A Reasonable Mystic

As a folower of Jesus I know that I have been reborn when I accepted Jesus as my Saviour. But I have sometimes wondered just how that rebirth comes about. How does God actually create that new life in me?

While reading Fuchsia Pickett’s excellent series of books on the Holy Spirit I came across a description, in Walking in the Anointing of the Holy Spirit: Book II (Holy Spirit’s Work in You), of how the Holy Spirit ‘overshadowed’ Mary in order to conceive the infant Jesus within her womb. I then remembered how, after God had shaped Adam’s body from the earth, “he breathed (enspirited) life into him and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7)

I also remembered how Paul drew on the Holy Spirit’s part in the resurrection of Jesus (Romans 8:11) to describe how our mortal bodies are “quickened” by that same Holy Spirit that dwells in us.

It becomes clear, then, that rebirth is not simply a legal transaction where we say to Jesus, “I accept your death for my sins and receive you as my Saviour”, and God then says, “Ok, now you can live!” I’m afraid that a lot of our Evangelical teaching comes across just like this.

No, God is far more directly and intimately involved in the process than this. The Holy Spirt, the very source and power of life, enters into our mortal body and changes it forever. He awakens or rekindles our sleeping or ‘dead’ spirit to once again connect with Father God, the Source. In fact, the Holy Spirit ‘overshadows’ us, as he did with mary, and creates a new life in us.

So, to believe that we can be a Christian, but not be aware of the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit within us, and hence to largely ignore him, is at best rampant foolishness, and must be highly grieving to the Spirit of God.

This re-creative act is surely the greatest miracle and the most amazing wonder and sign of God’s love and goodness to us.

When God made us he gave us a body, mind and spirit. Because of our western way of viewing the world, inherited from the ancient Greeks, by way of the church fathers and thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, and others, we tend to separate them from each other. We find it easier to understand things if we can take them apart and examine the separate components.

Of course, just like a small boy dismantling a wind-up gramophone to see how it works (which I once did), we are unable to put them back together again (as I wasn’t) because, while examining the parts we have neglected to study the relationships between them.

So, we agree we have a body, mind and spirit, but we don’t know how they go together, nor how they function in harmony. This is ironic, because none of those three parts can even exist (alive) without the others, let alone function!

The Hebrews, unlike the Greeks, understood a human being to be a whole, not a collection of parts.

Remember what happened at Pentecost – the Holy Spirit was poured out on a group of Jewish followers of Jesus. What was their response? Did they say, “Hey, this is different! Something physical just happened, tongues of fire fell. My mind can’t understand it, because I’ve never seen this before. But something changed in my spirit. I’m no longer afraid like I was a moment ago, and I am filled with a desire to praise God!”

No, I doubt if this is what they did. What it says they did do, was to go outside and praise God. And as people heard them tell of what happened they asked questions about it. So Peter, full of courage, told them that this fulfilled what Jesus, who they had murdered, had promised. And many believed in Jesus and joined them.

What was it Jesus had promised? Read John 14: 15-27 and 16: 5-15 to find out.
What does Jesus mean when he says he is in the Father and the Father is in him? And, he is in us? And, he and the Father are one? And, we will be one with each other and him and the Father?

Jesus is talking about a real joining of our spirits, both with his Spirit, with Father God, and with each other’s spirits. Our minds have difficulty with this, mainly because of all the things in this world we understand the nature of spirit least.

Is this surprising? Does a rock or a tree understand the nature of an animal? Does a man or woman understand the nature of God? No, the lesser does not understand the greater; rather the other way around. Neither does the mind understand the spirit any more than the body understands the mind.

God made humans in his image. And God is a Spirit (John 4: 24). So, it is reasonable to suppose that our being made in God’s image has to do with our spirit. This is how we are distinct from the rest of creation.

Can the part of us made from the dust of the ground understand the part of us breathed in by the Spirit of God? (Genesis 2:7)

In our Friday fellowship meeting at Beth Tephillah we looked at the relationship between knowing and doing, believing and acting, doing and being. To the Hebrew, to Jesus, to James, to the early Christians, these are the same thing! Believing is acting. Knowing is doing. Having faith is the same as obeying.

