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.
Archbishop Rowan Williams
Content
In Writing the Icon of the Heart we are invited to share the reflections of one who, over the years, has spent long hours in silence and prayer in one of the world's most wild and solitary landscapes, as well as the more urban context of Oxford. Casting new and often startling light on ancient texts and long-established spiritual practices, Maggie Ross shows how faith cannot be divorced from an outlook characterised by a rigorous questioning and testing of assumptions, and a passionate concern for the created world in which we are blessed to live.
This is a book that challenges as well as inspires, and takes us deep into what it truly means to worship, to love, to pray - and what it means to be human, made in the image of God.
View items in similar categoriesEndorsements
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.
Archbishop Rowan Williams
...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.
Professor John Barton, University of Oxford
Reviews
If you have never met Maggie Ross, you might like to start by reading The Fire of Your Life, or Pillars of Flame, or seek out her new book Writing the Icon of the Heart - books that will change you for the better, and change your Christian faith for the better. After all, Maggie Ross seduces us into facing reality without blinking, helping us live more faithfully as God's Easter people.
Western Australia Messenger
From The Church Times - 2 December 2011
'Maggie Ross, the author of Writing the Icon of the Heart: In silence beholding, is an Anglican solitary, who has spent long hours in silence. The book's subtitle captures its essence; for it is about silence and our need to "behold" God. "Beholding" is a concept that not only are we in danger of losing, but that is often lost in translation, even by the NSRV and the Jerusalem Bible. "Beholding" needs to be rediscovered 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 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 necessary 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.'
Canon David Adam is a former Vicar of Holy Island
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. (negative theology is an attempt to achieve unity with the Divine Good through discernment, gaining knowledge of what God is not (apophasis), rather than by describing what God is ). She is so enthusiastic about these things that she almost becomes fanatic.
But I must start with misgivings. First, the author permits the Oriel Professor of Theology in the Foreword to say, This is not a book about 'spirituality.' It most assuredly is a book about spirituality and a highly intellectual one at that. Secondly, I wish Maggie Ross did not say, from time to time, Put more simply. This is patronising. Moreover, it raises the question of why, if a topic can be put more simply, it was originally made difficult!
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.
Yes to all this. And again, yes, yes. But I am troubled by what seems to me to be her extreme emphasis on the way of silence to the exclusion of other aspects of religious life and devotion, and especially doctrine. If we are only permitted to speak of God in terms of what he is not, then where does that leave positive dogmas such as the doctrine of the Trinity? The church has always had regard for mysticism as a noble pathway of the spirit, but at the same time insisted that mysticism needs to be complemented by doctrine. Mysticism and Dogma are equal partners in any mature religious understanding. Goethe expressed this as the necessary tension between Dichtung und Wahrheit - poetry and truth.
Without intuition, poetry and the mystical endeavour, devotion can become staid, unimaginative and therefore uncreative. But mysticism without dogma is in danger of drifting off and becoming entirely free-floating, heterodox and Gnostic. Ross gives an account of being so moved by landscape and atmosphere that the Eucharist she had gone out to celebrate seemed to her redundant. And again:
Why do we still say Creeds that failed to pacify a Roman empire that became extinct more than 1500 years ago, words that attempt to define what should be left to silence?
Answer: because left undefined, false and misleading definitions will prevail. Sometimes mystics forget that heresy is a real possibility. There is also occasionally the sense that mystics who pray the prayer of silence are the really first class Christians and that the rest of, imprisoned as we are alleged to be in mere words, are not quite up to the mark.
But there is more profit than loss 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.
Reviewed by Rev'd Dr Peter Mullen, St Sepulchre-Without-Newgate, London
From http://anamchara.com - reviewed by Carl McColman - 29 August 2011
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, particulary 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.
Writing the Icon of The Heart is a collection of essays through which the golden threads of silence, beholding and transfiguration are woven. Silence and beholding are shown to be not the preserve of saints and mystics but our natural human state. The lack of these erodes not just our very selves, but also our communities and ultimately the fabric of creation. It is when we learn to dwell in deep and spacious communication with God that the possibilities for transfiguration emerge.
Archbishop Rowan Williams described this book as transformative - which indeed it is. It is a book that you will find yourself reflecting on and returning to, as you allow its content to enrich and permeate your soul.
Wendy Blagden
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!
Reviewed by Revd Dr Johnny Douglas
Book details
- ISBN: 9781841018782
- Published: 20 May 2011
- Status:
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 160
