Bernadette Roberts

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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.
 
Hi Buzzcut,

You truly amaze me! So many beautiful books under your cap of learning! That tells me there is something very special going on within your spirit! :yup: I’m remembering the days when I, too, had an insatiable thirst for spiritual reading. I never read anything by this lady, though, and my head is not inclined to pore over “difficult reading.” I think maybe I wore out my eyes???

Can you give us a brief idea of this special phase? I was not aware of anything beyond spiritual marriage. What more could there possibly be?
 
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buzzcut:
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.
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Dear Buzzcut

I haven’t read any of her books and I’d never heard of her to be honest until you posted the interview of hers in another thread. But I certainly liked and agree with everything she wrote in that interview.

It was difficult to read and I re-read it several times. It does seem to me true that a person can lose all attachment to self, so that there is no ‘Self’ once having experienced unitive prayer.

If it is possible for you and you have the time, I wonder if you would type some of what you think is interesting for people to take a look at? I’m sure you can type some sections of books without breaching copyright.

I was very interested in her writing and I think I’ll try and get hold of a copy of this book myself at some point.

Thank you for posting up that link anyway I have it saved to my favourites (here’s the link that Buzzcut posted before for anyone who wants it spiritualteachers.org/b_roberts_interview.htm )

God Bless you and much love and peace to you

Teresa
 
Joysong, Springbreeze, It’s good to have you here. I think we will be a very, very small group on this one! Just from a quick glance at the book, I see that Bernadette Roberts assumes the reader is already familiar with terms such as “prayer of quiet,” “infused contemplation,” “prayer of union” etc. Still, when two or three are gathered together …
 
I read Roberts a few years ago, as part of my reading of Christian mysticism. I’m not Catholic, and not “Christian” in the usual sense, either, which might be why I found Roberts interesting. To my mind, Roberts books reminds me of the Buddhist books describing “no-self” (in fact, Roberts has a book entitled “No Self”, if I’m not mistaken), though she does disagree with certain other teachings of Buddhism.
 
Well, since I’ve only just started reading, my contributions will be in the form of snippets as I come across them. Here’s one that caught my eye:

I have always held that St. Teresa was a mystic who had a few contemplative experiences, and that St. John of the Cross was a contemplative who had a few mystical experiences, because the difference between these two saints is so great that, without a shared doctrinal basis, their paths might never have crossed. Though any experience of grace may be called “mystical,” the mystics of history were largely noted for the phenomenal character of their experiences, i.e., visions, voices, etc., which are not common among ordinary contemplatives.

Bernadette Roberts, The path to no self, SUNY, 1991, pp. 19-20.
 
So she distinguishes a “mystic” from a “contemplative” by defining a mystic as a contemplative who has extra-ordinary experiences? Hmm…
 
Ahimsa, I don’t know how this can be compared to Buddhism. In Buddhism as I understand it there’s not very much mention of God. But for Bernadette Roberts, it is all about God.

I will continue. This is from a chapter called “Phase 1”. And “Phase 1” appears to take contemplative union as its starting point. Yes, that’s right, contemplative union is the starting point! :eek:

Bernadette Roberts quotes from the Living Flame of Love:

The soul’s center is God. When it has reached God with all the capacity of its being and the strength of its operation and inclination, it will have attained to its final and deepest center in God.

She then talks about this as though it’s all familiar territory to the reader:

As the self is displaced and God is disclosed, we marvel at the transformation and regard our union with God as truly spectacular, which it is.

But, she then says:

this is simply life as it was originally intended to be.

In reality we are just beginning to live as we should: to live a life in unison with God.

Quotes from pp. 37-38 of the book.
 
You’re right that in Buddhism the word “God” is not used a whole lot. But – just as something to think about – perhaps Buddhism uses other words that point to the same Presence, Truth, and Reality that Christians associate with the term “God”.
 
