£12.99
How can the Church ensure that its worship, life and mission flow from an encounter with the God of love, mercy and faithfulness? How can its members develop and sustain a loving personal relationship with Jesus? How can it ensure that it places itself in all it does and thinks under the guidance of the Holy Spirit? In other words how can it ‘Realise the Sacred’ both in the sense of ‘coming to know’ the Sacred and of ‘bringing it about’ – by turning to the ways of contemplation? Can these ways bring unity to the rich diversity of the Church and hence hope and love to a fractured world?
Paperback 187 pages. Published August 2025.
As a small business we rely on word of mouth recommendations to assist others in their choice of books. Please consider leaving a review of any of our books and so help us in our mission to promote books on Franciscan theology and spirituality. Thank you.
In order to leave a review you will need to log in to your account and go to the product page where you can click on the review tab to leave your comments
Realising the Sacred is the result of years of reflection by an older sage who loves the Church. He roots the synodal approach of Pope Francis in the person of Jesus and his relationship with the Father. David Jackson’s experience of working with women and men of other faiths enables him to see a similar call to a contemplative dimension in the lives of every person of faith. His imaginative, sometimes profound and occasionally provocative outcomes of taking synodality seriously are a real challenge to everyone in the Church. His re-imaging of worship, community building and mission are a breath of fresh air, urging us all to become more open to the inclusiveness, compassion and mercy of the Lord.
David Jackson has written a timely book with two major features: the significance of synodality in the Catholic Church, and the underpinnings of the mystical tradition both past and present as the means of experiencing the Spirit of God at work – a task for all the baptised – in a process of ongoing contemplation.
David Jackson encourages the reader to face up to all the wonderful challenges as we become Church today, by going to the heart of the matter. His theme: the People of God are self-consciously waking up to the notion that they are on a contemplative journey into new territory, the contours of which are only just beginning to emerge.
David has produced a work of modest length but of considerable depth and breadth through making full use of his wide reading and depth of experience over a long life. He centres his theme of the necessary ongoing renewal of the Church in the practice of contemplative prayer, a phrase which within the Catholic Church is usually reserved for monks and nuns. However, he points out that in the world at large the reality of contemplative or mystical prayer is a universal phenomenon at all times and in all religions, but under different names. This life of interior prayer leads out into true and fruitful action in the world. These two directions, ad intra and ad extra, are held together by the One who is the Union between Father and Son, the Holy Spirit and he shows how the Synodal Way with its practice of ‘conversations in the Spirit’ as initiated by Pope Francis, can, and perhaps must be, the way in which we find that centre round which the coming Church may live and grow to the glory of God and his Son Jesus Christ.
You must be logged in to post a review.
Peter Phillips, Hon. Fellow of the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University –
Reading the material relating to the synod on synodality generates excitement and enthusiasm, but leaves us with the question ‘Where do we start?’ This book answers that question. David Jackson here takes up Von Hügel’s understanding of the Church as comprised of three elements, the institutional, the intellectual and the mystical. He points out that ‘due to understandable historic forces, the centralising institutional element has tended to swamp the intellectual and ignore the mystic elements’ (p. 112). For the synodal process to blossom it must become ‘the fruit of the slow cultivation of a shared contemplative spirit’ (p. 122). Heartsight, ‘awareness’, attending ‘to things by way of intuition, instinct, feelings, imagination and poetry’ (p. 58) must be allowed to mediate between ‘mindsight’, the intellectual, and the institutional elements in the Church, and allowed to restore the balance.
