Love unknown

"Faith is not a thing of the mind; it is not an intellectual certainty or a felt conviction of the heart. It is a sustained decision to take God with utter seriousness as the God of my life. It is to live out each hour in a practical, concrete affirmation that God is Father and he is 'in heaven'. It is a decision to shift the centre of our lives from ourselves to him, to forego self-interest and make his interests, his will, our sole concern. This is what it means to hallow his name as Father in heaven." Sister Ruth Burrows, O.C.D.

I am indebted to "Leafyschroder" who comments on this blog for introducing me to Ruth Burrows, a Carmelite nun, who wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book last year. In particular she recommended Before the Living God. I found this in an on-line review: "Her other books demonstrate the way God used even her worst experiences in the convent for her (and other's) spiritual benefit. It seems one purpose of the book might have been to encourage the reader to realize that God will take the most traumatic, or unfair circumstances if we turn to Him and transform it into one of our greatest blessings that brings spiritual peace and personal intimacy with God." 

Leafyschroder then sent me this beautiful extract from a review of Ruth Burrows' latest book, Love Unknown:

"She has been trying to pray as a nun for 65 years. And what has she to show for it? Darkness, by her own account, and the feeling that God does not exist. As a young woman, when she prayed, nothing 'happened', and she soon realised it would always be like this. 'It is impossible to understand my life unless it is seen all the time against the background of black depression,' she wrote 36 years ago, in one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century, Before the Living God.


"Her depression did not stem from any 'Dark Night of the Soul'. It came not from her vocation as a nun, but happened to be something that she brought to it with her, as part of her disposition. Those who have met her find her a sharp, intelligent, amusing interlocutor, but things are no easier for her in her spiritual life today. The difference is that now she is 'happy to be poor'. This attitude of poverty is the underlying, human theme of Love Unknown. The two themes go together: the objective reality of a loving God, and on the other side a radical human poverty on the part of the Christian loved by him.

"In this lies the answer to the person who finds that he or she is 'not getting anywhere' with prayer. Ruth Burrows challenges any such judgement based on subjective experience. Since it is God who prays in us, what would we expect to see and feel? Only by focusing on what is revealed by the risen Christ can we be sure that our God is real and not just a projection. We can only know the true, living God through his incarnate image."


Forgive me if you've already read my conversation with Leafyschroder, but I thought that last quotation really merited being a main blog entry. I'm ordering some of Ruth Burrows' books.

Is he really with me?

Last Thursday was Ascension Day, the day when Christians recall the end of "all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day that he was taken up", as St Luke says in Acts. On Thought for the Day the speaker told us, as far as I understood her, that the message of the day is that Jesus left his disciples, and us, on our own to get on with it. She finished with the gnomic statement: "It is possible to make our peace with God when we live with the reality that we live together, alone."

I was sorry Lucy Winkett ended there, because, of course, the story doesn't end there. It was just the end of what "Jesus began to do and teach". St Luke proceeds to tell us what Jesus went on to do in The Acts of the Apostles, and he certainly doesn't mean that the apostles did his work for him together, "alone", i.e. without him. Arguably they are "on their own together" for ten days. But on Pentecost they receive "the promise of the Father". On the night of  his arrest, Jesus had told them: "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." Putting it a different way, he'd said,  ^"And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you." And, pow! on Pentecost, don't they know it! I have a feeling that that's the significance of the physical signs they experience - they're to be in no doubt that Jesus has kept his promise: "Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age."


It remains true. The Holy Spirit of Jesus dwells in those who follow him. On 24th May 1738 (anniversary - Thursday), the Rev John Wesley wrote in his journal, "In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans.  About a quarter before nine, while the leader was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." He was never the same man again. It was the same transforming experience which radicalised the first disciples at Pentecost. He had no doubt that Jesus had answered his longing and kept his promise.


On 30th September 1994 another Anglican cleric wrote, "God answered immediately and dramatically, as it seemed to me. The conversation between my spirit and the Holy Spirit was humbling, yet full of his fiery love. I knew and physically felt that, in spite of everything, God loved me. It was the most liberating and wonderful experience.... It was not surprising that next morning I was different." He would tell you that, although his life has not been easy, he still has no doubt of the presence of Jesus.


Last Friday we read the story of Jesus asleep in the storm. "On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, 'Let us go across to the other side.' And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, 'Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?' And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, 'Peace! Be still!' And the wind ceased, andthere was a great calm. He said to them, 'Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?'" The accompanying note suggested we imagine the Father's arms around us. I have to admit that didn't really help me. I actually found the picture of Jesus there sleeping in the storm-threatened boat more like my experience. It's clear that he's there, and therefore it's ok, but nevertheless it can be pretty scary - but it's all right. You can't sink Jesus, and he's not suddenly about to take to the lifeboat. This is the lifeboat!