The mystic or contemplative is the man or woman who is intensely and intentionally alive to the aliveness of God. Mysticism or contemplation is “the wordless awareness of oneness with God beyond what thoughts can grasp or words can adequately convey.”[1]  The mystics are acutely conscious of living in God and of God living in them as a fish moves through water and water moves through fish. It is this felt presence and awareness of the intimacy of God experienced as a living relationship that endows existence with ultimate significance and makes life holy. The mystical life is life lived fully alive to the gratuitousness of God and to the grandeur of all reality. Beginning with the humble and wondrous surprise of being, the mystic is acutely aware and appreciative of all that is. “The truth of human being,” Rabbi Abraham Heschel states, “is the love of being alive.”[2] Mysticism is “being open in a new way to every aspect of experience.”[3] Heschel points out there are three ways we may respond to the reality of the world around us: “We may exploit it, we may enjoy it, we may accept it with awe.”[4] The mystic not only enjoys the world, the mystic accepts it with awe.

~ Daniel J. Miller, © 2007, from Radical Amazement and Prophetic Sympathy: A Mystical-Prophetic Approach to Pastoral Theology and Care Inspired By the Works of Abraham Joshua Heschel

Notes

1James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 1.

2Abraham Heschel, Who Is Man?, 35.

3Robert McAfee Brown, “Heschel’s Social Ethics,” in Merkle, ed. Abraham Joshua Heschel: Exploring His Life and Thought, 126.

4Heschel, God in Search of Man, 7.