Marianne opens by admitting that mysticism is often a divisive topic. Additionally the various liturgical seasons are reflected in the annual seasons that happen each year. January is marked by epiphany. Epiphany means to reveal or the sudden manifestation or perception or the essential nature or meaning of something. Epi- meaning surface phono- is manifestation, so it means what is here, surfaces so that we can apprehend it. Usually an epiphany is an intuitive grasp of something, it usually happens through an event, usually something simple and striking. An epiphany is defined as an illuminating discovery or realization or disclosure so this time feels like an appropriate time to talk about mysticism.
Definitions
If you google mysticism you get that it is knowledge inaccessible to the intellect. Other sites describe it as a delusion of dreamy and confused thought. It is often put in the category of religious ecstasy or a hidden truth. There are others who describe mysticism as the search for deeper awareness and consciousness of god, with that in mind it is a very integral part of religion. Mysticism is part of the search and longing for more meaning and understanding about what is. Marianne reminds us of her understanding of the definition of religion to be that which binds and ties us together and that religions are human constructions. Religions are an effort to weave together an understanding that explains the world and what it means to be human. The more ancient root meaning of relegar is to pay particular attention so religion is about paying attention. With this meaning in mind, mysticism and religion are about paying particular attention. Marianne paraphrases a poem by Mary Oliver that says ‘I don’t know how to pray, I do know how to pay attention and may that be enough.’ Mysticism draws our attention to what is important and meaningful. Marianne then reads the Listening Hearts Guidelines and draws our attention to the ‘Listening’ part of the title.
Mysticism
Marianne begins with a passage from Augustine that names all of the senses, and Marianne suggests that our senses are actually our portals and apprehensions to this mystery. Our senses are our guides and not hindrances. Mysticism is not only for the sensitive few but a democratic and accessible thing for all of us. Sometimes the way we think god is supposed to be can predetermine our experience. In the passage Augustine is addressing god.
“How late I came to love you, oh beauty so ancient and so fresh. How late I came to love you. You were within me, yet I have gone outside to see you. Unlovely myself, I rushed toward all those lovely things you had made, and always you were with me. I was not with you. All these beauties kept me far from you although they would not have existed at all unless they had their being in you. You called, you cried, you shattered my deafness, you sparkled, you blazed, you drove away my blindness. You shed your fragrance and I drew in my breath and I pant for you. I taste and now I hunger and thirst. You touched me and now I burn with longing for your peace.”
Medieval Mysticism
Medieval mysticism focused on the out of body experience. The limitations of our humanity in the medieval sense of it are transcended for a moment and a complete union with god for a moment is achieved. It is fundamentally indescribable except by metaphor, an experience is really not accessible to the human mind. Its so completely beyond our senses that to say I am having a mystical experience means emphatically that you are not having a mystical experience because the ego is so completely lost in the union with god that we no longer have any sense of our selves. Mystical experience not only takes us outside our selves but also outside all of human experience to that place where the material world is left behind altogether. Bill offers three considerations of that high medieval notion of mysticism that are still with us.
First, this sort of thing happens in every lasting spiritual and religious tradition. There is a strain not just of thought but of experience that we not only yearn for but at times seems to reach some sort of direct union with god and everything. The limitations of what it means to be human are for a moment transcended and that last bastion of our conscious humanity which is our ego is dropped away. Every lasting religious tradition speaks of this kind of experience. The loss of the sense of the individual replaced for a moment by a sense of the all. Bill believes that every lasting religious religion talks about this is because it really does happen, it really is part of what it means to be human. This stuff is real even though it is quantifiable.
