Writing the Icon of the Heart

In Silence Beholding

Ross

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781621895459
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

The subtitle of Maggie Ross's new book captures its essence, for it is about silence and our need to behold God. Beholding is a notion that we are in danger of losing. It is often lost in translation, even by the NRSV and the Jerusalem Bible. Beholding needs to be recovered both in theology and practice.Ross is very aware of poor talkative Christianity. There is a twofold plea to enter into silence--for lack of silence erodes our humanity--and to behold the radiance of God. This is a book full of deep questioning and the testing of our assumptions. Throughout there is a great love for the world and for our humanity, accompanied by sadness that we are so easily 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.--adapted from a review in The Church Times (London) by Canon David Adam.

Cranberries1

Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone
because he had been talking with God.

—Exodus 34:29.

September in the heart of Denali, just outside the border of the national park near the old mining town of Kantishna: the silent land is expectant. The first blanket of snow could come at any time. The tundra is suffused with the slanting light of a lingering sun; the heavy, golden air is filigreed with the hoarse fluting of cranes as they spiral to the heavens. The Mountain’s2 presence is tactile. Wickersham Wall, the 15,000-foot expanse of sheer grey granite, seems close enough to touch, though it is thirty miles away as the raven flies, across a landscape saturated with autumn, soaked with the radiance of cranberries.

Cranberries: low-bush cranberries, to be specific. Easily over­looked, trodden underfoot, they spring back from their bed of Labrador tea, unbruised and unhurt. Growing with blueberries and crowberries, they provide some of the loveliest patterns of color in nature. When half-ripe they are brilliant scarlet against the blue-silver of new spruce growth, the russet of bearberry or the grey of reindeer lichen; their brilliant hues hint of Christmas. As the cranberries ripen, their scarlet transmutes into a darker purple-red; they become harder to find. Once made brilliant by bright sun, their subdued maturity is now made visible in the more subtle light of high clouds or the sheen of mist and rain.

Cranberries. I’ve been living with cranberries for a week nοw, gallons of them. To be out in the vastness amid their prodigal abundance makes me glad I have to pick them on my knees. I go out with my backpack, some gallon jugs, and the berry rake. When I find patches where berries grow thick enough to use it, I feel rather like a small bear, clawing with my wooden paw through the vegetation, putting the harvest into containers instead of my mouth. Slowly the jars fill, and slowly my backpack becomes heavier.

Late one sunny afternoon I brought my haul back to camp, rolling the cranberries by handfuls down an inclined frame on which a piece of woolen blanket had been stretched, the rough cloth catching the bits of leaf and moss that inevitably are picked with the berries. They rattled on to a flat tray, the crimson punctuated by the odd blueberry or crowberry.

When the tray was full, I looked at it as if for the first time and caught my breath. A phrase from Psalm 34 leaped to mind, “Lοοk on him and be radiant . . .” (v. 5). I picked up the tray of radiance and set it on the bench outside the food storage cache where the angled light made the berries glow ever more deeply from within.

This same radiance extends to everyone at our camp, guest or staff, no matter what the weather; it shines from their faces. They arrive tired and stressed, travel-weary, even a little suspicious if they are first-timers, not knowing quite what they will find in the people or the wilderness. But soon the quiet magic of the land takes hold: a caribou against the horizon; a bear cavorting among the willow; a wolf at its kill; tiny spring flowers still to be found among the few snow patches remaining from last winter; a pair of ravens soaring overhead, calling, calling; the cloudy drape drawing back from The Mountain to reveal its glory.

This glory of cranberries and wilderness bestows humility in the radiance that captures us and is reflected in our faces. It is most present when we are least self-conscious, when our awareness is focused outside ourselves and we are briefly taken into a space where the ordinary preoccupations of time are laid aside. Above all, it is a gift, as the cranberries themselves are a gift. This radiance is the trace of divine love that creates and sustains, lingering in all creation, no matter how muted it may seem. The ability to see this love depends on our receptivity to the gift of humility, which is contemplation, purity of heart, and peace all rolled into one, the single virtue of which the paradoxes of the Beatitudes speak.

We come to understand that only love can recognize Love. It is only because we bear, each one of us, each fragment of creation, the trace of the divine that we dimly realize the hunger crying out from every human heart can be fed by this radiance alone.

It is these commonplace cranberry events that underlie the wisdom of the Judeo-Christian heritage. The psalms are full of such references. God needs mere fingers to make the heavens, the stars and the moon (Ps 8:4); he sports with Leviathan (Ps 104:28) and feeds the young ravens when they cry (Ps 147:10). The psalms refer not only to the natural world, but also to the profound effect that world has on us, what it reveals of our psychology and character. The full sentence from Psalm 34 is an example: “Look on him and be radiant, and let not your faces be ashamed” (v. 5).

