6 min
Talk · Dr Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann
Dadirri
Six minutes in which she explains dadirri in her own words.
Overview
What does christian mysticism point to?
Christian mysticism refers to contemplative currents within Christianity that emphasise direct, often wordless encounter with the divine, alongside scripture, liturgy and communal life.
Figures and practices span many centuries and traditions, from desert monasticism to contemporary centring prayer, united by an interest in silence, surrender and inner transformation.
In the stillness beneath the words, something is already listening.A central teaching within Christian mysticism
Teachers
Voices within this path.
Compare background, approach and format before choosing a teacher to follow.
Franciscan contemplation
Richard Rohr
Franciscan friar and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, largely retired from teaching after a cancer diagnosis.
View profile →JF
Christian contemplation
James Finley
Clinical psychologist and former student of Thomas Merton, teaching Christian contemplative practice through the Center for Action and Contemplation.
View profile →MS
Christian mystic translation
Mirabai Starr
American writer and translator of Christian mystics such as St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, teaching within an interfaith contemplative frame.
View profile →Retired
Gratefulness practice
David Steindl-Rast
Austrian-American Benedictine monk known as the 'grandfather of gratitude', now living in contemplative retirement at Europakloster Gut Aich.
View profile →AB
New Monasticism
Adam Bucko
Episcopal priest and co-founder of the Reciprocity Foundation who now directs the Center for Spiritual Imagination, teaching contemplative Christian prayer and "new monasticism."
View profile →BT
Cosmic Story
Brian Thomas Swimme
American mathematician-turned-cosmologist and co-founder of the Center for the Story of the Universe, known for retelling cosmic evolution as a sacred narrative alongside Thomas Berry.
View profile →Artists
Musicians and singers.
Devotional music and chant from within this path, alongside its teachers.
CN
Maronite and Syriac Hymns
Christiane Najjar
Lebanese singer of sacred and Oriental repertoire, at home in Maronite, Syriac and Byzantine chant as well as the classical and traditional music of her country.
View profile →HD
A Cappella Sacred Chant
Harpa Dei
Four siblings, born in Germany and raised in Ecuador, who sing Catholic sacred music unaccompanied, gathering chant from many traditions and languages.
View profile →SO
Ambient Music for Prayer
Salt of the Sound
Husband-and-wife duo Anita and Ben Tatlow, writing quiet ambient music for prayer and reflection from their home in Hong Kong.
View profile →SG
Ethiopian Orthodox Mezmur
Sosena Gebre Eyesus
Ethiopian singer and begena player who performs traditional Orthodox mezmur, the hymns of devotional reflection, sung softly over the low buzzing drone of the ten-stringed lyre known as the harp of David. In the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo tradition the begena belongs to prayer and contemplation rather than to performance, and her recordings keep the instrument in that register.
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Eastern Christian Liturgical Song
Abeer Nehme
Lebanese singer, qanun player and musicologist, born in 1980. She sings the sacred liturgies of the Maronite, Syriac Orthodox, Byzantine and Armenian churches in their own languages. That preserving work, carried out in languages and chant forms that are losing their singers, is the heart of what she does, alongside a wider career in Lebanese and contemporary music.
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Orthodox Sacred Chant
Divna Ljubojević
Serbian singer and conductor of Orthodox sacred music, born in 1970 in Belgrade. From the age of ten she was taught to sing by the sisters of the Vavedenje monastery near Belgrade, where she developed a style of her own out of the Karlovci chant tradition. She studied at the Mokranjac Music School and graduated from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. In 1991 she founded Melodi, a choir and studio for spiritual music, which she conducts as its artistic director.
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Medieval Sacred Song
Arianna Savall
Swiss-Catalan singer and harpist, born in 1972, who grew up inside the early-music world as the daughter of Jordi Savall and Montserrat Figueras. She specialises in medieval and early sacred music, singing to her own harp, and leads the ensemble Hirundo Maris with Petter Udland Johansen.
View profile →CM
Gaelic Psalm Singing
Calum Martin
Precentor in the Free Church of Scotland on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, and a bearer of Gaelic psalm singing. The precentor gives out the line and the congregation answers unaccompanied, each voice finding its own way through the tune. This is Reformed congregational worship first of all, and the sound it makes is what carries beyond it.
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Georgian Sacred Polyphony
Ialoni
Georgian women's vocal ensemble formed in Tbilisi in 2009, rooted in the Orthodox liturgical polyphony of Georgia. For its first years the group sang nothing else, reviving little-known chants from archives, manuscripts and field recordings. Their repertoire has since widened to take in the folk and city songs that make up the other two streams of Georgian polyphony.
