Evelyn Underhill
1875-1941 20th century Feast day: June 15
Prayer given back to everyone: not a separate career, but an ordinary life turned toward God.
Who was Evelyn Underhill?
An English writer and keen scholar of the mystics, she long searched through books before recognising that the spiritual life is a matter of love, not erudition. An Anglican and a retreat leader, she sought to make prayer accessible to ordinary people, amid their ordinary cares.
In their own words
The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a life which includes and redeems every department of human existence.
We spend most of our lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do, forgetting that none of these has ultimate significance except so far as it is transcended by, and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be.
Worship is the response of the creature to the Eternal.