Jackson acknowledges that this rediscovery of the contemplative spirit in the Church is a ‘big ask for all the members of the Church’ (p. 123) but it is an essential step on the way to a refreshed, synodal Church. Pope Francis calls us to ‘conversations in the Spirit’. The Synod on Synodality mandates that at all levels diocesan synods, parish pastoral councils of laity and clergy should be created and should be ‘the place for listening, for prayer, and discernment, particularly when it comes to choices pertaining to the life and mission of the Church’ (Final Document, par. 108). These grouping should not be talking-shops, or thinking-shops, but places for listening to the other, embodying ‘a companionship of the empowered’. Jackson explores this theme in a series of chapters exploring worship, community and mission as emissaries of a contemplative Church and asks whether ‘the Church, in the shape of a reconfigured priesthood, [has] now got a ministry of service to offer, defined as that of mandating and empowering the baptismal charism of all the faithful, and so reveal the mystics hidden among us and the contemplative spirit residing in all of us?’ (p. 115). This spirit must inspire all our activity: Jackson insists, for instance, that ‘action for justice and peace divorced from contemplation can produce angry activists and prophets driven by ego not the contemplative spirit’ (p. 154), is a danger to be shunned.
Pope Francis entrusts us to dream dreams and share our visions, not losing ourselves in wormholes of endless discussion and, above all, as St Benedict reminds us, avoiding the corrosive effects of murmuring and grumbling about the other. There is much here. We must read and reread this lyrical and inspiring study, invite our fellow parishioners to read and reread it, and to put it into practice.
T. Patrick Hill, Associate Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University, USA –
If a recent report that millions of people are turning to a variety of chatbots in pursuit of a more spiritual life is true, then David Jackson’s Realising The Sacred is indeed timely.
For Jackson, the Roman Church is institutionally at an unprecedented crossroads, with its clericalism under critical scrutiny and its synodality under experimentation. For Jackson, the choice between two conflicting forces lies with synodality. Clericalism, with its emphasis on doctrine from on high tends always to exclusion; in contrast, synodality, with its emphasis on discerning from within favours inclusion and the rediscovery of the Church’s contemplative tradition.
For justification, Jackson takes the unusual step of premising his choice on the work of neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist who blames what he sees as the widespread dysfunction of contemporary society, on a domination by the left-brain hemisphere over the right-brain hemisphere. In much the same way, Jackson blames what he sees as the polarisation of the Roman Church, on the dominance of its external doctrinal compliance at the cost of an internal contemplative tradition. And just as McGilchrist would reverse this in the secular world so that the right-brain hemisphere is dominant, Jackson argues for an interior life of contemplation or mysticism to inform any exterior doctrinal posture. As he puts it, ‘By consciously reinstating, repositioning that contemplative vision at the centre of its [the Church’s] contemporary synodal process, all else … will circle round it as planets round a sun in the gravitational pull of the love of God.’
This begins, Jackson claims, with returning to Jesus as heir to the contemplative elements in the prophetic tradition, and evident in ‘the poetry of the Psalms and the writings of the prophet Isaiah’. It is from within such a tradition that we can learn how ‘to speak from the heart and seek to reflect that as its context whenever it has to speak from the head’. And from there, the life of the Church, in its community, its worship and its mission, can become emissary of a rich contemplative tradition.
Timely as Realising The Sacred is, it is also challenging because its message is revolutionary, not evolutionary. It calls for a ‘returning to something earlier’, not a ‘developing into something ahead’. The mysticism it speaks of consists, according to philosopher Ken Wilber, in apprehending ‘Reality … directly and immediately, meaning without any mediation, any symbolic elaboration, any conceptualization, or any abstractions; subject and object become one in a timeless and spaceless act that is beyond any and all forms of mediation.’ For Jackson, the apprehension is achieved through contemplation, which consists in ‘forms of silent, non-discursive prayer, a ‘presence in simply “being”’. It hearkens back to The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth century treatise on mysticism in which the cloud of unknowing is a metaphor for a spiritual awareness that replaces the mind and thought about God with the heart and love as it encounters the divine. In its present crisis, the Church, Jackson contends, has ‘urgent need of placing all “thinking”, intellectualising, ideologising, as well as all action for justice, peace and the care of creation under the guidance’ of its now largely neglected contemplative tradition.
