Earth to Mystics
One of the basic functions of church should be to connect us with an evolving and never-ending process of revelation.
This is the second in a short series of shorter pieces, thinking about church. The first one is here.
As I continue to take courses at a Methodist Seminary, I sometimes run into approaches to theology that I find dry to the point of insufferable. Genial, wordy, vapid oration that seems to me to have very little to do with any dynamic reality. Tropes. Genial, clever, stale tropes. As a preface, the speaker might humblebrag (or outright brag) about his credentials. And then what follows is only occasionally illumined with even the dullest reflections of any genuine spiritual life. And I wonder, how can so-called leaders get so lost?
A surprising amount of recent Christian writing consists mainly of wistful, lyrical musings about basic Christian ideas: God. Jesus. Justice. Our neighbors. The kingdom of heaven. Reading or hearing some of it can be spiritually affecting for sure. Reading or hearing a lot of it, though, can start to feel like you’re reading the dust jacket of a book, waiting for the book to start. (Note: Sometimes I have the same feeling about this Substack. So there.)
Part of the issue, I think (with Christianity, I mean, not with this Substack), is an inherent problem to any spiritual system looking at the transcendent — which is that all the folks involved in the inquiry are, generally speaking, semi-transcendent at best. When adepts talk about their spirituality, they’re describing a meal that they’ve eaten fully. When we talk about their experiences, we’re talking about what the description teaches us about a meal that we’ve seen, or smelled, or perhaps occasionally tasted. It’s like we’re talking about the menu, and menus aren’t meals. It’s understandable that this might end up being a little dull sometimes. Like that one lousy summer in high school where no one had a car, and you just talked about what it would be like if someone did. Sometimes, it genuinely amazes me that pastors comes up with anything worthwhile to say, week after week, at all.
Also, though, iterations of spiritual practice begin to generate human artifacts — and these start getting treated like ends in themselves. The original purpose starts to get lost in the noise of day-to-day activity. At the Methodist seminary I’ve been attending, for example, there are folks who seem mainly to be aspiring breadmakers. They’ve gone to a bakery all their lives. They like bread. Heck, they love bread — nominally, anyhow. Now they’re learning how to be bakers, and they’re planning to be bakers. Sometimes their interest in questions like, “what is bread?” or, “why bakeries?” strikes me as shockingly passing.
It’s worth noticing that the idea of religous organization itself is conducive to these sorts of artifacts. I mean, the moment you create a role, you create an idol, and then that creates an attraction for the parts of ourselves that are vulnerable to idols. It doesn’t mean that a spiritual group shouldn’t have roles. And it definitely doesn’t mean that folks in seminary are there for bad reasons. But it does suggest that there should be some conscientiousness of the incidental waste that can be produced.
Zen fronts the idea that all human-derived forms ought to be regularly de-constructed, in order to reveal their artificial, distorting nature. If you study the mind, you get a deeper and deeper sense of its model-making function. These models are inspired by reality, but are they strictly real? Sometimes we’re just walking on the roadmap, not on the road. There’s often a deeper perception of reality behind any thought or idea.
Christianity could do very, very well to internalize this kind of thinking — much more deeply than it has, throughout more of its institutions. It seems to me that the essential life of the Church — by “the Church,” I mean all of the the sprawling, diverse tapestry of ways that people try to follow the Way of Jesus — doesn’t lie in its traditions, or in its ability to implement a clear plan articulated in canonical scripture. I think the essential life of the Church is to curate a rich conversation about the intersection of revelation — in all of its forms — with everything else that’s going on here on earth.
In other words, the task of the Church is, more or less, to connect mysticism with the rest of life.
A big task. But in the Christian approach, the first three premises of this endeavor seem to me to be pretty clear:
Suppose that the ground of reality is a consciousness that is ultimately, gloriously, explosively good, and that this consciousness surpassingly loves all of us, with a surpassingly active interest.
Suppose that nothing — I mean nothing — is ever fundamentally stopping you from a fuller relationship with that consciousness, except:
a bit of careful thinking about the next experimental step forward,
your own distractedness.
Get in the habit of telling the truth, as fully as you understand it — to yourself, to trusted others, and to this conscious ground of reality that surpassingly loves you — as often as possible.
(Also, listen.)
It’s worth noting that there are a lot people who have gone further along in this journey toward God — sometimes incredibly far, in fact — and that they’ve talked about it, a lot, and that diving in with them really helps refined one’s approach: The authors of the gospels. Hermas. Clement. Origen. The elders of the desert. Gregory of Nyssa. Dionysius the Areopagite. Whoever wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. Bernard of Clairvaux. Hidegaard von Bingen. Margery Kempe. Teresa of Avila. Julian of Norwich. Meister Eckhart. Jeanne Guyon. Jacob Boehme. Swedenborg. John Ruusbroec. Just to name some of the better-known ones. If you want a great book to get started, try Teachings of the Christian Mystics, by Andrew Harvey, which is just a collection of selections from primary sources. It’s wonderful.
Why get excited about the mystics? Because they’re amazing, and their contributions to us are amazing. If you want to get a sense of what the mystics have to offer, I’d again recommend that Andrew Harvey book, but maybe this quote from Augustine will suffice:
Imagine if all the tumult of the body were to quiet down, along with all our busy thoughts about earth, sea, and air; if the very world should stop, and the mind cease thinking about itself, go beyond itself, and be quite still; if all the fantasies that appear in dreams and imagination should cease, and there be no speech, no sign: Imagine if all things that are perishable grew still—for if we listen they are saying, “We did not make ourselves; he made us who abides forever”—imagine, then, that they should say this and fall silent, listening to the very voice of him who made them and not to that of his creation; so that we should hear not his word through the tongues of men, nor the voice of angels, nor the clouds’ thunder, nor any symbol, but the very Self which in these things we love, and go beyond ourselves to attain a flash of that eternal wisdom that abides above all things: And imagine if that moment were to go on and on, leaving behind all other sights and sounds but this one vision that ravishes and absorbs and fixes the beholder in joy; so that the rest of eternal life were like that moment of illumination that leaves us breathless:
Would this not be what is bidden in scripture, Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?
I would imagine that any careful reader is aware that something of a person is encoded in the language that they use, in a way that’s hard to explain. When you read the words of people who have experienced the divine directly, something deep begins to happen. You can sense through the words the underlying mechanism is operant. We’re led into the experience, ourselves. You can begin to feel the deep, wrenching project of absolute glory at work in all this muddy matter. Everything in the Gospel is happening right now — all those people are here. And underneath, the ground of reality is watching, knowing, loving, and involved.
We should be reading the mystics together. In church. Talking about the lives of the saints. Talking about people who are talking about the lives of the saints. Somebody recently said to me that people go to church because they want answers. I think a much better way to look at it is that people should go to church because they want connection with God, and with other people who are seeking God, and because they want help getting better at seeking the answers. I don’t think the foundation is ortho-doxy (right belief); I think the foundation is the pursuit of ortho-antilipsi (right seeing).
You might treat a church service as a temporary thought experiment: For the next so long, act like the entirety of our individual and collective lives on earth is merely commentary on the basic fact that God extends outward, and everything is wholly dependent on, wholly circumscribed by the context of God.
We can also do spiritual inquiry whenever else we want. In whatever groups we want. Whenever we do it, we can call that church.
But in a lot of ways, the point of whatever we call church is to facilitate this kind of communion expansion. The bridge between God and the rest of our lives, is at the heart of it. It’s good to be really serious about that. Don’t just cajole people with advetisements. Dive in!