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Evelyn Underhill
Theologian and Mystic
d. 15 June 1941
One of the twentieth
century’s significant Christian figures, Evelyn Underhill was a prolific writer on
the spiritual life, a sane and encouraging spiritual director, and a promoter of the
retreat movement who has been highly influential in the Anglican tradition. She was a
woman whose own spiritual journey was long and painful, but who in her life mixed
mysticism with common sense and has helped many to grow in faith.
She was born into a comfortable middle-class family in 1875 but not, as she said, "brought up to religion". Confirmed into the Church of England at fifteen, she was into her thirties before she began to seriously explore the spiritual life. Travels abroad with her husband put her in touch with religious art which brought a new dimension into her life. She also began to read philosophy and poetry and was drawn to mysticism.
In her writing she emphasised a complete trust in God – "Lord help me to trust you through thick and thin". She sought to establish the uniqueness of Christianity – "in the depth of reality revealed by the cross, Christianity stands alone", but her approach to personal religious experience had much in common with other faiths, and perhaps her finest book Worship expresses a deeply ecumenical approach to liturgical worship.
Miss Underhill taught that the life of contemplative prayer is not just for monks and nuns, but can be the life of any Christian who is willing to undertake it. It was Evelyn Underhill's conviction that the one hope for the future depends on a mystic approach to life. By "mysticism" she does not mean paranormal spiritual experiences but, rather, "a robust common sense," "a vivid sense of the presence and transcendence of God" and an acceptance of "human nature as it really is in its limitations and weakness."
Thus does God effect often surprising transformations. Who would have thought that this well-bred Edwardian gentlewoman, who had received little formal education, would become the first woman lecturer in religion to appear in the Oxford University list? Or that this unlikely scholar would become a great spiritual leader and the first lay woman to give retreats within the Anglican Church? Her life is a reminder that a humble surrender to the divine can unleash forces which transcend all limitations.
Acknowledgements:
IWC Replica Watches
www.iwcreplica.com
Text adapted from James Kiefer's Christian Biographies,
Perigrina, St. Peter's Church,
Nottingham,
Perigrina, St.
Peter's Church,
Nottingham
Image from Godconscousness
