Ours is a world that has decided that mysticism is actually kind of dangerous a retreat from reality into fantasy, a thumb-sucking, navel-gazing way of compensating for how much life hurts. We've become too sophisticated to buy into all this "God is love" nonsense. Non-Christians can be particularly pessimistic about the message of the mystics and compare it, to its detriment, to the scandalous behavior that all too often characterizes Christian society. How can a judgmental and exclusionary religion be a conduit for divine love?
And so, faced with a cynicism that parades itself as realism, we turn away from what mysticism offers us. We turn our gaze away from heaven and back to earth. Ours is a world that busily (some would say frantically) offers a variety of lesser destinies. Thanks to the dominance of a strictly empirical/ scientific worldview, Western society sees life strictly in terms of the verifiable "only what can be scientifically proven is real." In other words, we live a finite mortal existence in an environment with limited resources, where we participate in biological processes for eighty or ninety years, and then we die. Life seen like this is all about limits, so we need to make the most of what little we've got. This worldview dismisses all spiritual beliefs (including mysticism) as merely wishful thinking. In other words, the mystical vision of an eternal dance of loving communion is simply too good to be true.
This pessimistic view of reality may find favor among atheists and those who insist that only what can be measured is real, but, ultimately, it's a pretty miserable way to view the world. In fact, it really only makes sense for the small percentage of human beings who live a life of material comfort and leisure and even those who enjoy the best pleasures that the earth has to offer sooner or later discover that the limitations of that life eventually win. We always lose our health, our relationships, our very lives. Buddha said: "Life is suffering." And we know that ignoring that suffering neither makes it go away nor makes it easier to bear.
Human beings simply don't like limits, whether these are the physical limits of a life that inevitably includes suffering and death, or the ideological limits of a worldview that tells us "this is all there is." Consequently, various spiritual theories have emerged over the ages and around the world that seek to answer the question of life's greater meaning. Many of these spiritual narratives are beautiful and inspiring, although some contain their own hidden limits.
One popular idea holds that all material existence is an illusion, and that the only thing that truly exists is one, single, solitary being. You and I and everyone else are only projections or masks that this one being wears in order to create the illusion of separate entities. On the surface, this is a beguiling idea, because it basically claims that you are God (and so is everyone else). The theory begins to lose its appeal, however, when you carry it to its logical conclusion. If I am God, and everything else is an illusion, then I am all alone. What's the point of being God if you have no one to share your deity no one to love? Sounds pretty lonely to me.
By contrast, the bold claim of Christian mysticism is not merely that we "are" God, but rather that we participate in God--a subtle but crucial distinction. God remains God, I remain me, you remain you, and we all love each other. We exist in each other, through each other, in union and communion, here in the beauty of the present moment and for all of the ever-expansiveness of eternity. That, Christian mysticism dares to assert, is the ultimate promise of life. It promises the same ecstasy and joy that the all-things-are-god theory claims, but its promised bliss is grounded in relational love -a love that ultimately has no limits, either in space or in time. "Eternity," the word Christians use to describe the locus of God, transcends the physical limitations of space and time.
Christian mysticism makes this bold claim: What appears to be naive folly in purely human terms is bracingly and joyfully possible in terms of the Divine. Possibility in God is a theme that appears frequently in the Bible. "For nothing will be impossible with God" (Luke 1:37). Nothing is impossible: not even the amazing destiny of love-in-divine-communion that Christian mysticism promises. Traditionally, this has been called the "Beatific Vision." A Trappist monk I know dismisses that term because it implies stasis. "Heaven is not a spectator sport," he insists. He suggests that a better way to describe our ultimate destiny in God is as a" Beatifying Communion." I rather like to think of it as "living in Heaven Consciousness."
And the amazing truth of Christian mysticism is that this vision, this communion, this consciousness is available to all of us right here, right now.You can begin to live in Heaven Consciousness today.
There is a cost, however. Although you don't have to surrender your earthly life to embrace the Beatifying Communion, you do have to "die" in a figurative sense. Christianity has traditionally called this symbolic death a "dying to self." Some describe it as the death of the ego that small, selfabsorbed tendency we have to prefer control over love. When you offer God all the parts of yourself that prefer control or pride or anger to love, you begin the process of dying-to-self. It's not something that happens in an instant, and it's not always painless. But the Christian faith insists that this death leads to a resurrection. When I die to myself, I rise to Christ which is another way of saying that I rise to new life, in love.
So is all this too good to be true?This is not just a rhetorical question. It is the question on which everything hangs. If you decide that the promise of Christian mysticism is too good to be true, then, at a fundamental level, you are deciding that life is not, ultimately, about love. But if the essence of life is not love, then what is it? One common response to this question is that life is all about power ("the person who dies with the most toys wins"). Another is that life is all about knowledge and/or awareness ("the secret of life is to know all the secrets"). Granted, awareness and ability are important keys to a life well lived, but if you organize your life around either of these principles, then you miss out on love or, at best, experience only a limited, finite love.
