No easy version of spiritual life

Love Unknown

Ruth Burrows
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The art of mental prayer, to which Ruth Burrows as a Carmelite devotes an hour each morning and an hour each afternoon, may not sound like a very Christmassy starting point. After all, we might think, God is utterly other. He is not to be seen and our mind has no concepts that can capture him.

Yet God with us - Emmanuel - is the central, objective theme of Love Unknown. In a chapter called "The Word Became Flesh", the author emphasises that "the Word, which is the self-expression of God and therefore God, actually becomes something other than he is, becomes a made thing, a creature." It is with him that the Christian's life of prayer is concerned, as is the life of love.

As the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who commissioned this book, puts it in his introduction: "When we are empty of our fantasies about goodness or holiness or integration or however we phrase it, we can just allow God to be who he is - ‘love unknown', the one who wants to live in us and pray in us, so that we - silenced and humbled by his generosity - can come to life again, without anxiety."

If this sounds like an easy-ride version of the spiritual life, we need to take a step back. Ruth Burrows is not saying that approaching God through his Incarnate Son dispenses with the need for faith. She enjoins the personal study of Scripture, emphatically of the gospels, because they are a means through which the Word of God reveals himself. He is still revealed through faith, and faith does not mean that God becomes visible - quite the opposite, as Ruth Burrows' life bears witness.

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.

A "rock-like certainty that God, in Christ, has given us everything, and guaranteed an inheritance that cannot be spoiled" should result in a life of thanksgiving. Yet Ruth Burrows is far from supposing that it is easy to maintain a lively sense of God's loving presence "when dismayed by the horrors of perpetrated evil and the human suffering following on natural disasters". To be true to our Christian calling to holiness, "we must work for steadfast faith, or rather, activate the faith we have been given".

The function of faith is nowhere more vividly exemplified than in a passage in Love Unknown on the response of Mary to the sufferings of her son. "Jesus' mother, daughter of Judah, had imbibed the innocent suppositions of her people. She understood that she was to conceive and bear the Messiah, but where now the proof? Her son showed no signs of being Israel's saviour; rather she saw him heading for disaster, seemingly unable to avert his fate. How could a disgraced, crucified man be the Messiah?" Only through faith and steadfast loyalty was she able to surrender her conceptions of the Messiah.

Nearly 40 years ago, a book by Ruth Burrows called Guidelines for Mystical Prayer changed Rowan Williams' life. He was astonished by its "honesty and realism". Its title now sounds a little technical (and Ruth Burrows insists on the impossibility of teaching anyone else to pray, as if by some laid-down technique). Love Unknown is intended as an easily approachable Lent book, for parish study groups to use week by week. It is no bad thing, though, that it has come out in time for Christmas.