Ruth Burrows: Essential Writings

"The Carmelite order continues to this day and continues to produce some remarkable individuals. Ruth Burrows, otherwise Sister Rachel, of the Carmelite community at Quidenham in Norfolk, is a writer whose work I first came across in the 1970s thanks to a Benedictine friend of mine. Her book, Guidelines in Mystical Prayer , appeared at that point. I have to say, like many other people I was absolutely held and engaged by this completely fresh perspective on the Carmelite tradition of prayer. In this book, Ruth Burrows does a little bit of what Teresa does in The Book of Her Life, that is to say she spells out a set of metaphors leading us from one stage of praying to another and, instead of the metaphor of irrigation that Teresa uses, Ruth Burrows uses metaphors of travel from one island to another. There are territories we come to be at home in, but we have to travel on and the transition between them can be quite difficult. Fundamentally, as for Teresa, the journey is one from self-reliance to God-reliance. In that process, there are long patches of really not being able to make much sense of things, where you have a not much more than a blind trust that God is still holding onto you. You just have to stay with it and you need people around who will support you in that. Again, part of the book is Ruth Burrows, as the author’s voice, discussing with two other sisters in the community their perspectives on things. She chooses to fix on two sisters of very different temperaments. She speaks about the ‘light on’ and the ‘light off’ temperament. There are those for whom there’s usually quite a strong sense of things being all right, and you can carry on. And there are those who hardly ever have a sense of things being all right, but they know they have to stay where they are. So, ‘light on’ or ‘light off’ doesn’t really matter because it’s not about whether you’re having wonderful experiences or not. It’s a question of whether your entire self is being turned inside out and opened up to a degree of receptivity to divine love, which will come through you and transform your actions. When I first read this book, I thought it was really one of the best things I’ve ever read on prayer and contemplation. And everything that Rachel has written since then has had very much the same impact. So, I was delighted when a few years ago, this anthology of her writings appeared. And to my mind, she is really one of the greatest teachers of prayer in our own time. It’s a good question. In some ways the Carmelite tradition is the absolute opposite of the Ignatian Exercises, because there’s no method prescribed. What is interesting is that Teresa herself was very close to many of the early Jesuits and had huge respect for Jesuit teachers and pastors. She’s not writing it off. Again, when she’s making her teasing comments about St John of the Cross, she says, ‘This sort of thing would be all very well for people who were doing the Spiritual Exercises’. It’s not dismissive exactly, but there’s a ‘That’s alright for those who like it’ feeling. I suppose the contrast is that St Ignatius, in the Exercises, is trying to encourage people to use their minds and their imaginations almost, in a way, to get beyond them—use your imagination, think of what the words of Christ might have sounded like, what the scene would have looked like, put yourself there in the story, follow through your imaginative instinct and curiosity. Then, at the end of that, ask what you have learned. What difference has it made? What do you go on to? Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Now, Teresa, I think, would have said, ‘That’s fine, but it’s actually a technique to get you into something else. The something else is where the images and the imagination, the exercise of your mind, will all just freeze and eventually melt and disappear’ because, at the end of it, what you want is a state of being receptive. While you will never stop, at some level, thinking about the human Jesus—she is very insistent on that—you mustn’t get fixated on your own images of that. I think she’s speaking there to people who have already got a bit used to silence and darkness in prayer. She’s not nearly as far from St John of the Cross as she sometimes sounds or pretends she is. Like St John of the Cross, she believes that there is a real dismantling of the routine ways in which we think and imagine that has to go on because so much of our thinking and imagining takes a long detour through the world and lands right back in the middle of the ego—business as usual. And somehow, we’ve got to get beyond business as usual. Meditating on the life of Jesus is fine, and Teresa certainly doesn’t discourage it, but it’s at best a kind of door opener for her. You’ve got to be unstuck, unpeeled from that constant circling back to what’s making you feel good."