Drinking from our own well: How a Salt Spring Island experiment recovered Christian contemplation |
When the parish of All Saints by the Sea consecrated its new church in 1994, it did something unusual: it placed meditation and silent prayer at the very centre of the celebration. That choice, made on a quiet island in the Diocese of British Columbia, launched a spiritual experiment that would soon ripple far beyond its local roots. Nurtured by Margaret Haines’ founding vision for The Contemplative Society, this initiative used a parish setting as a laboratory to prove a vital point: the Anglican tradition already possessed the spiritual depth many Western seekers were crossing oceans to find. At a time when common wisdom held that to find transformation one had to “go East,” this small society demonstrated that the water of life was already flowing in the West, if only someone would teach us how to drink from it.
That guide arrived in the form of the Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault. When Haines’ mentor, the internationally renowned Fr. Thomas Keating, was unable to attend the consecration, he sent his protégé in his stead to help the parish drink from the waters they sought. It was a meeting of kindred spirits. Bourgeault told the Diocesan Post in 1998 she found “a group of dedicated and self-motivated spiritual seekers with a tremendous depth of creativity.” This mutual recognition birthed The Contemplative Society, not as a rogue operation, but with rare institutional foresight. Bishop Barry Jenks and the........