The Contemplative Struggle: Radical discipleship in a broken world

How do we embrace and work out our call to be disciples in a broken world? In The Contemplative Struggle Ian Cowley sets the central themes of the gospel of John alongside each other – abiding in Christ, conflict, light and darkness, obedience, loving one another – and explores how these can be reconciled in daily life. Drawing on his experience of living in his native South Africa during the apartheid era and challenging understandings of contemplative prayer and spirituality as essentially inward-looking, he highlights the urgent need for Christians to be active in bringing transformation to a suffering world and paints a compelling picture of radical discipleship for today.

‘Just as we are all meant to be contemplatives and to hear the voice of God in our lives, we are all meant to answer God’s call to be his partners in transfiguring the world. This calling, this encounter with God, is always to send us into the midst of human suffering.’
Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Here is a much-needed book: the story of the battle against racism, injustice, poverty, held in tension with the necessity of time for contemplation. We need to hear it – there is much here that applies to our world today.
Esther de Waal, writer and scholar

I do appreciate Ian Cowley’s interleaving of storytelling with spiritual reflection. It is good to have the story of UCM told to a wider audience than South Africa.

Ian’s tribute to Steve Biko is welcome and true, and so is his account of white students’ struggle on the matter of conscription.

His major concern with contemplation fits well into his account of this crucial time in the South African church struggle... 
John Davies, former bishop of Shrewsbury and one-time national chaplain of the Anglican Students’ Federation of South Africa

What an incredible book this is! I was deeply moved reading it. It is very inspiring and ignited a hope that we can be agents of change in this world. As someone who has known the value of contemplative prayer and practice in my own life, it felt like a gentle call back to that which I know and love, without being remotely judgemental. In fact, the whole book brings a wonderful balance of challenge without condemnation.

I pray that all who read this book will examine afresh their response to the issues raised and explore the riches of contemplative prayer for themselves.
Louise Rose, community projects manager, Fresh Hope Ministry, Stamford

 The Contemplative Struggle is a generous gift and a profound challenge. Ian Cowley draws on a deep well of (sometimes painful) personal experience to pour out this vision of contemplation in action. If you’re tired of rootless activism and otherworldly spirituality, and you’re looking for the common ground where prayer and protest can flourish, you need to read this book.
Chris Webb, deputy warden of Launde Abbey and author of God Soaked Life

Review by Nicholas King SJ.
Christians are often charged with being of 'no earthly use' (because their gaze is fixed on the heavens); evangelicals find themselves accused of giving insufficient time to contemplative prayer; white Christian South Africans often have it alleged against them that their discipleship is pure self-indulgence, because they benefited so largely from the sin of apartheid; and that the Roman Catholic tradition has nothing to offer Christians today. In this splendid book, those four myths are soundly 'busted': Ian Cowley is an evangelical Christian who has given himself to transform this unjust world into something that looks like the Kingdom of God; he has for many years as a busy Anglican priest given himself over to the practice of solitary contemplative prayer (and offers some useful tips about how to approach it). More than that, he is a white South African whose Christianity drove him, at some considerable cost, to engage in student activism against the apartheid regime, and who reveals his immense admiration for Steve Biko, who died that appalling death in the hands of the SA Police. He has, moreover, drunk gratefully of the waters of the Roman Catholic contemplative tradition, including Thomas a Kempis, Richard Rolle, and that remarkable Cistercian monk, Thomas Merton. He has, besides, the Protestant gift of a solid grasp of Scripture and the awareness that it can change your life. He was also alert to the dangers of environmental pollution at a time when such interests were dismissed as mindlessly sentimental “tree-hugging”. Nowadays we wish that more students had followed his example, half a century ago. This book is to be warmly recommended.