A Life Between Worlds

Cynthia Bourgeault is a theologian, Episcopal priest, and one of the most influential contemporary voices in Christian contemplative practice. Her work draws together the Christian mystical tradition, the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, and decades of lived experience in contemplative formation, including her leadership in founding Wisdom Schools.

In this conversation with Matthew Dillon, Research Associate and host of the Center for the Study of World Religions’ Pop Apocalypse series, Bourgeault reflects on a life shaped by early encounters with silence, the tensions within modern Christianity, and the search for a path that unites attention, surrender, and embodied practice. What emerges is a vision of spiritual life lived, as she puts it, between worlds—grounded in tradition, yet oriented toward transformation.

What was your relationship to Christianity growing up? Did you always feel called in this direction, or was it more distant at that time?
I had a kind of interesting, challenging religious upbringing as a child. I grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania, in the heart of old Quaker country, and from my earliest elementary school days I was sent to a Quaker school where we had meeting for worship once a week.
Those of us between the ages of five and twelve would troop into this old meeting house and sit down on the old brown benches. The light filtered in, and it was the first time I was quite sure of a presence—a holy presence. I did not have much language for it then.

At the same time, we were not Quakers. My mother was a Christian Scientist, and I was absorbing very complex metaphysical premises. I could never quite bring the two together: on the one hand, God as an ultimate metaphysical principle, and on the other, simply feeling this presence in the meeting house.
I think the struggle between those two positions must have touched something in me that was already an early seeker. By the time I was seventeen, I knew my path was going to be deeply involved with these great spiritual questions.

You went into medieval studies. What drew you to sacred drama and music?
There were no departments of religious studies where I was studying, so I wound up in medieval literature. I had originally planned to work in modern poetry, but I gravitated toward the medieval. A manuscript of one of the English mystery plays had just appeared, and I began working on that.
At the same time, I was already involved in early music in a performance way. So I immediately perked up an ear and thought: why are we just studying these works? Why not perform them?
When I emerged from Penn with my PhD, the only job available was in Lubbock, Texas, and I was not about to go. Then I discovered an Episcopal seminary right near campus. I walked into the dean’s office and said, essentially, have I got a deal for you. They were not going to pay me, but I was allowed to take one theology course per semester. It was like falling into a trough of honey.
That was also the period when women’s ordination was really gearing up in the Episcopal Church. Everything came together. My medieval background gave me a sense of liturgy and spirituality from a much wider perspective—the handing off between beauty as experienced in art and beauty as experienced in mystical theology.

Later, you encountered Gurdjieff’s work. What drew you there?
One of the questions that tormented me was how a religion centered on the most radically inclusive, generous, compassionate teacher could so often express itself in rigid, polarizing, and exclusivizing ways.

Where was the disconnect?
When I read Jacob Needleman’s Lost Christianity, I realized he was circling that same question. He suggested that something was missing—what the Buddhists might call a middle way—and that it had to do with practice.
So I began looking for groups. But how do you find a Gurdjieff group? In the 1980s, it was virtually impossible. They hid. You worked on becoming a more conscious person, but you never spoke of Gurdjieff. You expressed the teachings through secular modes, often in the arts.

At the same time, you were drawn toward Christian contemplative practice, especially centering prayer. What brought you there?
In a way, it brought me back to the quiet, light-filled presence I had known as a child. Through Needleman’s book, I learned about Trappist monks experimenting with centering prayer, and eventually I found my way to a monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, where I took a ten-day immersion retreat.
It was like coming home again. Centering prayer is a simple practice for letting go of the thoughts that pull your attention outward and regrouping yourself inward, more down in your body. Every time a thought comes up, you let it go.
Thomas Keating used to say that for twenty minutes twice a day, you get to take a brief vacation from yourself.

