In Search of A Way

Course Description

Walking a path. Following a way. The journey. The impulse to walk is so strong within us. Perhaps because of this, it has proven a durable and useful metaphor for spiritual longing. At the very heart of Christian spirituality stands the image of a path: the hodos or “way”; a key to understanding both the identity of Christ (“I am the Way”) as well as the life of faith (“the Way, the truth the life”) and the meaning of community (Christians were often known simply as “people of the Way”). Walking or journeying would remain critical to the Christian spiritual imagination for centuries afterward. Not only among those who took up pilgrimages, to Jerusalem or Santiago de Compostela or Canterbury.  But also for those who envisioned the encounter with God--in prayer and in community living--as a kind of path or journey: the early monks’ journey into the desert; the long, difficult passage through the darkness envisioned by Gregory of Nyssa in his Life of Moses; Bonaventure’s elaborate and subtle Itinerarium: The Mind’s Journey into God; John of the Cross’s intense path of purgation outlined in his Ascent of Mount Carmel; Teresa of Avila’s long descent into union with God evoked so beautifully in her Interior Castle. There is a recurring sense here that walking, of following a path, traveling along a route both familiar and strange, is somehow essential to our capacity to grasp the meaning of our own spiritual experience, to help us know who we are (in God). Itineraries found in Christian mystical traditions have a particular importance to play in illuminating what it means to be “in search of a way.” Members of the class will be invited to engage and critically respond to these traditions and to consider how learning to “walking the path” can draw us closer to God and one another in love.

Program Goals

By the end of the program students will have:

• A deeper understanding of the varied Christian mystical traditions and their practices
• A stronger understanding of prayer, various prayer practices and their own spiritual discipline
• A fuller sense of contemplative practices and how a disposition to such practices may be assimilated into daily life.
• An awareness of how the wisdom of the Christian mystical tradition can be adapted to the needs and realities of today’s world as well as their possible application to the students’ own lives.
• An awareness of what it means to “walk the path”—both within and without—and of what it means to bring a deeper understanding to this practice.