Customer Reviews

Emerging Heart: Global Spirituality and the Sacred

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I hear of so many who have a deep longing to deepen and live their faith but are too often alienated by traditional religious doctrines--either their own and or those of others that seem to breed violence instead of peace. And I always want to get word of Beverly Lanzetta's Emerging Heart: Global Spirituality and the Sacred out to those people who seem to feel they cannot find a way or a community in which to share their faith. Emerging Heart opens up avenues for people who know there is something greater than any religious structure can contain--the sacredness of each individual's birthright to know the Divine within themselves. This book changes lives because it re-names that which has become petrified and makes evident the animating forces that are our source of being. Read this book.

Yes, WOW! She captured the essence of the world-wide spirituality movement; I couldn't put it down. She writes so fluidly, with experience, knowledge, wisdom and artful poetic verse. Dr. Lanzetta has modernized the visions and thoughts of Merton, Panikkar, Gandhi, Thurman, Griffiths, etc. You get a deep, inner sense while reading Emerging Heart that we are all on the verge of something big if we simply allow it and explore our interior life.
Great job, Beverly. I look forward to more scholarly work from this truly knowledgeable thinker and mystic.
Duncan-of-the-desert

I'm a big fan of Lanzetta's work. I've read all of her books, Path of the Heart , The Other Side of Nothingness, Radical Wisdom and now Emerging Heart. In each book she tackles in a different way the issues of the new spiritualities that are flourishing globally. In Emerging Heart: Global Spiritualities and the Sacred, Lanzetta explores what it means to have a spirituality that allows for the flourishing of all the world's traditions while simultaneously critiquing them for their oppressive constructions. This is a complex idea, and one fraught with the possibility of trivializing the issues. But Lanzetta grounds her work in both the mystical traditions of the world's religions and her own experience of years of spiritual direction with hundreds of people who are seeking to forge such a path.

Lanzetta starts Emerging Heart with a vivid account of one of her own mystical experiences. This section alone is worth the book. It is rare to hear what happens to a person when they have a deep mystical encounter with the Divine. There are many references to these encounters, but descriptions, at least in the modern context are largely absent or lack detail. Lanzetta's description is moving to the point of breath-taking. One gains a sense of the place of mystical unity, intimacy and total benevolence that she describes as the core of all religions. But rather than claim that mysticism is the territory of only the elite few, she describes it as one of the basic structures of human consciousness. She defines mysticism as the direct experience of the Divine and claims that this direct experience is the core of one's own being. Thus everyone has both the potential and the longing for this personal, direct and blessed experience of God as she or he understand that Reality. This understanding of mysticism both democratizes it and paves the way for Lanzetta to develop her thesis: that there is a new revelatory paradigm being born today in the soul struggles of average women and men.

The new paradigm of which she speaks is one that is grounded in this mystical consciousness. Through it all are able to see the unity that lies behind religious revelation and behind religious dogma. While this is a claim that has been made before, Lanzetta is able to make it while holding to the preciousness of the diversity of the embodied human experience, both in every day lives and in religions. This ability to honor both unity and diversity is central to what she has observed being born in the mystical experiences of seekers from all walks of life. Her description of this does justice to how wrenching it can be for people to walk a religious path holding to the truth of more than one religion or without a named religion at all. Yet it is exactly these types of experiences, ones that are on the borders of religious life, that are the vanguard of breaking through of new understandings of the Divine.

Lanzetta ends her book with a call to those who walk this path or any path of global spirituality to make sure that their devotional life is relevant to the struggles in the world today. Lanzetta has always been very sensitive to the important role that religion plays in both creating and mitigating suffering. She challenges the world's traditions to abandon their views of the wrathful or uncaring Divine and find within themselves their own deep mystical cores where all are welcome at the table of love and compassion. She challenges individuals to overcome their own internal divisiveness and violence so that they will be able to create a world of greater peace and justice.

Lanzetta's style is simple and lyrical. She intersperses her extensive knowledge of the world's mystical traditions with stories of people who have walked and are walking this path today, which makes this book personal and accessible. But this personal style simultaneously is filled with jewels of understanding that many will want to underline and return to later.

This book should be in any library or bookstore that has an interest in mysticism, world peace or in promoting interreligious understanding and dialogue. It should also be on the book shelves of anyone who wants to understand more about these paths either academically or personally. It is a book that people will want to come back to again and again.

In her introduction, Beverly Lanzetta describes finding Ewert Cousins and the historical theology program at Fordham and reading a paper by Cousins: "I sat down on the steps in front of Keating Hall, and a voice, larger than myself, said, `This is it!'" That is how I have felt as I have read each of Beverly Lanzetta's books, from Path of the Heart, to The Other Side of Nothingness, Radical Wisdom and now Emerging Heart.

I was like the persons Lanzetta describes in Emerging Heart: vaguely discontent, not fitting in any religious tradition, as Lanzetta says, "I could dwell in any religion, but I was not of it."

Citing classical writers such as Meister Eckhart, Gregory of Nyssa, and Ibn al' Arabi, and introducing such varied contemporary thinkers as Merton, Thurman, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gandhi, Panikkar, Teasdale, Griffiths, Dorothy Day, Cousins, Heschel, Huston Smith, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Lanzetta elucidates the convergence on a global spirituality that includes but goes beyond religious traditions.

Emerging Heart, like Lanzetta's other books, is to be savored and re-read. She writes so clearly and deceptively simply that it is sometimes easy to miss all the depth and beauty of her lyrical prose. My third time through this book finds almost every page underlined. For example: "Mysticism scandalizes our complacency. It permits us to wake up, to open the eyes of the soul and to proclaim the right to be fully aware of the great burden placed upon us." (p. 47) That "burden" is our "willingness to acknowledge what we already know," our innate capacity to feel the "inherent non-harmlessness" and love of God, of the divine, of creation, and to mirror it for each other and, as such, to restore the wholeness, the holiness, of creation and the world around us. I look forward to her announced forthcoming book on the theologies and practices for sustaining our "emerging hearts."