by Roland Ashby
RA: First of all, could you explain what a “solitary” is?
MR: I’ve been trying to find out all my life! But solitaries are born, they’re not made, and it’s a life that is so preoccupied with God that it’s really not possible to do anything else but be preoccupied with God or yield to that preoccupation.
And it is a life, at least in my case, that tries to steer clear of politics and political bandwagons, and silence is the essential context for that. I try to hide in plain sight so as not to get tangled up in institutions and their politics.
RA: Could you give people some idea of your day? Do you spend most of the day in one room, for example?
MR: I spend some time tending my vegetable garden in the summertime, but the rest of the time I’m pretty much alone in my room. I’m probably alone about 97% of the time.
RA: And would you spend most of that time in prayer?
MR: Life is prayer! You reach the point where it’s not so different off the cushion to on the cushion.
I do have some pastoral responsibilities, mostly over the internet, but it’s not something I encourage or seek. In fact, I actively try not to have a following, if that tends to start happening, because I think spiritual dependence is a very great evil of our time. Spiritual maturity, while it’s always in the context of community in some way, is only as healthy as the solitude it’s built on. So it isn’t just community or just solitude, they’re interdependent.
RA: Would you have much engagement with the world in the sense of watching television or reading newspapers?
MR: I watch the news. Occasionally I might watch a program, but I try to keep it to things that will inform my life.
I read a lot, including novels, and also listen to classical music sometimes, particularly on Sunday afternoons. I listen to the Early Music Program, and Choral Evensong.
RA: You didn’t have a religious upbringing, so what drew you to religion and the contemplative life? What was their early appeal to you?
MR: When I was five years old I was taken into my first church which happened to be Washington Cathedral. I really don’t know how to describe this, there aren’t any words for it, but I was taken out of myself, and when I returned to myself, as it were, I knew that whatever “that” was, because there was a residual sense of something, that’s what I wanted to give my life to.
I had to keep it secret all during my childhood and adolescence. When I finally told my family I was going to be a nun my mother said “I’d rather you be a prostitute”. So that gives you some idea of what my childhood was like.
RA: What does it mean to be taken “out of yourself”?
MR: I don’t know. It’s very hard to describe. These encounters leave residual traces, as it were, and it’s that that we can think of as experience, but as soon as we start using the word “experience” we’re already interpreting; I mean it’s already interpreting to say that something happened. An experience is a construct of the self-conscious mind which is limited to what it knows and understands. An experience or encounter like this is outside its conceptual and linguistic framework and therefore its ability to describe.
A word I prefer to use is “beholding”, which recognises that something outside ordinary experience is happening.
RA: I was very struck when you wrote that faith “is a willingness to freefall in the love of God”, so obviously this beholding is, at its heart, an experience of love, isn’t it?
MR: Beholding informs everything, becomes manifest as we grow; it is always there in the seat of the soul; it is not something separate. But it’s something you can only be aware of obliquely, and so you can’t in any way say it’s an experience. It’s a relinquishing of experience. You’re rooted in silence and somewhere in that silence is the beholding, but it’s not something that you can look at directly, it’s something you look for out of the corner of your eye.
So when people want to interview me I say there’s no story here! Because mostly I can’t talk about it, I can only tell you how to dispose yourself towards it or be open to receive its gifts; but what it is, in fact, is beyond words, it’s beyond our ken. More than we can ask or imagine, as it says in the New Testament.
RA: In the final chapter of Volume One of ‘Silence: A User’s Guide’ you talk about the fruits of silence, the fruits of beholding, if you like. What do you see as the fruits of the beholding and the silence?
MR: Peace, emotional stability, a sense of inviolability... I don’t really try to analyse it. I think that’s a mistake. I think we receive what we get and it will manifest itself as it will, but, again, if you try to analyse it, compartmentalise it and systematise it, you destroy it. Because most of this goes on out of our sight, and part of the problem with the spiritual life today is that people go looking for experiences, for extraordinary happenings; they go looking for something like what happened to me in the cathedral, but what they get, in the end, is only what they’ve projected, and so it does not necessarily come from beyond or outside their own mind.
Another fruit of beholding is that you no longer have the fear of death, and, you know, when you get to be 79 it can’t be too far off!
RA: You mentioned the word “relinquishing”, and so the notion of self-emptying obviously is an important part of it. Could you say a little bit about what’s involved in self-emptying?
MR: I think self-emptying is something you can only dispose yourself to. You can only open to self-emptying. It certainly isn’t a voluntary act. Yes, you can relinquish your evil thoughts about somebody, that’s a form of self-emptying. But the really profound self-emptyings are not something that you do, they’re something that God does.
RA: In your books on silence you talk about two kinds of mind – the “deep mind” and the “self-conscious mind.” How are they different?
