Mother
Clare Watts Presents
at Harvard University Bookstore
In early December Mother Clare presented a talk on her book,
Giving Birth To God: A Woman's Path to Enlightenment to a full
house at the Harvard Coop, Harvard University's bookstore. The
Coop's book reviewer introduced Giving Birth To God to the 50+
people as "a book of vision, the author gazes on this vision
not with dewy eyes but the wide, rapt, unblinking eyes of a
Byzantine saint." Mother Clare read from her well-received
book and then answered a variety of questions and responded
to comments. In the audience were people of all ages and walks
of life who had read her book -- including a 9-year old boy
and a Trappestine nun, who said Mother Clare was "the voice
of prophecy." Mother Clare's book will be on display in
the front window of the Harvard Coop throughout the month of
December.
Below is the complete review of Giving Birth To God by Richard
Kaplan, Harvard Coop Book Reviewer:
Introduction
of Mother Clare Watts
at the Harvard Coop Book Store
by Richard Kaplan, Harvard Coop Book Reviewer
December 2, 2004
Books
about spiritual enlightenment often hinge around a moment of
denial, of abnegation. Of the repudiation of one kind of life
and the total surrender to another.
The
Brahmin, for example, abandons cosmopolitan preoccupations as
a growing child might put aside his toys and sets off with a
begging bowl upon the road. Revelation shows the world and the
flesh to be in fact the devil, and the seeker turns his back
on both.
Sometimes
he leaves his family, his country, even his name behind. Sometimes
he finds salvation in the mystic school of his own faith, at
others in the service to a foreign God. If lucky, like Kipling’s
Lama, he may find, in the words of the last sentence of Kim,
“Salvation for himself and his beloved.” But often
there is no room, no time, for anything as distracting, as cumbersome,
as a beloved.
We
are a dualistic species. Either/or might be encoded in our DNA.
We may not like it but we can’t easily get around it.
The flesh and the spirit, the sacred and the profane, the ethereal
and the mundane – they’re always either/or for us,
each pair like the opposing faces of a Janus-Head.
Tonight’s
book tells of one woman’s escape from, or transcendence
of, this classic quandary.
Now,
if Mother Clare Watts wanted to get our attention with an audacious
title, she could scarcely have done better than Giving Birth
To God.
email:
MotherClare@sophiaretreatcenter.org
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Her narrative
itself is no less audacious – and anything but the same old new
age thing. Mother Clare is very much a pilgrim and her book is a pilgrim’s
progress that, like John Bunyan’s classic, hurls us, right off
the ban, In Media Res.
It begins
with an ecstasy and it never lets up.
If I had
to describe it simply and briefly – though it is not, although
simple to read, a simple book at all – I might call Giving Birth
To God the description of a kind of alchemical wedding, since it is
in that esoteric tradition, if I remember Jung correctly, that opposites
are reconciled, soul and body integrated, and the worldly and the mystical
cease their quarrel and embrace.
Now I must
admit to approaching so-called spiritual or inspirational titles warily,
if not cynically, since so many, too many, of them are – no other
word for it – sappy. Sappy, gushy, dewy, and too Californian by
half for my flinty New England brain. They’re the inspirational
equivalent of an airbrushed centerfold – an adolescent’s
cliché fantasy of female allure on one hand, an adolescent’s
cliché fantasy of paint by the numbers enlightenment or shake
and bake bliss on the other.
But there’s
nothing airbrushed about Giving Birth To God. Mother Clare has not written
a religious infomercial. Acclaim it or reject it, Giving Birth To God
is a book of vision, and in these 150 pages the author gazes on this
vision not with dewy eyes but the wide, rapt, unblinking eyes of a Byzantine
saint. |
