The SILENCE OF GOD

Rating:
Summary: The author, for all his wisdom, writes like a seeker.
Review: A careful read-and it requires concentration, Carse reveals no interest in any mamby-pamby feel-good horsefoolery here-gains one of the rarest rewards in literature: not just the complex made simple, but the delicious experience of having something you thought was only simple turn abundantly complex. Another kudo: no particular religious persuasion, synod or theological bias seems to have sway. Which is not to suggest this isn't about God and talking with Him; rather, it's only about that.

Rating:
Summary: Wordy but makes contribution
Review: At the beginning of these four meditations author James Carse discusses the paradox of using words that cannot describe what he is about to reflect upon. Carse makes a number of assertions that are material for reflection. He calls prayer begging, begging for life itself. He goes on to explain how our need to be listened to us based on our need to live.

At times, though, his meditations are wordy and sound more like philosophical discourse. He makes use of examples and stories which enflesh his points. Kierkegarrd's story of the king and the peasant girl, the couple who through a medium believe they have contacted their son are among several.

One can read this small book carefully and use it for meditation, but one has to read slowly. the structure of the paragraphing make it difficult to be meditative.

Rating:
Summary: Wordy but makes contribution
Review: At the beginning of these four meditations author James Carse discusses the paradox of using words that cannot describe what he is about to reflect upon. Carse makes a number of assertions that are material for reflection. He calls prayer begging, begging for life itself. He goes on to explain how our need to be listened to us based on our need to live.

At times, though, his meditations are wordy and sound more like philosophical discourse. He makes use of examples and stories which enflesh his points. Kierkegarrd's story of the king and the peasant girl, the couple who through a medium believe they have contacted their son are among several.

One can read this small book carefully and use it for meditation, but one has to read slowly. the structure of the paragraphing make it difficult to be meditative.

Rating:
Summary: God listening
Review: Don't be put off by the title! This is about God listening. Because God, and you and I, can listen only when we are silent. The silence of God is what opens us to pray, gives us permission and encouragement. Praying into the silence of God gives us what we pray for: the presence of God.

Rating:
Summary: An extrordinary book
Review: This book is extraordinary. It opens us to the possibillity for totally new ways to approach God, faith, and the life of the spirit. This opening is achieved by showing the critical difference between talking about God and talking to God, a God who is present to us in a silence pregnant with listening. This key entry point allows Carse to reveal new meanings of gift, receiving, property, division, and world.

This book should be valuable to Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists alike. It is especially helpful to Christians as we have a faith so overladen with a deadly and moralizing familiarity.

One powerful benefit for me in Carse's book is that he opened me up to powerfully new ways of receiving the parables of Jesus and to their intended gift of a disturbing, disorienting suprise. So many of the parables have been reduce to moral platitutdes. Moralizing the parables hides their shocking truth from us, blinding us to the astonishment of an entirely new way of seeing and receiving the world, a seeing and receiving that I think Jesus may have intended with his parables of the Kingdom.