‘Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis’ by Sarah Bachelard BOOK REVIEW

‘Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis’ by Sarah Bachelard. Revised by Liam Kelly. Convivium Press, 2012. ISBN 978-1-934996-32-4

In this short book, Australian spiritual writer Sarah Bachelard introduces us to contemplative practice. She is quick to warn against the simple desire to have a religious experience, behaviour she recognizes over time even in her own life. By asking how we might know if we are experiencing God, she gradually takes us through true and false ideas about God, transitory and lasting forms of experience, before inviting us to consider contemplation itself, i.e. the possibility of our own contemplative life in the world.

She writes: “Contemplation is a practice of becoming still enough, silent enough, open enough to ‘hear’ the voice of the other Other. It is a practice of readiness and expectancy. ‘Here am I’ is the expression of the contemplative stance – open, receptive and listening. ‘Here am I’ is a surrendering of one’s own agenda and one’s prior conceptions about what is needful, even about what is good … we learn radical non-possessiveness in relation to ourselves, our notions of God, our desires. In the space that opens up, we find ourselves beginning to tune in, at first barely recognising the sound, to the Word that resonates in the silence.” (p. 36)

Bachelard’s concern though is with crisis, whether collective or personal crisis, and how we are sustained in transition “from the suffering of crisis into a deeper wholeness and truthfulness.” (p. 59) Written in 2015, she is talking to a pre-pandemic readership, but her words speak directly and meaningfully to the current international crisis and our own awareness. Bachelard provides an extended meditation on the Passion story as “the wayless way”, summarised in the section headings “the surrender of Friday”, “the waiting of Saturday” and “the gift of Sunday”. The concluding meditation draws on her own personal crises while using a range of contemplative writers who speak to the truth of crisis.

Thomas Merton is quoted in regard to the discovery that acceptance of self and our own limits can awaken a profound love of others – “a profound compassion for all of us.” Iris Murdoch speaks of “unselfing”, where we overcome the propping up of the ego, and belief in the illusions it creates. Then John Main, clearly an important influence, who writes of the risk of contemplation itself: “it requires nerve to be really quiet.” Or Parker Palmer who she says, in response to the crisis of questioning if our work is being effective, “judges his action, not by the result it gets, but by its fidelity to his own calling and identity.” Bachelard presents us with different dimensions of contemplative living, grounded in lived experience and its many varying challenges.

‘The White Stone’ by Esther de Waal BOOK REVIEW

 A short review by Philip Harvey in the Autumn Issue of the Newsletter of the Community of the Holy Name, Cheltenham

‘The White Stone’ by Esther de Waal. Canterbury Press Norwich, 2021 ISBN 978-1-78622-401-9

Written during lockdown, in a period of solitude in which the author had to plan moving from her home of fifty years in Wales to a new home in Oxford, this book is about how “we all have to face up to the process of letting go at intervals throughout our lives.” She writes of “embarking upon a new life when one has reached old age.”

Letting go of familiar places, letting go of former ways, letting go of people in our life, and possessions – these are realities for which we find we have no choice. This book follows the different ways in which the author has reflected and learnt to live through such letting go. She explains how age has taught her to approach the world with simplicity. Learning to forgive is essential. She finds meaning through common rituals, detailing them as she goes.

Given the author’s lifelong interest in monastic life, which she has drawn upon and written about extensively, it makes sense that this is central to her now. Hence her questions, coming from Benedictine practice, “Am I becoming a more loving person?” and “Are you hastening towards your heavenly home?” Likewise, her renewed need to let go of illusion and false gods, to listen “with the ear of the heart.” A chapter on reading the Psalms, relying particularly on the work of Thomas Merton and Jim Cotter, is an integral connection.   

This book of learning and loss is the closest Esther de Waal has come to an autobiography. It is not without grief and pain, though thanksgiving is the keynote. She is taking stock of her life, what she has gained and lost, but significantly what she values that she must learn to let go of. It’s easy to let go of things you don’t like, much harder letting go of that which you love.

The range of her quotation, most especially, is a value she gives back to the reader. No one else can be Esther de Waal and this is her personal account of dealing with change. However, there are meditations, poems, sayings and stories here that speak to our own individual experience in this context, that speak of her world of valued spiritual guides. She writes: “I am grateful when W. H. Auden speaks of the need to practice the scales of rejoicing, because it reminds me of the sort of discipline that I should be looking for in myself.”

