Personal Transformation and a New Creation

This volume is devoted to the work of Beatrice Bruteau, a new name to me, but someone who was nurtured by both Catholic Christianity and Vedantic Hinduism and was a founder of the American Teilhard Association. The book contains personal reminiscences as well as essays on various aspects of her work, including by Ursula King on a feminine mystical way, the Trinity and evolution, personal and cultural maturation and evolution towards personhood. I resonated with some of the principal themes of her thought, such as the movement from self-separateness to self-participation, from the partial self to the whole self, away from the self as a separate entity towards the self as intimately intertwined with other humans and the entire cosmos. This entails prioritising the values of cooperation, sympathy, compassion and forgiveness as 'the basic value patterns of perception'. It is significant that she was a friend and colleague of Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths and David Steindl-Rast as fellow bridge builders. She was also a pioneer with her comparative study of Teilhard and Aurobindo. I appreciated Ursula's coining of the new word pneumatophore as a carrier of the spirit and an 'expression of transformative, empowering ideas and inspirations' indicated in Bruteau's work.