Some more now on clarifying what we mean by loving union with God. It is not an emotional love. It is a union of our will with God’s will:

Some authors, however, would have us believe that the ultimate contemplative union is some type of affective, or emotional union of love, an idea which is patently false, and nowhere to be found in St. John of the Cross. The saint tells us time and again that union cannot be grounded in, or properly experienced by, the emotions; such a lower faculty is incapable of entering into union, and any overflow experienced is a sign of weakness, a soul not perfectly purified or conformed.

The few references the saint makes to an “affective love” should be understood in the Thomistic sense of rational psychology, where the term “affective” refers to the will, not to the emotions, or “passions” as the saint calls them. There is a link, of course, between will and emotions; in fact, the will stands in a unique position as mediator between mind and emotions. Yet the emotions belong always and forever to the self, while the will has the capacity of belonging equally to God and the self, as a kind of shared faculty. The union of wills abandons the self’s feelings of its own love, in order to enter into God’s own love – love beyond all emotionality.

I can find no place in St. John of the Cross where he affirms that God and the soul are in a process of becoming one, or that union is in the making; rather, he affirms that the whole of the contemplative movement is the process of realizing our oneness with God on ever-deepening levels. As he says, man has numerous centers and unions, all of which must be passed through and left behind in order to reach the deepest, centermost union, which is the same union, but realized at its deepest level.

Quoted from p. 39 of the book.
 
it is unclear to me from these brief excerpts if the Roberts book you are quoting was written as a critique or analysis of John of the Cross, or as a spiritual guide. In either case, as you say her starting point is the unitive phase of infused contemplation, it would, like the Cloud of Unknowing, be unsuitable reading for someone who has not advanced through the purgative, and enlightened states in to the contemplative state. I hold, since I follow the rule of St. Benedict, that spiritual reading should be assigned by one’s director and not chosen willy-nilly of one’s own volition. Also one’s progress should be discerned by the director, since it is very easy to mislead oneself on the basis of what we read in this or that book.

Most spiritual writers caution that in the first flush of progress in the second stage, we have a hunger and thirst for spiritual reading and tend to gobble up books indiscriminately, and try to apply all the advice and commentary of spiritual writers to our own state, whether or not they apply to us.
 
Hi Buzz -

Just read your link. I know that St. Teresa said their were many mansions each with many, many rooms . . . but I didn’t know there was a penthouse suite!

Interesting stuff, but way over my head. 🙂

Do you know if she is still a practicing Catholic? Does she say anything about Thomas Merton in her book by any chance?

Thanks.
 
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DBT:
I didn’t know there was a penthouse suite!
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LOL … good terminology 🙂

She reveals almost nothing of the externals of her life in the book I’m reading. It’s wholly about the inner life. No mention of Thomas Merton or anyone else since the sixteenth century for that matter. I did read something on the web that said she kept up the contemplative prayer after leaving the convent, and also going to Mass, and that she came from a devout Catholic family. As for whether that still applies today, I don’t know.
 
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DBT:
Hi Buzz -

but I didn’t know there was a penthouse suite!

QUOTE]

Dear Dave

:rotfl: ‘There are many rooms in my Father’s house’…it seems there is more than we dare even dream about!

God Bless you and much love and peace to you

Teresa
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buzzcut:
No mention of Thomas Merton or anyone else since the sixteenth century for that matter.
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Hmm . . . Thought I saw a certain similarity. Maybe I’m reading to much into it though from just that one link.
 
Some more on the subject of the our will and God’s will:

It has been said that, consciously or unconsciously, man seeks the highest good, and that he cannot help seeking it, because it exerts a pull on him that never gives up. Those who go against this force, naturally, do not seek and do not find, but those who follow this path of least resistance will automatically be pulled to the center of their being. I call this magnetic pull a “will-to-God” which, at the same time, is possibly as much as we can “feel” of our union with God on an everyday level.

