Archive for July, 2009

The Prophetic Role of Monasticism

The monk is not a special kind of person; everyone is a special kind of monk, because the central and deepest human impulse is monastic. Monos means one, and the wayfaring human person finds oneness only by tracking Christ through deserts and dark nights into Glory. Nevertheless, a culture needs a sacred center, and the [...]

A Rule of Life for Everyone

The raison d’etre of the Spiritual Life Institute is to create ecological situations — wilderness areas — in which people can live so vivaciously and mindfully that, in a loving kind of relatedness, Christ-like and Trinitarian, they embody and anticipate the Kingdom of God.
Consequently, thirty-eight years after its founding, the Spiritual Life Institute has a [...]

The Disciplined Wildman

Editorial note:  This original, recent article by William McNamara was received by the editors of this website in late June 2009.  It represents a return to one of McNamara’s longstanding themes, dating all the way back to The Human Adventure, that of the mystic as a “disciplined wildman” who follows the dangerous path blazed by [...]

El Camino de Santiago Grafitto by Abba Willie

A pilgrim on El Camino de Santiago, the thousand-year old pilgrimage route in northern Spain, found this graffito written years ago by William McNamara. It is a tradition to write spiritual messages at various locations along the Camino.