View from Outside
So we are patient with others who don’t yet understand, and that would be most of the world. You are never alone, but you will often feel lonely. Rare is the non-mystic who will accept your position on things; rarer still the fellow traveler. Most rare is a mystic with any significant overlapping vision. As a Christian Mystic, you are less likely to experience so much loneliness, simply because most Christians are forced to entertain a certain amount of mysticism, even if they denounce the term.
The degree to which you feel the full warmth of fellowship will often depend on how much you say. Mysticism is the unending process, and the anchor point remains God Himself. You are enlightened by the Spirit, but forced to drag around this fallen flesh, along with the broken intellect. At God’s whim you will be released, but until then, it can’t get any better than a full mystical awareness as a Christian. To all others, this will make you appear all too subjective, because no two fallen humans share precisely the same flaws, and thus, they don’t share the same particular experience with Ultimate Truth.
You’ll be torn by a burning desire to tell all you know, even as your seasoned wisdom warns you there are times when silence is better for everyone involved. If we understand this as a journey, for yourself and everyone around you, then you aren’t in a hurry to drag everyone to the place you rest on the way. God isn’t going to reveal to you every pertinent detail of any other person’s life, only enough to act in the given context. If telling someone I am a Christian Mystic will only serve to hinder their growth, then I won’t tell them. Commitment to the truth is a fragile knife edge stance, a moving target. We prefer sheer transparency, but we can’t throw our pearls at the feet of those who can’t value them. It’s not a simple matter of deciding who is and isn’t a pig in your world. There is no method at all; every step of the way, any choice is a risk. We don’t want to upset or alienate anyone, and rightly so, but we don’t get to choose how God uses us to help others along, or even them help us along. So we carry a fragile awareness that nothing is simple and do what our convictions demand from that moment, and sometimes we say nothing.
By now, it should be obvious transparency is not an absolute, nor is patience or any other marker of Christian Mystical maturity. How do we put it into words? Complex simplicity? Simple complexity? Paradox is the norm. Only those whose sole anchor is concrete objectivity can demand we divulge our entire being in terms they require. So let them choose their terms and play the game, because they aren’t ready. Let them call you whatever it is makes them comfortable. We are called liberal, emotionalist, hippies, and sinners by those wedded to Aristotle’s epistemology. True liberals will not understand our devotion to that small selection of eternal principles which seem reactionary to them, because we know some things are wrong in almost every context.
Learn the lesson of Joseph in Egypt. On the one hand, the religion was entirely pagan; on the other hand, he engaged the rituals required to serve on Pharaoh’s staff. We know the strong centralized feudalism he created in Egypt is not healthy by the standards of Noah’s Covenant, but it was God’s wisdom for Joseph. We know the truth of God was rooted in his heart, but he didn’t seem to evangelize at all. He was a slave, but he devoted himself to his master’s welfare. He was in prison unjustly, but served with grace and dignity. He didn’t shrink from telling the truth to a condemned man, and didn’t harass the one who forgot him. The paradox of God’s justice is our acceptance of injustice as the norm often serves to set things right. The ways of spiritual mysticism seem too much like wishful thinking, but we aren’t in it to succeed, only to be faithful, so that God defines contextually what it means for Him to prosper the service of our hands.
Most of the people you meet will express impatience with you. They will unconsciously demand their answers be your answers, as if they have somehow latched onto some concrete foundation. But if the whole world comes apart, then that solid foundation floats free — and then what? Christian Mysticism sees far beyond the immediate, but we see it best by looking within. Not at our fallen selves, but that treasure of Heaven resting in our broken vessel. The Spirit of God invades our being so as to provide the ultimate anchor, so in that sense, introspection is the ultimate source. We will seem to others self-absorbed, but that is what God-absorbed looks like in human terms. Because we know there is a mighty, constant war between God and our fallen nature, we know where the real action can be found. It’s not in the world around us; God has that well in hand. For each of us, the answers are all found by starting with what’s inside. For what’s outside, we have nothing but questions.
Our motto: Question is the Answer. In other words: Apparent confusion is our peace and stability. It’s not because we are internally confused, but we are able to realize the apparent solidity of reality is the ultimate delusion. To understand the universe, you have to step outside it, to the realm of One who made it. Since you can’t leave this world alive, you have to meet your death face to face before any part of you can go outside. Mundane reality is a prison, and the only escape is to migrate our spirits through this one portal of sanity and freedom. No, it makes no sense in words, because the truth is in the Land Without Words. If we don’t turn all reality inside out, we can’t hope to see the path of escape, and we are stuck in the prison of blindness and death. The result is we perceive the most pragmatic path through the dead world around us, a path which makes no sense at all to those anchored here.
(The completed series is posted as a single document here.)
