Anglican Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) was one of the most popular and penetrating writers on religion and spirituality in the early part of the 20th century. Her many books include the classics Mysticism (1911), The Mystic Way (1913), and Practical Mysticism (1915). She was revered as an eminent scholar of mysticism, but the following passages, adapted from letters she wrote in 1939 and 1941, and from Worship (1936), also reveal her to be a woman full of practicality and charm——a wise guide who is not in the least bit stuffy!
You ought to go very slowly and quietly—not only for the sake of your mind and body but still more for that of your soul. In revealing Himself to you, God put you at the beginning of a long road, and you must go at God’s pace, not your own (or mine!).
The wind and rain in our face
Make up your mind from the first to ignore the ups and downs of the “spiritual climate.” There will be for you as for everyone sunny and cloudy days, long periods of dullness and fog, and sometimes complete darkness, to bear. Accept this with courage as part of the Christian life.
Conversion means giving yourself to God, not having nice religious feelings. Many of the saints never had “nice religious feelings”; but they did have a sturdy self-oblivious devotion to God alone.
Remember what old Samuel Rutherford* said: “There be some that say, ‘Down crosses and up umbrellas,’ but I am persuaded that we must take heaven with the wind and rain in our face.”
The cure is more simplicity!
Just plain self-forgetfulness is the greatest of graces. The true relation between the soul and God is the perfectly simple one of a childlike dependence.
Well then, be simple and dependent, acknowledge once for all the plain fact that you have nothing of your own, offer and trust your life to God—the ins and outs of your soul as well as everything else! Cultivate a loving relation to God in your daily life; don’t be ferocious with yourself because that is treating badly a precious (if imperfect) thing which God has made.
As to detachment—what has to be cured is desiring and hanging on to things for their own sake and because you want them, instead of offering them with a light hand and using them as part of God’s apparatus; people seem to tie themselves into knots over this, asking anxious questions on the subject—but again, the cure is more simplicity!
We are anchored in God
A spiritual life is simply a life in which all that we do comes from the center, where we are all anchored in God: a life soaked through and through by a sense of God’s reality and claim, and self-given to the great movement of God’s will.
Worship is the response of the creature to the eternal. There is a sense in which we may think of the whole life of the universe, seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, as an act of worship, glorifying its Origin, Sustainer, and End.