Embodied Spirituality • Contemplative Life • Sacred Activism
Embodied Spirituality
•
Contemplative Life
•
Sacred Activism
Charis Foundation for New Monasticism & Interspirituality (Charis Foundation) supports spiritual maturation, interspiritual collaboration, and broad systemic change in the world. Our ethos, or the spirit of our ideals, is articulated in our “Charis Community Vows.”
Charis programs form an interconnected ecosystem, each one serving a particular niche . They assist practitioners of all types—whether “spiritual-but-not-religious” or members of traditional religious paths—in their desire for a committed Contemplative Life and Embodied Spirituality, which remains connected to the world and its needs through Sacred Activism.
What is New Monasticism?
What is Interspirituality?
‘Monastic’ traditionally symbolizes a complete commitment to a transformative spiritual journey. By ‘new monasticism,’ we refer to the potential of living out this spiritual calling while ‘in the world,’ amongst intimate relationships, friendships, family, and daily hardships. As a ‘new monk,’ one passionately embraces social and spiritual transformation, utilizing tools of traditional contemplative life, and allowing all of one’s life decisions to flow out of this commitment.
‘Interspiritual’ names our approach toward the diversity of contemplative life today. For Charis, interspirituality calls us into intimate dialogue with one another and diverse spiritual communities, naming a presence-based exploration among contemplative traditions and individual spiritual paths. A word first coined by Brother Wayne Teasdale in 1999, interspiritual describes “the increasingly familiar phenomenon of cross-religious sharing of interior resources.” At Charis, we believe in an interspirituality that supports a flowering of diverse spiritual journeys, in partnership with traditional contemplative paths and teachers—building intergenerational bridges between elders, religious traditions, and younger generations along the way.
Charis
Charis (pronounced, care-iss) is an ancient Greek word for ‘grace,’ describing the life-giving joy and kindness that flows into our lives, often unexpectedly, from sacred dimensions of our being, transforming our awareness and view of life in the world.
“We need to understand, to really grasp at an elemental level, that the definitive revolution is the spiritual awakening of humankind.”
— Brother Wayne Teasdale, The Mystic Heart
“We need to understand, to really grasp at an elemental level, that the definitive revolution is the spiritual awakening of humankind.”
— Brother Wayne Teasdale, The Mystic Heart