Ruth BURROWS. Essential Writings. Selected with an Introduction by Michelle Jones. Modern Spiritual Masters series. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019. pp. 176. $24.00 pb. ISBN 9781608337750 (ebook) ISBN 9781626983120 (PBK.) Reviewed by Jill RAITT, University of Missouri, Columbia, Emerita, Columbia, MO 65211.

I was drawn to this book by short devotional pieces I had read in Give Us This Day, a daily missal. Michelle Jones’ Introduction: To Know the Gift of God (pp. 1-13) draws a portrait of Rachel Gregory (pen-name: Ruth Burrows) that is only a little less startling than the quotations from Gregory herself in Chapter 1. Gregory writes: “I was born into this world with a tortured sensitivity.” She tried to understand where it came from and so tells us that she deeply loved her parents and that her mother could not at all understand either Rachel’s or her father’s overly sensitive natures. She was the third of seven siblings born within twelve months of each other. Rachel says that when she was just a year old, her mother’s attention was absorbed by her newborn so that Rachel felt deprived of the cuddling that she needed. Rachel was beset by nightmares and “bogeys” in every dark corner. She had violent tantrums and, in short, presenting nothing like the supposed babyhood of a future contemplative nun and powerful spiritual writer.

In spite of these unpromising beginnings, Rachel succeeded brilliantly in her convent school where she was a leader academically and socially, in spite of her continuing psychological discomfort. When she understood that she had to make a retreat, she resented it as an infringement of her spiritual privacy, but she conformed for the sake of her reputation with the nuns. During that retreat she experienced a deep fear that turned out to be the beginnings of a religious vocation. If, indeed, one could be intimate with God, then that is what she must seek. She was converted, suddenly and irreversibly.  None of this made her life easier. On the contrary, she struggled in darkness and with a kind of bitter determination to acquire virtue, to be what she understood she was called to be. She wrote: “It is impossible to understand my life unless it is seen all the time against the background of black depression.” p.23

   Rachel’s assiduous reading of the New Testament and her love for Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, encouraged her and she entered a Carmelite monastery in Mansfield that eventually joined the Quiddenham Carmelites. Her life as an enclosed, contemplative nun continued to be a struggle that led her to understand that humility and emptiness was her way and, as she came to understand, the way that all God-seekers must go.

  At this point, I began to wonder how she could so firmly decide what the spiritual life of everyone else had to be. I knew a very holy nun who, in her advanced age, said, “Dark night? Why I’ve never even been in a tunnel!” As I read further, I wondered as well where her concern and vocation of prayer for others entered in. I found it only in the last section of the final chapter (pp. 168-172), a kind of coda to an otherwise unrelenting reference to darkness, emptiness, and lack of emotion.

  And yet this hard, hard way, in Rachel’s case, led her to a humble “Yes” to everything God asked of her so that also, in that last chapter, “Transformed into the Gift of God”, she writes knowingly of the essence of union with God: “Total receptivity means total selflessness and this means that God is truly all in this heart. There is no ego on the summit of the mountain, only the honor and glory of God.”