for young catholic resisters and protestors in America in the late 20th century.
Reading Douglas’ book and recognising the people in his network of relationships, I realised I had found at least some of my conversation partners, namely Daniel Berrigan SJ, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton OSCO, and Thich Nhat Hanh. As I began to explore this network of contemplative resisters of the 1960’s, I became aware of the profound influence Mahatma Gandhi had on those who were protesting the Vietnam War and the Nuclear Arms Race and who were the championing the Civil Rights Movement.
However voices were missing from the conversation that I was seeking to have, particularly those of Black Americans at the heart of the Civil Rights movement. We are familiar with the names, stories and faith of Martin Luther King JR, Jesse Jackson, and John Lewis, and perhaps a little less so with that of Howard Thurman, a contemplative teacher and faith leader whose teaching had a profound effect on King, Jackson, Lewis and others who were at the frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, some have criticised Thurman for not being in the frontline, though I would argue that his role, like that of Merton, was one of creating and holding the space through his teaching and writing from which others might draw insight, inspiration and strength. Crucially, Thurman, like Merton, introduced people to the contemplative journey where the inner tyrants could be identified and resisted whilst facing down the outer tyranny encountered in the world. Both Martin Luther King Jr and Jesse Jackson carried Thurman’s book Jesus of the Disinherited, with them in their travels and it was Thurman who encountered Gandhi in India and introduced his teachings of non-violence to King and others. One of Thurman’s response to his context was to be part of the founding of an inter-racial, inter-faith house of worship in California, a community that sought to enact MLK’s dream and vision of the beloved community, the kingdom of God.
One final question that has been significant for the direction my journey has taken was: who are the contemplative women of the black church in America at that time with whom I should also be in conversation? In researching this question (ie googling again) I came across several women who were described as contemplatives, but whom we might otherwise identify as activists, including such familiar names as Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer, and the perhaps less well known name of Thea Bowman, FSPA and others. There was however, little that spoke of the contemplative dimension of their prayer life or faith and I was left wondering.
I was not sure how to draw them into this conversation until I came across a book by Barbara Holmes’ entitled Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, a book which has profoundly disrupted my framework of contemplative understanding. As she brings to light the history and heritage of contemplative practice in the Black Church in America, she reaches back to indigenous African practice and the Early Church roots in North Africa, and it becomes clear that as outsiders we do not recognise the contemplative practices of the Black Church because they don’t fit neatly into the descriptions and definitions and experiences of contemplative practice as we have inherited them from a predominately white European, primarily monastic, context.
Holmes argues that many of the contemplative practices of the Black Church in America finds its roots in such things as call and response, singing, drumming and dance, and that these practises are communal. They are shared experiences that bind community together. Very un-still. Very un-silent. And very inter-personal. According to the testimony of Holmes, they are practices which enable a person to focus their energies and attention in a way which puts them in touch with the transcendent reality and presence of God and brings them into union with God and one another. This I do recognise as being at the heart of contemplative practice, whether silent or vocal, still or in motion, solitary or in community.
As a person just coming into contact with these different expressions of contemplative practice, it makes sense to me, that for a people who have for a significant period of history have experienced the use of silence, isolation and disconnection, as well as violence, as part of a system of oppression, such vocal, active and communal means of contemplation would be part of a true liberation of being. Forged out of the experience of slavery and oppression Holmes calls it crisis contemplation. It also strikes me as having something to say about fully embodied, physical contemplative experience that is truly incarnational.
This kind of vocal, physical embodied, communal practice upsets an understanding of contemplative life that views it as primarily that which happens in silence and stillness, before, or perhaps after, voice and body are engaged in action. In this new light, the very act of remaining seated on the bus or at a cafe counter, facing down dogs and firehoses, or marching and singing together in nonviolent resistance require a centredness of being and solidarity that is itself a form of very embodied contemplative practice.
Having caught something of a glimpse of this in the testimony of others, I am not in a position to say any more about it, certainly not at this stage, as it is not my lived experience or story, but that of sisters and brother to whom I hope to be able to listen, and from whom I hope to learn, and with whom I hope to share as the journey continues.
