Ross is very aware of "poor talkative
Christianity". There is a twofold plea to enter into silence, for
"[lack of] silence erodes humanity"—and to behold the radiance of
God. This is a deep book full of questioning and the testing of our
assumptions. Throughout, there is a great love for the world and for our
humanity with a sadness at how we are so easily distracted. Was the sin of Adam
and Eve that of being distracted?
We are invited into a silence that is not
necessarily an absence of noise, but is a limitless interior space. Ancient
texts are used in new and exciting ways, and many of our worship practices are
challenged. She is in no doubt that "the glory of the human being is the
beholding of God".
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"Maggie Ross clears away the 'white
noise' that so often attends writing and talking about faith. She invites us into real quiet, which is also real presence, presence to ourselves and to the threefold mystery that eludes our concepts and even our ordinary ideas of 'experience'. A really transformative book." —jacket comment by The Most Rev'd Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.
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"This book is intended for everyone
who has had enough of 'spiritual writing' and is looking for something that will make sense of normal human experience and integrate it into the knowledge of God through Christ." —from the Foreword by The Rev'd Professor John Barton, Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, University of Oxford.
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Review by The Revd Dr Johnny Douglas,
Free Presbyterian Church, Antrim, N. Ireland
If obedience is deep listening to God,
then Maggie Ross's new book is a powerful, effective and understated guiding to
faith and soul-truthfulness. There is a rarity, freshness in her writing.
Insight, scripture, wisdom and prayer swirl around here in this challenging
earthy write. You will see God clearly and more honestly than in most other
places.
The sense of having wrestled with the wilderness, wanderings and
wideness of humanity are striking. Repentance, tears and fire rarely get such a
wise and moving exploration. Reality permeates this wonderful new BRF title.
Faith and experience will be enriched should you invest in the reading of this
fine book!
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Review by Carl McColman,
www.anamchara.com
Almost twenty years ago I read Maggie
Ross’s wonderful book on the theology of priesthood, Pillars of Flame:
Power, Priesthood and Spiritual Maturity. Not only was
it a valuable book in helping me to affirm my ministry as a lay Christian, but
it also struck me as one of the most lyrical and eloquent statements of
Christian spirituality in general that I had ever read. Yes, that is high
praise. But the book deserved it. Ross, an Anglican solitary, clearly
understood how tainted Christian theology had become by imperial, Greco-Roman,
concepts of God-as-controlling-political-authority — and how such a domineering
image of God had corrupted not only Christian spirituality in general, but
particularly Christian thinking about priesthood. Only by regaining an
understanding of God-as-kenotic-love, as evidenced by the witness of Christ and
the New Testament authors, could we ever hope to re-vision priesthood as the
radical servant/ministry that Christ intended it to be.
So when one of the brothers at the
Monastery of the Holy Spirit sent me an enthusiastic email insisting that Writing
the Icon of the Heart, Ross’s newest offering, was by far one
of the most important books on spirituality that he had read in a long time, I
took him at his word. And now that I’ve read it, I’m happy to commend it to you
as well. The book is a collection of essays Ross had written over a twenty year
period, most of which had been published in journals like Weavings or Sobornost. But they have all been
revised/rewritten for this collection, and she requests that the essays be read
in the order presented here. So what emerges feels less like a hodgepodge
anthology and more like a thematic introduction to her singular perspective on
what it means to be a contemplative in today’s world, from considering the missing
element in so many discussions of contemplation (“beholding”), to a frank but
sober assessment of how a spiritual awakening might be our only hope as we
consider the breadth and depth of environmental degradation that characterizes
today’s world. Ross divides her time between Oxford and Alaska, and so her
writing is infused with an appreciation of wilderness, not only for its own
sake but also as a key element in an authentically kenotic spirituality.
