Enquire Within
This volume is one of eight in a major new series edited by Ravi Ravindra and consisting of articles published in Parabola magazine. The magazine was launched in 1976, and the editor, D. M Dooling, made the following remark in the first issue: ‘Parabola has a conviction: that human existence is significant, that life essentially makes sense in spite of our confusions, that man is not here by accident but for a purpose, and whatever that purpose may be it demands from him the discovery of his own meaning, his own totality and identity.’ Early in the book there are number of suggestive quotations and beautiful engraved illustrations accompanied by some beautiful texts that set the tone for the whole, for instance Jan Ruusbroec, ‘the image of God is founded essentially and personally in all mankind. Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and altogether not more than one alone. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and source in us of all our life.’

There are eight themes in the book: turning home, the search for the self, unseen warfare, attention and remembrance, a body of beauty and love, worldly and divine work, transformational knowledge, and fullness of being. There are well-known and less well-known writers. Among the better known contributors to these 40 pieces are Bede Griffiths, Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, Paul Tillich, Kallistos Ware, Elaine Pagels, Jacob Needleman, Eric Gill and Brother David Steindl-Rast. There are too many subjects to cover in a relatively short review, and each reader will find their own treasures in this book that encourages the practice of contemplative and therefore transformative reading. After all, the essence of the Christian journey is metanoia, a change of heart and mind and the journey from agitation to peace, from noise to silence, from being lost to finding, from ego to Self, from sleep to awakening, from separation to union and integration.

Spiritual rebirth in the story of Nicodemus is likened to a continual movement of the heart towards love, which is akin up to the remark by David Steindl-Rast that ‘we somehow have to struggle to become what we are.’ The theme of attention and remembering is prominent in two of the sections and we are reminded of the warfare imagery familiar from the desert fathers. Here some of the original Greek terms are evocative; Nous, the eye of the heart, Thymos, the intensity of the will, and Eros, the longing for ecstatic union. The journey proceeds through kenosis, self-emptying as an act of will corresponding to the quality of humility in which God can act within man. Or, as St Isaac of Syria puts it: ‘until the mind is freed from the multitudes of thought and has achieved a single simplicity of purity, it cannot experience spiritual knowledge.’ And this, for Bede Griffiths, is the real meaning of contemplation: knowledge by love.

The notion of personhood is taken up by Kallistos Ware and David Steindl-Rast. Bishop Kallistos emphasises that the whole person is not a self-contained unity but rather one who is open on the one side to God and on the other side to other human persons. As he puts it: ‘the isolated individual is not a real person. A real person is one who lives in and for others.’ He quotes the desert fathers as saying ‘know thyself and forget thyself.’ Steindl-Rast reflects this sentiment exactly: ‘we become persons through relationships with others - inter-relationship is what defines you as a person. What separates us defines us as individuals, but what relates us to other makes us persons.’ This leads to what he calls a universal interrelatedness in love.

For me, the second interview with Brother David Steindl-Rast Learning to Die is the most precious piece in the book. As the title perhaps suggests, the theme is as much about learning to live as learning to die. Life is about both giving and taking (consuming). And giving ourselves instead of grasping and holding events enables us to flow with life. It may come as a surprise to some readers to see leisure defined as a virtue of those ‘who give time to whatever it is that takes time Ð give as much time to it as it takes.’ The reason that leisure is almost inaccessible to us is that we are so preoccupied with taking, and taking means it is difficult for us to let go; we are reminded that letting go is a real death, a real dying, whereby we learn that ‘we have only what we give up.’

Brother David continues: ‘not to die, not to give up, means to exclude ourselves from the free flow of life.’ For him, giving of yourself is dying into deeper life, dying forward into the fullness of life, dying when we are alive, so as better to be able to let go when we do come to physical death. For him, growing means to die to what we are in order to become more we are not yet, to awaken to our interdependence as persons. Reading this volume reminds one that the inner journey and the metaphors of the Christian tradition are still very much alive. It can be recommended to anyone who would like to re-establish contact with the universal spirit of Christ.