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Tintinnabuli
Arvo Pärt
Estonian composer whose tintinnabuli style, drawn in part from Gregorian chant, has made him for years the most performed living composer in the world.
View profile →CR
Sacred Music of the Christian East
Cappella Romana
Vocal ensemble founded in Portland, Oregon in 1991, known for its work in Byzantine and Orthodox sacred music alongside the Western repertoire.
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Chants for Prayer and Silence
Taizé
Ecumenical monastic community in Burgundy of about a hundred brothers from Catholic and Protestant traditions, whose short repetitive chants are sung to carry prayer and silence rather than to be performed.
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Prayer Music
Young Oceans
Eric Marshall's prayer-music project, layering ambient indie textures under songs written for church gatherings and for private devotion alike.
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Begena, the Harp of David
Alemu Aga
Ethiopian musician born in Addis Ababa in 1950 and a leading living master of the begena, the ten-stringed lyre known as the harp of David. In the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo tradition the begena is reserved entirely for sacred use, played for prayer and meditation and never for entertainment. He sings his prayers barely above a whisper.
View profile →IA
Coptic Alhan
Ibrahim Ayad
Coptic Orthodox cantor and head deacon at the cathedral in Cairo, and one of the few living authorities on the hymns of the Church of Alexandria. He teaches alhan, the church's chant, at the Higher Institute of Coptic Studies, and has recorded the whole liturgical year on his own so that a tradition reaching back to the first Christian centuries can be handed on rather than remembered.
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Armenian Sacred Poetry
The Naghash Ensemble
Armenian ensemble founded in Yerevan in 2010 by the composer John Hodian: three women's voices with duduk, oud, dhol and piano. They set the mystical sacred poetry of Mkrtich Naghash, the fifteenth-century Armenian priest and poet, and place the sacred and folk traditions of Armenia inside a contemporary classical setting. They have toured internationally for over a decade.
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Ensemble Basiani
Ensemble Basiani is a male vocal ensemble founded in Tbilisi in 2000 with the blessing of Patriarch Ilia II, and named the State Ensemble of Georgian Folk Singing in 2013. Its repertoire joins Georgian Orthodox church hymns with traditional polyphonic folk song.
View profile →EO
Ensemble Organum
Founded in 1982 by Marcel Pérès at Sénanque Abbey and based at the former abbey of Moissac since 2001, Ensemble Organum performs medieval liturgical chant. Its work draws on manuscript sources alongside living oral traditions such as Byzantine and Syriac chant.
View profile →GP
Grupul Psaltic Tronos
The Tronos Psaltic Group is the Byzantine chant ensemble of the Romanian Patriarchal Cathedral in Bucharest, founded and led by Archdeacon Mihail Bucă. It sings Orthodox liturgical chant and Romanian carols, and has performed in Romania and abroad.
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Irish Sacred Song
Nóirín Ní Riain
Irish singer and theologian, born in County Limerick in 1951, who lived sixteen years beside the Benedictine monks of Glenstal Abbey and is an authority on Gregorian chant and Irish spiritual song. Her doctorate set out what she calls theosony, the sound of God: listening itself as a way to religious experience. She has been an ordained interfaith minister since 2017.
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Byzantine Chant
Nektaria Karantzi
Greek singer of Byzantine church music, born on 5 August 1982, who has sung in church since childhood and holds a diploma in Byzantine music. She teaches at the Central Conservatory of Athens and sings the sacred repertoire in Greek, Romanian, Arabic, Russian and Aramaic among other languages.
View profile →MT
Maïstores tis Psaltikis Technis
The Maïstores tis Psaltikis Technis are a choir of Byzantine chanters directed by Achilleus Chaldaeakes. They study and perform the work of Byzantine and post-Byzantine composers, and sing complete Orthodox services.
View profile →SM
Chant of the Christian East
Sœur Marie Keyrouz
Lebanese nun and musicologist who sings the sacred chant of the Christian East in its Maronite, Melkite-Byzantine and Syriac forms, mostly in Arabic, and founded an ensemble of musicians drawn from different faiths.
View profile →TM
The Monks of Keur Moussa
The Monks of Keur Moussa are a Benedictine community in Senegal who built a kora of their own and compose liturgical music setting plainchant beside Wolof, Diola and Serer.
View profile →SM
Sretensky Monastery Choir
The Sretensky Monastery Choir is the male choir of the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow, singing the monastery's own services alongside Russian, Ukrainian and Cossack song.
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Ghada Shbeir
Ghada Shbeir is a Lebanese singer who works in two repertoires at once: Syriac and Maronite liturgical chant, and the Arab-Andalusian muwashshah.
