Stillness Was Ours Before It Was Hers

A response to LLUH Women’s Spiritual Retreat Brings Mysticism to Attendees at Fulcrum7.

A recent Fulcrum7 essay describes a Loma Linda University Health women’s retreat as an occasion of “not the mystery of God, but that of another spirit.” The retreat’s offense, on that telling, is its featured author, Ann Voskamp, a devotional writer described as a practitioner of mysticism. Her vocabulary of stillness, attentiveness and spiritual practice is read as the code of contemplative spirituality, a foreign discipline smuggled into Adventist piety. Her quotation of the Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin is offered as proof of the contamination, and the conclusion is practical: stay away.

The argument is built almost entirely of words, and the words are the church’s own. The denomination’s press has used the supposedly foreign vocabulary approvingly for more than a century. It has also printed, as a model, the one figure the argument means to damn by association. The case for a smuggled mysticism fails not on its alarm but on its dictionary.

The Words Are Ours

The engine of the charge is lexical. Call it the code-word argument: take stillness, attentiveness and spiritual practice, read them as the terminology of the discipline of silence, and the accusation gathers momentum. If the vocabulary is foreign, the practice is foreign, and the whole case hangs on that conditional.

The vocabulary is not foreign. The Review and Herald did not ask, in 1960, whether Adventists should meditate but how: “How can we develop the lost art of meditation?” (Review and Herald, 1960-12-29, p.7). A 2009 Ministry article described a congregation that “becomes intentional about discipleship and spiritual formation” (Ministry Magazine, 2009-04-01, p.20). And when Ministry addressed contemplative prayer directly in 2015, the counsel was plain: “Words spoken against contemplative prayer must carefully define terms so this valid and beneficial devotional practice does not become misunderstood or lost” (Ministry Magazine, 2015-12-01, p.22). Valid is the denomination’s own adjective for a practice the code-word argument treats as suspect.

Said plainly, a word that has sat in the church’s own devotional writing for generations cannot serve as a password that proves someone has slipped in from outside. These are not the markings of a smuggled technology. They are the markings of a church that has taught quiet devotion for a century. None of this settles what Voskamp means by her own use of these words, since one vocabulary can hide two practices, and that is precisely the point. The words alone prove nothing, and a charge that rests on words alone has no engine. A glossary is not a doctrine.

Citing Is Not Converting

The strongest thing in the argument is a biography, and it should be conceded outright. Teilhard de Chardin was what the charge says: a French Jesuit and paleontologist, 1881 to 1955, who tried to fold evolution and Christianity into a single system and could speak of a pantheism with a Christian soul. None of that is contested.

What is contested is the step that follows. Voskamp quotes Teilhard, and the charge concludes that quoting him transmits his metaphysics. But a devotional writer who borrows a line about attention has not thereby adopted the noosphere or the Omega Point. A preacher who lifts a sentence from a poet he disagrees with on nearly everything else has not enrolled in the poet’s school, and no congregation has ever supposed otherwise. Nothing in the denomination’s press shows that any such transference happened here. That press contains no discussion of Voskamp or her book at all. The portrait of her as a mystic therefore arrives from secondary critique assembled outside the church, asserted rather than shown.

The creedal test is built the same way. The charge notes that Voskamp recites the creed’s phrase about the one catholic and apostolic church while describing herself as non-denominational and Brethren, and it treats the combination as incoherent. Yet the Adventist reading of that phrase has never turned on Rome. When the Signs of the Times took it up in 1912, the question it pressed was whether the words implied “a something divinely interposed between the soul and God” (Signs of the Times, 1912-03-19, p.6). That is a question about mediation, not about denominational labels. To recite a creed whose catholic means universal is fully compatible with worshipping in a Brethren chapel, so the contradiction found here is smaller than the charge supposes.

The Witness Who Would Not Testify

The most telling exhibit is Brother Lawrence, offered as proof of a mystical lineage running from F. B. Meyer through Catherine of Siena to the retreat. The association is meant to be damning, but the denomination’s own press did not find it so. In 1964 the Review and Herald printed Brother Lawrence’s words without a trace of alarm: “I possess God as tranquilly in the bustle of my kitchen-where sometimes several people are asking me different things at one time-as if I were on my knees before the Blessed Sacrament” (Review and Herald, 1964-09-24, p.12).

The very devotion the code-word argument treats as suspect was commended in the church’s leading periodical. Catherine of Siena, meanwhile, barely registers there at all, a name in a historical list rather than a theology anyone transmitted. The chain that was supposed to run from the mystics to Loma Linda keeps passing through sources the church itself approved.

The Method Is Never Shown

The code-word argument should be granted what it is owed. A denominational university hosting a retreat bears a real responsibility to be discerning about what its speakers teach, and the unease around spiritual formation is not fabricated; it has a genuine history inside Adventism. If a retreat were teaching a technique of emptying the mind, that would deserve the church’s care, and no fair reader should dismiss the concern.

The difficulty is that no such technique is ever examined. Voskamp’s six steps of stillness, attentiveness, cruciformity, revelation, examination and doxology are listed, not analysed. The reader is never told what the participant is asked to do with the mind or the breath, and the retreat’s own materials are never produced. The charge that the steps form a contemplative programme is an inference from labels, and the labels are the church’s. The warning itself is issued from years spent under a spiritual director, offered as a credential for discernment, yet the title treated as a marker of foreignness is not foreign either. Ministry wrote in 1988: “The apostle Paul was this type of spiritual director” (Ministry Magazine, 1988-09-01, p.9).

The same construct governs the treatment of silence, and here the text deserves a slower look. The argument insists that Jesus knew only an exterior silence in the garden, not the interior silence practiced within, and on that distinction the verdict of counterfeit is hung. But the pattern the church has always drawn is a withdrawal into solitude that does not split into inner and outer halves. Ministry set the scene plainly: “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Ministry Magazine, 2009-04-01, p.20). Picture it as written: a man rising in the dark, leaving a house, walking out to a quiet place, and no observer could say where his outward stillness stopped and his inward stillness began. Nothing in that sentence licenses a sanctified exterior set against a suspect interior. The line is the argument’s construct, not the text’s.

The retreat was supposed to have delivered an alien spirit. What the code-word argument actually produces is a list of words the denomination has used for a century, a quotation that proves nothing about the quoter, and a saint whose devotion the church’s press printed with approval. The mystery it warns of resolves, on inspection, into ordinary Christian stillness, the kind the church has long taught and the kind no glossary can convict. To believe the charge, a reader would have to accept that the denomination’s own editors, across more than fifty years, were quietly commending the very practice now called counterfeit.

That is a harder thing to believe than the argument ever asks.

— Dr. Miriam Sorensen, Theology Editor