For in the light of this radiance, all else is forgotten, all that preoccupies and troubles us, all our pain and dismay. It is not that they are excised or erased but, as the contemporary philosopher Erazim Kohák has remarked, our pain becomes part of something larger than ourselves, and is transfigured. In his book An Evil Cradling, a modern Dark Night of the Soul, Brian Keenan describes the moment when, in the midst of despair induced by solitary confinement, he was given an orange. Starved as he was for fresh fruit, he could not bear to eat it, could only behold the wonder of its cοlοr, its form, its radiance in the dark.3

Through these transfigurations, we realize concretely what the ancients knew—our participation in the divine nature. We are with Moses and the elders, whose beholding on the mountain and its effects constitutes one of the biblical passages most frequently cited by contemplative writers. This same beholding is promised to all of us, as summed up in the sublime vision of Revelation:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign for ever and ever. (22:1–5)

Our seeking to the beholding is not a matter of rejecting the particularities of creation but rather plunging into their deepest heart, allowing them wholly to draw our attention. Amor meus, pondus meum, wrote St. Augustine. Love draws everything to itself, and this radiant love is the source of all fruitfulness.4

Barking at Angels

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan.
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

A few years ago, the Bodleian Library published a Christmas card that showed the annunciation to the shepherds—or, rather, to one shepherd, standing on a hillside shielding his eyes from the glory of the herald angel. Beside him, his cheeky dog was doing what good sheepdogs do: barking at the strange intruder. It is not hard to imagine the poor shepherd, in dread and awe of this staggering vision, trying to get the dog tο shut up long enough for him to hear what the angelic messenger is saying.

I often wonder if all the fretful, frenetic activity in our lives isn’t a human way of barking at angels, of driving away the signs everywhere around us: signs calling us to stop, tο wake up, tο receive a new and larger perspective, to pay attention tο what is most important in life, to behold the face of God in every ordinary moment. These signs press on us most insistently at the turning of the year, when earthly light drains from our lives and we are left wondering in the dark.

The church, from ancient times, recognized the spiritual value of this winter span of darkness and created in its liturgy what we might think of as a three­-months-long Night Office, beginning with the Feast of All Saints on the first of November, and ending with Candlemas on the second of February. This season is a vast parabola of prophecy and vision, a liturgical arcing of eternity through the world’s midnight.

The readings—especially those from Isaiah and Revelation—do their best to subvert our perceptions of time and space in order to plunge us into the great stillness at the heart of things, the stillness necessary to make space for what is “ever ancient and ever new”5 to break through the clamor of our minds, tο open our hearts to the Beloved, to annunciation, and to fruition. Eternity is our dwelling place even in time, if only we have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the heart to welcome. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts,” cry the seraphs, their voices shaking the foundations even as their ineffable wings fold us into the stillness of God (Isa 6:3).

Only in this stillness can we know eyes are being opened and ears unstopped; the lame are leaping like deer and those once silenced singing for joy; water is springing in the parched wilderness of our pain. Only as we are plunged into the depths of this obscure stillness can we know the wonderful and terrible openings of the seals and the book; the rain of the Just One; the heavens rent by angels ascending and descending; the opening of graves and gifts, of hell and the side of Christ.

•

Our God, heav’n cannot hold Him,
Nor earth sustain;
Heav’n and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign.
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.

By contrast, it is a curiously contemporary phenomenon that the public rhetoric of religion employs words such as freedom and liberty even while it is taking away our sense of wonder, crowding our minds with insistent demands, and obviating the possibility of any space for contemplation. Thus, we are invited to think about ourselves and our discontents, especially our fear, which locks us in time instead of gesturing toward eternity.

By associating God with fear, political and religious institutions encourage us to calibrate certainty by establishing rigid conceptual grids. We then try to force ourselves and our world to conform to these templates, an exercise that ends in an illusory sense of control. This tragic search for security in exterior validation makes us hostage to what other people think, especially the opinions of those who seek tο define the boundaries and content of our lives. Our anxiety is so great that even the fickle wind of chance cannot break our death-grip on the wildly vacillating weathervane of others’ opinions. This desperate clinging to convention can extend to being afraid to talk about God—or even to pray—outside carefully scripted parameters, in spite of the fact that such denatured language can twist the thoughts, words, and intentions of our hearts.

True Christianity stands in opposition to such closed systems. Its essential message is this: to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death” (Heb 2:15). The fear of death can take many forms, most of which have little to do with what might happen after our bodies die. Rather, fear of death is a matter of the mind. It has everything to do with how we perceive and interpret our experience. Our self-consciousness generates anxieties that make us vulnerable to manipulation and coercion in every sphere of our lives, from the most trivial preoccupation with fashion to the fate of our planet. It conspires with the exploita­tion of fear and uncertainty that makes us complicit in inflicting physical or spiritual death on ourselves or others. Our fretful search for certainty becomes a search for numb complacency.

But faith...