Stories of Transformation through Contemplative Practice:
Doug Tanner of the Faith in Politics Institute

Glen Bouchard was at the time a freshman Congressman from southern Illinois. He had come from a fundamentalist southern Baptist background, but he read a lot of Thomas Merton and he went on retreats like Gethsemane.

We developed a group of four of us that met in Glen's office for an hour and a half on Wednesday mornings from 7:30 to 9 o'clock in a style that was very similar to the reflection group. He shared with us after a few weeks that he was having a very hard time facing the prospect of going out and raising another half a million dollars for his re-election campaign, and he just couldn't in good conscious do it for several reasons. He wanted to try to do it differently and not take any PAC money and not take more than $50 from anybody and debate his opponent in all 22 of his local counties and count on local newspapers to cover it and not buy television time, etc.

He pretty much did that with a bit of my support. He served five terms with always being grossly outspent by his opponents and every time getting a higher percentage of the vote than he had the last time. He ran for governor and got the nomination but lost in the general by just a few points. He says without that little group he didn't think he would have had the clarity to make that decision or the courage to say with it. It all happened within a setting where he was given the freedom and encouragement to follow where his spirit was leading him.