Saturday 17 July 2010

Reading Underhill

Evelyn Underhill in all her writing (that I have read so far) never strays far from her main point, which these quotations will make clear, from The School of Charity, Meditations on the Christian Creed -- The Mystery of Sacrifice, A Meditation on the Liturgy (combined edition published by Longmans 1956):

from The School of Charity
For Christianity is not a pious reverie, a moral system; it is a revelation .. of the realities that control life [p8]

God, as Brother Giles said, is a great mountain of corn from which man, like a sparrow, takes a grain of wheat: yet even that grain of wheat ... contains all the essentials of our life. [p8]

... a reality revealed to us in three ways as a Creative Love, a Rescuing Love and an Indwelling, all-pervading Love. ... Meister Eckhart, "Where I left myself, I found God; where I found myself, I lost God." [p9]

We believe that the tendency to give, to share, to cherish, is the mainspring of the universe ... and therefore when we are most generous, we are most loving and most real. [p10]

Humble self-abandonment is found and declared to be enough to give us God. [p42]

By a supreme exercise of humility, the deep purposes of God are worked out through man's natural life with all its powers, humiliations, conflicts and sufferings, its immense capacity for heroic self-giving, disinterested love: not by means of ideas, insights ... [p53]

Those who complain that they can make no progress in the life of prayer because they 'cannot meditate' should examine, not their capacity for meditation, but their capacity for suffering and love. [p54]

It is useless to talk in a large vague way about the love of God. [The Cross] is its point of insertion in the world of men, in action, example and demands. [p59]

The incarnation of the Holy in this world is social. [p92]
from The Mystery of Sacrifice
The history of the soul is marred throughout its course by cheap and unworthy oblations, which look impressive, but have not cost enough: by efforts to avoid the price of holiness, the totality of its obligation to God. [p22]

The mystic Erigena looking out on the world said, 'The loss and absence of God is the torment of the whole creation; nor do I think there is any other.' The full presence of God in His creation would mean the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. ... So the Eastern Church, adoring the humble oblation of bread and wine, sees in this the sign of a cosmic mystery, the consummation of all things, the transfiguration of the world in Christ. [p44]
By all accounts, she was an outstanding retreat conductor. But that is clear from her written legacy.

Sunday, 5 August 2007