There is no doubt, in Realising The Sacred, Jackson has thrown down the gauntlet, but gently. ‘The text strives not to judge but rather to bring a contemplative, non-dual spirit as the focus, modelled by Jesus, to the worship, life and mission of the Church.’ In this he is prophetic. May this prophet be heard!
Allan Figeroa Deck SJ, Distinguished Scolar of Pastoral Theology, Loyola Marymount University, USA –
Both Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV have insisted that synodality is the way forward for the Church in the Third Millennium. They speak of it as an essential feature of the Church’s identity and mission. Consequently, Pope Francis made the synodal way the signature feature of his papacy and saw to it that the Synod on Synodality would push forward with its work through a worldwide implementation phase culminating in a newly vinted Ecclesial Assembly in 2028. Francis was a man in a hurry focused on making the church less self-referential and narcissistic and more co-responsible and participative. He left more than just a few seeds of synodal reform as even a casual familiarity with the work of the Synod on Synodality will attest. In a measured and yet unequivocal way Pope Leo XIV has endorsed this monumental process of synodal reform. Consequently, synodality is here to stay. This is why David A. Jackson’s powerful new book on synodality as a way of life, as a spirituality and ‘mysticism of action’ makes such a timely and original contribution to the growing literature on this subject.
Jackson, a British educator, author and former priest, has written a stirring and evocative reflection on synodality titled Realising the Sacred: The Way of a Contemplative Synodal Church. Jackson synthesizes his extensive life experiences, expertise and vast learning in theology, spirituality and pastoral ministry to provide an impressive vision of synodality’s relevance to personal and ecclesial development based on the exercise of individual and communal growth in solidarity. This takes place through the practice of contemplation, deep listening, dialogue and discernment.
Central to the author’s concerns is moving beyond dualistic, either/or, and binary ways of thinking that fail to integrate realities and connect lives holistically. Dualistic mindsets often lead to building walls rather than bridges between us and the other. Foremost in Jackson’s thinking is the immensely consequential conviction that ‘heartspeak’ must take precedence over ‘headspeak’ if the spiritual underpinnings of faith are going to take root and flourish in human affairs. In clear and unequivocal terms, Jackson articulates the fundamentally affective character of the spiritual journey and respectfully but firmly puts the Western world’s and modernity’s tendency to intellectualize in its proper place. In six stirring chapters Jackson covers the ways in which the practice of synodal relationships originates in contemplative prayer. He elaborates chapter by chapter on the unfolding of an ever deepening synodal grasp of Jesus’ Gospel message, and in the faithful’s witnessing to that Gospel as his beloved emissaries who by virtue of baptism constitute a community of mystics possessed of a profound intuition called the sensus fidei. In this, Jackson evokes Karl Rahner’s much quoted remark about ‘Christians of the future being mystics or not being at all’.
Jackson combines remarkably rich insights from the Scriptures with a wide range of theological and philosophical sources along with pertinent examples from contemporary spiritual writers like Richard Rohr and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. He engages these contemporary thinkers with authoritative sources of church teaching from Pope John XXIII to Pope Leo XIV.
Throughout the book Jackson displays a familiarity with Franciscan spirituality as well as other traditions like the Dominical, Benedictine and Carmelite. One wonders why he did not make the connection with Ignatian spirituality and its emphasis on contemplation in action, mysticism of action, and discernment of spirits since these ideas are key themes throughout Jackson’s work. Nevertheless, the method pursued in this provocative reflection on synodality and its spiritual underpinnings and meaning is remarkably broad and interdisciplinary, bringing to bear Jackson’s many years of experience and learning on the Church’s and the world’s current realty and tribulations. Synodality offers him an opportunity to integrate a wide range of knowledge and reflection with rare spiritual acumen. While everyone will not agree with Jackson’s pointed convictions about some hot-button issues like his endorsement of married priests for the church in the West and the priestly ordination of women, his wide-ranging and robust tackling of synodality as spiritual practice is an exciting, hopeful addition to our late Pope Francis’s wonderful legacy for the Church and the world.