Second, this kind of direct link means there were times when the Institution was not the mediator of god to the people. Sometimes the Institution was bypassed. The Institution, the doctrine, the sacred writings could be bypassed altogether and this made folks suspicious of mystics regardless of religion. Sufi people are generally considered to be genuinely weird and even a little dangerous. This is why in the Christian tradition any contemporary mystics go through great pains to explain an affirm their complete orthodoxy. Mainstream Christianity tries to convince that a mystical experiences are very rare and require a great deal of preparation of the soul in a ‘don’t try this at home’ kind of way. In the Western Catholic tradition mystical experiences were considered to be a little bit dangerous. In the Calvinist tradition mystics were considered so dangerous that they were sometimes assigned to be possession by the devil. It is only in the ecstatic part of the Protestant tradition is the only one that embraced the notion of some kind of ecstatic experience. The remainder of Protestantism remain suspicious of mystical experiences.
Third, in the west mysticism has been profoundly influenced by Hellenistic dualism. That split between the soul and the body, with the body being lesser than the soul. Mystical experience is often described as leaving the body behind so that the soul can commune unhindered by the weight of the material body. Judaism escaped this for the most part because Jewish theology long not only resisted but rejected the notion that there could be a soulless body or a body less soul. The struggle between the Greek dualism and the Jewish oneness plays out in St. Paul. Ultimately St. Paul’s Jewish oneness wins out and he is able to imagine a spiritual body that could house a soul but cannot imagine a soul without any body.
Struggling with Platonic Dualism
For all these three reasons, Bill struggles with Platonic dualism. The soul is not some thing stuck inside the body waiting for death to escape a prison. The body as well as the universe is a transcendent place where god resides. God not being a name of a being or proper noun. It is through our senses and the universe that all of us are nourished and all of us grow and all of us become wiser. Our bodies are good, as explained in the first chapter of Genesis. Bill believes that people experience a direct union with god, he just hasn’t experienced it for himself. Finally institutional religion is not the one and only mediator of god to the people. Bill does agree with the nervousness that the institutions have when it comes to people who have mystical experiences. To claim direct union and insight to god is a very dangerous claim to make. History has a rich repository of charlatans and deluded people who have done a great deal of damage by claiming that link with god and the presumptive right of telling other people how to live and behave. This is why Bill remains firmly in the Anglican tradition that believes that only the Christianity that has generally been understood throughout the ages of Christianity is right and new ideas that people claiming to have direct union with god are not to be followed. Anglican understanding of doctrine therefore ends basically in the fourth century. Bill understands a mystical experience to be not that we are escaping our material bodies but rather that we become so immersed in the material that we are able to glimpse its core and that we are all one.
The Secret Life of Bees
Bill recommends The Secret Life of Bees to demonstrate mysticism in this era. The protagonist of the story is a self hating fourteen year old girl whose family is a festival of dysfunction and despite this she at times is able to discover the permeability of the world and discovers that the core of the universe and the core of god are the same. Then she comes under the influence of a truly benevolent woman by the name of August Boatwright who guides her into a deeper and deeper insight into her self. In finding this deeper self she finds the true god and finds herself transformed by that love. Bill offers a few quotes from the book the protagonist has sneaked out of the house at night and is looking up through the web of trees at night and she says “night fell over me and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the night” That’s union, she’s realizing she’s doing this. It’s not the classical sense of mysticism where she loses all sense of self but rather her sense of self gets wrapped up in unity. Later on in the book where she’s having a horrible sense of self loathing, she comes to this moment “you can say she says that I’ve never had a tribulations moment the kind where you know yourself spoken to by a voice that seems other than yourself, spoken to you so genuinely that you see the words shining on trees and clouds, but I had just such a moment right then standing in my ordinary room I heard a voice say, Lily Owens your jar is open.” The context for that is that she had put bees in a jar and she opened the jar in order to let the bees go, and she heard this voice saying Lily, your jar is open, you can go, you too can be free. Then she says “I realized for the first time in my life, there is nothing but mystery in the world. How it hides behind the fabric of our poor grubby days, shining brightly and we don’t even know it.” This is all before she meets August. Later after