MR: The self-conscious mind is the analytical mind, the verbal mind, the conceptual mind, whereas the deep mind is the intuitive mind, the creative mind, the nuanced mind. In Christian terms we would call it the ‘place’ where the Holy Spirit is operative.
The self-conscious mind is really a dead-end because the minute you’ve put a conceptual border around something you’ve killed it. So the two minds constantly need to interact. The deep mind needs the self-conscious mind to help it understand what’s going on, and the self-conscious mind needs the deep mind to constantly enrich and feed and expand its vision.
RA: You also refer to the value of one-pointed meditation in helping us to connect with deep mind. What do you think of mantra meditation as a form of one-pointed meditation?
MR: As long as it isn’t made an end in itself, I think mantra meditation can be very useful. One of the things John Main says is that at some point the mantra falls silent, it’s behind you. A lot of people think that he said when meditating we had to say the mantra all the time no matter what, but that’s not the end of the story. The mantra falls behind you. You hear it from behind, echoing, but you’re not self-consciously saying it. And that’s when you start really getting towards beholding. That’s sort of the last step on the path before you jump off the cliff.
RA: Into what you have described as a “freefall in the love of God”. You’ve also said this ability of the self-conscious mind to forget itself in the silence is what gives rise to joy, and is at the heart of being human. How do we know we’re having an encounter with God in the silence or do we not know?
MR: We don’t know. It’s an act of trust. I don’t think we jump off the cliff into the arms of the devil, for example. I think that confidence in God is the most important thing, because we can’t know for sure if anything is of God, so we have to have this faith, this trust, that this is what is happening and that that alone opens us to God and keeps evil at bay. I think the thing that evil hates the most is when we’re able to do that.
RA: You write that you don’t like the word “mystic”, particularly in the way it’s used these days, because you say that “to be a mystic is to live the ordinary through transfigured perception”. Why is word the “transfigured” important to you?
MR: I think it goes back to my dislike of the word “transform” because transform is changing one thing into something else. It’s not really like a chrysalis becoming a butterfly, it’s something more to do with essence, the essence is seen from a different perspective, and the important thing about the incarnation is that it is our very sinfulness that is the key to our salvation, the key to our transfiguration, as Julian of Norwich, the apostle of beholding, says.
It’s our human nature that is transfigured; it’s not transformed, it’s not changed into something that’s not human, and as Julian says, it’s our very sins that become the keys, the means even, to our salvation. It isn’t just that sin opens you to God, realising how miserable you are when you sin, it’s that it actually unlocks - if there is a lock - you to the point that you can receive transfiguration. You see things completely differently. But you see them exactly for what they are, it’s not a fantasy.
RA: You also say that in deep mind our wounds are healed.
MR: Well yes, it’s healing, but again, it’s transfiguration. It’s like Christ’s wounds. They’re not covered over but they’re glorified.
RA: In Volume One of ‘Silence: A User’s Guide’ you quote Pascal’s famous aphorism: that “man’s unhappiness arises from one thing alone - that he cannot remain quietly in his room.” Why do you think most people tend to avoid silence and solitude?
MR: For a multitude of reasons, but principally because they’re afraid of death and they’re afraid of self-knowledge. I think it’s very important to face up to both of those, to understand they are a very important part of life.
Much of our suffering that we inflict on ourselves and other people comes from trying to deny the fact of death in our lives, or the shadow of death. Our lives are lived against a background of death and it doesn’t have to be a morbid or gloomy thing. One reason people are afraid of death is that they think they’ll be self-conscious after they die and all these horrible things will happen to them, but I believe this is a fantasy.
RA: You write that the human race is “sleepwalking into oblivion, and if religion is to wake people up it must recover the work of silence.” What do you see as the consequences, both for the individual and for society, of a loss of silence?
MR: Look around you! It’s sad. I think it’s something that a few people see quite clearly, such as this lovely teenager Greta Thunberg, who is trying to wake people up to the environmental crisis. She is a very impressive lady. She tells it like it is, that our political leaders are failing us, lying to us and robbing her generation of a future. It’s their future we have squandered. We need a few more people like her.
RA: In your books you say a lot about environmental awareness as being one of the fruits of silence; and that silence leads to a much greater sensitivity to other life forms and to the natural world around us. Do you see that as one of the key fruits?
MR: I do, and we have to recall that in our present form we’ve only been around for about 600,000 years, and when we were hunter-gatherers on the Savannah we were quiet or we’d be eaten. You have to be acutely aware of your environment in order to survive in a life like that and so silence is really our natural state, it’s not an unnatural state.
RA: And you’ve lived in wilderness areas, both in a tent and a cabin. How would you describe that experience to a city dweller?
MR: Blissful! I lived in a tent on a mountainside in Big Sur, California. One of the things I remember that really woke me up was watching a lizard catch a moth about two feet from me. It was an extraordinary thing to see and it reinforced how important stillness and silence are, because this lizard was completely unafraid of me and it just sat there having a sunbath; and then this moth came by and it just grabbed it. I thought it was a privilege to be able to see something like that.
