Student Forums

SPRING 2012 (April 4): "Christian Contemplative Traditions"

Speakers:

The Very Revd. John Anthony McGuckin, Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary:

"The Way of the Pilgrim:  Practices of Mystical Awareness in Eastern Christianity"

Prof. McGuckin will talk about the specific way the Christian East approaches contemplation as both theory and practice – looking at the Jesus Prayer as a prime example of contemplation-theory set into practice as ‘cognition-changer’; and also at the ‘Way of the Pilgrim ‘ as an even more concrete example of the Jesus’ Prayer’s deeper theory.

Bio:  The Very Revd. Professor John Anthony McGuckin is a priest of the Orthodox Church in the Patriarchate of Romania's Archdiocese in America. He is currently  the Nielsen Professor of Early and Byzantine Church History at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Byzantine Christianity at Columbia University. He has published more than twenty books on religious and historical themes' most recently Prayer Book of the Early Church (Paraclete Press. 2012)  and The Ascent of Law: Patristic and Byzantine Reformulations of Antique Civilization (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press 2012). He is internationally recognized as a leading interpreter of the Early Christian and Eastern Orthodox traditions

Mary S. Gossy, Women's and Gender Studies and Spanish and Comparative Literatures, Rutgers University:

"Unoccupied Prayer and Divine Love"

Prof. Gossy will talk about what Ruth Burrows, a Carmelite nun writing in England, calls "unoccupied prayer."  This practice of prayer has been daily and uninterrupted among Carmelite nuns at least since the 16th century, when it was formally included in the rule of St. Teresa of Avila, the founder of the reformed or "Discalced (barefoot)" Carmelites.  Twice a day, for an hour each time, each nun goes into her cell and closes the door.  Once inside, Burrows says, "we leave every occupation aside and, as far as possible, the mental occupation that accompanies it, and set ourselves before God, exposed in our naked reality, undefended by the ritual of liturgy, planned meditation or techniques with which to maintain control; with nothing whatever to offer except ourselves and the desire to receive God's outpoured love." (Ruth Burrows, Carmel: Interpreting a Great Tradition , London:  Sheed and Ward, 2000, 101-102.)  Prof. Gossy will connect this practice with a few verses from the poetry of divine love of St. John of the Cross, and conclude with how being alone with the divine can effect changes in the human person and in human communities. Constance FitzGerald's article, "Contemplation and the Dark Night," a study of the effects of this kind of contemplative practice on impasses both personal and political, figures in that conclusion.

Bio:  Mary Gossy is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Spanish and Comparative Literatures at Rutgers University.  She has the Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard, where she studied early modern Spanish literature, including the Carmelite writers Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, and French feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and deconstruction.  She is the author of three books:  The Untold Story: Women and Theory in Golden Age Texts , Freudian Slips:  Women, Writing, the Foreign Tongue , and Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.  She was a member of an enclosed (“cloistered”) order of Anglican nuns in England  and spent some of her time with them living at the order's hermitage in a remote part of New Zealand.   Her fourth book, Enclosure, works through the ways that living with the nuns and learning their way of life in the cloister affects and transmutes what it is like to live outside the cloister, but still "in the enclosure of the heart," in the big city.

 Free and Open to the Public