Writing the Icon of the Heart. Maggie Ross
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is our natural state. Lack of silence erodes our humanity.
Silence is religiously neutral; it is the interpretation of what happens in the silence that tends to give rise to religious metaphor and doctrine. The debate over whether or not religion is innate to human beings has so far overlooked this consideration. It has also ignored the centrality of paradox, which links the superficial, conceptual, and linear mind to the deep, inclusive, and global mind, over which we have no control, but which we can put to use through intention; it is in this mind that connections are made, perspectives changed, and from which insights arise.
In speaking of the work of silence, the word mind refers to the whole person, not a disembodied energy (which, in this life, anyway, is an impossibility). The work of silence can be done entirely outside religion, though religious metaphors rightly used have the capacity to enlarge interior boundaries. Silence must be fed.
Through intention we can teach our selves to default to silence; meditation is only a first and very minor step.
Finally, a word about words. The word mystic appears in this book only three times—twice in quotations, and once as a negative. It is a word that, in my view, has become entirely useless. It has acquired nuances of romanticism, exoticism, and self-absorption. In addition, far too many studies of “mysticism” and “spirituality” are based on a modern and narcissistic notion of “experience” as self-authenticating, that corresponds neither to the way the mind works nor to notions of experience in the ancient and medieval worlds, which in fact do correspond to the way the mind works.
The words transcend and transform also do not appear in this book except in quotations. Both words are disincarnating. The interior life leaves nothing behind (“transcend”), nor is one thing changed into another (“transform”). There is no magic involved; frogs do not change into princes or princesses. The use of both of these words has done incalculable harm to the interpretation and transmission of what is meant by spiritual maturity.
Instead, through beholding we are transfigured in every sense: nothing is wasted; nothing is left behind; through our wounds we are healed: our perspective—the way we “figure things out”—is changed. In the resurrection, the wounds of Christ do not disappear; they are glorified. Only the devil appearing as Christ has no wounds, being too vain to bear them.
To summarize: in our core silence, through our beholding, we realize our shared nature with God; we participate in the divine outpouring upon the world: incarnation, transfiguration, and resurrection become conflated into a single movement of love.
Feast of Julian of Norwich, 8 May, 2010
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,