CMP Review 2025-09-30

September 30, 2025

For many years I have been influenced by the life and teaching of Evelyn Underhill. She lived from 1875 to 1945 and during that time she touched so many lives that she is now commemorated on June 15 in the liturgical calendar of the Church of England. The prayer book says that her “most valuable contribution to spiritual literature must surely be her conviction that the mystical life is not only open to a saintly few, but to anyone who cares to nurture it and weave it into everyday experience.”

Especially significant for me is that she pointed to the spiritual life as the key to unity among Christians. According to Robyn Wrigley-Carr, “Prayer was viewed by Evelyn as the essential ingredient of ecumenical unity… Evelyn believed that a widespread group of praying souls was essential for church unity: the Church would win the world for Christ only through ‘living spirits steeped in prayer’.” I think about this whenever the Charlotte Mason community brings together believers from so many diverse backgrounds and traditions.

Even so, for some reason Evelyn Underhill seemed to me to live in a different time and place from Charlotte Mason. She was a light in my own spiritual journey, but a separate and distinct one.

That all changed just a few months ago when to my utter astonishment I learned that Evelyn Underhill had been the keynote speaker at the 20th annual PNEU Conference in 1916. The original text of her lecture was preserved in the Parents’ Review. Thanks to the work of our transcription team, we’re able to bring it to you today.

Charlotte Mason believed that the intellectual life is not only open to a privileged few, but to anyone who cares to nurture it. She believed the same of the spiritual life. In that critical notion, Mason and Underhill overlap. The result is “The Education of the Spirit,” a wonderful and inspiring piece that I hope will touch you as much as it touched me. Find it here.

@artmiddlekauff