Ross warns in the introduction of the book
against the facile use of the words “mystic” and “mysticism,” and indeed, one
of her most consistent targets is the idolatry of experience that characterizes
so much spiritual thinking and activity in our day. While I am not willing to
be quite as damning in my critique of experience as she is — I see the turn
toward experience as a necessary corrective to the overly intellectualized
propositional theology that has bedeviled so much Christianity, particularly in
its Protestant form, over the past few generations — I broadly agree with her
assertion that the quest for experience has become a religious cul-de-sac,
reducing Christianity from its splendor as a threshold to the mysteries to a
mere consumer spirituality, trading transformational kenosis for mental-emotional
entertainment. The Christian mystery takes us far beyond what we can think or
feel — to the place of “beholding,” a splendid word that Ross notes has been
all but erased from modern translations of the Bible (not to mention most
modern translations of the writings of Julian of Norwich and the Cloud of
Unknowing, which helps to explain why Ross is so critical of reading those
texts in translated editions).
Unlike consumer spirituality where a warm
cosy experience of God’s love can be engineered by the right music and a
carefully crafted sermon, true contemplative beholding ushers us into radical
encounter with the terrifying living God, a place beyond our puny attempts to
control and our feeble insistence on good feelings as the arbiter of sanctity.
True beholding, therefore, is transfigurative rather than merely experiential —
echoing Teresa of Avila’s insistence that the only sure way of assessing
progress in the spiritual life is by considering one’s growth in holiness,
which is to say, growth in love and humble service of others.
For Maggie Ross, the “others” we are
called to love and humbly serve are not merely our fellow Christians or even
the larger human family. Rather, she eloquently speaks of the entire sweep of
creation as our brothers and sisters in the Divine economy. From cranberries to
walruses to a hair-raising near-encounter with a grizzly bear, her essays are
vibrant with the beauty and splendor of God’s good earth. She also pulls no
punches in considering how much damage our consumer economy has caused. Only by
abandoning consumerism and accepting the call of kenosis — of self-emptying
love — is there any hope for our fragile and distressed biosphere. And only by
beholding God in silence and self-forgetful abandonment can we hope to discern,
and accept, that uncompromising call.
In the end, Maggie Ross writes eloquently
of the experience of tears — not as some sort of emotional manipulation, as so
much religious spectacle seems to promote — but rather as an authentic
embracing of sorrow, of loss, of repentance, of grief, of letting-go — that
ushers us in to that place, where, in our letting go (kenosis) we encounter the
kenotic God. This is the place of transfiguration, beyond any “technology” or
“experience,” whether religious or otherwise. May we all be carried by our
tears to such a graced encounter.
-------------
Book
Review: Writing the Icon of the Heart by Maggie Ross BRF £6.99
ISBN 978 1 84101 878 2 The Rev'd Dr Peter Mullen, New Directions,
January 2012
There are
so many good, rich insights in this book:
All
our ills come from the loss of silence and beholding, our failure to listen and
our insistence on our flawed and limited interpretation...,
The
public rhetoric of religion employs such words as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ even
while it is taking away our sense of wonder...
The
tragic search for security in exterior validation makes us hostage to what
other people think...
The book
blazes with originality. Maggie Ross is an anchorite, a solitary – a role which
she manages to combine with that of a professor of theology who spends her
winters teaching in Oxford. She is a mystic, a contemplative, a strong
supporter of negative theology and the apophatic way...
There is
no mistaking the spiritual depth in her book. Anyone who reads it will come
away with a transformed view of prayer and the spiritual life. Maggie Ross
offers no anodynes and she is brave enough to insist:
Most
worrying of all is our unwillingness to accept pain as part of the ordinary
tissue of life, and the waste and suffering that are the consequence of efforts
to avoid it at all costs.
...
[There is profit in] this fervent and faithful book. Nowhere more movingly than
when Maggie Ross answers her aged mother’s fears about death in these words:
My
views on this subject are mindlessly simple. I think the universe is made of
love and that when we die we are somehow drawn deeper into that love.
