In this series, some posts use short quotations but offer links to associated resources in the text below the image-backed quote. In other weeks, the short, image-backed quote are taken from a more extensive quotation from the month's author, given below the image. And in the last week of the month there are questions to encourage reflection on the month's quotations.
Quotes for each week of March will appear below in ascending date order.
Quotes for each week of March will appear below in ascending date order.
Maggie Ross, our author for March, is a former university Professor of Theology who lives as a solitary in Oxford, UK. She is the acclaimed author of a two-volume text, Silence: A User's Guide (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2014 & 2018), from which this month's quotes are taken.
Monday 6th March, 2023
Maggie Ross, Silence: A User's Guide, Vol 1 (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2014), 11.
Image: Jon Tyson, New York, unsplash.com/@jontyson
This short image-backed quote is from Maggie Ross's Silence: A User's Guide, Vol 1 (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2014), 1. You can read more about this book by clicking here.
Maggie Ross in an Angical solitary, or hermit. As with many solitaires, the details of her life are comparatively hidden and images of her almost non-existent online. Born in the USA in 1941, her actual name is 'Martha Reeves' but she is most widely known under the nom de plume under which she has published numerous scholarly articles (particularly about Julian of Norwich) and books on contemplative and solitary life. After a privileged education at the Madeira School, an elite preparatory school for girls in Virginia, her initial theological training was at Stanford University in the USA. She lived monastically in a variety of communities before beginning to live as an eremitic. Ross studied psychoanalysis, became Professor of Anglican and Ecumenical Studies at the University of Tulsa in the States, and has translated several Carthusian texts for publication. For some years she was Spiritual Director to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is her bishop-protector, or Guardian, of her vows as a solitary.
Ross' two volume text, Silence: A User's Guide (DL&T, 2014 and 2018), from which this month's quotes are taken, are a theological tour de force: definitely not light reading! In her 2015 'Back Page Interview for The Church Times - see here - she describes them as having taken her whole life to write. Far more accessible are Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding (Bible Reading Fellowship, 2011) - see here - and The Fire of your Life (Seabury Books, 2007) - see here. For those of you who enjoy engaging with audio or video recordings of our month's authors, there is a 45 minute YouTube video of her lecture, 'Healing Silence', given at Durham University, here, and it is well worth focusing through Maggie's very dry, academic delivery for the immense wisdom it contains. Maggie also features in snippets in Director, Patrick Shen's 2016 docufilm, In Pursuit of Silence, which these days you can watch in full for free here. Maggie Ross' wonderful blog, 'Voice in the Wilderness' was very active from 2006-2020 and this can still be accessed here.
Monday 13th March, 2023
Maggie Ross, Silence: A User's Guide, Vol 1 (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2014), 11.
Image: Markus Spiske, unsplash.com/@markusspiske
This short image-backed quote, above, is taken from the longer quotation, below, in Maggie Ross's Silence: A User's Guide, Vol 1 (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2014), 11-12. You can read more about this book by clicking here.
To choose silence as the mind’s default in an accelerating consumer culture — a culture that sustains itself by dehumanising people through the unrelenting pressure of clamor, confusion and commodification — is indeed a subversive act.
For the reality is that our lives do hang in the balance: between speech and silence, action and reflection, distraction and attention, extinction and survival. We bear responsibility for maintaining this balance, just as our choices for or against silence can affect the choices of everyone around us, choices that have both material and psycho-spiritual consequences. We seem to have forgotten this responsibility, for in the present time we are disconnected from the wellspring of silence and stillness that is necessary for human beings to thrive. These living waters no longer animate the speech and activity of our minds and bodies, lost as we are in a wasteland of our own making. If there is to be a viable ecology, if we are to remain human, if our lives are to have any meaning, if we are to continue as a viable species, it is essential that we restore the flow that enables our everyday lives to be informed by the riches found in silence.
Monday 20th March, 2023
Maggie Ross, Silence: A User's Guide, Vol 1 (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2014), 13.