In a book by James Sire that I really enjoyed, Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life As a Christian Calling, he says:

Heart and mind are already together in the way God has made us, Whatever we are,
we are in fact one in our being … Being brings together knowing and doing, belief and obedience, for good or ill; for Christ?s disciples it will be eventually for good, of course. For when time shall be no more, our perfected, glorified being will bring
together in a perfect harmony a perfected heart, mind, body – and every other aspect of our human nature. We would do well to get on with it now. Such integration is a major aspect of seeking first the kingdom of God (p 162)

The whole point of Pentecost was to begin something. And that something is still continuing to be born and shaped – it is not completed yet. Jesus is building a people who are gathered together to be one with him and the Father and each other, and who will only do things the father is doing, and will not act in their own strength but in the power in the power of the Holy Spirit. We call this the Church.

And, as James Sire says, we would do well to get on with this form of living now! It is for now, not in heaven. “The kingdom of God is among you!” Jesus said.

First, let me apologise for the delay since my last post. Di and I have been to Queensland for a school on cutting edge ministry with Peter and Heather Toth – anazao.com.au . It was mind-blowing, and I’m sure I’ll say more later. But for now, something else.

A few weeks ago Richard Rohr, a modern mystic, was interviewed on The Religion Report on Radio National .
He says some provocative things about church and ministry. (Thanks for the heads-up Gary – theeighthday.org.au/mt/gdh/). Here’s an excerpt of what Rohr said:

Richard Rohr got some flak from readers of his column in the National Catholic Reporter recently when he suggested that few transformations happen in church, that the places where real transformation happens in our world are Alcoholics Anonymous, Ground Zero, the cancer ward, and of course the mountains of New Mexico.

Richard Rohr: Well I did say that. I wrote a whole Lenten series on the concept of liminal space, liminality. It’s amazing how interesting that subject has become to people. But in that, I said are the typical Catholic liturgies liminal space? Do they pull you out of business as usual, into an alternative universe where you have a different frame of reference, which Jesus would call the Kingdom of God. And I have to say it’s overwhelmingly obvious that they don’t. They’re very much a confirmation of the present consciousness, of the present politics of the present self-serving world view. And I’ve often said I go to Switzerland, God looks like a banker; I go to Germany, God looks like a policeman; I got to America, God looks like a businessman. I don’t know yet what he looks like in Australia. But it’s so obvious to me that we’re not leading people into alternative transcendence experience, but for the most part largely affirming and confirming. I mean talk about feel good, we’ve been the people in the church into feel good, in terms of making people think that American politics and wars are wonderful. I mean only today are we finally waking up to what a tragedy this war has been.

Stephen Crittenden: You’re talking there clearly, about more than just dead liturgy, aren’t you?

Richard Rohr: Well really, a whole consciousness, that’s right. The whole understanding of priesthood itself, which has so aligned itself with power, money, control, and I’m not saying that in an angry or malicious way, but it’s just to join the clergy is to join an establishment world view of status and security. And I think that’s what my father St Francis was trying to oppose. When I joined the Friars, first of all we were not encouraged to become priests. You know, Francis himself was not a priest, he refused ordination. And then they said, ‘If you are going to accept ordination, at best we’re blue-collar priests’. I don’t know, do you use that expression over here? Yes. We’re not white-collar priests. Our job is to live on the edge of the inside, so we can lead people into the larger world of the Gospel instead of mere churchyanity, and churchyanity is far too often, (and I think I’m being fair) become a substitute for Christianity.

Stephen Crittenden: We often hear secularisation accused as part of the big reason for the collapse of churchgoing and so on, that there’s a failure going on in the outside world, with all its false allures and so on. But it often occurs to me that perhaps a big part of the failure has been a failure of imagination on the part of the church and its leaders, and that’s what it sounds to me like you’re talking about.

