Bernadette Roberts

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For any of you folks in Ohio … she is giving a rare weekend retreat next spring:

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM

 

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I cannot comment at all on Ms. Roberts work or the more advanced works of the classical contemplatives. I am light years away from the unitive way, still struggling on the threshhold between the purgative way and the illuminative way. So I stay within the reading, study and prayer prescribed for this stage, and rely on Teresa and John and my spiritual director for help in knowing “where I’m at”. Counsel from all the classic directors is not to venture past the point you are until God has prepared you so I will stick with it.

 

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So I just discovered this Bernadette Roberts and went out on the weekend and bought one of her books. Now in her 70s, she was a Carmelite nun for about 10 years as a young woman. Her thesis is that there is a stage beyond the prayer of union/unitive stage/seventh mansion or whatever you want to call it. Does anyone who has read her books have eny impressions or comments to offer? They’re certainly difficult reading.

I’ve read her first two,* and am working on the third, the only one I find consistently more difficult. I"m fascinated by here parsing of what she claims is, and I very strongly agree is, a phenomenon of insight much more common than anyone would suspect. Much in her work supports this, and much in my studies and experiences support this as well. However, there are two difficulties. One she treats of to a degree on her own, and another is partially why I found and others might find it difficult to read her most excellent pages.

The first is the distinction she makes between mystics and contemplatives. And it is difficult to speak of this distinction for it is exactly her point that has encumbered both dialog and perception in the Church regarding her thesis. We do not have a language that is reliably useful in the matters of interpreting inner experience. Not only that, there is an ambient fear that things interior are “from the devil” unless there is some litmus test that so far no one has adequately delineated, at least in the Church. There might have been, as she mentions, from St. Teresa and from St. John of the Cross. But they both encountered an infamous obstacle, and who would blame them for not being more precise. She does however and notably put forth Meister Eckhart, the namesake of a contemporary much beleaguered by the “faithful” on the grounds of the anethemic but false association with “new age” crp. They have nothing to do with each other, Eckhart T. and the crp, except, it would seem, in the minds of ignorant and unstudied Oprah haters.

And this is perhaps the reason why many like Ms. Roberts are not heard from. She is actually postulating, for our consideration, that there are states beyond what the Church as a public institution regards and esteems as Sainthood. And I can only agree with her most emphatically. And what is mos clear from my perspective is that this wonderful Catholic contemplative, who had the courage to be in the world but not of it, is indistinguishable in her conclusions from a certain perspective independently arrived at by many in the world who are not Catholic. Because of their lack of association with the Church and their consequent freedom of expression due to no threat of censure, they were able to very clearly delineate in their won ways exactly what Ms. Roberts has come to in her very fastidiously Roman Catholic way. Praise be to her.

That brings me to the second point: Since these folks of different backgrounds, religious or not, who have arrived at this discovery–each must express in their own words and from their own particular experience according to their situational perspectives,–we have a language problem. But this problem is perceptible precisely because the conclusions are so obviously as near identical as such differences in expression might distort, but cannot even to a slightly sincere examination. The problem is in the terminology of different states experienced along the journey and their multiple meanings in English as well as their necessarily experiential referents, most of which the majority do not have in our ken. I can only speak of them from the standpoint that it came to me to be blessed by a rather life altering perception early on, that making it necessary to delve into this question in great depth.

So I can say easily that Ms. Roberts has given us and the Church a large unsalted chunk to chew over and digest into expression. And blessings on those who have enough trust in this Saint (she is easily that, if not more, in my opinion,) to read through and consider the implications of her work in terms of how we view salvation, grace, the historic nature of Our Lord, and many other such items that are now up for review. I pray that she does not fall, as did Sts. Theresa and John, under a pall such as they suffered and because of which we are less enabled of grace.

*The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey. State University of New York Press; ISBN 0-7914-1694-1 (revised edition March 1993); the first edition was published by Iroquois House (1982); ISBN 0-931980-07-0
The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center (1985). Shambhala Publications; ISBN 0-394-72999-4the third.