Contemplatio
Welcome to this website. These beautiful words from Julian of Norwich that invite us to behold, say so much to me about how I hope that this website will support our contemplation. I will offer meditations, writings, schola contemplatio and opportunities to enter into the depths of mystical texts, to behold and relate them to our prayer and to our lives. Echoing Julian’s invitation to behold, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, invites to behold with “the mind of good God only,” to be touched by the stirrings of love and drawn into ever fuller oneness with God in love. His words are so full of invitation:
“And then we can do nothing more than behold God and enjoy God,
with the most wonderful desire to be all one-ed in God and enter
God’s dwelling, attend to the wooing, enjoy the loving,
and delight in God’s goodness …”
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love.
“We need no more, than the mind of good God only, with a reverent stirring of lasting love; so that means you get nothing but God. If you keep whole the stirring of love that you feel by grace in your heart, and do not scatter from your beholding, then the stirring will tell you when you should speak and when you should be still. This stirring of love will govern you discreetly in all your living, and teach you mistily.”
The Cloud of Unknowing Seer, The Discretion of Stirrings.
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May we follow these stirrings of love together.
Upcoming Silent Retreats, 2026
“Nothing Between My God and Me"
The Prayer of Silent Love
Six Day Silent Retreat
Santa Casa, Queenscliff, Victoria
May 31st - June 7th, 2026.
For until I am substantially oned to God
I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say,
that I be so fastened to God
that there is nought …
between my God and me.
Julian of Norwich
In this silent retreat, we will bask in the simplicity of the prayer of silent love.Drawing on the tradition of contemplation, from Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Song of Songs, the tradition of Minne-Love and Julian of Norwich’s Showings of Love, we will create an atmosphere of silent-loving and support each other to enter into the repose of communing silence. To register please email Sister Lizzie at santacasa@ismapng.org.au
Recently I was invited to speak to women seeking the renewal of women deacons in the Catholic Church. The gathering was offered on the feast of St Phoebe, so I drew on Phoebe’s wisdom, along with Hadewijch, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Julian of Norwich who continue to ground us in divine love. At the same time, they open us into a new evolutionary movement as we seek to be faithful to the spiritual depths of our tradition while nurturing those seeking to discern and follow the movement of the Spirit in their lives now in their call to the deaconate.
Love's Oneing: A Heart Dialogue with Andrew Harvey
What a delight it is to be in heart dialogue with the contemporary, passionate, mystic-visionary Andrew Harvey about my most recent book, Loves Oneing: A Book About Contemplation. Andrew is a trustworthy guide who is grounded in a life-time of being a lover of the divine and enunciations from the wisdom traditions of world spiritualities that sing of this love. Speaking revolutionary words of wisdom with the language of a true lover, he inspires and invites what this world desperately needs now – communion in mystical love.
This interview was part of the release of the course Sublime Love, which I recently taught with Andrew. In it, we opened our hearts into the evolving wisdom of Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hadewijch of Brabant, Teilhard de Chardin and Bede Griffiths. Yielding ever further into the divine mystery, we plunged into the ever-revelatory depthless-ness of sublime love. Andrew writes of the course:
“I have never taught more openly and richly as I did that weekend, knowing Kerrie and the people she had so humbly shepherded for many years would be profoundly receptive to what I had to offer. Kerrie felt exactly the same way and told me that her own teaching that weekend blossomed fearlessly in the atmosphere of our mutual love. Such collaborations of souls mirror the sacred marriage of the divine masculine and the divine feminine and I am so honored and thrilled that the grace of what arose within us and between us can now be available to all of you who want it.
Kerrie Hide and I chose for the title of our first retreat together Sublime Love: Becoming One with the One for three interlinked reasons. As seasoned seekers and mystic guides we both know that the unconditional, passionate and compassionate love of the Divine for humanity and its boundless possibilities can only be described as sublime. We both know too that experiencing this love directly awakens its sublime passion and compassion and hunger for justice and harmony in us.”
If you would like to purchase the course, please click on the tab Schola Contemplatio and scroll down to Sublime Love
Recent Teachings
Contemplation and Compassion: Transformative Capacities for our World
An Inter-Contemplative Dialogue
with Dr Eva Natanya
In this dialogue, two contemplatives, Dr Eva Natanya and Dr Kerrie Hide, will meet in the ground of their hearts and reflect upon the spiritual, theological, philosophical, social and ecological insights that evolve from the contemplative wisdom streams of Christianity and Buddhism. Arising from the ground of contemplation, this inter-contemplative dialogue will inspire and invite a shared awareness of how contemplation, by its very nature, arouses compassion. Eva and Kerrie will model how this inter-contemplative dialogue, that flows from the ground of being, draws listeners into this same ground, inviting oneness in compassion. The illumination of this wisdom, and the transformative capacities it nurtures, will be expounded in relation to the healing of the world.
After exploring what is meant by “contemplation”, the conversation will highlight the spiritual traditions and practices that have shaped the contemplative lives of both women. The nuances of the awakening of what Kerrie describes as “oneing heart awareness” and Eva, “the awareness of awareness”, will be delved into sensitively and deeply. How to nurture and cultivate this awareness, and the ways such language can be applied across orthodoxies and disciplines will be addressed. Eva and Kerrie will reflect together on how a life of contemplation, evokes compassion and a capacity to be with the deepest traumas of our time, in ways that bring deep and lasting healing. They will expand on how contemplation awakens a communal, evolutionary, unitive consciousness, releasing the creativity to dynamically participate in the transformation, transfiguration and transubstantiation of the world.
A profound dimension of this conversation will be the witness of both women to dialogue as contemplation. Enacting the deep meaning of dialogue, from the Greek word dialogos, logos meaning “the word”, and dia meaning “through”, participants will taste the wisdom that emerges when dialogue takes place through the Word that flows from the ground of contemplation. In this way, dialogue moves beyond comparison into communion. The dialogue begins with a guided meditation and was facilitated by Dr Robyn Fitzgerald.
A teaching on the wisdom of Beatrice Bruteau
…we (in our true self, our deepest root) are at the centre, with Absolute Being itself; we are united with the Infinite Being which tends to be, to be more, to be in every possible way. We are not merely an expressed; we are also the expressor.
Beatrice Bruteau, Radical Optimism, 131
I invite you to enjoy this recent teaching on the luminous thought of the late contemplative and philosopher Beatrice Bruteau whose wisdom on contemplation is especially poignant for this season of the Ascension. Contemplation, for Beatrice, is being so united within the energy field of intimate creative union in God, that we live the divine life. We are an expression of oneing. Beatrice affirms that whilst initially, contemplation was thought of as a movement of consciousness from the world to God, now we recognize that contemplation is a manifestation of God in the world. Contemplation is, “a movement of consciousness from God, with God, in God, as God, out into the world, a movement in which the divine consciousness and my consciousness, flowing together, stream out in love and in creative, healing, beautifying energy to create the world and make it even better.” (Bruteau, Radical Optimism, 132.) This teaching is part of a five-day silent retreat, Oneness in Luminous Presence, offered in 2021. Two meditations accompany this teaching. For a guided meditation before the meditation, click here. For a guided meditation to follow on from the teaching click here. This teaching formed part of a five-day retreat Oneness in Luminous Presence which is available for purchase by clicking here.
Retreats and Spiritual Direction
I invite you to join me in the shared ground of Love’s silence…
Writings
Composed in silence, these writings invite you to enter more deeply into the Word…..
Schola Contemplatio
These meditations seek to awaken communion consciousness in the light of contemplation…