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Beholding: recovering “right brain” 
apophatic spirituality for the local 
church in mission

Nigel Rooms
Nigel Rooms is an Anglican priest, missiologist, practical theologian and vegetable 
gardener. He works part-time for the Church Mission Society enabling churches in 
post-Christian Britain to change their deep culture towards embodying the mission 
of God in their beliefs, attitudes and action. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow 
at the Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham. In his freelance work he is the editor of 
the journal Practical Theology and the co-editor of Ecclesial Futures, a researcher, 
facilitator, theological educator and spiritual director. He is Associate Priest at 
St Margaret’s, Leicester and a priest associate of the Sisters of the Love of God at the 
Convent of the Incarnation, Fairacres, Oxford.

Abstract

This article addresses missional spirituality, that is, what spirituality, individual 
and corporate, is appropriate and fruitful in churches which seek to participate 
in the mission of God. The paper engages with neuroscience around how the 
right and left hemispheres of the brain offer two ways of attending to the world; 
Iain McGilchrist asserts in The Master and his Emissary that left brain attention 



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has predominated especially in Modernity. Two Christian responses which uti-
lize these truths about the brain are critically examined, one from an American, 
broadly Evangelical school of thought and the other from the Anglican Solitary, 
Maggie Ross. Ross’ recovery of the apophatic stream of Christian spiritual-
ity via the right brain of “Deep Mind” is preferred without dismissing other 
approaches. The article delineates the “unintended consequences” of seeking 
silence before God who is, including the gift of “beholding” and how they con-
nect to what is required of missional churches. Some brief suggestions are made 
as to what might be done to enhance the practice of silence in local churches.

Keywords: Christian spirituality; Apophatic; Missional: Church; Neuroscience

 Introduction

The question of the relationship between Christian spirituality, both individual 
and corporate, and how the local church1 participates in the missio Dei is a very 
live one. I come to this question as both a spiritual director and a consultant to 
churches in my work with the Church Mission Society. In writing a book on 
the theology of spiritual direction I articulated a fractal connection I discern 
between spiritual direction and the missionary task of the church (Chatfield 
& Rooms, 2019: 157-64). Beyond my own work in spiritual direction I have 
to say I haven’t been that impressed with recent contributions to this question 
such as the collection of essays in Finn & Whitfield (eds), 2017, which left me 
feeling there has to be a deeper engagement with the topic. This article is a small 
contribution to the conversation.

As an Anglican priest of the Church of England I have increasingly valued 
the belief that, while remaining a Protestant body, my Church is both reformed 
and catholic – with the emphasis, in the second half of my life, on the catholic 
and the sacramental. This isn’t some partisan commitment as these things are 
often portrayed. Rather, I have been drawn into enabling churches to become 
missional, and I have a growing sense that the future of the Western church 
is dependent on the long Christian tradition before the Reformation. As my 

1 I employ the term “local church” in the title of this article and throughout as an umbrella 
term for any Christian worshipping community that is embedded in its proximate geography 
and community – sometimes called the “parish”. In the article church without a capital letter 
refers to such entities alone and Church to the wider denominational body or institution 
(which may or may not include its local manifestations). 



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Lutheran colleague in creating missional churches, Pat Keifert is wont to quote 
from Jaroslav Pelikan that “tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditional-
ism is the dead faith of the living” (Pelikan, 1984: 65). This article develops 
my writing about the connection between spiritual direction and the church in 
mission and the spirituality of leadership in such churches (Rooms and Keifert, 
2019). In this article I take a step back into the ancient via negativa of the Des-
ert Fathers and Mothers and their successors from the fourth century onwards 
before placing that alongside current thinking in neuroscience. I will then 
examine two schools of thought about how to employ neuroscientific thinking 
in Christian spirituality and discipleship, before coming to some initial implica-
tions of this work for the local church in mission.

