“At The Still Point”: Mystery, Misery and Ministry in Fraught Times

Monday 1st December 9:30am to 12:30pm

A morning with Professor Mark Burrows, writer and retreat leader, poet and scholar, inclusive of morning tea.

“At the Still Point”: Mystery, Misery and Ministry in Fraught Times

“We eat bread, but we live from radiance.” Wise words from the German-Jewish poet, Hilde Domin, written after her return to Germany in 1954, having survived the Shoah as a refugee. Hers was a quiet wisdom, a poetic sort of mysticism that knew that mystery and misery were never far apart. With the mystics she knew that light was always to be found in the darkness—if one knew how to look. More recently, the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski suggested that “poetry searches for radiance.” Where? In the mystery that lies in the darkness. In the misery we cannot evade. In destitute times. We’ll listen to voices like these that remind us, precisely in difficult times like ours, that the “unknowing” of wonder is the beginning of wisdom. They encourage us to experience, with T. S. Eliot, that “at the still point, there the dance is.”

Professor Mark Burrows is a theologian, poet and translator, much sought after internationally as a speaker and retreat leader. He is in Australia this month at the invitation of the World Community for Christian Meditation, leading events across the country. The author of three bestselling books voicing Meister Eckhart’s mystical vision (most recently Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light), he is also one of the leading translators and interpreters of Rainer Rilke’s writings. His translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus appeared in 2014 as did You Are the Future. Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke, co-authored with Australian writer Stephanie Dowrick. He lives and writes in Camden, Maine (USA).