Putting flesh on the bones
This is as far as I have come for now, and so I want to conclude by putting some flesh on the bones of my thinking and tentatively offering some identifying qualities of ‘contemplative resistance’, before sharing the actual practice this exploration is inspiring in my own life and context.
Contemplatives throughout the centuries from Thomas Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, Meister Ekhart, and Theresa of Avila, to Thomas Merton and Howard Thurman, insist in different ways that the authenticity of the contemplative life is revealed in the fruit of love it bears in the world — making us not perfect, but cultivating the slow growth of the spirit, making us more capable of love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The bearing of this fruit is itself a form of holy resistance to the corruption of evil and tyranny in the world. One can say then, that all contemplative practice is in some way a practice of holy resistance; and yet, particularly in turbulent times, there are certain contemplative qualities that may be amplified, to give life and strength to that resistance. The qualities I name here have been drawn from my engagement with the contemplative resistors I’ve mentioned above.
Contemplative Resistance is:
1. Incarnational — Contemplative resistance affirms and engages fully in the world of matter and body, seeing and loving God present in all things, as well as incarnating God by our living. In contrast the tyrant denies God’s presence in the world and in others by the unlove shown towards both the human and more than human world, and by setting themselves in the place of God.
2. Kenotic/Self-emptying — With Christ as our model, contemplative resistance is not self-seeking or self-preserving, but it is an outpouring of self whilst simultaneously receiving the inpouring of Godself. In contrast the tyrant is self-focused and extractive, seeking to save and protect and defend to the detriment and diminishment of others.
3. Cosmic/Universal/Inclusive — In recognising God as the source and ground of all being (not just my being) contemplative resistance embraces all that is as part of the incarnation of God and recognises the kinship of all creation. In contrast the tyrant is intensely tribal, separating and dividing, making others of any who, by virtue of their difference is perceived as a threat to their ‘kingdom’ and way of being.
4. Non-violent — In recognising the unity of all things, contemplative resistance also recognises the impossibility of any kind of violence; recognising also the imperative to love God, self, neighbour and enemy alike. In contrast the tyrant will use violence, whether physical or otherwise, subtly or explicitly, to protect, preserve and defend their own interests at all costs.
5. Objectless — Contemplation is not practiced to attain any object or goal, not even peace. One might say not even God, as God is not object to be attained. And so contemplative resistance is not a method or a technique by which to attain peace or justice or the overcoming of tyranny. Contemplation, by its very nature is resistant to the tyrant both internal and external, but this is the fruit of a practice which has no justification or purpose, other than being a fundamental good in and of itself and that for which we have been created, namely union/communion with God and all things in God. In contrast the tyrant will happily employ good methods and techniques to achieve its own goals and ends; employing prayer and ritual for self-seeking, and at times even evil, communion destroying ends.
Discerning my own call to contemplative resistance
Listening to the testimonies of the contemplative resistors of 1960’s America one sees that there are many different ways of incarnating a call to contemplative resistance. From Merton in the monastry, to Thurman in his pastoral work and teaching, to Berrigan, Day, King and Hamer on the front lines of varying kinds of non-violent protests. I would argue that that call to contemplative resistance is universal and possible for all God’s people. As Pizzuto puts it, ‘the incarnation has made mystics of us all.’ It is then for each of us to discern, perhaps daily, the particular way in which we are called to embody this part of our identity as God’s people.
My heart felt response to the place and context in which I find myself is a strong desire to turn more deeply to prayer and to some expression of the religious life which has long been part of my personal exploration of faith and vocation. I have come to understand the choice for the religious life itself as a prophetic act of contemplative resistance. My current context as a parish priest means this is not a choice I am able to make for myself, at least not at this time. However, my current context does afford me the flexibility in which I am able to shape a way of life that reflects something of the prophetic resistance I sense within the religious life.
In October I will begin a monastic experiment in the parish, keeping a five fold office of prayer and maintain a simplicity of life in which others will also be able to share and experience something of the rhythm of monastic prayer, at least for a few days of the week. In its choice for God, for prayer, and for simplicity there is within it an implicit resistance to that in society which is self-focused, violent and consumptive.
