It’s hard to learn from someone who doesn’t seem to believe the same as us. If we’ve made up our minds that they’re ‘unsound’, our curiosity tends to wither on the vine.

Imagine my own disbelief, therefore, when a ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ bestseller I’d bought (to check out the opposition) crept up on my blind side and helped me to see things afresh.

Eckhart Tolle’s star is in the ascendant right now; suffice to say he’s the subject of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club ‘Summer School’ this year. Russell DiCarlo’s introduction to Tolle’s The Power of Now sets an intriguing scene: ‘Our ultimate destiny’, he writes, ‘is to re-connect with our essential Being and express from our extraordinary, divine reality in the ordinary physical world, moment by moment.’ Sounds dodgy on one level, of course, but so did Jesus. On another level it resonates deeply.

Tolle, who at 29 experienced a ‘profound spiritual transformation’, describes compellingly how most of us rarely still the incessant, insecure chattering of our minds – the commentary of the ego (or ‘false self’) that we mistake for who we really are. Those souls who manage to - through contemplation, meditation, prayer… - find there’s so much more to life.

It’s a matter of dying to one’s self in order to live. Which rings a bell. But how many of us have truly inhabited the mystery of that biblical paradox? How many Christians have honestly learned to detach themselves from vain ambition and the battle to keep up with the Joneses? How many genuinely slow down to become more fully present to themselves, other people, God, the planet?

Father Richard Rohr has written a helpful article on Tolle, perhaps as a response to puzzled Christians like me who find themselves warming to this man’s wisdom. Fear not, is the nub. Tolle is no New Age freak. Instead, he provides ‘an opportunity for us to understand our own message at deeper levels.’ Today, writes Fr Rohr, ‘we need whatever methods or help we can receive to allow the Christian message to take us to a deeper level of transformation.’

That’s because most of us are still paddling in the shallows of our humanity, even if intellectually we’ve been swimming in ‘sound’ Christian waters for years. Sometimes a provocation such as Tolle’s will draw us deeper – if we let it - and help us to realise more of the great potential of our own faith.