This paper2 therefore develops a “turn to the tradition”, as we might name 
it, in my own spiritual journey since, for over ten years now, I have been seeking 
silence in prayer inspired by the Carmelite tradition, in such giants as Theresa 
of Avila and John of the Cross. And while many other traditions are available, I 
trust it contains a challenge to readers to mine the riches and resources that we 
have at our disposal from our forefathers and mothers in order to be the church 
faithfully in our own day.

 Background: Why spirituality matters in missional 
churches

Ever since the work of Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch in the late twentieth 
century it has been clear that the Western, so-called “mainstream” churches, 
both Protestant and Catholic, have been in the midst of a paradigm shift. In 
the world around them and in their theology of mission there have been mas-
sive changes that accompany the end of the modern, colonial era since around 
1950. The well documented numerical decline of such churches is at least in 
part attributable to their inability to change their behaviours and culture to 
meet the world as it is in the here and now as opposed to the world as it was sev-
enty years ago. They have become vulnerable even to death, because they have 

2 The writing here began life as a paper at a meeting of the International Research 
Consortium in Adelaide, Australia and the International Association of Mission Studies 
Conference in Sydney, Australia in June-July 2022. I am grateful to those who commented on 
it in those places. Another shorter version was a contribution to a Festschrift book of essays to 
be published in 2023 in South Africa in honour of Frederick Marais. 



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increasingly lost the ability to embody their faith in the incarnate one publicly 
in the neighbourhood (Walls, 2002: 30).

David Bosch (1991) for the Protestants and Steve Bevans & Roger 
Schroeder (2004, 2011) for the Catholics presented the concept of missio Dei 
as the required paradigm shift in theology which is brought forth by the con-
comitant paradigm shift in the world. This is the understanding that God is 
mission and therefore missionary by very nature and being, crossing boundar-
ies in creation and redemption. Such theology turns upside-down the inherited 
understanding of how missionary work occurs under conditions of modernity 
– and also the powers that came with State-Church acting during Christendom. 
Thus, to turn to some well-coined phrases, “it is not the Church of God that has 
a mission in the world but the God of mission that has a Church in the world” 
and the task of that Church is therefore to “find out what God is doing and join 
in”. A note of caution here however, again from a “Catholic” systematic theology 
perspective, for, as Alison Milbank (2020:18) points out Christians do not live 
outside of God and God’s life but rather inside the eternal overflow of God’s 
love. Theologically this is termed participation and, while there is much more 
to be said on the subject (Davison, 2019) it does further underline that human 
agency in mission is likely limited to “getting ourselves out of the way” of God, 
as we shall see rather than thinking that it is still somehow down to us and our 
singular effort to “join in”.

Reception of the missio Dei has been rather slow on the ground and not 
uncontested in the academy, yet it is beginning to filter through to church bod-
ies and particular worshipping communities and as such is now shaping their 
imaginations and behaviours (Clark et al., 2010). Even on the ground however 
there is new evidence emerging that it is openly resisted and brings conflict and 
contestation (Hardy, 2022). For me this is more evidence for the spiritual nature 
of the task of participating in the mission of God – it goes very deep into the 
church’s core beliefs and practices. I have written elsewhere of six practical and 
behavioural shifts that are illustrative of the church turning inside out in this 
way (Carson et al., 2021: 101–15). Some practitioners and scholars have called 
this movement the missional church, where the missional is about the forma-
tion of Christian community around God’s mission in the world – though the 
term is not without its difficulty and contestation too. The key word here is 
formation. Missional church is about how the “doing” of the church is wholly 
derived from its prior “being”. The being of a missional church is focused on 
how God calls, gathers, centres and sends it into God’s world to participate in 
God’s mission there. Ultimately therefore becoming a missional church is first 
and foremost a spiritual task. There are two ways to understand this better.