Image: meditnor.org/2018/12/06/lotus-childbirth-pros-cons/
This short image-backed quote, above, is an extract from a much longer quotation that we would usually engage with, below, taken from Maggie Ross's Silence: A User's Guide, Vol 1: Process (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2014), 12-14. To lose any of this would dilute and diminish the enormity of - and our capacity to understand - what the author is seeking to convey. I have therefore chosen to quote much of this section, even though this invites you to sit with a text that, on first (and perhaps second or third reading) may seem hard to follow and might well require you looking up some words! I believe it's worth the effort involved. You can read more about this book by clicking here and you can go to her 'A month with Maggie Ross' page by clicking here.
'The world is out of joint not only because, from a cultural point of view, our bodies have been cut off from our minds — just one of the many consequences of us having lost our relationship with the natural world — but also because our minds, overloaded with extraneous information, and stressed by the frenetic speed required merely to stay alive in our artificial world, have lost their relationship with the original silence from which, and within which, we evolved; silence that is essential to language, insight, poetry, and music. This loss of communion has gradually eroded our humanity, for what makes us human is not language, tool use, artifice, or self-consciousness — current research is showing us that many animals have these gifts as well — but rather the ability of the human mind to come full circle and forget itself in silence.
For millennia our survival in the natural world depended on the flow between deep silence and our evolving self-consciousness. In our technological age, this flow has been choked off, and in consequence our survival is under threat. … Silence is our natural habitat, and the work of silence is, as it were, a process of returning to the wild.
If we are to recover our balance — and our humanity — we need to unlock the flow of communication between the limited world of our self-consciousness that is linear, finite, two-dimensional, static, and dead, and our core silence — our deep mind — that is global, infinite, dynamic, and multi-dimensional. It is a mistake to say that the former is “rational” and the latter “irrational.” Too often the word rational is used when linear is meant. Both are rational ways of knowing, both are necessary; but the world of self-consciousness is rational only in the artifice of two dimensions; it can only reify; while the rationality of the deep mind is global, holistic, holographic, alive, and perceives directly.
If we are to be human, we need to seek and sustain a flow between these two aspects of knowing, between deep, multidimensional, interior silence, and the superficial linearity with which we negotiate what appears to be the exterior world, so that the two ways of knowing inform each other. We need to acknowledge that it is not our discriminating and reflexive self-consciousness that makes us human, but rather the ability to move beyond this self-consciousness to engagement and beholding, the irruption of our core silence into daily life.'
Monday 27th March, 2023
Maggie Ross, Silence: A User's Guide, Vol 1 (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2014), 25.
Image: Prateek Gautam, unsplash.com/@pgauit
This short image-backed quote, above, is taken from Maggie Ross's Silence: A User's Guide, Vol 1: Process (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2014), 25. You can read more about this book by clicking here.
The last week of each month in the 'Quoting Silence: A month with ...' series offers some questions to help you reflect further on the month's quotations and images, and how they resonate with your own spiritual journey and relationship with God.
Before reflecting on this month's quotes and images, take time to re-ground yourself in your body.
Perhaps take a few slow breaths, feel your feet on the floor and be aware of how your body feels in this moment.
1) Read back over the this month's quotes and spend time looking at their associated images. As you do so, note a phrase or image that draws your attention. If this is a phrase, you might like to write this out in a journal or on a piece of paper where you will see it regularly. Consider reading aloud several times what you have written to help the words sink more deeply into your heart. If an image resonates with you, let your gaze rest lightly on it for a couple of minutes, allowing it to speak to your heart. Consider using it as a screensaver for a while, or perhaps print it out and place it somewhere that you will see it often.
2) What emerges as you sit with the phrase or image that attracted your attention? Does a new insight or a question, emotion or sensation arise? Take some time to write down and ponder on whatever you notice.
3) Where can you see hope in the midst of what is emerging in you, for yourself, your neighbour, your community, or the planet? How might this impact your daily life and those with whom you share it?
4) In the days and weeks to come, how can you stay open to what you have discovered from your reflections?
Take some time to give thanks for the hope that you have found in this month's quotes and images.
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