Cynthia Bourgeault

Cynthia Bourgeault was born in 1947 and ordained in the Episcopal Church. She is a writer, hermit by vocation, and an internationally known retreat leader. For more than thirty years she was a student, then a colleague, of Fr. Thomas Keating, who helped recover Centering Prayer as a simple, sit-down method for Western Christians: a sacred word, consent to God’s presence, return when the mind wanders.

From that practice she taught a Christian Wisdom path — not a new church, and not a collapse of the Gospel into a technique. Wisdom, she says, is not knowing more; it is knowing deeper, knowing with more of you. The Gospel is read as a way of seeing: nondual, embodied, and demanding. She has written on Jesus as Wisdom teacher, on Mary Magdalene, on the meaning of the Passion, and on a daily Benedictine-shaped rule that can be lived outside a monastery.

She also sat with Gurdjieff’s Work. Mystical Courage (2021) offers commentaries on selected contemplative exercises compiled by Joseph Azize. The Fourth Way is not, for her, a rival religion. It is a language for attention that a Christian contemplative can verify in the body — three-centred knowing, the collected state, a heart that is an organ of perception.

She divides her time between solitude in a seaside hermitage in Maine and teaching Wisdom schools internationally. She has served as faculty emeritus of the Center for Action and Contemplation. The websites that carry her work are cynthiabourgeault.org and wisdomwaypoints.org. No complete-works set is listed here; the books are bought from their publishers.