Who is the mystic? The mystic is the person who loves being alive and whose heart breaks open wide with awe and gratefulness to the source and giver of that love and life. ~ djm
We live in a time when religious divisiveness promulgated by self-righteous, omniscient polemicists is rampant. In certain fundamentalist bastions of Christianity, mysticism* is feared, mocked, and sadly misunderstood. “Mysticism,” the joke goes, “begins with mist, centers on “I” and ends in schism.” Cynic is too kind a word for the perpetrators of this view. There is enough anti-mysticism, anti-contemplation nonsense on the web these days to make a reader break out in hives. I counsel avoid these sites altogether or else read with a bottle of Calamine Lotion nearby.
So for the person interested in the mystic way of understanding and living life, it would be wise first to identify what mysticism is NOT. Mysticism is not escapism disguised in religious garb. As William McNamara likes to say, it is not “tripping out,” it is “standing in.” It is neither a state of inward torpor nor a state of ecstasy. It does not refer to altered states of consciousness, charismatic gifts, external or internal visions, locutions, or relaxation techniques. The mystic is not characterized by “parapsychological phenomenon such as precognition, knowledge of events at a distance, control over bodily processes such as heartbeat and breathing, out-of-body experiences, levitation, and other extraordinary sensory or psychic phenomenon” (Christian Mysticism: The Art of the inner Way).
In actuality, the mystic or contemplative is the ordinary man or woman who is intensely and intentionally alive to life, alive to the aliveness of God and to the vivifying dance of all creation. James Finley defines mysticism or contemplation as “the wordless awareness of oneness with God beyond what thoughts can grasp or words can adequately convey” (Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God) Mystics, acutely conscious of living in proximity to God, live in the neighborhood of the divine and discover as they wander that there is no neighborhood, no region, no place that is not infused with divine presence. It is this felt presence and awareness of the nearness of God experienced as a living relationship that endows existence with ultimate significance and makes life holy.
Mystical life is life lived fully alive to the gratuitousness of God and to the grandeur and incarnate incandescence of all reality. Beginning with the humble and wondrous surprise of being, the mystic is acutely aware and appreciative of all that is, both its allusiveness and its immanent particularity. “The truth of human being,” Rabbi Heschel states, “is the love of being alive.” For the person who is truly alive, divine gratuity or what I call the extravagance of God’s love, evokes wonder and gratefulness. So wonder as a way of being receptive and responsive to life and gratefulness as an attitude turned into a conscious daily practice are sure signs of aliveness and evidence of someone in love with being alive. So important are wonder and gratitude to living a significant life that Heschel, whose writings present a poignant and poetic theology of wonder, claims that “life without wonder is not worth living” and that “It is gratefulness that makes the soul great.”
Mysticism is another word for the awe-dipped awareness of the wonder of being fully alive. This aliveness is earthy, not vaporous; natural, not super-natural; embodied, not ethereal; essential, not accessorial. It understands and experiences human aliveness as conscious, intentional, and grateful communion with and responsiveness to the Life of Life, the Source of all aliveness. Because of this, mysticism is not mist. It is a must.
PRACTICE: I can’t think of anything that activates our innate mystical inclination more than to make a conscious and regular practice of wonder and gratefulness.
Prayer mantra: I am wonder-full. I am grateful.
*NB! I use the terms mystic/contemplative and mystical/contemplative interchangeably.