Ruth Burrows - Love Unknown: The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book 2012

Love Unknown

THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURYS LENT BOOK 2012

Ruth Burrows OCD

Published by the Continuum International Publishing Group

www.continuumbooks.com

Ruth Burrows OCD, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers.

First published 2011

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: PB: 978-1-4411-1889-9

Designed and typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Sing to God a song you have never sung before!

O earth, raise aloud your singing voice!

Where his eyes rest there is beauty and brightness:

in his holy presence, all is holy and lovely.

cf. Ps. 96(95):1.6

Contents

Foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury

There is all the difference in the world between having a spiritual life and walking in the way of Jesus. Throughout her long life as a Carmelite sister, Ruth Burrows has returned many times to this crucial theme, and in this book she offers a wonderfully vivid and direct statement of the challenge. If we want to be disciples of Jesus not interested onlookers, not more or less enthusiastic subscribers to a spiritual method, but actual disciples we have to get used to uprooting quite a few habits of thought; and what we shall encounter here is a careful and loving diagnosis of the most damaging of those habits, in the light of the plain story of Scripture.

The heart of the problem, we are told, is in the way we inherit false and enslaving pictures of God. We receive and internalize the idea that God is jealous of us, suspicious of us, out to make our lives difficult so we become in turn jealous and suspicious, and make our own lives and those of all around us difficult. We act as if we had to impress God, as if we had to have something in our repertoire that would guarantee that he would take us seriously so we build up a professional arsenal of spiritual riches that will secure our place with him.

But the God of the Bible, and above all the God of Jesus, is not our rival or our examiner or our prosecutor but our lover. There is nothing we can do to impress him or put him in our debt. If we start from the assumption that we have to do these things, we shall become either deludedly arrogant or despairing. If we allow ourselves to be lured out of these fictions and prisons, we see that our utter inability to acquire a satisfactory and impressive spiritual life is the best possible news, because then we can simply put ourselves in his hands, trusting his love. 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, without arrogance, without despair.

Ruth Burrows takes us on a journey through the biblical narrative in lucid, accessible terms, to show how this awareness of God as gift and lover comes to birth in the experience of Gods people and is made clear and effective once and for all in Jesus, so that the blockage of our frantic self-obsession is at last broken by his Spirit. It does not mean that ahead there lies a life of easy confidence and surface peace. Quite the opposite in fact. It does mean that our dry and dull inner life, the brick walls we face, the sense of getting nowhere are all acknowledged without panic because the focus is Gods action, not ours. And, ultimately, to be a disciple is to let God in Jesus Christ be who he is, free from our fuss and fear or our hopes for impressive personal holiness. As the Bible says, Jesus is our holiness and all we can do is let him live in us.

So often in her writings, Ruth Burrows helps us see once again the fundamentals of our faith. In these pages, she distils, movingly and personally, a lifetime of discovering the God who is greater than our religious aspirations, greater than our fears and our hopes alike the Biblical God who is who he is and will be who he will be, who lives and works eternally as though there were nothing more important in the universe than us, his confused, unimpressive, self-deluding, unfathomably loveable creatures.

+Rowan Cantuar

Preface

On receiving the request to write the Archbishop of Canterburys Book for Lent, what should swim into my mind but Robert Burns lines addressed to the sleekit, timrous beastie, whose nest his plough had invaded. O what a panics in my breastie! My great regard for the Archbishop, who, I was informed by the wily editor, really wanted me to do it, put no small pressure on my emotions, but I was anxious.

Could I do it? I never think of myself as a writer. I have happened to write a few books, because from time to time I felt I had something to say; the matter was already there, and I was never tied to time. A year might seem long enough for completing a small book, but I belong to a community and my time is not my own. Our day is tightly scheduled with many hours devoted to prayer, and each of us must shoulder her share of what is involved in the maintenance of a large household. I can never, from day to day, be sure of having time for writing. However, allowing myself a few days in which to pray and reflect, I conclude that I should do it. So the panic in my breastie has subsided and I commit myself willingly to this task. I must trust in the guidance of the Holy Spirit as to what to offer to my Anglican brothers and sisters.

Introduction

It is an abiding grief to me that many faithful religious people, even regular churchgoers, understand little of the great truths they sincerely profess to believe. My special grief is for our young people. As children, they accompany their parents to church and delight in what goes on, perhaps active in the liturgy as acolytes and servers. But unless a real love for Jesus is awakened in their hearts, unless they have been helped to perceive something of the wonder and sheer beauty of the content of the faith in which they are instructed, how can they withstand the atheism of our materialistic society? It is in the very air they must breathe.

Recently I was saddened on reading a letter from a young man I have known since he was a schoolboy and is now a husband, and father of three infants. He writes: I am frightened. Much of what I believed in my life is crumbling. A religion I once held dear no longer makes sense to me. The word religion is significant. There is a vast difference between religion and faith in the God revealed in Jesus Christ, or, as a dear friend of mine expresses it, there is a vast difference between being religious and being a true disciple of Jesus. In the first instance, being a faithful Christian seems to consist in living a good moral life, practising justice and love towards others, and faithfully observing certain religious practices. Praise indeed, for those who live so! They are precious to God and he longs to give them so much more. The inner disturbance and distress this young man is feeling could well be the secret call of the Spirit to go beyond the externals to a purer, deeper faith, to an encounter, mysterious by its very nature, with the living and true God revealed in Jesus Christ.