As part of that rhythm, I am proposing a weekly peace walk to the civic gazebo (aka a bandstand) at the centre of the town, in order to spend a period of time in silent prayer for the nation and the world, before walking back to the church.
And finally, before I stumbled into the consideration of contemplative practices in the Black Church, I had already felt the desire to connect with a local black majority church in order to be connected in faith to brothers and sisters, when society and culture for so long seem to conspire to keep us apart. There is an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church[1] not far from my parish which meets at 12pm on a Sunday, meaning that I am able to lead worship and still make it in time to join with the AME Zion congregation afterwards. It is my intention to make this part of a monthly pattern. This will also be a context that will open a window into the worshipping and contemplative life of part of the Black Church which I hope will continue to broaden my own horizons of faith and contemplative practice and resistance.
In this nexus of practice and relationship, I trust there will be both a continued deepening of contemplative life and a strengthening of resistance to all that would act against the life of God in the world. And so the journey into contemplative resistance continues. I wonder where your journey is taking you?
About the Author
Rev. Leah Philbrick, Vicar of Trinity Episcopal Church, Hampton, New Hampshire, The Diocese of New Hampshire
While Rev Leah Philbrick grew up on the Seacoast of New Hampshire, she began her ministry in the Church of England where she spent seven years as a youth minister in London, England before training for ordained ministry in 2009. After completing her curacy in the Diocese of Southwark in South London, she moved to the valleys of south Wales in 2014 where she served as Community Chaplain in the Parish of Bedwellty and New Tredegar, later becoming the Team Vicar. During her time of ministry in Wales she was engaged in multi-agency partnerships seeking to address local poverty and social issues. Within the church congregation there was a great focus on engaging with children, families, and individuals in the local area, including through a volunteer-run community coffee shop and foodbank. Before her return to New Hampshire in 2023, Leah spent 10 months living alongside a Benedictine community of men and women at Mucknell Abbey in Worcestershire, England.
Bibliography
Books
Berrigan, Daniel, The Dark Night of Resistance, New York, Doubleday & Company, 1970
Douglas, James, Resistance and Contemplation, New York, Doubleday & Company, 1972
Holmes, Barbara A., Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2017
Pizzuto, Vincent, Contemplating Christ: The Gospels and the Interior Life, Minnesota, Liturgical Press, 2018
Thurman, Howard, Jesus of the Disinherited, Beacon Press, Boston, 1949
Thurman, Howard, With Head and Heart, New York, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1979
Merton, Thomas, The Hidden Ground of Love, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985
(including letters to Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, James Douglas, Jim Forest)
Nutt, Maurice J., Thea Bowman: Faithful and Free, Minnesota, Liturgical Press, 2019
Articles
Forest, Jim, Contemplation and Resistance: A dialogue between Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan, 1973, https://paceebene.org/blog/2020/8/31/contemplation-and-resistance-a-dialogue-between-thich-nhat-hanh-and-daniel-berrigan
Douglas, James – Nonviolence and Metanoia, Katallagete, 5 no 2 1974 p28-31
Berrigan, Daniel – Dear friends in Christ – On the death of Jonathan Daniels, Katallegete, 1 no 2, 1965
Fannie Lou Hamer, Freedom Summer, Article, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-hamer/
Documentaries & Biopic Films
Backs against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story, Directed by Martin Doblmeier, Journey Films, 2019 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVl_irB59lM)
Fannie Lou Hamer’s America: America ReFramed, World, (YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h2MzXavgEg)
Fannie Lou Hamer’s America: Beyond the Lens, World, (YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h2MzXavgEg)
Bowman, Thea “Address to U.S. Bishops” (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2021), conference presentation, June 17, 1989, (YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOV0nQkjuoA)
Gandhi, Directed by Richard Attenborough, Columbia Pictures, 1982
[1] Officially founded in 1821 in New York City, with its beginnings traced back to 1796. This was one of a number of churches established by Black Christians to give full rights to black people, who though in places were included in the Methodist Episcopal and Baptist churches were not given full equality and representation and often segregated within the congregations. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth were all members of the AME Zion Church.