Richard Rohr: Yes, I think so. When religion doesn’t move to what I’m going to call the mystical level; now don’t let that be a too far-out word. As far as I’m concerned, mysticism simply means when you move beyond external belief systems to inner experience, where you know something, you’ve experienced a love and a life and a quality of being that we would call God, for yourself. When religion doesn’t move to the mystical level, almost always the substitute for mysticism is morality. It gives the ego a sense of boundariedness, of superiority, of control, of earning God’s love, in fact I’d say the more you become preoccupied with moral minutiae -

Stephen Crittenden: And doctrine, perhaps.

Richard Rohr: Well that’s what I mean by external belief systems, when it remains at the external level of belief systems and rituals, to the degree you’re preoccupied with that, it’s almost a litmus test of how little you’ve experienced the real.

Stephen Crittenden: As a sociologist friend of mine says, ‘Doctrine is death’.

Richard Rohr: When that’s all you have. When you don’t know, you have to pretend that you do know. When you don’t really know the goodness of God; when you haven’t really experienced mercy, or forgiveness, the generosity of God, you have to bolster it up with all kind of heroic affirmations about the nature of God, and you can tell it doesn’t mean very much….

Richard Rohr’s website: www.malespirituality.org/ The full transcript of this interview can be found at www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2006/1788767.htm

I’ve begun reading some of the works of Evelyn Underhill, an Anglican writer on mysticism, a novelist, a metaphysical poet, and a student of Baron Friedrich von Hügel. Early in the Twentieth Century she wrote many books on mysticism, some of which go a long way to demystify it (if you’ll pardon the pun).

In the first chapter of Mystics of the Church she gives a useful description of the words “mystic” and “mystical”:

“Mystic” and “mysticism” are words which meet us constantly in all books that deal with religious experience; and indeed in many books which do not treat of religion at all. They are generally so vaguely and loosely used that they convey no precise meaning to our minds. and have now come to be perhaps the most ambigous terms in the whole vocabulary of religion. Any vague sense of spiritual things, any sort of symbolism, any hazy allegorical painting, any poetry which deals with the soul – worse than that, all sorts of superstitions and magical practices – may be, and often are, decribed as “mystical”. A word so generalized seems almost to have lost its meaning; and indeed, not one of these uses of “Mysticism” is correct, though the persons to whom they are applied may in some instances be mystics.

Mysticism, according to its historical and psychological definitions, is the direct intuition or expereince of God; and a mystic is a person who has, to a greater or less degree, such a direct experience – one whose religion and life are centred, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which he regards as first-hand personal knowledge. In Greek religion, from which the word comes to us, the myste were those initiates of the “mysteries” who were believed to have received the vision of the god, and with it a new and higher life. When the Christian Church adopted this term it adopted, too, this its original meaning. The Christian mystic therefore is one for whom God and Christ are not merely objects of belief, but living facts experimentally known at first-hand; and mysticism for him becomes, in so far as he responds to its demands, a life based on this conscious communion with God. It is found in experience that this communion, in all its various forms and degrees, is always a communion of love; and, in its perfection, so intimate and all-pervading that the word “union” describes it best. When St. Augustine said, “My life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee,” he described in these words the ideal of a true Christian mysticism.

So, there is nothing too esoteric here, nor magical, nor superstitious – just Christians desiring to be filled with God and to know him intimately – which is exactly what I find held out to me in the Gospels and the letters of the early church!

First, let me apologise for the disjointed order of these posts, although I shouldn’t need to apologise – blogging gives an author the freedom to post items as they come to mind. The reader must wait in anticipation to see if and when some order emerges from the heap. Why should I deprive anyone of that adventure?

Today I plan to begin discovering what mysticism is, and I will begin with a definition from Wikipedia:

Mysticism from the Greek μυστικός (mystikos) “an initiate” (of the Eleusinian Mysteries, μυστήρια (mysteria) meaning “initiation“) is the pursuit of achieving communion or identity with, or conscious wareness of, ultimate reality, the divine, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, or insight; and the belief that such experience is an important source of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. Traditions may include a belief in the literal existence of realities beyond empirical perception, or a belief that a true human perception of the world trancends logical reasoning or intellectual comprehension. A person delving in these areas may be called a Mystic.