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First, following Williams (2020), we can state that mission arises from a 
life of prayer with the emphasis in that prayer on the mutual gaze between lover 
and the beloved. Such a stance removes anxiety (at least about the big picture 
of how God holds all things, including a declining church) and leads Christians 
naturally into mission:

Mission is an invitation to live in a new world. It is not recruiting 
people for a manifesto or a programme … just as prayer, serious 
prayer, seems to begin in looking in wonder, in the gaze of aston-
ishment, so with mission. What is this new world where things 
are so different? What is this new world where depths we hadn’t 
imagined are uncovered and made visible? (Williams, 2020:14-15)

Another way of looking at this is that if local churches are to adopt the missio 
Dei as a way of being, the core skill, or in biblical terms gift, involved in “finding 
out what God is doing” is that of discernment. We might think of discernment 
alternatively as “paying attention”, being able to notice, to see – as Jesus demon-
strates to the religious leaders of his day in John 9. Discernment is also clearly a 
spiritual task, one which too is grounded in prayer.

This article works towards presenting a rather hidden and forgotten stream 
of Christian spirituality which is directly connected to the ability to pay atten-
tion in the here and now of any moment and arises from contemplative or mys-
tical prayer in silence. It is supported by the long Christian tradition, stretching 
back to the Desert Mothers and Fathers of the fourth century onwards, of the 
apophatic way or via negativa where words for God and in prayer run out in the 
face of the One who simply is. Somehow the ability to remain present to God in 
silence is directly related to the ability to notice the presence and activity of God 
at any other time and therefore participate in the new world that God’s presence 
and activity is always creating. In the biblical and Christian traditions there is 
a rather forgotten way of “paying attention” that is grounded in the “paradox 
of intention”, and draws on this negative or apophatic stance which states that 
trying to reach God can only be done so by letting go of the intention to do so. 
Perhaps this is also the case in mission – if we engage in mission in an anxious, 
even frantic desire for results we are most likely to be disappointed. In order to 
understand more how a recovery of the apophatic might work for us in creating 
missional churches we turn to neuroscientific research on the human brain.



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The right and left brains – “The Master and his 
Emissary”

Research into the functioning of the human brain has been magisterially 
presented by Iain McGilchrist (2018 [2009]).3 McGilchrist is somewhat of 
a polymath in that he works at a high level across many disciplines which 
include neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy and even the occa-
sional excursion into theology. In doing so he models for the reader what he 
is explicating which, to do a great injustice to the book of nearly 600 pages (of 
which more than 100 are notes and bibliography), states that the human brain 
is divided into quite distinct left and right hemispheres. It is not that left and 
right hemispheres do different things, as scientific studies have shown that most 
brain functions occur in both hemispheres. Rather they have distinct, what I 
would call epistemic functions which are related to the evolution of animal 
brains from birds. Birds need to pay close attention to small specks of food (left 
brain) and have a bigger, even whole or rounded picture of the world around 
them that contains predators, others in the flock and potential mates (right 
brain) (2018 [2009]: 27). The two halves need to be kept largely separate in how 
they attend to the world and this has remained pretty much the case throughout 
the course of evolution. However, there is, it seems, particularly in humans, an 
optimal relationship between the left and right brains for flourishing which is 
constantly under threat because of the way the left hemisphere operates.

McGilchrist (2018 [2009]: 14) employs a metaphorical fable from 
Nietzsche to convey the precarity of the relationship and hence the title of his 
book. A good and benevolent leader (the “Master”) is inevitably effective at 
growing his influence over lands and requires representatives (the “Emissary”) 
in the burgeoning fiefdom to see to the day to day work. Equally inevitably one 
day an Emissary realizes they do not need the Master and attempts a hostile 
takeover. Both are required but their relationship has to remain asymmetrical 
for life to continue to flourish across the lands. Thus, McGilchrist sets himself 

3 While not uncontroversial, McGilchrist’s work has continued with a further massive 
two-volume extension of his thinking published in 2021 as The Matter with Things. These 
volumes contain, amongst other things, a first principles argument for the existence of the 
sacred in the universe. Critiques of McGilchrist tend to revolve around accusing him of a 
supposed right-brain tautology which cannot be argued against. Such critique ends up, in my 
view, also being tautologous. What is without doubt is the increasing acclaim for his work, 
witnessed by his keynote speech at the AI World Summit 2022 – see https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=XgbUCKWCMPA accessed 9 November 2022. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgbUCKWCMPA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgbUCKWCMPA


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the double task of showing how the different brains offer different qualities 
of attention or “seeing” of the world. He demonstrates how the left brain has 
tended over the course of (at least) Western history to dominate – resulting in 
its current virtual hegemony in the post-modern period. Understanding the 
importance of defining what attention is, is vital here – it “is a way in which, 
not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a “howness”, a 
something between” (2018 [2009]:29, italics original).