View profile →VC
Vox Clamantis
Vox Clamantis is an Estonian vocal ensemble founded in Tallinn in 1996 by Jaan-Eik Tulve, with Gregorian chant at its centre and new Estonian music alongside it.
View profile →GV
Geghard Vocal Ensemble
The Geghard Vocal Ensemble is a women's choir founded in 2001 by the conductor Anahit Papayan at the medieval Geghard Monastery in Armenia, under the artistic direction of the musicologist Mher Navoyan. It sings the Divine Liturgy at the monastery on Sundays and focuses on the Armenian sacred monodic tradition from the 5th to the 15th century, alongside arrangements of sacred and folk songs. The ensemble has performed in many European countries and in Lebanon.
View profile →CA
Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Choir
The Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Choir is made up of about thirty women who come from seven remote communities in the central desert of Australia. They sing Lutheran hymns and other sacred music in English and in Western Arrarnta and Pitjantjatjara, languages still spoken in the Northern Territory and South Australia. Some of those hymns reached the singers' great-grandparents through German Lutheran missionaries more than a century ago and have been handed down in their families ever since. The choir works with choir master Morris Stuart, is the subject of the documentary The Song Keepers, and performs across Australia and overseas.
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Renaissance sacred polyphony
The Tallis Scholars
British vocal ensemble founded in 1973 by Peter Phillips, usually two singers to a part, devoted to unaccompanied sacred polyphony of the Renaissance. They have released more than sixty records on their own Gimell label and were elected to the Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2013. Their 1980 recording of the Allegri Miserere is still the one most people have heard.
View profile →Upcoming events
Upcoming events in christian mysticism.
Retreats, dialogues and online gatherings connected to this path.
∞
Feast of Light
Fairfield, Iowa, United States · Weekly healing gathering
See event pageWeekly healing gathering
∞
Empowerment Series Healings
Online · Weekly online healing session
See event pageWeekly online healing session
∞
The Art and Skill of the Quantum Jump
Online · Monthly online gathering
See event pageMonthly online gathering
∞
Meditation and Contemplative Prayer
Online · Weekly online contemplative prayer
See event pageWeekly online contemplative prayer
Talks & videos
Selected talks.
Talks and conversations from teachers within this path.
30 min
Interview · Dr Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann
The Importance of Deep Listening
Half an hour on One Plus One about dadirri, the inner deep listening of her Ngan'gikurunggurr people.
5 min
Music · The Tallis Scholars
Guerrero: Ave virgo sanctissima
Five minutes of Guerrero, and the shortest way to hear what two singers to a part does.
92 min
Music · The Tallis Scholars
Obrecht: Missa de Sancto Donatiano
Obrecht's mass sung in Bruges, the city it was written for, in the hall's own film.
Listen
Recordings from christian mysticism.
Voices from this path and the schools within it, playing from the platforms the teachers publish on.
Laurence FreemanChristian mysticism
A Apple Podcasts
Strengthening the Muscle of Attention with Fr Laurence Freeman
Laurence Freeman speaks about attention as something that can be trained through meditation and about how that capacity relates to love.
From the podcast WCCM Audio
Laurence FreemanChristian mysticism
A Apple Podcasts
The Iceberg of Consciousness with Fr Laurence Freeman on WCCM+
A talk on the unconscious layers of the mind and what happens to them in the silence of Christian meditation.
From the podcast WCCM Audio
Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home
John Philip Newell as a guest on the Nomad Podcast.
From the podcast Nomad Podcast
Laurence FreemanChristian mysticism
A Apple Podcasts
A Hunger for Depth and Meaning with Laurence Freeman OSB
Freeman reflects on the search for depth and meaning that brings people to contemplative practice.
From the podcast WCCM Audio
Reading Room
Source texts
The source texts beneath this path, free to read.
The Cloud of Unknowing
Translated by Evelyn Underhill · 1912
The anonymous 14th-century English guide to contemplative prayer.
Meister Eckhart's Sermons
Translated by Claud Field · 1909
The first English translation of the medieval German mystic's sermons.
The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus
Translated by David Lewis · 1870
Teresa of Ávila's own autobiography of her spiritual life and visions.
The Interior Castle
Translated by The Benedictines of Stanbrook · 1921
Teresa of Ávila's map of the soul's seven mansions, from the outer wall to union with God.
Discernment
Clarity should include the human context.
Contemplative practice can surface deep material. Spiritual direction is traditionally paired with pastoral or psychological support when needed.
Ask about contextIs a statement philosophical, meditative, relational or practical?
Notice powerHow are authority, money, intimacy and complaints handled?
Include embodimentDoes the teaching make room for emotion, the body and nervous-system limits?
Keep agencyA useful teacher supports clear choice rather than demanding surrender of judgement.