The Fr. Chales Brandt Annual Memorial Lecture
Father Charles Brandt was a Hermit-Priest who lived for many years on the Oyster River in British Columbia. The Hermitage Society is dedicated to preserving his legacy and promoting his vision of a more contemplative ecology. This year’s Memorial Lecture is a speaker series on the topic of “Hermitage as Spiritual Practice. All dates will happen at 7pm. The same link will be used for all events upon registration. The talks will be recorded at uploaded to YouTube shortly after the series concludes.
Dates and Speakers
Feb. 19th: Fr. Cyprian Consiglio and Fr. Dorathick Rajan OSB, Cam are both Camaldolese
monks. Fr. Cyprian is based at New Camaldoli Hermitage is California and Fr. Dorathick lives at
Saccidananda Ashram Shantivanam, where Fr. Bede Griffiths lived, in India. Fr. Cyprian is the
Secretary General of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue.
https://www.shantivanamashram.com/
Feb. 26th: Jason Brown will lead a dialogue with Kathi Bentall who has led silent retreats for over 25 years and worked extensively in Latin America. She co-founded Rivendell Retreat Centre on Bowen Island and founded The Listening Post in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She is the co-author with Margaret McAvity of Wings of the Wild Birds (2022).
https://www.rivendellretreat.org/hermitage
March 5th: Robert Rodriguez is the author of The Book of Hermits and founder of https://www.hermitary.com/.
March 26th: A panel from the Cascabel Conservation Association Hermitage Program will reflect on the long success of their work in the Sonora Desert. Much of their work was inspired by the desert ecological theology and immigration activism of Quaker-rancher James A. Corbett (1933-2001). https://cascabelconservation.org/hermitage/
Daniel F. Baker has a background in philosophy. He lived alone for two years in a remote valley cabin in California’s southern Sierra Nevada. After retiring from business, he moved to a rural community in the San Pedro River Valley of southeastern Arizona. There he became one of the founders and the initial facilitator of a hermitage program in what is now the Cascabel Conservation Association, of which he is an Emeritus Director. He has also worked as a conservation activist therein for over three decades.
Susan Tollefson has for the past nine years sojourned in a small earthen hermitage in the Hot Springs Canyon area of Cascabel, a rural community in Arizona. Until recently she co-chaired the CCA Hermitage Program accompanying sojourners on solitary retreats in the wildlands we steward. She currently co-chairs the Hermitage program from afar, and her desire is to return to Cascabel yearly to accompany sojourners.
Madison Cook has been the “Accompaniment Person” for the hermitage since October of 2025. Her position also entails the collection of reflections kept by those who visit, which have been thoughtfully collected since the inception of the program in the 1980s. She is an Arizona native and admirer of the desert and its inhabitants.
Resources
Peter France, Hermits: The Insights of Solitude (1996)
Fr. Charles Brandt, Self and Environment: On Retreat with Fr. Charles Brandt (2000) https://mediomedia.com/products/mmsef2
Robert Rodriguez, The Book of Hermits: A History of Hermits from Antiquity to the Present (2021)
Bill Porter/Red Pine, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits (2009).
James A. Corbett, Goatwalking (1991), Sanctuary for All Life (2005).
Fr. Cyprian Consiglio, Prayer in the Cave of the Heart (2010), Spirit, Soul, Body: Toward an Integral Christian Spirituality (2015), The God Who Gave You Birth: A Spirituality of Kenosis (2022).