There were also mountain lions, cougars, and deer and all sorts of animals; and sometimes the lions would scream at night. I also had a pet raven which was one of the great gifts of my life. I found her by the roadside, she had fallen out of the nest and her parents were trying to figure out how to get her back and, of course, they couldn’t, and just across the road there was a vulture waiting for her to die. I took the raven home and she became my closest companion for a couple of years. She was such an amazing bird, and so intelligent. She used to compete with the dogs by retrieving sticks. One of my dogs had a stick fetish and she was jealous so she started bringing me sticks to throw for her.
She also had a great sense of humour and mischief. For example, she would figure out what you wanted to keep the most, like your car keys, and take them up into a tree. She also knew the boundaries of the property somehow; I don’t know how, I’d never taken her around the boundaries. There was a crossing of a creek that was right by the cabin so when she saw somebody stop and start to trespass, she would fly close down and knock the person’s hat off.
Wherever she was, if I sat down to meditate, she would come and sit on her aviary door and rock herself to sleep. She was just an incredible animal. She was free to go. She flew with the other ravens in the area but if I called her, she would come down. She chose to stay with me. She would come down and land on my arm and put her beak up on my neck and croon.
RA: So she could show affection?
MR: Oh yes, they are very emotional birds. One weekend some small children stayed in a nearby house and the raven was instantly in love with them. The children, who were only 3 or 4 years old, and the raven, spent the entire weekend playing together. If the raven didn’t know where the children were she would go and tap on the windows of the house to wake them up, and if the children didn’t know where the raven was they’d mimic her call and the raven would instantly come down. When they left she was just distraught.
RA: You write that in deep mind and in the heart of the work of silence an “enchristing” process occurs, in which “our shared nature with God becomes manifest.”
MR: I think one of the things we forget about in Christianity is incarnation entails deification. We talk about deification as if it’s something separate, as if it’s something that happens after death, and it’s not. The very fact of incarnation contains, within itself, deification, and as we open ourselves to understanding incarnation we are becoming deified.
We participate in our deification every time we intensify the focus of our life on God, and that’s a gift of grace, but it’s also a fruit. Even Augustine says there’s a place in the soul where evil cannot touch, where there’s no sin and God resides. It’s a very, very old belief. Again, I think we have to learn to trust that.
RA: In what ways was Jesus part of the silence tradition? A lot of people wouldn’t see him as being contemplative.
MR: Jesus does go off into the wilderness quite often to pray and I think, again, part of incarnation is that his beholding of God is never interrupted. He lives entirely in the beholding of God and everything that he does comes out of that. I’m not saying that he didn’t have a learning process growing up, but that part of that beholding is that God allows the human to hold God in being and time even as God is holding the person in eternity and sacred time. There’s a divine exchange going on. And, again, that may not be something we’re aware of, except in the most oblique way.
RA: You write that the desert fathers and mothers have been key influences in your life, and you quote the hermit Anthony: “Whether alone or with others your life and your death are one with your neighbour.” Who do you see as your neighbour?
MR: Everybody. The solitary life is very eucharistic. And everybody and everything is in the solitude.
RA: Indeed, you have written that “solitude is never given for itself alone but for sharing with others.” You’ve obviously shared it in this profoundly deep way with the two books on silence you’ve produced. Is that what you’re seeing as your sharing with others?
MR: I think that’s sort of a minor detail. To understand why I think it’s eucharistic, I have to talk a little bit about intercession. I don’t see intercession as speaking a list of long names, I think it’s much more profound than that. God gives us life and we offer that life back, on behalf of other people, for God to do as he wishes. That’s how I understand intercession – it’s offering your very life and being on behalf of others for God to use as he wills on behalf of others. Because we can’t know where the need is, we can only see obliquely or superficially, but God can use that energy of our lives on behalf of other people.
RA: Another fruit of silence you have said is a greater sensitivity to the suffering and evil in the world. Living with that sensitivity must be very hard. Do you feel disturbed a lot of the time?
MR: I find the current world situation very alarming. Not at the root of my soul, but certainly at the self-conscious level I’m very disturbed. It isn’t just seeing the evil, it’s seeing the consequences of the evil. Like Trump’s racist and violent language. We’ve now had two mass shootings where people say they’re doing Trump’s will. I’m just absolutely horrified and sometimes I can’t stop weeping because of what goes on.
However, despite the constant awareness of suffering and evil, there is, at the same time, an even greater awareness of joy.
*Silence: A User’s Guide (Volume 1: Process) and Silence: A User’s Guide (Volume 2: Application). Published by Darton Longman and Todd.
Roland Ashby is the contributing editor of Living Water. Many of his interviews have been collected in A faith to live by (Vol. 1) published by Darton Longman and Todd and Morning Star Publishing; and A faith to live by (Vol. II), published by Morning Star Publishing.