Did Gurdjieff’s work and centering prayer feel in tension?
For a long time, yes. One emphasizes attention and effort; the other emphasizes letting go. What really put it together was meeting a hermit monk, Raphael Robin, who had been a self-taught student of the Gurdjieff work for decades. He showed me how to put together the path of Christian mystical contemplation and Gurdjieffian mindfulness. At a certain point I asked myself: if my head says this is a tension, why isn’t my body feeling it like a tension? That shifted things.
Gurdjieff has been the best counterbalance I have found for the tendency of the heart to dissolve into sentimentality. His work insists on three-centered awareness: the intelligence of the head, the emotional center, and the moving or kinesthetic center. But I also had to balance Gurdjieff with Thomas Keating.
You cannot do anything real in spiritual practice if you are dominated by anxiety. A lot of people in the Gurdjieff work begin with the sense that they have to improve themselves, become real, grow the second body. But fear is never a true motivator of wholeness.
One day I realized: what is so bad about being food for the moon? From centering prayer, I learned that the one freedom that always remains is the freedom to give it away. That took out the anxiety of having to reach some minimal baseline of achievement. I could be sincere out of love, not out of fear.

Your work often speaks about living between worlds—the finite and the imaginal. Can you say more about that?
Human beings stand with one foot in two worlds. We stand with one foot in the embodied, finite world, and one foot in what has come to be called the imaginal—the realm just beyond this one, more fluid and permeable.
The task is not to leave the finite behind. The finite is real, and the infinite is real. As long as we are in a body, we are responsible for holding that place of exchange.
In my relationship with Rafe, this became very real. After his death, I did not experience visions or messages, but a continuation of the same atmosphere, the same energy field that surrounded our encounters while he was still alive. It was a direct transmission of presence, a continuation of work between the worlds.

Your work also speaks often about the heart. What does it mean to put the mind in the heart?
At the most basic level, it means getting the mind out of the head. We spend too much time with our basic sense of identity buzzing around inside our heads, chasing its own tail with rumination, projection, and fantasy.
But the heart should not be isolated or romanticized. The danger is to make the heart do the whole job by itself. Then it can become overwhelmed—by sentimentality, by pain, by compassion that has no grounding.What matters is the flow, the continuous inner circulation of the whole being. The heart is powerful, but it needs to be held within the larger integration of the body, the centers, and the whole energetic system.

How has silence or hermitage shaped your spiritual development?
Silence cuts through evasion. So much of our life—our busy work, materialism, intellectual projects, identity projects—is designed to keep us from having to feel directly: what is this?
Rafe used to speak of being called into the bare self. Everything in you wants to run from it, but you stay. The absence of God is the presence of God.

What silence teaches is not withdrawal as a lifestyle. Hermit isn't a lifestyle. Contemplative isn't a lifestyle. It's a full-on engagement, a way of being real in the life you're in. Once you've found that place and stabilized yourself in it, you can come back and do the work you have to do without being roped in by all the definitions, projects, and worthy activities that go flying by. You can live in the midst of chaos and brokenness and still find that point of orientation that comes from beyond the conditions of this world.

How do the Wisdom Schools respond to what people are seeking today?

Many people come because something is missing. They sense the depth of Christianity, but not the way to embody it. In a sense, I am still responding to Jacob Needleman's challenge: Christianity needs a middle way that connects the loftiness of its aspiration with a real practice.

The Wisdom Schools are rooted in the Christian mystical tradition, but they draw on a broader contemplative understanding. I sometimes describe them as St. Benedict meets Gurdjieff. Building on St. Benedict's rhythm of ora et labora—prayer and work—the schools move through prayer and work, alone and together: prayer alone, prayer together, work alone, work together.

People learn to remain grounded in the classic Christian disciplines—contemplative prayer, lectio divina, common worship—but also to look carefully at the work of ordinary life: the crafts, study, and all the things people normally use to exercise their talents and assert their identity. The point is not to reject those things, but to become conscious within them.

The Wisdom School takes people on an orderly journey through those different modes of practice, allowing contemplation and action gradually to inform one another.

People practice this so that they can become more able to forgive their religion, to see it through different eyes, to grow into a more genuinely esoteric understanding of Christianity, and, essentially, to become better Christians.