Tribute to a rich life

AS WE KNEW HIM: Reflections on M Basil Pennington, edited by Michael Moran & Ann Overton. Paraclete Press, Massachusetts. 2008. 207pp.

Reviewed by Michail Rassool

As We Knew Him is a tribute to Basil Pennington, the late American Cistercian spiritual teacher, by family, friends, confrères and associates who knew him during various phases of his life and in several contexts.

Fr Pennington is perhaps best-known as a founder of the Centering Prayer movement. He died on June 3, 2005 (the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus) from injuries sustained in a car crash.

The Cistercian evidently combined the sprituality of the monk-priest called to a life of solitude and silence, prayer and contemplation with the external “man of the world”. He travelled much, loved and cared for others, and sought to spread the wonders of monastic-style spirituality; contemplative prayer and the Lectio Divina (letting God speak to one through his Word, in silence).

He wrote best-selling spiritual books, such as Listen with Your Heart, based on weekly talks to a community of monks on the Rule of St Benedict, and Seeking His Mind: 40 Meetings with Christ, drawing people closer to Jesus through 40 meditations on his life and words, gathered from Pennington’s daily practice of Lectio Divina.

A celebration of the priest and monk, the family man, man of prayer, dreamer and creator, human being and friend, the book takes us on a journey through a remarkable life as “one of a small band of monks since the Second Vatican Council… who made significant and lasting contributions to the spiritual life and consciousness of his contemporaries”.

Fr Pennington was much valued as an abbot of his order. He was chosen specifically for his great facility for keeping a community together — spiritually and otherwise — in difficult or uncertain times. One such times was at the Trappist Our Lady of Joy monastery in Hong Kong during the period leading up to the Chinese government’s takeover of that city in 1997.

His participation in conferences and symposiums on spirituality brought him into contact with a cross-section of people in whose homes he often stayed, and on whom he left his imprint and example of deep, yet joyful spirituality. Much of this is recorded in As We Knew Him.

Particularly for those with a particular interest in contemplative prayer and in how holiness can be embodied well in the modern world, this is an absorbing read.