The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism - 1200-1350 - Review

Commonweal, March 26, 1999 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

In The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris says that it was the liturgy that pulled her back to the practice of faith. Doris Grumbach, by contrast, charts a spiritual journey in which she gives up on liturgy and other "church" practices for a life of solitary prayer. Grumbach, a celebrated essayist and critic, is under no illusion about how the Christian contemplative tradition warns against such solitary spirituality. Indeed, in more than one place she quotes everyone from her daughter (who is a seminary president) to the spiritual authors she is reading, as they attempt to dissuade her from this lonely path. Grumbach, however, remains steadfast. Her many years of church attendance and sacramental practice have not continued to nourish her. As a consequence, amid extreme pain (from neuralgia) and from the perspective of old age, she sets a course of prayer relying on some spiritual guidance from favorite authors (Simone Weil, Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, Kathleen Norris among others) and from the traditional source of all Christian prayer: the psalms.

Grumbach prays because she is a woman of deep faith and, further, because in her younger days she had an overpowering experience of God's presence which anchored her in faith and which she would love to re-experience. The Presence of Absence is an account of her years of prayer, reading, and struggle with pain and with what the old authors would call desolation. Her experiences are set out in graceful prose and with compelling honesty. Like all spiritual persons, Grumbach struggles both with God's absence and with the authors she encounters. The end result is a book that would inspire any person of faith.

The professor in me desperately wanted to debate all this with Grumbach. Do not take seriously Merton's Seeds of Contemplation (1949). Merton himself regarded it as such a naive book that he completely rewrote it in 1960-61 under the title New Seeds of Contemplation. Don't think of the Cloud of Unknowing as the work of a solitary person of prayer; he was a Carthusian monk whose ordinary liturgical practices were the context out of which his contemplative prayer arose (the same thing goes for writers like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila). Don't think of the church as an institution; think of people within the church (like those with whom you correspond) as part of a community of prayer.

Despite such cautions, one must thank Grumbach for penning an authentic work. Anyone who despairs of the church but still clings to prayer will benefit from this woman's struggles and insights. Despite my dissatisfactions with some of what Grumbach has to say, my new resolution is to go back and read her earlier works such as Life in a Day and Fifty Days of Solitude. I have known of her writings mainly from her reviews and articles in magazines like the New Republic and this journal, but this recent book makes me wish for a more sustained encounter with this person of faith.

Johann Arnold is a well-known spiritual writer and peacemaker who belongs to the Anabaptist-inspired Bruderhof (whose life and origins are fully described in the final pages of this book). The Bruderhof are Christian communities who practice the sharing of goods, a life of simplicity, and a dedication to peacemaking. Anyone who thinks that pacifism is a synonym for passivity would do well to look at a manifesto of Arnold's father, written a generation ago and partially cited here. Each sentence begins with the phrase "We declare war against...cruelty to children, the search for power over the souls of people, the spirit of unforgiveness, envy," and so on.