The differences in how the divided brain pays attention are key to under-
standing McGilchrist’s argument. They have a double effect in that they not only 
change how we see the world, but they also affect the world itself (2018 [2009]: 
5) – the nature of how we see reality and even truth. The left brain divides and 
categorizes, it objectifies the world, sees things without relation to each other, 
only as separate entities; it reaches out to grasp the world, take power and rule 
over it; things have utility for the left brain whether they are animate or inani-
mate. The right brain on the other hand sees from the whole, understands all 
things as connected, allows things to simply be what they are and attends to 
the in-betweenness of the self and any Other with which it is in relationship. 
It is not difficult to comprehend, then, that the ability for much of what hap-
pens in spirituality, and particularly apophatic contemplation, resides in the 
right-hemisphere brain. Nevertheless, left-brain “linearity” has predominated 
over the past few centuries, thus marginalizing the gifts that mystical work can 
bring. McGilchrist’s work has been picked up by Christian thinkers and writers 
over the past decade or so and I wish to introduce here at least two approaches 
spirituality and missional church life that arise from this new understanding of 
how our brains pay attention.

 American Evangelical neurotheology and practice

First a group of American Evangelicals4 draw deeply on McGilchrist and other 
neuroscientific sources as well as the American philosopher and Christian 
author Dallas Willard. They develop a renewed understanding of discipleship 
and Christian formation (for example Wilder, 2020 and Wilder & Hendricks, 
2020). These works are related to the relatively new field of “neurotheology” 

4 It turns out, perhaps not unsurprisingly, that all these writers are male, which I note 
does skew my bibliography somewhat. 



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with authors crossing over from medical neuroscience into theology and spiri-
tuality such as Curt Thompson (2010) and Andrew Newberg (2016 [2010], 
2018).

Let us examine more deeply the work of Wilder and Hendricks, who are 
indeed concerned with Christian character formation, maturity and disciple-
ship in community, especially when, in their experience, spiritual “growth” 
seems to plateau and even become very stuck after an initial burst of energy 
and light.

Wilder and Hendricks locate the most fruitful possibilities for character 
formation in the right brain since this is where, as we have seen, relationality 
to the other is attended to (2020: 22). They also point out that much of the 
function of the right brain is “preconscious” (2020: 21) and therefore not sus-
ceptible to cognitive training which is how much discipleship formation in the 
church proceeds. This is important since it leads directly to the employment of 
spiritual practices in relational community for growth. Spiritual practices are 
habit forming over time and shift behaviour in much more subtle ways. The 
argument goes something like this.

Character formation arises out of “loving attachment to Jesus” (2020: 41), 
which makes theological sense in the light of the summary of the Law which 
is to love God and neighbour (Mark 12:29-31). The emphasis in the Christian 
life is therefore placed upon “attachment love” or hesed in the Hebrew Bible and 
agape in the New Testament. From such attachment arises relational joy which 
is described as “what we feel when we are with someone who is happy to be with 
us” (2020: 56) and which again is located in right brain attention. Such notions 
are clearly related to how we learn healthy or secure attachment in infancy fol-
lowing the child psychologists Winnicott and Bowlby (for example see Win-
nicott, 1991 [1971]). Such is the strength of belief here in attachment joy that 
it even leads the authors to overturn that Evangelical shibboleth of the division 
between the first and second persons of the Trinity on the Cross as Jesus dies 
which plays out in many contemporary hymns and worship songs. Rather the 
authors claim that Jesus “never lost touch of His Father’s face shining on Him as 
He was tortured and humiliated” (2020: 60, capitals in the original). Character 
is formed by focusing on increasing the capacity of the Christian community 
to exhibit hesed and joy by “training” the right brains of members with various 
exercises (2020: 187ff.).

