Support Your Local Mystic

Hark now, hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly
Into the mystic
Van Morrison

Jesus often slipped away to other places to be alone so that he could pray.
Luke 5:16

Grace to you and peace.

I remember one day, many years ago, sitting in my room listening to a recording of “The Planets” by Gustav Holst.  My brother came in, picked up the record (remember those?) and asked me which section was my favorite.  “Neptune, the Mystic,” I answered.  “That doesn’t surprise me,” he said.  “You’ve always had a mystical bent.”

It’s true; I have a ‘mystical bent.’  Always have had and I hope I always will.  I’ve always believed that there’s more to the world than what we can see with our eyes. But, it’s only recently that my mysticism has come into full bloom. 

Now, before we go any further, let me be clear about what I mean by mysticism.  I’m not talking about spooks or ghosties; nor am I talking about ancient aliens, crystals or New Age religion.  I’m talking about the Western mystical tradition and its roots go back thousands of years.  There have been important Jewish and Muslim mystics as well.  But, I can only speak as a Christian. The goal of Christian mysticism, ultimately, is union with God.  Mysticism is vitally important for our world, but more on that in a minute.

My core belief is that God speaks to us in many and various ways, but we’re too busy or too distracted to hear.  Our prayer life tends to be one-sided:  we speak and we expect God to listen.  We forget that it’s a two-way conversation.  We speak, God listens.  Then God speaks and we listen.  What the mystic is trying to do is listen for God’s voice.  Usually that happens through contemplative prayer (meditative prayer), but it can happen in many other ways as well.  There are a whole host of spiritual practices designed to make us more attentive to God’s voice.

So, why are mystics important?  They’re important because, as I said, they’re seeking union with God.  That ultimately leads to a union with other people.  You can’t love God and not want to love and care for God’s children.  Mystics don’t just sit in caves gazing at their navels; what they experience leads them back out into the world in service to others.

For example, take the mystic I’m studying this summer, Etty Hellesum.  Etty was a young, Dutch, Jewish woman who got swept up into the Holocaust.  We wouldn’t know about her except that she kept a diary from 1941 through 1942.  (Her diary and letters were published 40 years after her death at Auschwitz.)

Etty was surrounded by hatred, lived with hatred on a daily basis.  There were the Nazis, of course, who hated the Jews and were busy deporting Dutch Jews to concentration camps in the East.  Then there were her Jewish friends who believed that every German, without exception, should be killed.  Their hatred, while understandable, was something Etty could not share.  As she put it, “hatred of Germans poisons everyone’s mind.”  She believed that indiscriminate hatred was a “sickness of the soul.”

How was she able to rise above her own anger and hatred?  By getting down on her knees in deep, contemplative prayer.  This didn’t happen all at once.  She referred to herself in her diary as “the girl who could not kneel.”  But, she learned.  And she prayed.

Her philosophy was that we each have to solve the “war within” ourselves before we could hope to solve the world’s problems.  Etty’s goal, then, was to find inner peace and then become, as Annemarie Kidder has written, “an embodied presence of compassion” for other people.  Her time on her knees enabled her to be a calm, positive presence in a chaotic, hate-filled world.  Her time on her knees enabled her to look at the SS soldiers she encountered with pity, seeing them as nothing less than victims of a hate-filled ideology.

Etty was a beacon of love and forgiveness.  And this is what makes Etty and other mystics so important.  By being transformed within, mystics are able to “carry this inner harmony into the world, thus becoming catalysts in the transformation of the world.” (Annemarie Kidder)

This is why I chose to learn from Etty Hillesum this summer.  Our country, our world, needs peace, forgiveness and harmony.  It won’t come from politicians.  It won’t come through violence.  It might just come through your friendly neighborhood mystic.

By way of confession, this has been a very difficult blog to write.  It is impossible to for me to describe the spiritual changes that are going on inside of me.  Change can be frightening.  I was a little frightened at first by who I was becoming.  But, I have never felt closer to God.  Never.  And I have a number of spiritual directors and mystics to thank for that.  I will let Etty have the last word:

“I know that those who hate have good reason to do so. But why should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way? It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world makes it an even more inhospitable place.”