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Together in Solitude
By Douglas V. Steere
New York, Crossroads, 1983. 201 pp. $12.95.

The genesis of this book was, according to the author, a request of a publisher-friend to "draw together a cluster of things that I have written in these past years that deal with the nature of the interior life." The resulting collection does not, however, read as one might at first expect from this description. This is neither a handbook on methods of inner attention, a prescription for any devotional attitude or practices, or a survey of classic anatomies of the life of prayer. It consists of ten essays composed primarily as lectures or papers given on a variety of occasions to a number of different audiences. The result reflects the widely divergent interests of these audiences and the voices that Steere chose to adopt in order most appropriately to address their concerns. In them he is variously pastoral, scholarly, prophetic, philosophical, and simply conversational. Yet there is unity in this diversity and that unity is found in the man himself.

An active member of the Religious Society of Friends, Steere is steeped in both the quiet attentiveness to divine inspiration and the responsible social vision that characterize the best of Quaker thought.

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Moreover, as a career professor of philosophy, at Haverford, he has spent many years immersing himself in the devotional classics of the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions as well as exchanging ideas and sharing spiritual friendships with a generation of theologians including Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert Calhoun, and John Mackay. His book thus becomes an encounter with a man of broad and rare insight whose writings attest to a full and active life lived, as he says, from a luminous center. This man, whose sane and sensitive attempts to attain an authentic human vision are evident on every page, conceives of the nurture of the inner life from a refreshingly wholistic perspective. As the title of the collection suggests, his conception of such is both communal and individual.

A committed spokesman for ecumenical dialogue, Steere sees the task of sharing within the Christian communions as a coming together on common frontiers to exchange unique insights that each denomination has cultivated in order that all might be enriched. The most basic ground of unity he sees as the life of prayer, for it is there, in the individual and intimate presence of God, that renewal and growth can take place. In prayer one Christian and all Christians can potentially produce a climate "for turning around into the life and power of Christ, for a deep inward passion to move along together and to listen and to speak and to act for the needs of all men."

These essays are about both Christian prayer and ecumenical sharing viewed from ten quite different starting points. Yet they ultimately produce a rich and unified tapestry of reflections, insights, and questions that make absorbing reading. The essays tend to be multifaceted explorations of a given theme in which Steere calls up his considerable knowledge of literature, philosophy, contemplative thought of a number of traditions, personal and historical anecdotes, biblical imagery, political and sociological considerations and succeeds in focusing these to illuminate the point in question. In the section entitled "Together" four pieces range across denominational boundaries. The first looks at areas of ascetic theology potentially common to Catholic and Protestant thought (spiritual direction, the cultivation of prayer, social and individual responsibility) to rethink the Christian approach to "the nurture and deepening of human responses to the grace that is lavished on men and women." "The Life of Prayer as the Ground of Unity" emphasizes the ultimate and common source of all genuine action and being. This section also contains an essay on teachers and their role in a religiously concerned educational institution and a splendid analysis of the gift of spiritual direction given to the great Catholic ecumenist and scholar, Baron Friedrich von Hügel.

The second section, "In Solitude," is made up of another group of writings more concerned with the dynamics of individual encounter with God, although for Steere this encounter always opens out of itself into a "lifting of all men into a community of interdependence." "Bethlehem Revisited" is a meditation on the inner Bethlehem of the human heart

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and its redemptive significance. In a lovely pastiche on "Solitude and Prayer," Steere insists, with the authority of the masters of the Christian contemplative life, that prayer that is to be genuinely transformative requires the womb of solitude where a person is brought to the depth of his or her own being and is made still enough to hear God speak. Other elements of truly restorative prayer are explored in "Contemplation and Leisure" and "On Being Present Where You Are." Also included is a longish and more theoretical inquiry into the mystical experience which takes up several unsolved problems in the study of mysticism and weaves these into a discussion of the claim that mysticism is essentially "anti-intellectual." The collection concludes with a probing of the phenomenon of Christian sanctity in order to find a ground for renewal of the church that must continually take place for the Christian community to remain vital.

Anyone involved in the life of prayer in both its individual and communal aspects as well as in the renewal of authentic Christian life in the present day, especially as viewed from an interdenominational perspective, will not only enjoy reading this book but will be enriched by an encounter with the reflected presence of a remarkable man.

Wendy M. Wright
University of California
Santa Barbara, California.