Sitting Still: An Encounter with Christian Zen

Patricia Clifford came to the Mercy Center in Burlingame, California to spend one week simply sitting still on a cushion in a room. She was an Episcopalian woman visiting a Catholic retreat center to practice Zen meditation under the direction of a Jesuit priest. For seven days she and twenty-five other people would sit together in silence for hours on end in an attempt to give mindful attention to each present moment.Sitting Still is a personal account of those seven days. One great accomplishment of the narrative is that it succeeds in making Zen meditation, which evolved within Buddhism, intelligible to western Christians. It also offers suggestions for carrying the techniques of silent, wordless meditation into the daily lives of busy westerners.