The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill

Summary: Part biography, part spiritual direction guidebook, part instruction in wisdom.

I have known of Evelyn Underhill for a long time, but she was one of those characters of Christian history who I have never read or read about and only had vague impressions of. One of the people I meet with for spiritual direction was talking about her and that prompted me to pickup The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill by Robyn Wrigley-Carr.

This is a recent book, it came out in 2020, but I am somewhat surprised I haven’t heard more about it. As someone who is a spiritual director, I think this would be a great book to use in a training program. It is not directly a spiritual direction training book, but the book is framed by looking at the influence of her own spiritual director, Baron Frederick von Hügel, and how they both were shaped and how that shaping impacted their work as spiritual directors. My own training was very helpful and it included a number of the old books that shaped Underhill and von Hügel, but with the exception of reading Ignatius of Loyola’s autobiography, there was very little discussion of how biography and social position impacts your work as a spiritual director.

This is not a full biography, and I would like to read a full biography of Underhill, but it contains enough biographical content to make sense of Underhill’s life. At times, spiritual formation can be overly oriented around ideas and practices and not pay attention enough to other areas. Underhill was fascinated with mysticism. Both her and von Hügel wrote books about mysticism before they met. But part of what the book points out about their spiritual direction relationship is that von Hügel was concerned that Underhill was too focused on mysticism and the intellect. His guidance drew her first to see the church as a necessary component, not because we need the church to be saved but because it grounds us in a community of people. There was a theological component to von Hügel’s guidance, as one of the more well known Catholic thinkers in England at the time, he believed in the sacramental nature of the Eucharist. Underhill was Anglican, but also came to believe that the Eucharist was an important mystical reality. Together they came up with a minimum and maximum approach to spiritual practices for Underhill. Because she was a writer as a profession and primarily worked as a spiritual director in retreat settings, she had a lot of seasons of extreme busyness. When she was busy, she had a minimum of 2 Eucharist services a week that she attended. But she also had a maximum of 4 so that she was also encouraged to have a wide variety of experiences.

Similarly, as a way to combat her orientation to individual mysticism and intellectualism, as part of his guidance, she made it a practice to visit 3 or 4 poor families a week in their homes. This was charitable work, but also community building. She wasn’t just being a patron, she was building community across class lines as another way of grounding her faith outside of mysticism and intellectualism.

There is a lot of basic wisdom for spiritual directors or anyone else about how to approach spiritual disciplines and formation.

When the tactics of fear are used in Christian communities to motivate a life of trust in God and love of neighbour, habits of maturity never have a chance to develop.

….our everyday normal lives provide the material for our spiritual formation: without activities and interests that are not directly religious, we lose the ‘material’ for ‘Grace to work in and on’ and ‘penetrate’, thus these interests should be ‘taken up’ for the ‘sake’ of religion, alternating non-religious and religious study.

Though Evelyn was always candid as a spiritual director, she was careful not to be too directive. Following Ethel Baker’s ideas concerning the ‘excessive’ powers of the director, she imitated the Baron’s reluctance to interfere, believing that the ‘object’ of spiritual direction is organizing the directee’s life so they can walk alone. Von Hügel’s maxim became her own: ‘The best thing we can do for those we love is to help them to escape from us.’

Like all good biographies of writers, The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill makes me want to read Underhill directly. She wrote about 40 books over her lifetime, most of the later books were based on the talks that she prepared for her retreats. She would prepare a series of 4 to 6 talks over a weekend and maintain that basic outline for the 5 to 8 retreats that she led each year. In addition to her talks, she made herself available for half hour spiritual direction sessions and then maintained correspondence with the retreatants after that. There are multiple books of her edited correspondence in addition to her other books.

This is not a flashy book, but it is a highly sourced book. There are multiple citations per page to ground the book in the actual writing, journals or correspondence of Underhill or von Hügel or others that influenced or were influenced Underhill. I would have like a little bit more about the role of gender and family. She was the first woman to lecture clergy in the Church of England and she did not have children. She also wrote several novels prior to her non-fiction work and I would have liked to hear some more about the role that fiction played in her theological development (if any). And I would have liked more on the development of her influence both in the world of Protestant spiritual retreats and through her writing. I know of her because she was influential, but I don’t really know how or why she became influential so that I reading about her about 80 years after her death.

(Flannery O’Connor was also significantly influenced by Baron von Hügel as was detailed in Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor and The Life You Save May Be Your Own.)

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-spiritual-forma...