admin, Author at The Evelyn Underhill Association

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November 2004

News & Noteworthy

The Retreat House at Pleshey in the Anglican Diocese of Chelmsford, England, occasionally has retreats on Evelyn Underhill. Check its website at www.chelmsforddiocesan.sageweb.co.uk

The literary executor of the Evelyn Underhill estate is Ambassador Richard Wilkinson, British Embassy, North Forest 0125, The Counts, and Santiago, Chile. Please contact him for question about permission to publish Underhill’s writings.

As an act of generous friendship, Mary Clemente Davlin, OP completed an article by Mary B. Durkin, OP that was left unfinished at her death last year. The article, “Evelyn Underhill: Her Life and Religious Thought,” has now appeared in the March/ April 2004 issue of Spirituality.

NEW BOOKS

The complete text of both The Spiritual Life and Mysticism can be found on line at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, … Read more

by Michael Stoeber
Regis College University of Toronto

(This important article appeared in the March 2003 issue of Worship. ⁽¹⁾ It explores little-known aspects of Underhill’s early thought, especially the connection between magic and mysticism. In the first years of the twentieth century Underhill grappled with this connection and wrote about it in her novels and early essays. — Dana Greene, EUA President)

Underhill and Magic

Evelyn Underhill is firmly established in the mainstream of twentieth century Anglican-Catholic spirituality, probably influencing its contemporary shaping more than most writers in the field. In that regard, she was not extreme nor radical in her perspective. She was not a socio-political activist, except perhaps briefly, towards the end of her life, when she advocated pacifism at the beginning of the Second World War. She possessed no feminist agenda, and theologically she maintained … Read more

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November 2003

New & Noteworthy

Emilie Griffin’s lovely new anthology of Evelyn Underhill’s writing—Evelyn Underhill: Essential Writings, is now available from Orbis Books, pk. $15. The introduction by Griffin is followed by chapters on: The Spiritual Life, House of the Soul, Aspects of Mysticism, The Soul’s Journey, Worship, and Practical Advice.

Stephanie Ford, Assistant Professor of Religion, Earlham School of Religion, has completed a dissertation on Evelyn Underhill’s mystical theology in light of the feminist critique of Grace Jantzen. Ford’s degree was completed at The Catholic University of America.

Oxford University Press’ New Dictionary of National Biography includes an entry on Evelyn Underhill by Dana Greene. Carol Poston, Professor of English at Xavier University, Chicago, has received a contract from the University of Illinois Press to publish a new edition of … Read more

by John C. Kimball

This novel by Willa Cather is a successful example of Evelyn Underhill’s assumption that the spiritual life is available to every human being. Underhill assumes and demonstrates that the spiritual life is part of our human nature, just as physiology and psychology are part of all human life.

At the outbreak of World War I, Evelyn Underhill published Practical Mysticism because she believed that practical mysticism was the very activity needed most in a time of “struggle and endurance, practical sacrifices, difficult and long continuous effort.” Whether national or personal, there are always such times, and so always the very activity needed most.

Underhill then defines her subject: “Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical man is here invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his languid … Read more

The Synchronicity of Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) and Benedictine John Main (1926-1982)
by Paul T. Harris

There is no doubt that Anglican laywoman Evelyn Underhill is one of the most widely respected twentieth-century authors and guides on prayer and the spiritual life. Today she is recognized as one of the few voices of this period to bring contemplative prayer and spirituality from the cloistered life of the monastery and academic treatises to the everyday lives of ordinary people.

In many respects she served as a teacher and guide to other late twentieth-century teachers of contemplative prayer, in particular, Benedictine monk John Main, whose teaching on prayer has spread around the world from the Benedictine monastery he founded in Montreal, Canada in 1977. His teachings are now practiced in 1300 Christian meditation groups in over sixty countries of the world and at … Read more

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November 2002

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

For the past eight years our newsletter editor Lois Sibley has contributed much to the EUA newsletter. She kept the burgeoning mailing lists, solicited copy, designed and laid out the newsletter, and then reproduced it for others to mail.

A freelance editor and proofreader, and wife, mother and grandmother, as well as caregiver for newborns who will be adopted, Lois did the newsletter in her spare time! As you read this, send up both a prayer of thanksgiving and a shout of joy for her generosity. Thank you, Lois.

Help! Help! Help!

If you have read the above, you know this little newsletter is in need of Help! Yours, that is. We need a replacement for Lois Sibley to carry on the tasks named … Read more

by A.M. Allchin

Arriving one Saturday afternoon in September at the Community of Bose in North Italy, an ecumenical monastic community, I was surprised to find myself talking in a rapid, insistent way about Evelyn Underhill to the monk who was welcoming me. My host was puzzled since, though he spoke excellent English, he had clearly never heard of Evelyn Underhill and was anxious to explain all kinds of practical things like the layout of the community buildings, and to show me where I would be staying. I pulled myself up short, saying, “We can talk about Evelyn Underhill some other time,” and began to listen to what the brother had to tell me.

Settling into the room that was to be mine and having some time before the evening office, I was amused at my vehement desire to enquire … Read more

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November 2001

Insights That Endure

by Dana Greene

Evelyn Underhill died in June 1941, 60 years ago this year. Her death came when Britain was locked in a battle for its life. A year before her death she left Kensington, a place she had lived her entire life, for the somewhat safer suburb of Hampstead. It was a confusing time for any believer, but particularly for the Christian pacifist. In 1939, Underhill joined a tiny group of English pacifists, most of whom were members of the historic peace churches. She took her stand humbly but resolutely, believing that the pacifist position was a vocational one, but that it followed from the Christian admonition to love one’s enemies. For a woman who was a committed British patriot, and one who witnessed the Blitz, … Read more

by Mary Brian Durkin, O.P.

When Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) began to study and write about the meaning of mysticism, she immersed herself in the writings of St. John of the Cross. Her monumental volume, Mysticism (1911), reveals her knowledge and appreciation of his teachings concerning mystical life. In The Mystic Way (1913), Practical Mysticism (subtitled “A Little Book for Normal People, 1914), and Mystics of the Church (1925), she continued to expound on John’s wisdom concerning ways to achieve union with the Absolute.

It was particularly in retreat conferences and in letters to advisees that Underhill utilized and with keen discernment, presented ways to develop a practical and balanced spiritual life based on the teachings of St. John of the Cross, who, she claims, is “at once the sanest of saints and the most penetrating of psychologists.” (Mysticism. … Read more

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November 2000

Open Letter to Evelyn Underhill

Dear Evelyn,

Ever since I read in Dana Greene’s book, Artist of the Infinite Life, that your grave in Hampstead was neglected and obscured by grass and brambles, I wanted to go there, tend and prune, and pray with you.

On Saturday, June 24, 2000, Dana; Donna Osthaus, our tour guide; and eight of us did go there. We laid a dozen white flowers on your grave, and I said for us all, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. Even so, says the Spirit, for they rest from their labors.”

We began our pilgrimage by entering Italy at its marvelous gate, Florence. To me, the vision of Fra Angelico’s Virgin receiving her annunciation is worth all the glories of the Renaissance. … Read more

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