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Christopher Bryant is an Anglican monk and he writes from within a living tradition of spirituality. Like many before him he treats the spiritual life as a journey or pilgrimage. What distinguishes his approach is the way in which he draws extensively on modern psychology to illuminate the journey.
Fundamental to Fr Bryant's thinking is Jung's concept of the self which he takes to be the centre of the soul and the place where God may be encountered. ‘The work of finding our true centre and of bringing the whole personality into harmony with it… is the work of a lifetime.’ ‘The desire for God is the desire to be one with our true centre … to live in accordance with the truth of our being.’ ‘Being estranged from God means being unaware of, and out of touch with, the heights and depths of our own personality, estranged from our own centre, unable to live our own truth.’
In the first half of the book the author uses Erikson's developmental model to explore the various tasks which life presents us, with the different and various ways in which growing can be arrested or one-sided. He sees the goal of the first half of life as being to develop our humanity as fully as possible, while that of the second half is to give ourselves away to God and our neighbour: ‘For only those who possess themselves can give themselves away.’ At the same time he is at pains to make clear that there is no clear dividing line between the two and that many of the tasks of early development remain to be dealt with in the second half of life.
In the second half of the book he explores the Christian tradition of prayer, drawing usefully on Jung's typology, and on the ‘psychosynthesis’ of Assagioli, as well as on the more obvious authorities of tradition.
The book has several merits. It is simple and easy to read and could be of real value to religious people who know little of psychology and to psychologists who know little of religion (though I should add that its aim is not intellectual or academic i