The term “mysticism” is often used to refer to beliefs which go beyond
the purely exoteric practices of mainstream religions, while still being
related to or based in a mainstream religious doctrine. For example, Kabbalah is a significant mystical movement within Judaism, Sufism is a significant mystical movement within Islam, however Gnosticism can refer to either a mystical movement within Christianity or as various
mystical sects which arose out of Christianity. Some have argued that Christianity itself was a mystical sect that arose out of Judaism. While Eastern religion tend to find the concept of mysticism redundant, non-traditional knowledge and ritual are considered as Esotericism, for example Buddhism’s Vajrayana. Vedanta is considered the mystical branch of Hinduism.

My only interest is in Christian mysticism, so I will give the Wikipedia definition of this:

Mysticism is the philosophy and practice of a direct experience of God. Christian mysticism is traditionally pursued through the practice of the disciplines of prayer (including meditation and contemplation), fasting (including other forms of abstinence and self-denial), and alms-giving, service to others, as discussed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). Other forms of mysticism in general include participation in ecstatic worship and the use of entheogens, the latter not being associated with the mainstream of Christian spirituality. Christians believe that God dwells in Christians through the Holy Spirit, and therefore all Christians can experience God directly.

Without needing to accept that these definitions by the unknown Wikipedia authors are the be-all-and-end-all of truth, one point immediately becomes clear. If mysticism includes “the pursuit of achieving communion … with, or conscious awareness of, … God through direct experience, intuition, or insight; and the belief that such experience is an important source of knowledge, understanding, and Wisdom“, and if “Christians believe that God dwells in Christians through the Holy Spirit, and therefore all Christians can experience God directly“, then all Christians can and, I contend, should be mystics!

Of course, there is at least one growing mystical movement in the Protestant church, alongside the mystical elements of more Catholic and Orthodox traditions, which never went away. This is typically expressed in an exploration of the contemplative traditions, and perhaps accounts for the fact that so many Protestant, and even Evangelical pastors now have Roman Catholic spiritual directors. The movement is typified by such organisations as Renovaré, a Christian renewal para-Church organization founded by Quaker Richard Foster in 1988. There are many other signs and centres of this stream.

Some of the resources of this stream have been useful to us in our teaching people how to hear God’s voice, as can be seen on our listening2god website.

Some Renovare resources:

• Richard Foster (ed), The Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible (Protestant Edition). SanFran, 2005.
• James Smith & Richard Foster, A Spiritual Formation Workbook – Revised edition: Small Group Resources for Nurturing Christian Growth. HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.
• Richard Foster, Devotional Classics: Revised Edition: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups. HarperSanFrancisco, 1989.
• Richard Foster, Spiritual Classics : Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups on the Twelve Spiritual Disciplines. HarperSanFrancisco, 2000.
• Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth. HarperSanFrancisco, 1998.
• Richard Foster, Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

The posts to this blog also go to my Google Group – reasonablemystic@googlegroups.com. “Dr David” posted the following comment to that group:

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“because God cannot be logically proved without being experienced in relationship”

Spending time looking at this issue of “proof” and “relationship with God” can lead one to some interesting conclusions regarding being “prepared to be reasonable mystics”

It is not possible for me to recount in this reply decades of research along this avenue but I can make a few points. 1) the terms relationship, mystic and proof need definition 2) the links between the terms need clarification, and 3) the application of these concepts to humanity and well being need to be further expanded. I have attempted to do provide some material to address each of these points on my website www.SacredHealingNow.com

I think that any one on the path of the “reasonable mystic” is taking apath that few have traveled with widom and compassion.
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Here is the gist of my reply:

Dr David, you might like to outline briefly how you believe your work relates to the subject of this group, keeping in mind its purpose. I quote from the group website “The visible trail of my journey from reluctant fundamentalism, through evangelical by conviction of Jesus as the only way, charismatic through encounter with the Holy Spirit, postmodern by choice, to protestant mystic as the only sensible response to the presence of God. ”

In the context of this group, and the blog that it is fed from, www.reasonablemystic.com, I would define a “reasonable mystic” to be one who seeks an intimate and experiential relationship with the Living Father God, with Son Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit, but who does not at the same time neglect clarity of reasoning and the expectation of learning more about who God truly is and how God relates to his children and the world.

