true for institutional religion.
One of the motivations for writing this book is an attempt to make more accessible the assumptions about silence and beholding that underlie the often arcane language of the interior life. To do this, I have referred to key functions of the mind that are familiar to everyone. The paradox of intention is the one most critical to both silence and the religious metaphors that refer to it, and it turns up in these essays in a number of guises. I have illustrated some of these observations about the mind with quotations from Isaac of Nineveh, whose unsurpassed writing on the spiritual life is underpinned with a psychological acuity that was widespread among ancient and medieval writers. In many ways they knew more about the way the mind works than we do; some of the most basic insights—such as how we arrive at insight—have corollaries in recent neurobiological studies.6 This correlation does not “prove” anything, however; it rather shows convergence at a cellular level with what had been common knowledge for millennia until about the middle of the fifteenth century, when the practice of silence was suppressed by the Western church.
As this is a book of essays (a more comprehensive and systematic study is forthcoming), the central themes are prismatic, refracting throughout the book. Thus, it might be useful to list some of the them in orderly fashion.
We need to recover the lost word behold, to restore it to its central place in the Judeo-Christian textual tradition, and to theology and practice.
Silence is not an absence of noise (though that sort of silence helps), but a limitless interior space.
Silence 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
