It’s a Mystery to Me

March 25, 2008 by djackson.

I ended up reading a little mysticism yesterday. It was serendipitous - had nothing to do with my slated tasks for the day. In sifting through the accumulated layers of back-logged paper on my desk (I call this administrative archaeology) I discovered a couple of documents I’d seen but set aside to enjoy later. The first was an article by Dallas Willard on preaching. The second was the prospectus for a course in prayer at the Lebh Shomea retreat center.

Willard took the position that good preaching rests, not on deep knowledge about God, but on deep experience with God. Consequently he advises, “Experience the fullness of God, think about the good things God has done for you, and realize he has done well by you. . . .We have to stop trying too hard.”

Father Kelly of Lebh Shomea said much the same thing though his phrasing leaves the page redolent of the monasteries of Spanish mystics in the sixteenth century:

In its deepest sense, to pray is to remain in loving receptivity to being loved by one’s Beloved. To pray is to be lured into intimate loving communion with and by God, the soul letting itself be drawn consciously and freely. Only God can pray someone and thereby cause that person to pray in return.

“Loving receptivity to being loved,” “Realize that God has done well by you” - both, more or less, encouragements to what mystical theologians call apophatic spirituality, the pilgrimage of knowing God by unknowing everything else. God, the argument runs, is wholly other from us and our experience. We can therefore speak of God only by analogy, and analogies, even when accurate, are always more false than true. (God truly reveals himself as my heavenly Father, but the point of similarity to my fatherhood to my two sons is so narrow as to be almost invisible.) So before we can know God we must refrag the hard drive, wipe the disc clean of all files and leave plenty of ram for the Spirit to enter true data.

But there’s a problem here. If all ways of knowing God are largely inaccurate, then isn’t one way of knowing God just as good as another? And if unknowing is the way to know God, does it matter which system we unlearn? In other words, is mysticism the ultimate stem cell religion from which all specific belief-systems are manufactured?

Evelyn Underhill, in her magisterial work on mysticism, says yes. “Attempts to limit mystical truth - the direct apprehension of the Divine Substance - by the formulae of any one religion, are as futile as the attempt to identify a precious metal with the die which converts it into current coin.” C. S. Lewis summarizes this position in the following from Letters to Malcolm:

Mystics (it is said) starting from the most diverse religious premises all find the same things. These things have singularly little to do with the professed doctrines of any particular religion. Therefore, mysticism is, by empirical evidence, the only real contact man has ever had with the unseen. It is therefore the one true religion. And what we call “religions” are either mere delusion or, at best, so many porches through whch an entrance into transcendent reality can be effected.

So must I throw away my copies of St. John of the Cross and Thomas Merton? If mysticism does indeed tend to universalism it is simply heresy and, however attractive to me personally, simply and completely sinful. Lewis responds with a helpful analogy. The base experience of mysticism is indeed the apophatic, the emptying, the leaving behind of a known way. In the same way, the first thing experienced by people on a ship as it sets out on its voyage is the disappearance of the land, the home port, the known coastline and village. This does not mean, however, that each vessel sets out with the same crew, passengers, cargo, destination or intent. Pirates and missionaries, slave traders and educators - they all leave in the same way but that does not mean they make the same voyage. Joseph Conrad captures something of the same idea in the opening of his Heart of Darkness as the anonymous narrator meditates on the Thames river:

It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith– the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ‘Change; captains, admirals, the dark “interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned “generals” of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

But is Lewis right? William Johnston, former professor of religious studies and director of the Institute of Oriental Religions of Sophia University, a Jesuit outfit in Tokyo, has had occasion to observe the similarities and differences of “mystic silence” as practiced by Christians and by members of other faiths. Mulling over an experiment in Assisi in 1985, where members of various faiths bowed together in silence before dispersing to various parts of the city to read the Bible or Koran or Sutras or whatever their specific devotional literature might be, Father Johnston asks, “Can we finally say, I wondered, that there is one religion with many expressions?”

Johnston pushed his researches to the point of interviewing non-Christian contemplatives about what their silence and emptiness were like. In the end, he decided that “the silence or nothingness was in fact penetrated by whatever faith the participant embraced,” and that “in the silence of Zen there is an underlying something that is different from what underlies Christianity.”

I think Lewis and Johnston are onto something. The Christian finds that even nothingness is Triune, that even his silence pulses with the interplay of Father, Son, and Spirit. As Ralph Wood, professor of theology and literature at Baylor University writes,

There is no God-beyond-God, no far-off Father who relativizes all religions, no pre-Trinitarian issuer of the terrible decrees. There is only - but also finally and fully - the God whose life becomes ours when we are baptized in the reality-creating name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

So mysticism, it seems to me, is not a way, though not a safe way, to know God. But then there’s nothing so very unique about that. Doctrine is a way to know God, but also not a safe way as the long history of heresy demonstrates. But my point here is to free myself (and anyone else who’s buying into this and cares to come along) “to remain in loving receptivity to being loved by my Beloved.” And I like Father Kelly’s language - “Only God can pray someone.” I am not a flute gasping for breath in a desperate effort to make music; I am a flute through whom breathes the master musician. I may not always like the tune he plays, but that is his affair.

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