Yoga and prayer: a helpful DVD from Tom Ryan, CSP

Tom Ryan has done a brave and good thing.

Now living in New York and working for the Paulist Office of Ecumenical Affairs and Inter-religious Dialogue, Tom Ryan is respectfully remembered across Canada for his 14 years service as the effective head of the Canadian Centre for Ecumenism in Montreal, and then five years at a centre for spirituality in that city, called UNITAS.

All these years, Ryan has practised yoga, becoming a yoga teacher certified in Kripalu. He has integrated yoga teaching into hundreds of retreats and workshops. I myself attended one of these weekends in Montreal in the early nineties.

It made sense to me then, and does now, that we Christians are in an ideal position to combine prayer and bodily movement. We are an incarnational people. Tom Ryan seeks assiduously to encourage a holistic approach to bodily prayer in his nine books and now in this graceful, relaxing DVD which is useful for all, beginners or long time practitioners.

Yoga Practice: an Embodied Christian Spiritual Practice is 91 minutes in length. It shows Tom Ryan speaking about the theology of yoga as intentional prayer, then moving through movements on a mat with music accompaniment. Finally, there is an instructional section where he talks the viewer through the movements, demonstrating without music what one does in practice. I would say that for a fairly fit adult, these movements are possible and pleasant.

The DVD is, at the same time, brave, because he is offering his knowledge of the body and prayer at a time in our history when there is active official suspicion about the body. In addition to our centuries-long ambiguity about the body, evident in our backwardness about sexuality, there is a new campaign, born of ignorance, against "New Age" concepts and programs. I myself know a diocese where the retreat house has had pressure from the bishop to cancel "12-Step" programs, and yoga classes.

What Ryan shows is a great serenity in response to this line of thinking and an admirable perseverance in carrying out his ministry.

"Westerners," he says, "have been conditioned to think of prayer in the mind, perhaps even in the heart, but never in the body. Yet our great Christian feasts, Christmas, Easter and Pentecost, all are deeply body-involved. Moreover, God's got plans to keep the whole me, bio-degradable but not disposable!"

East and West are now sharing spiritual gifts, and as a worker in the field of ecumenism, Ryan is well positioned to keep us informed about this exciting development. "Yoga is a kind of hardware to which all faiths can bring their software," he says. In fact, his new book, Reclaiming the Body in Christian Spirituality, has essays from yoga practitioners from several great faiths.

In his T-shirt, track pants and bare feet, Ryan show's maturity in years, but presents a powerful picture of the body offering praise, thanksgiving and supplication. Salvation, after all, doesn't mean getting out of this skin, but of being glorified and transfigured in it.

The music selections are beautiful, but I couldn't find acknowledgement of their source in the DVD notes.

When one meets a spiritual resource such as this DVD, one hopes the person behind its creation will be safeguarded from criticism or censure.

DVD available from www.soundstrue.com or SoundsTrue, Box 8010 Boulder, CO, 80306

COPYRIGHT 2005 Catholic New Times, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group