On the other hand, if you dare to believe that the ultimate meaning, destiny, and purpose of life is to love and be loved in expanding, eternal divine/human communion if you dare to believe this is true then everything changes, literally, immediately, and everlastingly. Despair and cynicism no longer reign. Hatred, prejudice, oppression, and cruelty lose their final claim over your life; such things are nothing more than problems that must be overcome. Granted, if you give your life to love, you become responsible for cleaning up your own mess. And you take on that responsibility because you believe there is a reason and a purpose for doing so.
What I am talking about here is deeply countercultural. Few people even those who are supposedly committed to a spiritual or religious life accept the idea that life is totally and radically about love. We're too dazzled by the competing claims that life is all about power, or all about position or prestige, or all about knowledge, or all about bliss or fun. When you orient your life to love, however, you discover that you can attain a loving measure of all these other things as well (see Matthew 6:33). When you orient your life to anything other than love, no matter what you gain, you risk losing out on the fullness of love.
The beauty of Christian mysticism lies in its promise that, by choosing love over all the other potential blessings that life can give us, we are embracing the best possible life; a life in which all blessings can flow, but always in accordance with love.
LOVE IS THE KEY
Simply put, mysticism at least, Christian mysticism is all about love. To explore Christian mysticism basically means to explore love. It's an invitation to join the noblest of human aspirations. Love has inspired poets and philosophers for as long as human beings have enjoyed telling a good story. Without love, we would have no Romeo and Juliet, no Tristan and Isolde, no Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, no Wandering Aengus and the Glimmering Girl and, for that matter, no Song of Songs, no Jacob and Rachel, no Ruth and Boaz. Whether the topic is love won or lost, love thwarted or misunderstood, comic romance or passionate tragedy, there is nothing
so fundamentally human as a good story about love. And mysticism is just that. It is the greatest of love stories. And that's why it matters.
That's why people like you and me are drawn to mysticism. For some, mysticism may be a "head trip," but for most, it's a "heart trip" a journey into the sacred nature of love.
We are all breathing miracles, living clay with a carefully calibrated capacity to give and receive love. And no matter how that may play out on a human level for human love, of course, can take many forms and can be joyous or heartbreaking this thing called mysticism dares to proclaim that you, and I, and everyone else who has ever been given a beating heart and a wondering mind, have all been invited to immerse ourselves in an immediate, experiential, life-transforming relationship with the very Source of Love in its purest, most original, foundational form. Christians call that Source of Love "God" and we find God in Jesus Christ, made real and visible and accessible to everyone.
Christian mysticism is grounded in this love. The teachings of the great mystics speculate on the nature of this love, where it came from, and why we believe it is accessible to us all. Mystical wisdom about love is recorded in the autobiographies and memoirs of Christian contemplatives and visionaries who great and ordinary, ancient and medieval, modern and postmodern, male and female, young and old, educated and not so ed- ucated---all tell about how this love surprised them, pursued them, filled their awareness with breathtaking visions and heart-rending suffering, demanded almost superhuman sacrifices, and yet overflowed with unspeakable joys.
As we discover not only the stories of the great mystics, but also our own stories, and the stories of our friends and neighbors and others who have heard the whispered call from the Ultimate Mystery, we sense intuitively that we each have something to say directly and intimately to each other. For Christian mysticism does not belong in a library or a museum. It belongs in beating hearts and meditative minds. I believe that, even though there is tremendous diversity among the great mystics of Christianity, at the heart of all their lives they are telling the same story. And I believe that we each represent, at least in potential, a new chapter in that story, a new verse in the eternal song. The great story of God's love resides in our hearts, just waiting to be given yet another new and unique form of expression.
Christian mysticism encompasses 2,000 years of wisdom that shows you how to open your heart to the possibility of receiving this love, to conducting your life in a manner that is both honorable and worthy of it. Through this wisdom, you learn how your mind and heart can perceive and receive the overtures of this love as it comes to you in an infinite and unpredictable variety of ways. In other words, the writings of the great mystics include instructions on how to live a mystical life -a faithful life, a holy life, a life in which we strive to become saints even while we humbly learn to accept that, ultimately, we have no control over just how "mystical" our experience or our God-awareness may be. When you become an acolyte of mysticism, you learn how to pray, to meditate, to contemplate, to read the Bible and other sacred writings in a divine way, to serve and to sacrifice, to open your heart with hospitality for the world even while you somehow realize that you are, ultimately, the citizen of another country.
That's why mysticism matters.
CHAPTER 1
The Mystical Paradoxes
You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.
EXODUS 3 3 : 2 0
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
MATTHEW 5:8
Think without thinking.
FRANCISCO DE OSUNA'
Paradox, physicist Neils Bohr tells us, explodes our everyday linear concept of truth and falsehood by positing two qualities that exist on a single continuum. "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement," he claims. "But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth." Paradox thus points us to the mysterious place where two or more profound truths pull against each other in a tension that cannot be resolved by the clever machinations of the rational mind. Mysticism is all about paradox. It's all about the ways in which God and faith always seem to be pulling us in two directions at once. In the words of the French Orthodox theologian Jean-Yves Leloup, "God has no name and God has every name. God has none of the things that exist and God is everything. One knows God only through not knowing. Every affirmation, like every negation, remains on this side of God's transcendence..""
