Elaine Pryce

The traumatic loss of a loved one is among the most devastating hurdles that life can throw in a person’s path. Such grief, whatever its cause, alters existence forevermore and confronts the survivor, eventually, with a choice: to move through pain into a more authentic way of being, or to withdraw from full engagement with the spiritual meanings of life and mortality. Drawing from her own experience, as well as from art, literature, and traditional wisdom, Elaine Pryce explores the spiritual aspects of grief, recovery from grief, forgiveness, and the blessings of acceptance. Discussion questions included.… (mere)

The title suggests Pryce’s topic, finding the Divine in silence. It’s an appropriate subject for those of us who gather, mostly on a Sunday morning, to join our silence in an exercise to align our minds with the Mind of God. Or to use more mundane language, to bring us together to experience a goodness that we would bring with us into the world.

Along the way, Pryce drifts quietly through the notion of “the quiet way offers everyone the means of direct access to God,” to attempts at defining God. She references the Franciscan Francisco de Cisneros, an African creation myth, George Fox, Middle Eastern mystics, and American poet Annie Dillard. Her final say on that matter: “God is more than the very summit of your thoughts, God is more than human projections, wishes, rationalizing, linguistic forms, and ideas. Whatever we believe, our understanding of God will only ever be fragmentary, like the partial and hazy view of a whole landscape we glimpse through a misty mirror.”

With remarkable consistency, the Pendle Hill Pamphlet series publishes thought-provoking, well written essays that deliver interesting and important information in 3,000 words. Pryce’s contribution extends well beyond that description in both well-developed ideas and a literary style exceptional in its exquisite beauty with nary a hint of pretension.… (mere)