Ruth Burrows: Essential Writings (Modern Spiritual Masters)

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we are trying to do is to help ourselves to be present for God to love us. We are not trying to achieve anything.

Christianity must never be allowed to degenerate into ‘Cross-tianity.’ We must never make an ideology out of suffering. That is the constant temptation, to think ourselves superior or deep because we suffer. Everything that can be said of consolation applies equally to suffering. True religious experience erases all sense of being special and superior, even in the area of suffering.”Jones concludes her article, “The Riches of our Human Poverty: Insights into the Mystery of the Trinity from Ruth Burrows,” with this summary of the insights we can gain from this modern spiritual writer: And the third island: one knows when one's on it. The union with God is complete, though it won't be 'good feelings' and 'experiences'-filled kind. Improving it through rest of one's life is still possible. There's now some contentment mixed into emptiness. One ponders and reads, and can now follow God's will quite perfectly (even if the outside world won't see it).

The book includes an appendix, a full bibliography of Carmelite primary sources with a listing of all the published writings of Ruth Burrows, and an extensive index. “About this book” introduces the readers to a brief biography of Burrows and the author and how the book came to be. A conclusion summarizes the book’s contents but also invites the reader to explore the possibility of what many consider the greatest need of our time: a mysticism that is not only personal, but deeply ecclesial, able to radically transform the church and the world. It is the Holy Spirit who enables us to believe—"No one can come to me except the Father draw him"—but we must cooperate with all our powers. And this means we must "labor for the food which endures to eternal life" (John 6:27). "This is the labor of God that you believe in him whom he has sent" (John 6:29). What can be more important? The way we worry about spiritual failures, our inability to pray, our distractions, our ugly thoughts, and the temptations we can’t get rid of…it’s not because God is defrauded, for he isn’t, it’s because we are not so beautiful as we would like to be.” In the early 1970s I formed a very supportive friendship with a holy woman who enlightened and enriched my life. She gave me a deeper understanding of what it was to be a true contemplative. If I were to point to a "moment," it would be then. In this much-needed work, Michelle Jones provides … the most comprehensive, readable introduction to Ruth Burrows that is presently available.

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This sentence seems to capture it all: “from the shelter of the Son’s heart we go on trying, with him, to do always what pleases the Father.” By itself, the phrase “trying…to do…what pleases the Father” could be merely the voice of the law. And indeed, one does get the sense that Burrows’ particular message about resting in Christ is a message that only has its powerful, catalytic effect for people who have long been attempting to please God by their religious duties. As a Protestant evangelical reader, I often find myself wondering how Burrows can be presenting, as a spiritual breakthrough, what I generally take to be the very first steps of the life in Christ: trust in salvation by grace (alone, may I add?). On the other hand, what a wonderful thing it is to hear this message of recumbence on Jesus as savior, shared as a hard-won and new-treasured thing, and spoken with an overwhelming awareness of the relief and excitement that comes from it.

In paschal suffering, we cling to God, in neurotic suffering we cling to ourselves. In clinging to God we experience Gethsemane, in clinging to ourselves we experience neurosis.”A Christian, praying in great weakness from a frail humanity, is aligning with the incarnate Son who aligned himself with us. He lived out in our common humanity the Trinitarian receptivity of Son to Father, showing how it could be done in human nature. When we experience the besetting failures and weaknesses of human life, and confess that we are utterly enmeshed in them, it is possible to perceive in those very weaknesses the kind of dependence Jesus had toward the Father. When you read my reflection on Burrows' book, please bear with my lay level of spiritual growth. Also know that I'm a Protestant exposing myself to the Roman Catholic thinking regarding Christian life, yet looking at it through my childhood Lutheran glasses: for depth, I require no frills, merely a focus on Jesus. And this I (mostly) found in Burrows' work. Fresh, frank, and fruitful beyond measure is the wisdom of Ruth Burrows about what it means to be a Gospel mystic. Humans are not nothing. But fundamentally we are made from nothing, and deep down, we know it. At least some of us do. Suffering is not an infallible indication of growth, it can just as easily indicate neuroses. We must be careful not to cast a mystical garb over indigestion.”