Dear Wisdom community,
In January 2015 we launched “The Year of Teilhard de Chardin” and tasked our network with becoming more and more acquainted with Teilhard’s expansive body of writing. Since then, Teilhard’s stunning evolutionary mysticism and cosmovision have become a central thread in our Wisdom understanding.
During that same Year of Teilhard, one of the planet’s Christian contemplative giants quietly passed into the unseen—the Camaldolese monk and priest Fr. Bruno Barnhart. In many ways, Fr. Bruno’s work picked up where Teilhard’s left off—integrating Teilhard’s world-affirming, evolutionary, “Western” vision with the nondual depths of the “Eastern” traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism) into a powerhouse of Christian mystical synthesis.
Bruno believed that contemporary Christianity was severely diminished, having lost touch almost entirely with our own depth dimension—“this depth of life and consciousness that has so largely disappeared from our Western civilization, and from our Western Christianity,” he wrote, “is wisdom.” And so he gave himself to the midwifing of a new sapiential, or Wisdom, understanding of the Christian path.
Significantly, Bruno did not believe we could go backwards. Having fully internalized Teilhard’s forward-looking roadmap, he did not see the unfolding of Western civilization, secularity, and modernity as dead-ends or wrong-turns but (shockingly to many spiritual ears) as the natural and inevitable outcome of the incarnate, descending trajectory of the Christ-mystery itself. Modernity and secularity were not ends in themselves, but neither were they simply mistakes. The goal, therefore, could not be a simple return to some earlier, primitive wisdom, but only a forward movement of integration and new equilibrium—the emergence of what he called a “second simplicity.”
Fr. Bruno mapped his vision as a quaternary mandala over the Cross—spanning, in St. Paul’s words, the “breadth, 
length, height, and depth” (Eph. 3:18) of the Christ-Mystery. These dimensions break down as follows: the nondual, apophatic, unitive (Father/Silence); the logoic, rational, “masculine” (Son/Word); the dynamic, intuitive, “feminine” (Spirit/Music); and the embodied, incarnate, “earthed” (Cosmos/Dance).
Our various cultures and religious traditions tend toward imbalance, shrinking our spirituality to one quadrant or the other. For some time, the West has been locked in “Word”; the East in “Father”; indigenous traditions hold the much needed wisdom of “Cosmos”; Teilhard embraced the dynamism of “Spirit.” What is called for now is a new, full-on integration of these dimensions: oneness and manyness, Spirit and matter, stillness and movement, apophatic depth and historical dynamism. Bruno’s mandala is a Cross planted deep in the earth, reaching to the heavens, all-embracing in its span. He called the resulting wisdom eucharistic.
For whatever reason, Bruno’s legacy has not been well-known in today’s Christian Wisdom reemergence, and we’ve spent little time as a community exploring his centrality to our own lineage. As one of Cynthia’s primary mentors, she says of her first encounter with Bruno: “Suddenly he was in my life, and it was as if it had always been that way. […H]e was powerfully, fiercely present during the decade or so of my own explosive spiritual awakening from 1987 onwards. He was spiritual father and mother both, guiding me with a gentle and deeply intuitive clarity.”
When the Northeast Wisdom Board (or, as we prefer to call ourselves, “Wisdom Council”!) gathered this past month to vision for the year to come, we realized that it was time to bring Bruno to the foreground. Our Year of Teilhard, and the years intervening, have laid the groundwork for a new “Year of Bruno Barnhart.” We encourage all of you to begin reading through his work—in Cynthia’s words, “books that you return to again and again to refresh your soul and renew your faith in truth.”
To that end, we are sending as a gift to our donors who give $150 or more to this year’s annual campaign a copy of Bruno’s recently republished The Future of Wisdom: Toward a Rebirth of Sapiential Christianity. Out-of-print for some years and hard to find, Cynthia describes this work as:
Bruno’s final and in some ways most theologically daring masterpiece. For the thirty years that I was privileged to call him my friend and teacher, I knew full well that he was one of Christianity’s best kept and most cherished contemplative secrets. Now it is time for him to be more widely known, and this re-publication is a solid step in the right direction. I suspect he will be increasingly discovered and revered, as our planet blazes toward its imminent axial leap.
Join us this year in reading this essential Christian Wisdom text, or pick up Bruno’s equally beautiful and important Second Simplicity: The Inner Shape of Christianity or The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center. We’ll soon be sharing quotations from these works on our facebook page, and posting more about Bruno in the 
year to come.
Just last week, Cynthia visited Bruno’s former cell at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, CA. While there, she donned his old work jacket (pictured here). “Feeling a bit like Elisha,” she wrote. Perhaps the mantle has been passed—not just to Cynthia, but to all of us. We are now the midwives of a new Wisdom, of a second simplicity. And so, Fr. Bruno, pray for us—and aid us in the work at hand.
