Beatrice Bruteau

"...For most of Beatrice Bruteau’s long career, she lived in and around Winston-Salem, N.C., where she and her husband, Fordham professor James Somerville, founded the Schola Contemplationis, a center for the study and practice of the contemplative lifestyle according to the classical traditions of both East and West. For more than 30 years, their "mind-bending" monthly newsletter, The Roll, was painstakingly composed in their home office, run off on an old mimeograph machine, and hand-mailed to their small but devoted mailing list. A Southern lady to the nines, she dressed impeccably for every occasion, refused to travel by air, and insisted that coffee and tea be served in proper china cups, not in -- heaven forbid -- mugs!


… Correspondence soon led to a personal visit and a mentoring relationship that would span the next three decades. I am honored to report that the very first public spiritual teaching I ever gave was at her behest, to her Schola Contemplationis group, in the early 1990s… The most powerful debt of gratitude I owe her was her unflagging support during the writing and publication of my first book, Love is Stronger than Death. Still in a very tender place following the death of my hermit teacher Raphael Robin… Her luminous support at this critical threshold of my life is one of the main reasons I am where I am today…


In about the fall of 2013 I began to hear rumors that Alzheimer's disease was starting to affect her magnificent brain, and in spring 2014, following a conference in Greensboro, N.C., I was able to pay her what turned out to be a final visit. While it was indeed obvious that the disease was making some inroads on the habitual operations along the horizontal axis of life, as soon as we leaped into spiritual issues, her vast mind still took over like the lioness it was. Her teaching continued luminous and more and more vast…


One of my younger students, Joshua Tysinger, had begun his seminary studies at Wake Forest, right there in Winston-Salem, at just about the time that Beatrice's life was rounding toward its end. I suggested -- and Josh was alert enough to follow up on the suggestion -- that having a world-class spiritual master right in town was an opportunity not to be missed. He began to pay her regular visits, and it soon became clear that a lineage transmission was in process. As Josh willingly and sensitively helped Beatrice and Jim navigate the horizontal axis, her brilliant final imparting of a lifetime of spiritual wisdom and spiritual fire (mostly over lunch at the K&W Cafeteria, with, yes, proper coffee cups!) is an exchange I suspect will not leave the planet unchanged…


In late July, she suffered a fall and was hospitalized and in nursing care for several weeks thereafter. During this time, it seemed she was very much on the decline and "in transition." She ceased eating, and her already-slight frame shrank to 50 pounds. By October, a hospice worker had been called in, and Beatrice was seemingly hanging between the worlds.


Nine days before her death, she sat up, got up, resumed eating enough to sustain the physical body a bit longer, and began to teach and transmit in a luminous burst of continuing insight. It was as if the Alzheimer's had been left behind -- or perhaps, if truth be told, she had already "died" to this world and was returning, her own risen and christed self in her imaginal body, to complete what was needed vis-à-vis this earth plane… Teacher to the end, she left us with a luminous, stunningly hopeful demonstration of how a conscious death is already a risen life; the two are joined at the hip. With her final magnificent fusion of clarity, will and freedom -- all those qualities her spiritual practice had been about for more than half a century -- she went out like a bright candle, filling the whole room with the perfume of her realized being.


That being accomplished, she slipped away quietly into the night at just after midnight. Her last gift to us was a brilliant, living testimony to the triumphant reality of her two deepest convictions -- radical optimism and God's ecstasy -- carved in the final sacrament of her life.”


~ Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault is an Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally known retreat leader.
Photos ~ Beatrice Bruteau ~ with her husband Jim ~Joshua Tysinger, Cynthia Bourgeault & Beatrice Bruteau