running away from home, she sees a picture that her mother had of a black Madonna. She sees this picture on a jar of honey and understands it as, ‘this is where we need to go’ because she sees this as a connection between her dead mother and this place. When Lily goes to August’s house she sees a carving of Mary and this is her experience of communion with this carving. Lily says “everything about that smile said Lily Owens I know you down to the core, I felt she knew what a lying murdering hating person I really was. I wanted to cry but in the next instant I wanted to laugh because the statue also made me feel like Lily the smiled upon. There was beauty and goodness in me too” In this moment of communion Lily is able to view herself as whole, her capacity for evil as well as her beauty and goodness. Later in the book, Lily asks how the black Madonna got chosen for the honey label and August replies “I wish you could have seen the daughters of Mary (an organization of black women that August leads) the first time they laid eyes on this label. You know why? Because when they looked at her for the first time it occurred to them that their lives what’s divine could come in dark skin. You see everybody needs a god who looks like them Lily. You know this Mary in this painting, she’s just an old figure head off an old ship but the people needed comfort and rescue so when they looked at it they saw Mary, and so the spirit of Mary took it over, her spirit is really just everywhere Lily, it’s just everywhere. It’s inside rocks and trees and even the people but sometimes it will get concentrated in certain places and it will just beam out at you in a special way. What I mean is the bees were really singing the words from Luke, they really were, but still if you had the right kind of ears you can listen to the hive and listen to the Christmas story somewhere inside yourself. You can hear silent things on the other side of the world that nobody else can.” August is saying the bees are singing to everyone and the song is accessible to everyone. This is not transcending what it means to be human, and not transcending sight and sound but rather becoming so immersed in our lives and the universe that we can hear the bees singing about the birth of Jesus. Later still there’s this quote from Lily “my breath came faster something coiled about my chest and squeezed tighter and tighter until suddenly like someone had snapped off the panic switch, my mind became unnaturally calm as if part of me had been lifted right up out of my body and was sitting on a tree limb watching my spectacle from a safe distance the other part of me danced with the bees. I wasn’t moving a lick but in my mind I was spinning through the air with them. I had joined a bee conga line” Lily is not transcending the human experience rather she is rather experiencing the fullness of human experience so completely that she knows what’s happening, she is aware of complete union. In this next quote, August shows Lily a number of things from her mother. It turns out that Lily’s mother had fled to August’s place ten years before, lived there for a time before coming back. The last of the items was a picture of Lily and her mother. Lily says “I didn’t care about anything on this earth except the way her face was tipped toward mine, our noses just touching how wide and gorgeous her smile was. She rubbed her nose against mine and poured her light on my face. I looked down at that picture, then I closed my eyes. I figured May must have made it to heaven and explained to my mother about the sign I wanted, the one that would let me know I was loved.” That’s mystical insight, to be so completely in tuned with the unity of everything that you can, perhaps for the first time in your life, realize you are loved, truly and completely and not just for what you’ve done but for what you are. Finally, “‘Our Lady’ says August ‘is not some magical being out there somewhere like a fairy god mother, she’s not a statue in a parlor, she’s something in side of you Lily. You don’t have to put your hand on her heart to get strength and consolation and all of the other things you need to get you through life. You can place your hand, right here on your own heart and whatever it is that keeps widening your heart Lily, that’s not only the power that’s inside you but it’s the love. And when you get right down to it Lily that’s the only purpose grand enough for human life, not just to love but to persist in love no matter what.'”
The Heart of Mystical Insight
This is the heart and soul of mystical insight, to be able to persist in the love because we are so deeply immersed in the goodness of creation and god that we have been completely transformed by it. Bill despite not having an experience for himself believes that everyone is capable of being immersed in their own stuff enough that they can experience that same essence and that same love. Everyone of us experiences a profound sense of separateness and that makes us lonely and grief. From time to time and very briefly that sense of separateness and most of our anger, confusion, and prejudice come from our ability to deny that we are one. We are each other’s keeper and we have a way to deny that and therefore because we can deny that we are each other’s keeper we can therefore prefer personal safety to expansive compassion. It is mystical experience that breaks that sense of separateness down.