"Elizaveta Iurievna Kuzmina-Karavaeva Skobtsova, later known as Mother Maria, was a Russian Orthodox religious thinker, poet and artist. Her multi-faceted legacy includes articles, poems, art, and drama. In the 1910s she was part of the literary milieu of St. Petersburg and was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. She fled Russia soon after the Bolsheviks' takeover and lived in Paris, where she became a nun. In 1935, she participated in organizing the so-called Orthodox Action, which was designed to help Russian immigrants in France. She and her fellow-workers from Orthodox Action opened a house for homeless and sick immigrants in Paris. During the Nazi occupation of the city, the house was transformed into a refuge for Jews and displaced persons. Mother Maria and her son were arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and died in the Ravensbruck camp in Germany. Mother Maria's selfless devotion to people and her death as a martyr will never be forgotten. In 2004, the Holy Synod confirmed the glorification of Mother Maria." - from Columbia University Libraries Special Collection link

Words about No Words

Everyone gets the irony of words about silence.  You see the title, and you chuckle.

The issues - like in any Zen Koan - lay deeper than that surface observation and are entwined and entangled with everything that is.  This is precisely what make's Maggie Ross's book "Silence: A User's Guide" so very auspicious.  Like the sword that cut the Gordian knot,  she has taken us swiftly to the heart of the matter.

Not only does she help us see the vast landscape of inner processes and aggregates, she gives us new ways to hold onto previous knowledge we bring to the subject.  Left brain and right brain are brought into our conversation early on.  Self-consciousness and deep mind are added to the mix.  Maggie paints for us - just this side of poetry - a vista of simple complexity that opens the mind to the wonder in a grain of sand.  The one that is in the very far corner of this landscape she has given us.  She focuses us again and again in a way that keeps us from plunging down any one rabbit hole for the answer and reminds us that answers are always beyond the beyond.

But, you get the sense from this work that you can really plunge into the stillness of silence and still define its edges while not stepping past them.  You can hallow its precincts with words that are so very light they are transparent and do not block nor encumber the view.

If you will partner with her in the journey, she will give you space to figure out the vastness of the topic.  For, is not silence as expansive as the universe is wide.  While we may have a low-grade hum that is itself ever present in time and space as – I believe she says – a “b-flat”; is not the very constant presence of that thing itself a stillness and a platform upon which all silence is itself silent.  And, there is the thing.  Maggie walks us into riddles and lets us know that there is no one answer that defines “suchness”.  Conundrum is closer to truth than matter.

I have seen the reviews that others have given Maggie's piece and I believe their words speak outside of the framework from within which Maggie is herself speaking.  The richness of her understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of the conversations concerning silence, and the patristic pronouncements of formation and direction that she eschews from the desert fathers and mothers, start in medias res and move forward at a rather fair clip.  While anyone can grab hold of the book and join the conversation about silence, you better be prepared to do your homework on areas she inclines to point you toward going in her fast paced conversation.

I love that she spends a whole section of the book talking about the language or words we use in our conversations about silence.  While she does grab hold of a whole lexicon worth our review, there are a few terms I wish she would add.  Theoria and perhaps diakrisis and nepsis could be added.  She leans into the deep headwaters of the Eastern Christian Tradition on silence and I think these words could help sustain some hunger in people for obtaining more in days ahead.  But, all in all, this is a masterful guidebook on the issues.

The true work of silence is really the eternal recreation of creation; the becoming new of the person (and of course the cosmos as well).  Transformation and transfiguration reveal the presence of the depth work that silence avails.  And, clearly this is where silence is apt to take us when we have encountered it as either neophyte or awakened-one; to the path of wholeness.  

Pushing silence out of our lives has fragmented human existence, experience, and rent our being asunder.  Some find Maggie’s conversation about the damaging influences of the modern age upon our psyche and our soul to be harsh.  For me, it sits quite nicely where it belongs – a truth hard to hear.

Maggie's conversation about deep-mind is an extension of - for me - the conversation about deep-imagery in poetry.  It resonates with thinkers used to integrating the presence of the neo-cortex into the life of humanity.  In this instance it is the value of the neo-cortex in humans to help us integrate the nature, and process of silence into all our life.  It is a higher function of human beings – an executive function.  Higher than reptilian "reaction" to life and threats; higher also than mammalian "nurturing" of intimacy and bonding. 

Silence is the ground upon which we stand to gain a vantage point on existence; and from within which we move and have our being.  But, that being said, it is not just an organ of discrimination and healing, it is the very place where our highest functioning as humans with a neo-cortex let go into the world of the spirit.  The place of taking a leap – the place of pure AWARENESS.

This is why Maggie's conversation draws reference on many occasions to Jane Hirshfield's Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.  It is about mind.  It is about heart.  It is about spirit.  And, it is about the place where these all converge and conjoin. 

Get the book and read it.  You will not be disappointed.



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