A Reasonable Mystic

Of Virtue

It is thus we acquire virtue, with facility and certainty; for, as God is the fountain and principle of all virtue, we possess all in the possession of Himself; and in proportion as we approach towards this possession, in like proportion do we rise into the most eminent virtues. For all virtue is but as a mask, an outside appearance changeable as our garments, if it doth not spring up, and issue from within; and then, indeed, it is genuine, essential, and permanent: “The beauty of the King’s daughter proceeds from within” saith David (Psa. xlv. 14). These souls, above all others, practise virtue in the most eminent degree, though they advert not to virtue in particular; God, to whom they are united, carries them to the most extensive practice of it; He is exceedingly jealous over them, and prohibits them the
taste of any pleasure but in Himself.

What a hungering for sufferings have those souls, who thus glow with Divine Love! how prone to precipitate into excessive austerities, were they permitted to pursue their own inclinations! They think of nought save how they may please their Beloved: as their self-love abates, they neglect and forget themselves; and as their love to God increases, so do self-detestation and disregard to the creature.

O was this easy method acquired, a method so suited to all, to the dull and ignorant as well as to the acute and learned, how easily would the whole Church of God be reformed! Love only is required: “Love;” saith S. Augustine, “and then do what you please.” For when we truly love, we cannot have so much as a will to anything that might offend the Object of our affections.

Posts in this series:
Madame Guyon – A Spiritual Reading
Madame Guyon – A Short and Easy Method of Prayer – Preface
Madame Guyon – A Short and Easy Method of Prayer – Chapter 1
Madame Guyon – A Short and Easy Method of Prayer – Chapter 2
Madame Guyon – A Short and Easy Method of Prayer – Chapter 3

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

A year or so ago I went to the YWAM base in Melbourne, Australia to hear Rhonda Hughey speak. What I heard was inspiring. Here is a woman who, while being a leader with a global perspective on the church, at the same time sees the preeminent importance of a truly intimate relationship with Jesus. I want to quote to you what she says in the introduction to her book, Desperate for His Presence: God’s Design to Transform Your Life and Your City.

In a declining culture, the church cannot fully recover the presence of God
in her midst apart from the catalyst of a true revival from heaven. We are
living in an important hour of history! God is challenging the church’s
self-centered identity and shifting our mindsets and ineffective methodologies.
He is inviting us to respond to one of the greatest challenges we have ever
faced – to return to our first love and to step out of our compromised church
culture into His kingdom!

Do you hear the message here? Instead of being focussed on ourselves, or even on the church, we need to expand our horizon and see that the Kingdom is the true reality. Hughey goes on to speak about three doors that the Lord has placed before us:

In order to fulfill the purposes of God for our cities, we must hear what the Spirit is saying to the church and be obedient to His voice. Isaiah prophesied: “Pass through, pass through the gates! Prepare the way for the people. build up, build up the highway! Remove the stones. Raise a banner for the nations” (Isa 62:10 NIV). The Lord is issuing an invitation to His church to pass through a threshold into the reality of His kingdom. He is opening three “gates” or doorways before us.

The first door is the Door of Intimacy. Scripture contains
two pictures of this door. The first is found in the Song of Solomon: “I sleep,
but my heart is awake; it is the voice of my beloved! He knocks, saying, ‘Open
for me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one’” (5:2). A second picture is
found in the book of Revelation: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If
anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with
him, and he with Me” (Rev 3;20). Jesus is knocking at the door of His church,
longing for fellowship and intimacy with His beloved. This door must be opened
before the church can become like Jesus. We can only become what we are
beholding in prayer and intimate fellowship. By fixing our gaze on Him, we can
be transformed into His image, from glory to glory.

The second door is a Door of Hope. In Hosea we see the response of God to His
wandering bride: “Behold, i will alure her, [I] will bring her into the
wilderness, and speak comfort to her. I will give her her vineyards from there,
and the Valley of Achor as a door of hope; she shall sing there, as in
the days of her youth, as in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt”
(Hos 2:14-15). The Lord is opening the door to invite His people out of their
captivity and compromise and into their true destiny. It’s a door that leads us
out of the Valley of trouble and into renewed covenant with God. This door will
lead the church from her compromise into betrothal and fruitfulness.

Finally, the last door being opened is the Door of Heaven.
In the book of Revelation John writes, “After these things I looked, and behold,
a door standing open in heaven. And the first voice which i heard was like a
trumpet speaking with me, saying, ‘Come up here, and I will show you things
which must take place after this’” (Rev 4:1). The Lord, who invited John to come
up higher for the heavenly perspective, is also inviting His church, His
beloved, to “come up higher” and sit with Him around His throne. The invitation
lifts us out of our compromised state and into the revelation of heaven’s
perspective. With heaven’s perspective, we gain revelation regarding our
identity and destiny in God. This door will help the church realize her
transforming purpose.

Is this not the same perspective that was being sought by those called “mystics” since the beginning of the church, beginning with John, the beloved disciple?

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!

How often, when you are reading an online document or webpage, do you find a link that leads to a related term? You follow the link, fully intending to return, but you find more links. Gradually you diverge further and further from your original quest or task, until eventually you can no longer remember what you wanted. Even if you did, you might be hard pressed to find it again. And, what do you do with all the marvellous things you discovered along the way?

