This is the text from the free study guide for our free booklet, Mysticism and the Inner Life: Evelyn Underhill and Christian Spirituality.
Evelyn Underhill’s work is important not only because she was a notable 20th-century female Christian writer, but also because she makes clear that a normal life, centered in God, is a transforming adventure into the true reality of God’s ever-present love.
This is seen in the first excerpt from Concerning the Inner Life, where remaining focused on God “keep(s) alive the awed, adoring sense of the mysteries among which we move.” A fruitful inner life “means an ever-deepening awareness of all this…transmuting (and) supernaturalizing our lives by all ways and at all times.”
This is the essence of Christian mysticism: “the life of a dedicated will moving steadily in one direction, towards a perfect and unbroken union with God.” Christian mystics may focus on the eternality and infinity of God, or the relatability of the incarnate Christ, but always on “calling forth a total response from mind, feeling and will.”
The deepest life is therefore the “terribly practical job” of growing in love for God and for all humanity, “two loves which at last and at their highest become one love.” Such love is not self-directed or self-empowered—it is a total cooperation with the will of God that is practiced within a Christian community. Because the call to grow in love is universal, “every faithful personality can find a place and opportunity of development.”
The universality of this call means that the supernatural effects of prayer—its central spiritual practice—permeate all of human existence, from our physical and mental health to history itself. Through prayer “our small and derivative spirits…can grow and expand into tools of the creative love and power.”
Image: Cover to the booklet, “Mysticism and the Inner Life,” incorporating a 1926 photo of Evelyn Underhill (Source).