In another suggestive development such joyful attachment allows a phe-
nomenon Jim Wilder names “mutual mind” or intersubjectivity as occurring 
via the right brain between people (Wilder, 2020: 33). I suspect this is related 
to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (2002 [1992]) concept of “flow” in the positive 



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psychology movement’s study of happiness, which is not unrelated to the the-
ology of joy we are discussing here and Polanyi’s notion of “tacit knowledge” 
(Wilder, 2020: 40). All of which raises the possibility of finding a mutual mind 
with God which further results in the joy and peace of being seen by the divine 
(2020: 49).

Wilder connects with the practice of mindfulness (2020: 37) as a precursor 
to prayerful attachment with God which is helpful, but perhaps because of a fear 
of meditative practice that does not sit before an Other (2020: 38) he will not 
lean into contemplative prayer or any sense of the apophatic. He seems largely 
unaware of the paradox of intention which we referred to above and the “nada” 
or “nothing” on the ascent of Mt Carmel in the writings of St John of the Cross.

What we might call the Wilder school introduces fruitful spiritual prac-
tices designed to “train” the right brain in order to grow joy and character, which 
Mike Harrison has explicated helpfully (2022). Yet I cannot help but feeling, 
especially after finishing the The Other Half of Church that Christian disciple-
ship for Wilder and his colleagues remains a programme based on a certain 
kind of (even gendered) activism which could lead to ultimate disappointment 
under the paradox of intention. The practices recommended in these books 
largely remain cataphatic and therefore do not go quite far enough for me. I 
wonder whether the left brain emissary has asserted itself and gained the upper 
hand once more. I believe we must turn to the apophatic in order to actually 
find the wholeness that Wilder and his like are seeking.

 The right brain, apophatic “beholding” and the 
missional church

Therefore, we turn to Maggie Ross, an American Anglican solitary based in 
Oxford, and her two-volume work on silence (2014, 2018). Ross almost joy-
ously utilises McGilchrist to make a claim about how the suspicion and even 
loss of the apophatic in western spirituality is directly related to the hegemony 
of left brain attention. Ross engages with McGilchrist’s understanding of the 
epistemic difference in how the two halves of the brain function from the very 
start. She offers a schematic diagram (2014: 36-7) for this in relation to her 
definition of contemplation as “a specific disposition of attentive and responsive 
receptivity” (2014: 75) in the Christian tradition. There is a sense in which apo-
phatic practice has always employed the human right brain – it is simply that 
now, from neuroscience via McGilchrist, we have the evidence for it.



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It is worth noting here that silence in apophatic prayer is not the technical 
absence of sound, but a disposition in the one who prays to be solely present, 
without distraction, to God who is ultimately unknowable. I would suggest this 
is a simple, yet highly nuanced approach to Wilder et al.’s understanding of 
attachment to God. Ross’ schematic shows the proper relationship between left 
(“Self-conscious Mind”) and right brain (“Deep Mind”) attentiveness for opti-
mal functioning. Ross summarizes this relationship thus:

Most people [we might say Western people] are trapped in the 
virtual and noisy world of self-consciousness (left side of dia-
gram). For the mind to function optimally, it must be recentred 
in the deep mind (right side), restoring circulation between the 
two epistemologies so that ordinary life draws on its wellspring 
of silence and transfiguration. Then experience is understood 
as provisional and is continually submitted to silence where it is 
transfigured. (2014: 36)

The self-conscious mind on the left side of the diagram is “governed by the 
paradox of intention” which Ross believes is the key to undermining its hege-
mony. The deep mind can be accessed only by apophasis which describes by 
double negation in unknowing, “it is not that, and it is not even not that” (2014: 
69) thus coming to know God, whose centre is everywhere and circumference 
is nowhere. In the middle of the two kinds of mind is a liminal in-betweenness 
where the connectivity happens. The first two “threshold/effects/phenomena” 
noted here are attentive receptivity and beholding, which are no doubt con-
nected to Wilder’s attachment love, as we noted above.

Before we continue, a note about the use of the word “experience”. Ross, 
along with much of the Christian tradition, is very wary of speaking of (or in 
fact having) “spiritual experiences”. This is not to deny that they happen or can-
not draw us closer to God, but the simple truth is that any experience is we have 
is ours and therefore by definition cannot be God. As Ross states in relationship 
to the master of the deep mind or right brain, in contrast to the self-conscious 
emissary of the left brain, “when self-consciousness is suspended there can be 
no experience” (Ross, 2014: 78). Here is another departure from the Wilder 
school. Newberg (2018: 259-78) has a chapter entitled “Escaping the prison 
of the brain: Mysticism” which addresses throughout so-called mystical expe-
riences. Newberg seems unaware of any critique of experience in the context 
of spirituality which drives what I would understand as a non-question about 
whether we can escape our brains. Our brains are a given, as is God; what is 



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simple but profound is the space between them when placed in proximity in 
silent prayer.

Ross devotes a whole chapter in her second book to beholding (2018: 128-
36). Ross thinks that the word behold is “arguably the most important word 
in the Bible” (2018: 129). It is the first word God speaks to Adam (Gen. 1:29) 
and the last word Jesus gives to the disciples (Mt. 28:20) and occurs over 1,300 
times (2018: 132). However, many more recent translations elide the meaning 
to “remember”, “see” and “know” thus offering more evidence for the domi-
nance of left-brain attentiveness in modernity.

In beholding Ross states that again the paradox of intention applies – it 
cannot be made to happen. Etymologically it is related to grasping (“getting it”, 
we might say, or having a “light bulb” moment) thus, “one holds or grasps by 
ungrasping: in beholding the analytic conceptualizing faculty is relinquished” 
(2018: 129, italics in the original). Here is yet another departure from Wilder, 
since while we are not far from “mutual mind” here, in fact there may even be 
an equivalence, Ross would understand such moments as gifts to be noticed 
rather trained for and sought out. I suggest there is a connection here with 
the practice of visio Divina. If lectio Divina is reading the inspired text along 
with God, visio Divina is seeing or perhaps better, imagining the world as God’s 
creation along with or even as God sees it. This takes us directly to the develop-
ment of the imagination through poetics, music and art.

Beholding is a “covenant” word and the beholder therefore, “faces out-
ward, self-forgetful, engaged, and contiguous with the community of the 
beheld; beholding is receptivity and engagement” (2018: 130). I don’t know of 
a better description of a missional stance from within the people of God, the 
church, not least because “beholding is a living, ongoing recapitulation of the 
self-emptying en-Christing process of Philippians 2:5-11” (2018: 133). It is also 
a public act which stands over against the privatisation of religion in moder-
nity (see also Chatfield and Rooms, 2019: 163). Elsewhere Ross writes of the 
importance of understanding the Christ hymn as encapsulating incarnation, 
transfiguration and resurrection where trans-figuration is exactly what happens 
when the deep mind becomes involved in beholding. With beholding a new set 
of possibilities erupts in the here and now. What happens is a “shift of perspec-
tive, turning inside-out and upside-down” (2018: 134). And here we return to 
where we started with Rowan Williams’ definition of mission as discovering the 
possibility of a different world.



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 The unintended consequences of seeking God in 
silence and the missional church

At this juncture, as we conclude the article, I want to bring together the threads 
of what we have been learning. That is, what is the effect, or the fruit, of utilizing 
our God-given right-brain way of attending to its full capacity and engaging 
our Deep Mind through the apophatic practice of silence in relation to the mis-
sion of God? We need to delineate its consequences and ask how those effects 
are helpful in missional churches alongside what might be done to enhance 
the practice of silence. But before we do that some caveats are in order. First 
let the reader not take away from this work that the cataphatic and cataphatic 
ways of praying are of little use. What we are about here is a re-ordering of how 
the two halves of the brain function, rather than advocating for some equally 
awful binary opposition of left and right. Second, silence in the whole sweep of 
Christian history comes in various forms some of which are deeply antithetical 
to the purposes of God in the world as Diarmaid MacCulloch has wisely dem-
onstrated (2013). Silence in the face of evil, especially when perpetrated by the 
Church, is not what we are engaging with here. And finally, we have to remem-
ber the advice given by Abba Moses to a new hesychast entering the desert to 
pray, “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything” (Ward, 1975: 
139). That is, it is the repeated and habitual entry into silence, which is enough 
in all its utter simplicity, difficulty and ultimate profundity, that is required. The 
English mystic text The Cloud of Unknowing (2001) calls this a “naked intent 
towards God”. Given the paradox of intention which is ever at work in seek-
ing after God, God’s presence and activity, fruitfulness emerges properly as an 
unintended consequence of the practice of silence. The practice is both an end 
in itself and a means to an end since it has a deep and lasting effect.

Let us then gather together some of these unintended consequences. We 
can work here with Ross and place alongside her the descriptions of the effects 
of a deliberate entering into silence by Sara Maitland (2008) when she took 
herself off to live alone in a remote place. I think it helps here that Maitland 
does not become a silent recluse for overtly Christian purposes (e.g. as part of 
any religious community), thus she is able to describe what happens in her with 
reference to a whole range of other sources. Her work is a properly interdisci-
plinary, even, we might say, secular and scientific examination of the subject. 
Perhaps it combines her right and left brain in helpful sequence.

 Seeking silence is by definition an embodied practice, as Ross says, “The 
mind’s work with silence and its effects involve the entire bodied person” (2014: 
45). Maitland notes the “extraordinary intensification of physical sensation” 



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(2008: 48) with all her senses and feelings become more available to her. Such 
intensification occurs in the here and now. Silence before God is about being 
present in the moment, on the theological principle that God is always where 
we are, not where we imagine we ought to be (usually in some self-conscious 
nostalgic past or idealised future). Presence to the reality of the here and now 
alongside embodiment are vital signs of the members of a missional church. 
They are able to be the change they wish to be, fulfilling Newbigin’s description 
of the local church as the hermeneutic of the gospel, being God’s people who 
“believe it and live by it” (1989: 227).

Maitland notes what she calls “disinhibition” arising quickly in her new 
silent state (2008: 52) and she relates this to a lack of self-consciousness (in 
Ross’ terms the left brain is losing its hegemony) and in Jungian terms having 
the persona, or with Freud, the superego taken away. Such disinhibition can 
go in several directions, but when placed in a theological frame I am drawn 
back once again to the Christ hymn in Philippians and the kenosis of the Christ 
which Ross noted was also directly related to the gift of beholding. I once heard 
(I forget the exact moment) Bishop Gordon Mursell, then Bishop of Stafford in 
the Church of England, call this phenomenon being “unselfed”. An important 
distinction needs to be made here since Ross thinks it is very dangerous to 
speak of the destruction of the self. Rather by self-forgetfulness which arises in 
silence the “me” that gets in way of God can be “parked” as I sometimes put it, 
or laid aside so that, in Ross’ terms again – transfiguration of the whole of us 
can happen. Another way of putting this according Bishop Wolfgang Huber, 
is “free, creative self-withdrawal” (quoted in Keifert & Rooms, 2014: 14). As 
corporate bodies missional churches have raised levels of good conflict since 
something vital is happening and there will always be resistance to such new life 
(Keifert & Rooms, 2014: 15). This heightened conflict can only be dealt with if 
enough members have learnt how to lay aside their own self-conscious desires, 
and stay silent until they can speak from their innermost hearts where God 
resides. In my work of consulting to churches we call this a “floated conversa-
tion” as part of corporate spiritual discernment. It is truly beautiful when it 
happens, as it ebbs and flows with the movement of the Spirit.