Word Made Flesh: Dwelling Amongst Books

Fr Ken Parker invited Carol O’Connor to give the 5th Bunyip Lecture at St. Thomas' Church, Bunyip on the 2nd of December 2018. Here is the outline of Carol's lecture, handed out to attendees.

A certain philosopher questioned the Holy Anthony.  “How,” he said, “do you content yourself, Father, who is denied the comfort of books?” He answered, “My book, philosopher, is the nature of created things, and as often as I have a mind to read the words of God, it is at my hand.” Sayings of the Desert Fathers Book XXI

In the Church cycle, we’re now entering the Year of Luke: praise is a keynote of this Gospel. It’s a ‘Gospel of messianic joy.’  Luke’s emphasis is universal salvation; it is laden with practical ethics and causes us reflection on moral living. Dr Dorothy Lee, Melbourne New Testament Scholar & Anglican Priest.

What does gift giving mean? As Christians we believe that the real gift on Christmas Day is the birth of Jesus Christ, but what is it that we are being given? And how do we live in response to this gift?

Three of the many gifts given to us in the birth of Christ Jesus:

1          The gift of relationship

Spiritual and religious books are never an end in themselves - they only ever point the way towards. They point the way toward the ‘Word made flesh’, it’s up to the reader to live from the meaning discovered in the book with courage, with a willingness to risk embodying the Word in themselves.

When we are born, we are born into relationship. The primary relationship we are born into is with God. Our first human relationship is with the person or persons who are our primary care givers. Ideally they are figures of love.  To grow and flourish through childhood we need the other - the one who loves us. The network extends outwards into community, between cultures. ‘We go to heaven in one another’s pockets,’ is a phrase quoted by Rowan Williams.

We take community with us wherever go because we take with us our capacity for relationship in God.

2          The gift of memory always happens from the place in which we stand in the present. It’s meaning derives from the relationship we have in God. 

Good spiritual writers can give us courage to face our own terrors and examine memories that are painful. Go to the hard places, especially in your relationship with God, stand there and see what you can see. Go to the hard places with the eyes of God. Ask: what can I see or re-see in and from this challenging place?

For Miroslav Volf it’s important to remember the past rightly. Christ’s Passion and resurrection need to inform how we engage in the action of remembering. 

It’s important to learn to live theology, not just read it in books. Remember God’s love in all that you do.

3          The gift of language

Good spiritual writers give us a language that can help steady our feet; words that enable us to enflesh or put form around our experience. They offer a language, a vocabulary, upon which I can invite my own experience into and hang my own thoughts upon. The gift of language can provoke our imagination; push further the boundaries of reflection. Language grows us. 

Writers like Rowan Williams & Richard Rohr offer vocabularies that are living and nuanced. As they’ve drawn from other writers, through their words God speaks to us. Theirs becomes a language which I can draw from, dwell upon, and in turn hope God uses through me to speak to others. And this is a gift giving whose primary source is the Word made flesh.

Both Rowan Williams and David Adam encourage us to take the words we use in our prayer life seriously. They encourage us to find prayers to sit with, have them walk them inside us inside as a mantra.  And we can only do this when we enter into ‘slow craft time.’  In his book Holy Living, Rowan Williams reminds us to stay present ‘where you are, rather than taking refuge in the infinite smallness of your fantasies.’  Expansion of the heart takes time. Williams quotes the Welsh saying: ’life is about inhabiting a great hall within narrow walls.’ P 65. For him, and so many of these writers, life is about learning to be still and listen, to ponder, to be fully present to the place you are in.

Language takes many forms. God also speaks through the expressive arts: music, poetry, dance, painting. God’s Word is found in nature and in silence and the unsaid. The grammar of God is in the nature of created things and  lives inside each one of us.

Finally

If our language serves reconciliation, breaks through the illusion of separation and hate, of fear and abuse then our lives start to become aligned into the enlarging the heart of God. 

I can purchase or read all the books about God I like, but if I do not live first from response to this space of Love, and if my first book is not, as Holy Anthony says, the nature of created things as seen through Love’s eyes, then what I see will be forever only an illusion. 

The gift of the Word made flesh, with all its hope and beauty and pain and vulnerability, the gift of Christ who is born at Christmas, enables us to see through illusion to Reality. And that’s a Word really worth holding onto.