Paradox is not always warmly received by those who want their faith to be watertight and easy to control. If you have invested your heart and soul in the idea that God makes everything neat and tidy and your job is simply to obey the rules, then you will have no room for paradoxical statements in your spirituality. After all, if the goal is an unassailable faith, then seemingly contradictory truths must be eliminated.
But for those who regard faith as a relationship rather than a belief system, paradox is not nearly so threatening. When faith is large enough to encompass "unknowing" rather than mere certitude, paradox can be a source of joy and wonder rather than fear or doubt. A spiritual paradox may provide evidence that God is bigger than our limited human capacity for reason and logic. Is the kingdom of heaven within or among us... or not of this world (Luke 17:21; John 18:36)? Are we justified by faith apart from works... or is faith without works dead (Romans 3:28; James 2:26)? These seeming inconsistencies may pose a challenge to some, but a source of delight to others not because they introduce an element of chaos into the landscape of faith, but because they point to an ultimate mystery that is beyond human control, beyond what passes for "common sense."
Saint Paul made a common-sense observation when he noted: "When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways" (I Corinthians 13:11). The spirituality of paradox represents precisely the kind of mature faith to which Paul is alluding. When my faith offers me equivalent truths that pull me in different directions, I see this as an invitation and a challenge. Rather than pretending that these inconsistencies or seeming contradictions don't exist or don't matter, I feel encouraged to approach the mysteries of God in a spirit of humility, recognizing that no one will ever reduce God to the level of human reason. In saying that mysticism is about paradox, I'm not suggesting that Christian mysticism is a series of word puzzles or locks to be picked. I'm simply pointing out that, again and again, mysticism requires you to take a step back and look at the truths of your faith from a larger, more inclusive perspective. Doing so, in many cases, brings you to the very threshold of mystery. At that place, on the frontier where human reason shades off into divine unknowing, you may find a resolution to the paradox, or at least a sense of acceptance that can help you assent to the apparent contradictions in your spiritual life. But if God remains inscrutably beyond the farthest reaches of the most brilliant human mind, sooner or later we can expect to stumble across paradoxes that simply cannot be resolved. These insoluble paradoxes are the core of faith. They invite you, like Zen koans, to surrender the hubris that lurks beneath your apparent understanding and control. A God you cannot comprehend is a God you cannot manipulate. This, I believe, is a God of true grace, a God worthy of worship.
One reason I like the word "paradox" is that it is a first cousin to that most religious of all words, "orthodox."The prefix "ortho" means "right" or "correct;" the prefix "para" means "beside" or "alongside." What links the two is the root word "dox," which can mean "opinion" or "teaching" (as in doctrine) or "praise" (as in doxology). The praise/teaching meanings merge in a spiritual way when we consider that both of these concepts point us to God -a God whom we praise and from whom we learn.
Thus, an orthodox statement is simply something that is settled and generally accepted by the larger Christian community: God is love; we are called to repentance; the Holy Spirit is with us always. These are the ground rules by which the Christian faith operates in the world. Meanwhile, a paradox does not negate orthodoxy, but rather exists "alongside" it. Paradox represents the breathing room in which the ongoing guidance of the
Holy Spirit occurs. The paradoxes of faith invite you into a deep unknowing that place beyond the reach of human reason, not pre-rational, but trans-rational where God wishes to meet you without the pomp and noise of your finite, gotta-be-in- control mind getting in the way.
THE MYSTICAL PARADOXES
Some of the paradoxes that characterize Christian mysticism are central to Christianity as a whole; others are uniquely the province of mystical spirituality. Some are easy to resolve; others are like tenacious vines that simply refuse to yield, even when we hack at them with the blade of human reason. To some, these inconsistencies and logical disconnects are evidence that Christianity is irrational or unworthy of belief. From the perspective of the mystic, however, these open-ended places are the exciting launch pads from which Christian mysticism spirals off into supra-rational and trans-rational dimensions.
Mysticism is the quest for God.
You cannot seek God unless God has found you.
Christian mysticism celebrates the passionate love that flows between humanity and God, which means that, for each of us, it represents a personal romance with our maker. And love is all about seeking a beloved, right?
Looking for true love is a central fact of being human. It's the stuff of fairy tales, date movies, and romance novels. We understand how love sustained Jacob day after day when he had to work fourteen long years for Rachel's hand in marriage. We want every love story to have a happy ending, and we sigh with disappointment when as with Romeo and Juliet it doesn't work out.
Christianity teaches that human beings are, by nature, meant to love and be loved by God. This can lead to endless bliss and ever-unfolding joy in a heavenly communion that can begin here and now and will embrace all of eternity. But this outcome is by no means automatic. God is a very polite and rather shy lover, and he never forces himself on you. If you want his love, you have to declare to him, and to yourself, and indeed to the world, just what it is you seek.
The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality Page 7