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Exploring Silence
The author explores the place of silence in contemplative prayer, and the difficulty of subduing our constant internal chatter in order to reach a place of stillness. She draws on various sources of wisdom, including the teaching of Martin Buber and her own experience of Quaker and Orthodox practice. First published in 1974, this book has helped many people over the years and is presented in a new, revised third edition.
WENDY ROBINSON, a member of the Orthodox Church, has worked for many years as a psychotherapist, pastoral counsellor, speaker and facilitator. She is an Associate of the Community of the Sisters of the Love of God, adviser to various religious communities and currently Warden of the Servants of Christ the King, an ecumenical Christian group movement which has silence at its heart.
WENDY ROBINSON, a member of the Orthodox Church, has worked for many years as a psychotherapist, pastoral counsellor, speaker and facilitator. She is an Associate of the Community of the Sisters of the Love of God, adviser to various religious communities and currently Warden of the Servants of Christ the King, an ecumenical Christian group movement which has silence at its heart.
Hardcover
First published March 31, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 25, 2018
Plane Speaking
There is much of value in this neat little vade mecum. I am reviewing it now on a short trip to Paris. There is often a sense of having tracked this flight path before, reconnoitred the same dry ground, but Wendy Robinson goes into little niches of thinking which are refreshingly unfamiliar, especially in her discussions about Martin Buber, whose distinction between the HE of belief and the THOU of faith is movingly formulated.
Robinson writes also that if we are overcome by a mood or anxiety that cannot be ignored, then it needs to be released, explored, opened up before God, 'not left travelling around the confines of my ego.' She refers, quoting Michael Polanyi, to the 'tacit dimension', where the ego plunges into a nosedive before massive turbulence in the lower atmosphere sends you soaring once again to a deeper sense of nearness to God and a more acute sense too of an even closer shave in future.
The writer pulls no punches here. She takes up the point that exploring silence can lead to what she calls an 'inner apathy', when we become saturated by our own illusions of becoming better, those wraithlike 'idolatries woven by our self-reflecting narcissism'. The idea of absorption in something Other, or God by any other name, in a long period of Quaker-like silence, in order to discover the sense of who you are in a wider community, and to have that sense of self somehow defined and developed by that community, seems to me something desperately lacking in 2018 Britain. Reading this short and sagacious collection of thoughts from an Orthodox believer lifted me up and now takes me down to a gentle, worry-free landing at CDG airport. Paris, here we come!
There is much of value in this neat little vade mecum. I am reviewing it now on a short trip to Paris. There is often a sense of having tracked this flight path before, reconnoitred the same dry ground, but Wendy Robinson goes into little niches of thinking which are refreshingly unfamiliar, especially in her discussions about Martin Buber, whose distinction between the HE of belief and the THOU of faith is movingly formulated.
Robinson writes also that if we are overcome by a mood or anxiety that cannot be ignored, then it needs to be released, explored, opened up before God, 'not left travelling around the confines of my ego.' She refers, quoting Michael Polanyi, to the 'tacit dimension', where the ego plunges into a nosedive before massive turbulence in the lower atmosphere sends you soaring once again to a deeper sense of nearness to God and a more acute sense too of an even closer shave in future.
The writer pulls no punches here. She takes up the point that exploring silence can lead to what she calls an 'inner apathy', when we become saturated by our own illusions of becoming better, those wraithlike 'idolatries woven by our self-reflecting narcissism'. The idea of absorption in something Other, or God by any other name, in a long period of Quaker-like silence, in order to discover the sense of who you are in a wider community, and to have that sense of self somehow defined and developed by that community, seems to me something desperately lacking in 2018 Britain. Reading this short and sagacious collection of thoughts from an Orthodox believer lifted me up and now takes me down to a gentle, worry-free landing at CDG airport. Paris, here we come!
April 5, 2012
Purchased while I was on retreat at Fairacres. It is a fair little booklet but most of it is quotations from other sources (ie Buber and Sister Mary-Clare) and pithy anecdotes, not a clear discussion on silence.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews