Welcome to the Contemplative Underground. We're so glad you've decided to visit our online community.

The Contemplative Underground is an outgrowth of a prayer ministry that The Benedictine Way has been engaged in for several years. This ministry unites contemplatives and those seeking to explore what contemplative prayer might mean in their lives, as part of an online community.

Early in the pandemic we realized that there was a kind of “underground” of people who longed for prayer, silence, and inner peace. These people were searching for peace and hoped to do this within community. The nature of the pandemic and the great distances between us allowed us to utilize the internet for these purposes.

And so we created a community of Christians who began searching for ways to move - from dogma toward Spirit, from legalism toward liberation, from violence toward nonviolence. We do that by living a contemplative life in the hope of following Jesus. For more than four years we’ve been meeting on Saturday mornings for a Centering Prayer Sit in which there is a brief teaching and a twenty minute meditation period. Our community has grown over these years and now has members from seventeen states and occasionally from abroad.

A contemplative life is rooted in contemplative prayer, forms of Christian meditation like Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina (a type of Bible study), the Jesus Prayer, and other such forms of meditation and prayer. This approach to prayer is an attempt to access the inner flame dwelling within each of us as the gift of the Holy Spirit.

So why underground?

Our founding Spiritual Guide, Br. James Dowd, OSB, has traveled throughout the country offering workshops in centering prayer and the other forms of Christian meditation. In doing so, he met many people who hungered for a deeper connection to God and to one another. From the most rural areas to the largest cities, from suburbia to the countryside, he found people looking to join a wider movement in the way of love.

The solitude and silence of contemplative prayer moves us away from anxiety and stress and into a community of love and peace.

We invite you to join us, here in the underground. We invite you to give us a try. Join us in a Centering Prayer Sit. At this time, we offer Sits four days per week and will eventually have at least one sit every day of the week.  Our community also offers video and written reflections.

If you are seeking inner peace, healing, wholeness, a deepening of your interior prayer life, then Contemplative Underground might be for you. We hope you will consider joining our community. Please take the time to explore our website for more information, and feel free to contact us with any questions.

All are welcome! Let’s bring this underground movement above ground. Peace be upon you.