By “relationship” I intend to include all aspects of how two or more beings may interact in ways that enrich each other and bring life rather than death.

I would not wish to separate the terms “reasonable” and “mystic” because then we are talking about something else entirely. For example, I am convinced that true “knowledge” is attained more through the spirit than the mind, whereas the mind is good at remembering, making connections and decisions, and initiating action. The two working together promote understanding. If we focus on the mind as the knowledge source then we are not considering mysticism but materialism and humanism. If, on the other hand, we neglect the mind in this relationship, we are into superstition and ultimately occultism.

However, we can gain much from studying both reason and mysticism in isolation (using both spirit and mind to do so, of course), while keeping clear in our minds that not everything said about either of these is necessarily life bringing.

Having said all of that, and it is necessarily superficial but I hope it gives the general drift, then I must say that I am convinced that such a true “reasonably mystical” relationship with God and the world can best be explored by interacing with and relating to the one true expression of God in the world – Jesus Christ. If God has deliberately revealed himself in this one, then is it reasonable to avoid him in our search? And, since the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, is the presence of God in the world, and has been promised by God to indwell followers of Jesus, then surely the easiest way to get in touch with God is to interact with that Spirit, not some other spirit – human or otherwise.

In the light of this, I did a quick scan through the website you refered us to, Dr David, looking for the terms “God”, “Jesus”, “Christ”, and “Spirit”. There is much material on your site, and I have not been able to read it all. However, I was rather surpirised at the results of my search. I found references to a great many areas of investigation that I would be hestitant to embrace, having seen the mental, emotional and spiritual damage such experimentation caused to many of those troubled souls who come to us for ministry and healing. I found references to “God”, but in a fairly non-identifiable form as to who this “God” is. I found “Spiritual”, etc, but nothing that would point me to the Holy Spirit of God. And I did not find “Jesus”, or “Christ” or “Jesus Christ”, except in one or two quotes from other people.

Could I invite you to respond to the above so we can beter understand your position.

You must be wondering what happened to My Spiritual Journey, after more than a year! It hasn’t finished – I’ve just been rather busy doing it. More will come, I promise.

In the meantime, I’ve just begun reading Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World.

What has atheism got to do with being a reasonable mystic, you might ask? Well, I discovered something interesting. For a long time I have heard atheists using the words of people like Voltaire and Descartes to bolster their cause. Now I discover that neither of them were atheists. In fact, they were deists. Not only that, but Descartes was actually trying to prove that God does exist, not the reverse!

Anyway, let’s go back one step so we can see what this has to do with this blog.

How many times have you heard someone say that Voltaire said God was an invention of man? They quote him as saying: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” On page 25 McGrath gives this line along with the other four lines it belongs in:

If the heavens, stripped of their noble imprint,
Could ever cease to reveal Him,
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him,
Whom the sage proclaims, and whom kings adore.

In fact, Voltaire was as antagonistic to atheism as he was to the brand of Christianity exemplified by the corrupt hierarchy of the French Catholocism of his time. Far from wanting to remove Christianity, he actually wanted to remove this cancer that was forcing the loathed atheism to appear.

On pages 31 and 32 we meet Rene Descartes, famous for his “I think, therefore I am”. He was aware of the threat the new ideas of atheism were to Christianity, and with others set about trying to provide a philosophical proof that God did exist. Unfortunately, in order to make his “proofs” more palatible to his readers, who were more inclined towards science and natural reason than to religion, he decided to not make any appeal to experience of God. Of course, as this makes any such proof impossible, because God cannot be logically proved without being experienced in relationship, his efforts only succeeded in making the existence of such a hamstrung God seem even more unlikely.

The nail in the coffin came from the way other “Christians”, equally devoid of true experience of God, fought with each other in popular journals to demonstrate that their proof of God was better than anyone else’s proof. Atheism won by default, without hardly having to strike a blow.

So, it is clear that if they had realised the crucial need for experience of God as well as reason and understanding of his nature and ways – in other words, they had been prepared to be reasonable mystics – things could have turned out somewhat differently.