The Sacred Gaze

New this spring:

The Sacred Gaze: Contemplation and the Healing of the Self

Eight hundred years ago, Clare of Assisi advised a correspondent to gaze into the mirror of the crucified Christ and study her own face within it. A hundred years ago, sociologist Charles Horton Cooley said we can know our self only as it is reflected to us by others. Contemplation is the choice to find our reflection in the divine Mirror. In The Sacred Gaze, Susan Pitchford explores how a false self is created by distortions in the mirrors around us. Drawing from the mystical and sociological traditions, and with practical suggestions for how to begin, Pitchford shows how gazing into the face of Christ can reveal to us who we really are. When the true self is known, and known as God’s beloved, the way is opened to radical freedom and joy

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The Sacred Gaze invites the reader to consider devoting the time and energy to cultivating the contemplative life, not only for its own sake, but also for the way deep experiences of God’s unconditional love have the potential to bring a deeper level of healing to a wounded or spoiled identity. To experience oneself as beloved of God, expressed either through a mutual gazing in love upon one another in imaginative contemplation or as held in God’s embrace in imageless prayer for long periods of time over a lifetime, leads to the discovery of one’s true self that relieves one of the burden of all ego projects. To look into the mirror who is Christ is to discover one’s own Christic identity.

Dr. Janet Ruffing, RSM, Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut

The Sacred Gaze is more than just an insightful overview of the relationship between healing and spirituality: it is a splendid general introduction to contemplative prayer. Susan R. Pitchford understands that contemplation is, at heart, a revolutionary way of viewing life, love, and God. With humility and grace, she explains the beauty and power of contemplative seeing, and how praying in this way can help you to become the authentic person God has created you to be.

Carl McColman, Author of Answering the Contemplative Call and The Big Book of Christian Mysticism

[From the Foreword:] How do we live in a world “addicted to velocity”? How do we resist the seductions of a culture that invites us to define ourselves by what we consume? Susan Pitchford has written a fiercely honest and probing “guide for the perplexed” that brings together sharp psychological insights with the ancient wisdom of the Christian spiritual tradition. In doing so, she outlines for us a great anthropological adventure: This book is about the recovery of radiance-the sheer wonder and amazement of being alive and aware.

Alan Jones, Dean Emeritus of Grace Cathedral

My books

The Sacred Gaze: Contemplation and the Healing of the Self

Contemporary Christianity is afflicted with two problems: First, our spiritual life is often bland and lukewarm. Distracted and fragmented by our lives, and malnourished on conventional piety, we feel out of touch with the God described in the Bible as a “consuming fire.” Second, we don’t know how to make sense of suffering, especially the pain of spiritual darkness and aridity. The answer to both of these problems is passion. In God in the Dark, Susan Pitchford explores the two faces of passion: desire, the mutual attraction between the soul and God; and suffering, especially our confusion and grief when we find ourselves in dark places. We often misinterpret times of darkness, assuming we’ve failed and God has abandoned us. Pitchford suggests that darkness is not a place of abandonment but a place of intimacy and a special call to a deeper relationship with the God who desires us. Once we understand this, we will not have to fear the dark, and when the night closes in around us, we can experience it as an embrace.

In a little town in Italy, nearly eight hundred years ago, Francis of Assisi renounced everything he owned to follow Christ with passionate and single-minded abandon. Even today, centuries later, this simple saint draws people around the world to his story of living in humility, love, and joy. Here in Following Francis, Susan Pitchford tells her own story of the Franciscan life, as a member of the Third Order, founded by Francis himself so that people from all walks of life can follow the saint’s ideal, without leaving their homes or occupations. Pitchford learned that the Franciscan tradition isn’t the exclusive possession of monks cloistered in a monastery, but a spiritual path for ordinary people living in the twenty-first century. Organized around the Rule of St. Francis, this book – a wonderful resource for private devotion or group study – shows readers what it means to live out the Christian life with a Franciscan accent.

“Identity Tourism: Imaging and Imagining the Nation” examines the role of tourism in the construction of national identity. To imagine a nation, nationalists must construct a national story about their history and culture that defines them as a people, and counters the negative story circulated by their enemies. One of the objectives of this book is to identify the necessary historical and cultural components of a compelling national story. Yet, a story is of no use unless it is heard, so nationalists need media through which the national narrative can be told. The principal objective of this book is to show that identity tourism is a medium that can be used to tell the national story, both to group members and outsiders. As such, it is particularly useful in the construction of a sense of national identity. The analysis is based on observational and interview data primarily from Wales, where nationalism, identity and tourism have long been heatedly contested. A comparative perspective is provided through the use of secondary case studies examining Native American tourism in the United States and Canada, and tourism in Brittany and South Africa.

The Sacred Gaze

New this spring:

The Sacred Gaze: Contemplation and the Healing of the Self

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