Читать книгу Writing the Icon of the Heart - Maggie Ross - Страница 8

“I had it on the tip of my tongue.” Everyone has had the experience of not quite remembering a name or a word, and the experience gets more common with age. The word we are looking for lies just out of range, and, as we turn our inward eye to see it, it slips further away. The more intently we think about it, the more it evades our grasp. The only solution is to stop paying it conscious attention; then it suddenly pops into our mind unbidden, just before sleep or when we are thinking (or think we are thinking) about something else.

This phenomenon is sometimes called the paradox of intention, and it points to two different ways of “paying attention.” One in­volves straining every nerve to concentrate on something, which we then fail to find. The other is a matter of having a habit of being aware of things that are not ourselves, in a way that allows what we know to surface in our mind. This second kind of attention cannot be deliberately practized, but depends on our whole mental state. It is something like what Maggie Ross calls “beholding”: holding ourselves open for reality to impinge on us. In a world of distraction and striving, it is the special kind of passivity in the face of reality that we most need.

This is not a book about “spirituality”—acquiring spiritual “experi­ences”—but about being open to reality, which includes and indeed is rooted in the reality of God. “Beholding is inclusive, organic, un­grasping, and self-emptying” (p. xvi). This book is intended for everyone who has had enough of “spiritual writing” and is looking for something that will make sense of normal human experience and integrate it into the knowledge of God through Christ.

John Barton

Oriel & Laing Professor of the

Interpretation of Holy Scripture

University of Oxford