Abstract
Among the many gifts that this imposing volume offers its readers, two are preeminent. The first is access to seven of Constance FitzGerald’s articles. Each of the seven is dense in the best possible way, inviting encounter with the breadth and depth of God’s relationship to humanity. Second, the book is a witness to the value of engagement with the mystical-monastic tradition of theological reflection. The latter can help to free theology from the inclination to a rationalism that suggests life’s dilemmas are all susceptible to neat—and theoretical—resolutions.
Through her explorations of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, FitzGerald has developed the notion of “impasse,” a term that summarizes our inability to force life’s conformity to our preferred ways of perceiving reality. In the experience of impasse, there is darkness. As FitzGerald illustrates powerfully, however, darkness is “the place where egoism dies and true unselfish love for the other is set free . . . it is the birthplace of a vision and a hope that cannot be imagined this side of darkness” (88). Such hope, of course, is a pearl of great price. FitzGerald acknowledges the price, but is no less insistent that grace can empower and sustain our capacity for hope through promoting our ongoing conversion. We do not come to possess hope as an object, but grace enables us to practice it in manifold circumstances.
The other authors in this collection, which functions as a Festschrift as well as a means to showcase FitzGerald’s writing, illustrate well how FitzGerald’s insights into the mystical tradition can fuel theological reflection on the needs of our own time: from confronting racial injustice, to addressing issues of the climate emergency and the still-unfolding experience of the COVID pandemic. The essays make clear that responding to “impasse” will always require something other than a grand plan: it requires changes in hearts and attitudes, no less than changes in structures and cultures.
This is a volume to take slowly—FitzGerald’s essays alone are an invitation to the quiet proper to a retreat. It is also a volume for this moment of history. As a moment familiar with myriad forms of darkness, the present is a moment ripe for the hope that grace engenders, the hope that these essays nurture.