Saint Bruno, Pray for Us
You saw your beloved friend brother Bruno
Of Immaculate Heart fame visit you
Exalted in Heaven seen you below
Gazing on you while you gazing thereto
He stepped into your Consciousness Divine
As your sisters and brothers on High want
To come to you with messages of Mine
That they are family your Soul to vaunt
He was quite tall in gaunt appearance his
For hermit of Mount New Camaldoli
Appearance still the same in Heaven’s Bliss
In his Visitation in great Glory
You have a new patron on High in him
His Holiness I Show you in Bright Glim
Excerpt from THE BELOVED in which The Father speaks to the Beloved
Copyright Jean-Marie de la Trinité
July 22, 2019
Trenton, NJ
A mystical panegyric to New Camaldoli and Bruno Barnhart excerpted from my Quora response on “How as the Catholic Church positively shaped your life?”
The wonderful hermits of saint Romuald at New Camaldoli Hermitage Big Sur, California ingrained the Liturgy of the Hours into me and gave me a hermitage for the solitary worship of God in contemplative prayer. They also understood my mystical life which was already profound when I came to them. Their holy prior Bruno Barnhart was a kind and learned spiritual confidant at the time and also encouraged my writing on the mystical life. He understood me quite well, both spiritually and intellectually. There, at Immaculate Heart Hermitage, I was fully grounded and educated in the eremitical life and the life of reclusion which I live to this very day in a mixed spiritual life of action in the world as a public philosopher and mystic which is added to my life as a hermit-recluse.
Also, at Immaculate Heart, God gave me four of the greatest mystical experiences of my entire life centered around the Holy Spirit and Mary the Mother of God, which I have written about from time to time over the years. It was there that God gave me the first miracle which would be witnessed by another person and so was able to be objectively corroborated by that person.
It was there also on those holy grounds, walking down from the campanile to the retreat house one day at high noon, that God gave me my first immense inspiration in poetry which flooded into my being and consciousness out of Heaven. This was to be my vocation thereafter in which The Father confirmed me some years later, calling me, simply, WRITER with absolutely no qualifiers to His incredible statement identifying how I would serve Him in the world, that is, not a writer of this or that but simply WRITER which was left infinitely open for my own defining by filling up its content in all that I have written over the years since, now some 100 books and counting.
Peace and Love always. jm
oh this is just wonderful .. x
Here is a short review I wrote of Second Simplicity that gives a flavor of his work. While I did enjoy it, I do have to say that I find his work challenging, especially the Future of Wisdom book. Up until this point, his work hasn’t really “stuck” with me; perhaps that will change in the year of Barnhart. Here’s the book summary:
“Barnhart provides a powerful vision of the Christian life based on four dimensions of a mandala: (1) unitary consciousness (God), (2) logic and rationality (Word), (3) inclusivity (Spirit), and (4) incarnation (Matter). To become more spiritually mature in the contemporary age means to move from the northwest quadrant of the mandala, a mix of (1) and (2), in a southeast direction. This means seeing the divine in the created world (moving from 1 to 4), and balancing critical thinking with a more personal and emotional sensitivity (moving from 2 to 3). The result is a replacement of a static, institutional belief system with a dynamic, incarnational experience of the Spirit. This more inclusive faith will bring about a second simplicity, a return to the Mystery of the Christ event evident in the first few centuries of Christian history, but lost in much of the intervening time.
Beyond the many useful applications of this mandalic symbolism, Barnhardt writes with a holistic, restorative force that is difficult to resist. Even if at times the reader wishes for greater clarity, the rousing spirit that breaks forth in the writing is itself a testament to the mystical understanding of the author, who serves as a New Camaldoli monk in California.”
Thank you Matt and Wisdom Council for your loving work and contribution to the awakening of our collective consciousness to Bruno Barnhart’s Wisdom.
This sacred symbol…this map…longs to become known with the
“new story” of Bruno’s teaching. Symbols (think 1’s and 0’s) transmit information profoundly in human “language”–but in our Son/Word dominated cultures this symbol has lost it’s unitive understanding. Wisdom can teach us all to re-know this symbols Unitive Power and Transfiguring Divine Love. Humanity needs this new understanding of our most sacred symbol—-a symbol that formed western civilization and it’s consciousness needs to become “viral” as the dynamic, synthesizing, unifying and joyful expression of the power of Love and Life that it is.
YES–one of the few writers whose words remain seared in my consciousness as we all learn “to bear the weight of our divine vocation” And to listen to St. John speak through Barnhart’s listening heart was a true gift. We are never truly separated from those who have gone before and each one of us will also contribute to this becoming of God’s dream.