Essential reading

As a member of an Anglican contemplative community (the Sisters of the Love of God, widely known as 'Fairacres' from the name of its mother house in Oxford), the kinds of books which immediately occurred to me to focus on, when I received an invitation to contribute to the 'Essential Reading' series, were those which have been essential in sustaining a vocation to the contemplative life, especially during the first ten years (which were certainly the worst!). More recently I have become focused on the Old Testament and an attempt to return the Song of Songs to the contemplative dimension to which, I believe, it properly belongs. But since the Song has exerted an influence from my first entry into the Community, through the use of some of its loveliest verses in the monastic liturgy, and since I was profoundly affected at an early stage by the first commentary on it, that is where I shall begin.

I. Origen, Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson in the Ancient Christian Writers series. Over the years I have read deeply in Origen, and his grapplings with the Bible become more and more interesting and illuminating the more I study them. But one always has to be prepared to dig down through many layers, and this is especially true of his commentary on the Song-though a great deal is immediately accessible, such as the theme of 'the wound of love.'

From Glory to Glory, the selection of texts by Danielou from Gregory of Nyssa's mystical writings, a much-read book in our Community, contains marvellous passages from Gregory's commentary on the Song (pp. 152-288). More recently I have read McCambley's translation of the whole work and eagerly look forward to that of Richard Norris after reading his paper on Gregory's commentary, 'The Soul Takes Flight,' published in the ATR, Fall, 1998.

Bernard of Clairvaux's Eighty Sermons on the Song of Songs was another work I met at an early stage, first reading it in the excellent shortened version by a Religious C.S.M.V, long since out of print, unfortunately. The sermons range widely and too often are not about the Song. But, no less than Origen and Gregory, Bernard understands the Song perfectly, and expounds its theology wonderfully.

A fourth work, the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross, becomes more and more important in my understanding of the Song, for it reveals the same burning love of God, and uses the same imagery, especially nuptial imagery, to convey the relationship of the perfected soul to its Maker.

II. The book which had the greatest influence on me in the years before mv entry into the Community was the Cloud of Unknowing and Other Treatises, especially the Epistle of Privy Counsel, in the Justin McCann edition. The author's teaching that contemplation is the work of the soul which most pleases God, and the one by which the whole of mankind is most wonderfulIy helped, 'thou knowest not how' (Cloud, p. 5), struck deep chords. Later, when our press produced a Fairacres Publication of the remaining treatises bv the Cloud's author, translated by Clifton Wolters under the title The Study of Wisdom, the treatise which made a lasting impression was The Discernment of Stirrings, in which the author exhorts the reader not to be 'ape-like,' that is, not to imitate others in their spiritual practices.

III. Westcott's great commentary, The Epistle to the Hebrews, was a book I immersed myself in during the latter part of my novitiate, a life-saving remedy against the corrupting air of the Sixties which succeeded in seeping in to the enclosure in spite of the spiritual leadership of Mother Maly Clare and our then Warden, Gilbert Shaw. There is a contemplative dimension to Westcott's biblical expositions which, together ,ath his knowledge of the Fathers, and the connections he makes between Old and New Testaments, proved formative, and contrasted significantly with a lecture on Hebrews we were given in the early Seventies by a well-known New Testament scholar: 'There is not much,' he began, 'to be said about the letter to the Hebrews.'

IV. The Desert Tradition. When I entered the Community, it was already imbued with the spirituality of the desert, especially through the Institutes and Conferences of John Cassian. In 1972 John Eudes Bamberger O.C.S.O. published his translation of Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer by Evagrius of Pontus, the fourth-century spiritual genius of the Egyptian desert. Evagrius's short, piercing sentences, which reveal a timeless comprehension of the two worlds, the seen and the unseen, in which we live and pray, have been for me absolutely fundamental. Then, in 1975, our Sister, Benedicta Ward, published The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which immediately became 'essential reading,' not for imitation but for the fostering of a disposition which welcomes silence, solitude and the spirit of dispossession.

V. The Caratelites. The teaching of our founding fathers, of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, was based on that of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross and we continue to celebrate their feast days with the solemnity due to patrons. During my juniorate I read Teresa solidly and was enormously influenced by her, especially by the Life and The Way of Perfection, which last has a warm homeliness, essential for the actual living of the contemplative life. John of the Cross's influence has already been mentioned but can be further conveyed by a sentence which confirms the teaching of the Cloud: 'A little of this pure love [contemplation] is more precious to God and the soul, and more beneficial to the church, even though it seems one is doing nothing, than all those other works put together' (Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 29.2).