Does this remind you of many so called “prayer meetings”? Each person prays their list, while the next person desperately tries to find something they can pray which hasn’t yet been mentioned, at the same time trying to listen to the prayer. Or, you may want to add to a prayer, but someone gets in first and changes the subject! And so it goes on, around the world and back again a few times. If you wanted to agree with something and try to drag the prayer back to a previous point, you are just sure that people are thinking, “Where has he or she been?”

For me, often the only thing lacking in such meetings is prayer itself!

A sure sign, for me, that a group is listening to God when they pray is that there will be only one agenda, and the prayers that are prayed will not be those that the participants had in mind when they came to the meeting. After all, are we wanting to pray God’s own heart, or do we just want to look spiritual? Who is fooled by this? Cetrtainly not God!

In my last post I mentioned the more obvious mystical stream in the Evangelical church, based on the contemplative tradition. Much less recognised, however, and one of the primary motivations for my explorations, is the clear mystical content of the Charismatic Movement. This movement, following on after the original Pentecostal Movement of the early 20th Century, introduced the direct, tangible experience of God into the lives of many otherwise conservative, evangelical believers, who would probably neither have, nor desire, contact with anything they thought of as mystical.

Evangelicals have long had a suspicion, even a fear, of mystics and mysticism, seeing their teachings and practices as closer to Eastern religions than true Christianity. Some of the old mystics appearing to engage with the occult did not help either. The modern equivalent is seen in the New Age Movement. Yet, when we look at the goals of many mystics and those of many charismatics, they are identical – only the point of origin of their journey differs.

Consider my own story. I was raised in a Fundamentalist break-away from a conservative Baptist church. Eventually I migrated back to that Baptist church, and finally my wife and I became its pastors. Before we met we independently found the baptism of the Holy Spirit, largely due to a total dissatisfaction with the absence of real spiritual experience in our earlier training. Then together we embarked on learning, then practicing, and then teaching healing prayer ministry (which was earlier called prayer counselling), intercession and spiritual warfare, and operating in prophetic gifts. Of course, along the way we had to learn how to hear and recognise the voice of God (and other spirits), and had many experiences of hearing, seeing and feeling God’s presence in ourselves and on behalf of others. For us, the Vineyard Conferences in Melbourne, the Toronto Blessing of the 1990s, Intercessors for Melbourne, Tom Marshall seminars, and the prayer ministry courses of Elijah House, Ellel Ministries, Charles Kraft’s Deep Healing Ministries, and Wholeness through Christ were part of God’s great training ground.

While many people appear to see this charismatic movement as a new thing, I have long considered that there is an unbroken stream, which runs right through church history, of people with similar experiences of the power of the presence of God in the believer. It is usually manifested in small groups of people held suspect, or even ostracised by the rest of the church. Some of what they did was indeed heretical, but this is possibly inevitable among pioneers of unpopular views who are willing to risk reputation, and even life, in the pursuit of some reality.

I am sure we will take a closer look at some of these groups in our further explorations of being a reasonable mystic.

A few of the books related to this post:

Vineyard and John Wimber:

• John Wimber, Power Evangelism. Trafalgar Square Publishing, 2000.
• John Wimber, Power Healing. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Toronto Blessing:

• Guy Chevreau, Catch the Fire: The Toronto Blessing an Experience of Renewal and Revival. London: Marshall Pickering, 1995.
• Dave Roberts, The Toronto Blessing. Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications,1994.

Tom Marshall:

• Tom Marshall, Living in the Freedom of the Spirit: Becoming the Person God Intended You to Be. Tonbridge, Kent: Sovereign World, 2002. [Was Free Indeed!, Sovereign World, 1983.]

 

Elijah House and the Sandfords:

• John and Paula Sandford, Elijah Among Us: Understanding and Responding to God’s Prophets Today. Grand rapids, MI: Chosen Books , 2002.
• John and Paula Sandford, The Elijah Task. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1979.
• John and Paula Sandford, Healing the Wounded Spirit. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1985.
• John and Paula Sandford, Prophets, Healers and the Emerging Church. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2003.
• John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1982.
• R. Loren Sandford, Wounded Warriors: Surviving Seasons of Stress. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1987. (This is now out of print but the material has been incorporated into the following book)
• R. Loren Sandford, Burnout : Renewal in the Wilderness. Concrete, Washington: Exanimo Corporation, 1998.

 

Ellel Ministries:

• Peter Horrobin, Healing Through Deliverance, Vol 1: The Biblical Basis. Chosen Books, 2003.
• Peter Horrobin, Healing Through Deliverance, Vol 2: The Practical Ministry. Chosen Books, 2003.
   

Deep Healing Ministries and Dr. Charles Kraft:

• Charles H. Kraft, Christianity with Power: Your Worldview and Your Experience of the Supernatural. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 1989.
• Charles H. Kraft, Confronting Powerless Christianity: Evangelicals and the Missing Dimension. Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 2002.
• Charles H. Kraft, Deep Wounds, Deep Healing: Discovering the Vital Link Between Spiritual Warfare and Inner Healing. Vine Books, 2004.
• Charles H. Kraft, Defeating Dark Angels: Breaking Demonic Oppression in the Believer’s Life. Tonbridge, Kent: Sovereign World, 1993.
• Charles H. Kraft, The Rules of Engagement: Understanding the Principles That Govern the Spiritual Battles in Our Lives. Wipf & Stock, 2005.
   

Intercession and Spiritual Warfare:

• Cindy Jacobs, Possessing the Gates of the Enemy, Third Edition, Revised with Study Guide: A Training Manual for Militant Intercession. Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 1991.

More books later.

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.