Paula Pryce: Silence, Bodily Knowing and Ritual (Episode 28)

What happens when a friendly anthropologist conducts an ethnographic study of contemporary contemplative Christianity in America, looking at subjects both in monasteries and in secular life?

Paula Pryce does just this kind of work in her insightful book The Monk's Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity. Spending several years of research with teachers like Cynthia Bourgeault and Thomas Keating, along with monasteries like the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Massachusetts, Pryce offers a detailed exploration of how contemplative spirituality is making a profound transformation in our time. From previous days when such practice was almost exclusively found within cloistered walls, to the increasing (if still marginal) presence of contemplation  in churches, centering prayer groups, online forums, and educational offerings such as the Center for Action & Contemplation's Living School or Bourgeault's own Wisdom School, contemplative practice is a vibrant subculture within Christianity — and Pryce, to our knowledge, is the first ethnographer to write about contemplative Christianity in a scholarly, yet accessible, fashion.

I always meditated before I wrote... I go back in my mind, meditate, and then enter in through memory to those places where I was doing research, and that allowed me to give language to these non-verbal situations. — Paula Pryce

What emerges from her research is a recognition that contemplation (and, by implication, the practice of silence) invites the practitioner into a new way of knowing, that is marked by qualities such as embodiment, community, humility, and ritual.

I'm always after trying to understand the beauty of humankind. We have lots of messages about how awful we are! And we can't ignore that and I wouldn't want to. But I honestly think we need to embrace how wonderful humans are. — Paula Pryce

In this conversation, Paula joins the Encountering Silence team to explore not only her own relationship with silence, but also how her research deepened her knowledge of contemplation as a transformational practice. She movingly speaks of her Anglo-Indian father as her silence hero, and draw connections between his lifelong meditation practice and his commitment to social action. She reflects on the paradox of writing about silence (expressing a non-verbal phenomena through the verbal medium of language), and on how ethnography, as a discipline, can help us to understand silence better.

One can use anything as a contemplative practice. That's the main point of this book: people are trying to train themselves in everyday life as contemplatives, in every action and every way of being. — Paula Pryce

Some of the resources and authors we mention in this episode:

Paula S. Pryce, The Monk's Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity

Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna

Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments With Truth

Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings

The Beatles, Abbey Road

Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play

Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy

Joseph Cassant, L'Attente Dans Le Silence

Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: Translation with Commentary

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

Hadewijch, The Complete Works

Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems

Episode 27: Silence, Bodily Knowing, and Ritual: A Conversation with Paula Pryce

Hosted by: Kevin Johnson

With: Cassidy Hall, Carl McColman

Guest: Paula Pryce

Date Recorded: May 29,