When the parish of All Saints by the Sea consecrated its new church in 1994, it did something unusual: it placed meditation and silent prayer at the very centre of the celebration. That choice, made on a quiet island in the Diocese of British Columbia, launched a spiritual experiment that would soon ripple far beyond its local roots. Nurtured by Margaret Haines’ founding vision for The Contemplative Society, this initiative used a parish setting as a laboratory to prove a vital point: the Anglican tradition already possessed the spiritual depth many Western seekers were crossing oceans to find. At a time when common wisdom held that to find transformation one had to “go East,” this small society demonstrated that the water of life was already flowing in the West, if only someone would teach us how to drink from it.
That guide arrived in the form of the Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault. When Haines’ mentor, the internationally renowned Fr. Thomas Keating, was unable to attend the consecration, he sent his protégé in his stead to help the parish drink from the waters they sought. It was a meeting of kindred spirits. Bourgeault told the Diocesan Post in 1998 she found “a group of dedicated and self-motivated spiritual seekers with a tremendous depth of creativity.” This mutual recognition birthed The Contemplative Society, not as a rogue operation, but with rare institutional foresight. Bishop Barry Jenks and the Anglican Foundation funded Bourgeault as a “hermit-in-residence,” officially prioritizing spiritual growth. Yet the driving force behind this container remained founding president Margaret Haines. A voracious seeker herself, Haines counted Tibetan Buddhist rinpoches, Sufi mystics and Fourth Way masters among her teachers. Bourgeault later described her as a “midwife” to the movement: “Margaret was the spiritual mother… everything she touched, from plants to people to fledgling organizations, grew sturdy and strong in her graciously nurturing hands.”
To understand how radical this work was, one must remember the spiritual climate of the 1990s. Yoga was beginning its meteoric rise, with the number of practitioners growing by 21 per cent annually in the late ‘90s. As millions sought physical and spiritual grounding outside traditional structures, the institutional church was facing a precipitous decline. Anglican membership in Canada, having peaked in the 1960s, would drop by nearly half by 2001, and regular church attendance among Canadians would fall from 39 per cent in 1985 to just 22 per cent by 2005. For a generation of seekers, the assumption was clear: the church offered belief and morality but if you wanted transformation and direct experience, you went to the zendo or the ashram.
The Society’s wager was that the transformative experiences drawing people East could actually be addressed by Christianity’s own lost wisdom tradition. In an interview with the Salt Spring Island Driftwood in March 1998, Bourgeault diagnosed the problem with characteristic bluntness: “The Christian path tends to make the mistake of talking all the time,” she noted, adding that her “long-range dream and wish would be to see Christianity reclaimed in this fashion as an authentic wisdom path so people don’t have to leave Christianity to deepen their spirituality.”
The Anglican tradition, fluid, sacramental, and historically capacious, proved to be a fertile wineskin for this new wine. Unlike more rigid confessional streams, the Anglican ethos allowed The Contemplative Society to be both seriously Christian and open to the wider world. It was here that the ancient concept of kenosis (self-emptying) was brought down from the theological shelf and applied as a practical method of prayer. Rather than a void to be feared, silence became a space of consent, a way of joining the self-emptying love of Jesus.
The “little church that could,” as Bourgeault affectionately called the early Salt Spring Island cohort, eventually gave a gift to the wider world. The work incubated on the island launched Bourgeault into an international teaching career, earning her a place on the Watkins list of the “100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People” and sparking a global network of wisdom schools and contemplative prayer groups. It demonstrated that a local community could be a transmission line for a global renewal, offering a how-to for the interior life that the broader church had largely forgotten.
Today, The Contemplative Society’s mission feels newly urgent. The church’s decline that began decades ago has only continued but so has the thirst for wisdom. The story of The Contemplative Society offers a blueprint for how the church can meet this moment: not by competing for attention, but by teaching attention.
Ultimately, this is a story of cultural recovery. For too long, the narrative has been that the West is a spiritual void, a place of dry intellect that one must leave to find the water of life. But as texts like the 14th-century The Cloud of Unknowing remind us, the same non-dual thread of wisdom that runs through the East has always run through the West, buried under the floorboards of our own tradition. The Contemplative Society stands as a testament to what is possible when a community decides to stop looking elsewhere and instead trusts that the water of life is flowing in its own well, waiting only for someone to help draw it out.