When deep calls upon deep, what do we hear? What is conveyed in the union of wills? Since God’s first will is that we exist, it follows that our first will is also to exist, to exist for God, which means being what we were created to be. So, on the one side of our unitive center we are totally passive to God, and, on the other side, completely free to be what we are – totally human. Thus, it turns out that our will-to-God is equally our will-to-be. We can now accept ourselves and our human lives without fear of going contrary to God, because now there is no contradiction of wills. To realize the fullness of human freedom, then, and to exercise it without fear, there must be total acceptance of our self and our present lives – such as they are. This may sound easy to do, but, in truth, it is extraordinarily difficult.
From pp. 44-45.
 
Dear Buzzcut
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buzzcut:
Some more on the subject of the our will and God’s will:

It has been said that, consciously or unconsciously, man seeks the highest good, and that he cannot help seeking it, because it exerts a pull on him that never gives up. Those who go against this force, naturally, do not seek and do not find, but those who follow this path of least resistance will automatically be pulled to the center of their being. I call this magnetic pull a “will-to-God” which, at the same time, is possibly as much as we can “feel” of our union with God on an everyday level.

I agree with this, there is once we submit to God and truly seek His will an absolute knowledge of obedience that turns us to the deepest inward introspect and then forces us to look outward to God again and this is a never ending cycle. This cycle leads to love, foremost of God, then to others and then to the self which is no longer self but existing purely for God and to please God. So then all things become for God and all things are aligned to union with God and seeking constantly the face of God in all things forgetting the ‘self’.

**When deep calls upon deep, what do we hear? What is conveyed in the union of wills? Since God’s first will is that we exist, it follows that our first will is also to exist, to exist for God, which means being what we were created to be. So, on the one side of our unitive center we are totally passive to God, and, on the other side, completely free to be what we are – totally human. **

I have realised more and more just how much freedom God gives to His creatures in this life. We are totally free and our freedom can become our prison, we can create for ourselves if our will is not joined to God, prisons of no liberating nature though humanity looks upon them as freedom we are infact slaves to other things that are not of God. So there is no true freedom than living in union with God though the world would deem this as oppressive with far too many rules, but this is true freedom because when man makes his own rules and lives by laws not of God he becomes a slave to them and they are most merciless to him. But when living in God’s laws, full mercy and freedom is found. And so God sets His creatures free in Himself and true freedom is found here and God desiring also to help and sustain His creatures comes to their very existance and in such, existance is theirs and His, He dwells and exists within them and them in Him and thus both existing in the union that is LOVE.
Thus, it turns out that our will-to-God is equally our will-to-be. We can now accept ourselves and our human lives without fear of going contrary to God, because now there is no contradiction of wills. To realize the fullness of human freedom, then, and to exercise it without fear, there must be total acceptance of our self and our present lives – such as they are. This may sound easy to do, but, in truth, it is extraordinarily difficult.
God’s loves us as we are, accepts us as we are and sees all our failings and sins and still loves us. This union is dependant on one thing…desire…if we strive to desire God with all our hearts, minds and spirits, He will come to us and will make us a wholesome place for Him to dwell in by opening our eyes to our sins and by purgation. Then His Majesty takes up residence in us and we then are truly in Him and we are set free in the Saviour of the World, Christ Jesus. It is when we die to self that our true self lives in Christ Jesus.
**Yes the devil tempts us but much of the battle is internal within ourselves and against ourselves it is a battle against the corrupt human ‘self’ and only God can reform this by His grace and our desire for Him. **
Satan is very fond of using our broken ‘self’ against us, we must as Christians renounce the 'self’

None of this can happen without PRAYER

St Paul 'It is no longer I that live, but Christ Jesus’

**Just my reflections on your post Buzzcut 🙂 **

God Bless you and much love and peace to you

Teresa
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Teresa, thank you for your reflections. I’m amazed you can take in all that Bernadette Roberts says. I read it but I’m just blown away by it. I think she mst have an IQ of about 160! 🙂
 
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buzzcut:
Teresa, thank you for your reflections. I’m amazed you can take in all that Bernadette Roberts says. I read it but I’m just blown away by it. I think she mst have an IQ of about 160! 🙂
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Dear Buzzcut

Or maybe she just has lived it 🙂 Faith is not dependant upon intelligence.

God Bless you and much love and peace to you

Teresa
 
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