Writing the Icon of the Heart
In Silence Beholding
Maggie Ross
Writing the Icon of the Heart
In Silence Beholding
Copyright © 2013 Maggie Ross. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
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isbn 13: 978-1-62032-693-0
eisbn 13: 978-1-62189-545-9
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Ross, Maggie.
Writing the icon of the heart : in silence beholding / Maggie Ross.
xxiv + 140 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 13: 978-1-62032-693-0
1. Silence—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Spiritual life—Christianity. 3. Contemplation. 4. Spirituality. I. Title.
bv4509.5 r67 2013
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Anglicised Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.
Quotations from the Psalms in the essay “Cranberries” are taken from the 1979 BCP Psalter, and verse references follow the numbering in that version.
“But the silence in the mind . . .” by R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems: 1988–2000. Bloodaxe Books, 2004. Reprinted by permission of Bloodaxe Books.
“I have often thought of Jesus as the Undistracted One who was always aware of his Father’s presence in a way we seldom are. Maggie Ross lives that undistracted life better than anyone I know, and the eloquence of her words allows us a glimpse into that beholding that is the awareness of his presence.”
—James P. Danaher, author of Contemplative Prayer:
A Theology for the Twenty-first Century
“This collection of essays by Maggie Ross spirals around the themes of silence, beholding, and letting go. Examples are drawn from Ross’s own life and from her extensive reading, including excerpts from seldom-quoted Syriac spiritual masters. For Ross, beholding is more than seeing. It is inward vision springing from the ‘deep mind’: non-linear, non-controlling, and self-emptying.”
—Fr. Charles Cummings, author of Monastic Practices
“Maggie Ross is already well known for her ability to express what defies expression. In Writing the Icon of the Heart she draws her reader through a vivid engagement with creation and a jarring acknowledgment of human suffering toward the transfiguration of human life in beholding God’s presence. This is a book that gives hope to a jangled, distracted world.”
—Bill Countryman, author of Calling on the Spirit
in Unsettling Times
“Maggie Ross writes in the silence that births language and lays it to rest. I’ll share this book with an Anglican wondering whether her simple, steady skepticism means she has lost her faith; with a gay friend longing for communion and struggling with his Roman Catholic church’s condemnation of homosexuality; and with a Buddhist whose compassionate practice teaches me so much about prayer. Then I’ll read it again.”
—Donald Schell, President, All Saints Company
Also by Maggie Ross
The Fire of Your Life: A Solitude Shared
The Fountain and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire
Pillars of Flame: Power, Priesthood and Spiritual Maturity
Seasons of Death and Life: A Wilderness Memoir
For
Marion Glasscoe
Scholar, Mentor, Friend
But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm-
writer, the bottomless ocean
we launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.
It is presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our
own fathoms. What to do
but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still?
—R. S. Thomas
The essays are best read in the order in which they appear.
Foreword
“I had it on the tip of my tongue.” Everyone has had the experience of not quite remembering a name or a word, and the experience gets more common with age. The word we are looking for lies just out of range, and, as we turn our inward eye to see it, it slips further away. The more intently we think about it, the more it evades our grasp. The only solution is to stop paying it conscious attention; then it suddenly pops into our mind unbidden, just before sleep or when we are thinking (or think we are thinking) about something else.
This phenomenon is sometimes called the paradox of intention, and it points to two different ways of “paying attention.” One involves straining every nerve to concentrate on something, which we then fail to find. The other is a matter of having a habit of being aware of things that are not ourselves, in a way that allows what we know to surface in our mind. This second kind of attention cannot be deliberately practized, but depends on our whole mental state. It is something like what Maggie Ross calls “beholding”: holding ourselves open for reality to impinge on us. In a world of distraction and striving, it is the special kind of passivity in the face of reality that we most need.
This is not a book about “spirituality”—acquiring spiritual “experiences”—but about being open to reality, which includes and indeed is rooted in the reality of God. “Beholding is inclusive, organic, ungrasping, and self-emptying” (p. xvi). 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.
John Barton
Oriel & Laing Professor of the
Interpretation of Holy Scripture
University of Oxford
Acknowledgments
The essays in this book have been revised and rewritten. In their original form they were published in the following journals: “Cranberries,” “Whatever Happened to Discretion?,” “The Space of Prayer,” “The Walrus of the Living God,” “Writing the Icon of the Heart,” “Remembering to Forget,” “Barking at Angels,” “Liturgy in Truth,” and “Practical Adoration”