Contemplating Christ inevitably confronts us with a crucified God who will not tolerate confinement in the pages of history or the sacred precincts of our mind,
but who tears beyond the veil of what we know, to enter our very flesh as One who is “crazy” in love and who begs to be loved in return.
Father Vincent
Fr. Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D. is a Professor of New Testament and Christian Mysticism in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco. He has presented internationally on a wide range of theological issues facing the world today and works for the advancement of contemplative Christianity through his many workshops, lectures, sermons, and retreats given annually. As an Episcopal priest he serves as Vicar of St. Columba’s Episcopal Church and Retreat House in Inverness, California where he has established a vibrant contemplative community. Fr. Pizzuto’s unique combination of scholarship and pastoral charism has since gathered a global audience on the ‘Thomas Keating Meditation Chapel’ in which he leads weekly teachings and meditation on his most recent book, Contemplating Christ: The Gospels and the Interior Life (Liturgical Press, 2018). A Spanish translation, Contemplar a Cristo: Los Evangelios y la vida interior (Desclée De Brouwer, 2022), is now available. In its pages, Fr. Pizzuto seeks to bring his readers into a lived realization of their “deification”– that the Incarnation has made mystics of us all.
The Scriptures are much like a slatted fence. What they conceal or reveal depends largely on shifts in our perception or where we place our focus.
The contemplative life is not simply about adopting meditative methods and techniques but about entry into an interior silence that deepens our relationship
with the triune God
who dwells within.
"My dog is better than I am,
because he loves
and does not judge."
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Abba Xanthios,
Sayings of the Desert Fathers
A spiritual truth to which our culture and society have so successfully numbed us is that the contemplative life is not a luxury or a quaint pastime but a matter of grave spiritual, social, and now even planetary urgency.
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Contemplatives know this intuitively.
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The prayer of silence that confronts the tyranny of the false self and opens us to the transforming power of the Spirit is a moral imperative.