We have noted the predominance of anxiety in the contemporary church 
which reduces its capacity to deal with the very things it is anxious about – 
a vicious circle. Whereas being before God in silence is the antidote to that 
anxiety. In silence we become connected to the “ground of all being” which 
in turn grounds us and develops in us, from Family Systems Theory what can 
be termed a “God-centred self-definition” (Rooms and Keifert, 2019: 15). Self-
definition in God is what allows us to focus on God’s presence and activity 



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and not be distracted from it by fighting or fleeing from those resisting it. And 
the result of that state of being is the opposite of anxiety; joy. Here we are in 
full agreement with the Wilder school. Two of Maitland’s reflections are based 
around the emergence of joy during silence (2008: 62, 74) and we have already 
referred to Harrison’s work on the subject (2022). I would add here that fun is 
part of, if not limited to being joyful. This has been my experience of people 
who are liberated from anxious church activity into having fun, finding out 
what God is up to and joyously taking part.

While Maitland does not specifically refer to a heightened sense of sight, 
we did hear of other senses being enhanced and we might extend that to see-
ing. We have already referred to the possibility of visio Divina. According to 
Ross this is because silence leads to transfiguration (rather than transformation, 
which she dislikes as it implies a change of being) and the subsequent “behold-
ing” which changes our perception of reality (Ross, 2014: 98). The result of such 
transfiguration is a new openness and receptivity to the other which welcomes 
the receiving of hospitality (Keifert & Rooms, 2014: 16-19) and a reversal of the 
inherited one-way flow of church (Barrett, 2020).

Given its efficacy, therefore as we have demonstrated here, how might an 
emphasis on practicing silence and the apophatic be integrated into the life 
of churches? The individual and corporate seeking of silence both in private 
prayer by some (I don’t believe this needs to be for absolutely everyone, though 
I would recommend it for leaders however they come to it as there are many 
paths) and public worship, as we have demonstrated will de-centre the “selves” 
of the membership over time.

At least two practical suggestions flow from this, though space limits 
other suggestions. Ross has created and road-tested a “contemplative Eucha-
rist” (2018: 100-27) which can take up to four or five hours since it includes 
long periods of silence. This is not to be a very regular occurrence but one 
can see how it would create the conditions for intentional silence in weekly or 
even daily public worship. In fact, if a church’s regular worship does not contain 
periods of silence longer than a few seconds, its missional engagement may be 
seriously lacking. That is, if a corporate body of Christians cannot hold silence 
together for any significant length of time they are unlikely to be able to last 
long on a journey to be missional. The spiritual practices that become habits in 
missional churches (Keifert & Rooms, 2014) contain the possibility for learning 
to be silent in community. Other specific, intentional groups gather for just this 



Nigel Rooms—Beholding

83

purpose such as the Julian Meeting and the World Community for Christian 
Meditation.5

Further, if there are to be Christians exploring apophatic prayer they are 
going to need support from good spiritual directors. I referred in the introduc-
tion to my practical theology treatment of spiritual direction (Chatfield and 
Rooms, 2019) and, as sometimes happens when writing I realized there is a 
connection between the discernment that occurs in spiritual direction and the 
corporate discernment of the missio Dei in missional churches. Indeed, one 
might be a “fractal” or microcosm of the other – they are the same shape and 
only differ in scale. In fact, missional church may simply be spiritual direction 
scaled up (2019: 162).

 Conclusion

I have long believed that the Christ hymn in Philippians describes the shape 
of Christian discipleship (e.g. Chatfield and Rooms, 2019: 72) and mission for 
both the individual and the church. The depths of the cross that we are called 
to take up in discipleship (Mark 8:34) cannot be plumbed without apophasis, 
without engagement with the practice of silence, without the gift of beholding 
which arises from within that very silence. We have to give up our anxious 
activity, embrace our vulnerabilities, even looking the “death” of the Church 
in the face, if we are to find resurrection. If we attend to God’s presence and 
activity, the missio Dei in the world in this way, waiting for the surprises that 
beholding bestows upon us we have a new missional future and world that we 
can live into and embody.

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