Customer Reviews

Where Only Love Can Go: 30 Days With a Great Spiritual Teacher

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I find this book rich and full of life growing ingredients. One has to have some familiarity with the "Cloud of Unknowing" or the tradition of "Contemplative Prayer". This is a book to be read over and over for a very long time. It is spaced out for a day each month and then it can be repeated --- in fact, it should be repeated.

I have never read, but always wanted to read, The Cloud of Unknowing. So, for me I look at this as an introduction to the classic. The original was written in Middle English. This is just a caution if buying a copy of the classic. You may desire a more modern English version.

Besides borrowing the material of a spiritual classic, this book was arranged also to be a book of prayer, coming with its own instructions. For those who are not familiar with this type of prayer, the book also acts as an introduction to Meditation, or the concept of Lectio Divina (although that is usually, but not necessarily, done with Sacred Scripture). This is good because The Cloud of Unknowing is said to be a good opening to much present-day teaching on meditation and prayer. Part of the tradition is that it was intended to teach mystical prayer.

It is challenging in that it introduces us, or confronts us, with some of the conflicts and contradictions we must face in ourselves in encountering God. Something must give (always in us) in order to grow spiritually. We can look at it as a continual process of "Not my will, but yours be done." This is always difficult, because we cannot immediately see the benefit there is in this for us. We have to accept it and act in Faith, believing in the teaching of the mystics who preceded us that the payoff is real and we will be better off for this.

It is also nice to have the wisdom of "great guides" like this packed into bite-sized chunks that we can digest at our own speed, and that we can learn as we go.

Since we are all individuals, and God treats us as such, and each of us is at our own unique level of growth in the Spiritual Life, a book life this can produce varied responses in each person. This should be seen as a good thing, because the Holy Spirit adapts himself to each of us as we need it.

Some of the names traditionally associated over the years with the original classic are William Johnston: The Cloud of Unknowing: and The Book of Privy Counseling (Image Book Original), James Walsh: The Cloud of Unknowing (The Classics of Western Spirituality), and Evelyn Underhill: The Cloud of Unknowing. There are others I have never heard of. There is also Walter Hilton: The Cloud of Unknowing (Great Christian Mystical Writings) who is well-known, but I have never known him for this book.