“THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN-MYSTICISM” 2 Kings 2:1-12a; 2Cor. 3:12-4:2 Transfiguration Mark 9:2-9 Feb. 13,1994
Our second word of the Magnificent Seven...and remember these are words which were not “in the blessing business” when I started my ministry 35 years ago, but are now...is mysticism...mystic...mystery. It is a word which still sounds somewhat foreign to our ears, yet is coming out of the closet and becoming more in focus as an important part of the life of faith. However else we might try define what it means, let us begin by saying simply it means the experience of God which is deeper then thoughts and words and defies explanation. Mysticism has reference “to the non-rational experience-side of faith.” For the mystic, a person can know something about God by experience...“mystical theology is experience of God.” (Luther and the Mystics, Hoffman, pp.14,15)
It is something which happens which we cannot define, explain, control or capture which goes deep and stirs the soul within with a love which will not let us go and will not let us down and will not let us off, ever.
Mysticism has always been a part of the life of faith; it just hasn’t been given prominence in our western world for some time, because we worship the mind, logic, understanding and what we know about God we want to be able to put down in doctrines and creeds. So much so, that even a prominent Protestant theologian of our century, Reinhold Niebuhr called mysticism a “heresy.” Indeed, there has been an ambivalence toward mysticism in this century which has just started to wain, as we become more aware of right-brain activity and recognize that all that is to be said and known is not of the left-brain, known only by our heads without our hearts and souls being in on the knowing. Not that this is anything new, even though it might be new to us; for as Paul said to Timothy a long time ago;
“Without any doubt, the mystery of our religion is great:
He was revealed in flesh,
vindicated in spirit, seen by angles,
proclaimed among Gentiles,
believed in throughout the world,
taken up in glory.” I Tim 3:16
And if we think we can capture all there is to this Jesus and to God’s love with our minds, our rational being, our left-brains, then we are of all people the most to be pitied, for then we will be out of touch with who we are as well as who our God is.
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The word mysticism comes from the Greek mystikos, which has two meanings: one, to “shut one’s senses” and the other to “enter the mysteries”. Over the centuries, the first meaning became the distorted understanding of mysticism which led to all sorts of strange and non-human ways of being which denied the beauty of the created world and of our human bodies and twisted the word into distorted ways of living and being. It became the mortification of the flesh by which anything human was denied and the few who sought to be mystics lived in ways which put down anything which was beautiful or of this world. The stories which came out of this distorted view of mysticism sound strange and weird to our ears and hardly something we want to be a part of our life of faith, like the nun who was so holy that “she never allowed herself to look at or touch any part of her person, even such as decency does not require us to veil.” Or Bishop St. Hugh, who, “though compelled by his pastoral charge to deal with women,...had never for forty years looked one in the face.” And again, St. Laurence Justinian who, “even when he might blamelessly have used his eyes, abstained from contemplating the beauty of the country, and the foliage of the trees which grew in his private garden.” (Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, pp.38,39)
Such a view of asceticism and mysticism led to the denial of the mystical in its true meaning, that of entering the mysteries and being open to wonder, imagination, awe and beauty. That which is more right-brain then left-brain, more given to experience then to explain without which we are out of touch with our deepest selves and even dead while we live. For as Albert Einstein said,
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Who ever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead."
And we can add all true religion too...for the mystical is part and partial of all religions, and certainly is at the center of our Christian faith.
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It is to this that Buechner speaks when he says,
“At its heart, I think, religion is mystical...Religions start, as Frost said poems do, with a lump in the throat, to put it mildly, or with the bush going up in flames, the rain of flowers, the dove coming down out of the sky.” Buechner, Listening To Your Life, p273
And Abraham Heschel, a renowned Jewish theologian, who defines mysticism as “radical amazement.” The mystic in us is the one moved to radical amazement by the awe of things. “Humans exist for awe’s sake - to be radically amazed and to draw radical amazement from one another. That is our task. It is a mystical task, a task that demands we overcome the temptation to take our existence for granted. Awe is the opposite of ‘taking for granted.’ If awe precedes faith, then there is no faith without it.” (Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, p.51)
Mysticism is the WOW of life when confronted with all it’s amazing brilliance, without which we cannot know who we are or what we are all about. Listen also to these words written by someone who knows what mysticism is all about and what it’s absence does to us:
"A civilization that denies the mystic is no civilization at all. It offers no hope and no adventure, no challenge worthy of sacrifice and joy to its youth or its artists. It offers no festivity, no sabbath, no living ritual to its people. And no deep healing. Such a culture actually promotes negative addictions: drugs, crime, alcohol, consumerism, militarism. It encourages us to seek outside stimulants to provide meaning for life and defense from enemies because it is so woefully out of touch with the power inside. It relegates the poor to still greater poverty and the comfortable to an infinite deluge of luxury items, and those in the middle to resentment toward both poor and rich. For such a culture knows nothing and teaches nothing about authentic empowerment. Such a culture will trivialize the deepest riches of the human spirit and will fail to employ persons in the good work that art and creativity are all about."
(Alice Miller in “The Coming of the Cosmic Christ”, pp.43,44)
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The transfiguration was for Jesus, as well as Peter, James and John a mystical experience. As was Jesus baptism...and the Garden of Gethsemane...and the many times Jesus went off alone to pray. These were moments to enter the mystery and be swallowed up by it; moments to feel the energy of God’s love surround him and remind him who we was and why he was and what it was all about. And there is no way to fully capture such experiences with words. Perhaps that is why Jesus told the three disciples who were with him to tell no one about what they had seen and experienced until later. The words would only spoil the experience and would not be able to transmit it to the others. Only after they had their experience with the risen Christ, would they be able to understand - and then as if through a glass dimly - what had really happened on that Mount of Transfiguration.
Sometimes we try put into words and logical systematic creeds what it is we believe and where as this is good and necessary and helpful...it is not all there is to say about a God who, as Paul says, is beyond human understanding. Of whom it finally has to be said, no matter how much we think we know about God...
“O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.
How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable
his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?
Or who has given a gift to him,
to receive a gift in return?
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be glory forever. Amen. Rom.11:33-36
Not all mysteries are to be solved; some are to be preserved!
The mystics remind us to not bottle God up and sell God in our neat formula’s which sound so good and feel so terrible; and they remind us to leave room for mystery in all that we say we believe, not trying to give answers to all the dilemmas of life, but living rather with a God who holds us in the palm of his hand and trusting, as William Sloane Coffin put it “in that love that never ends and that dazzling grace which always is.” Watch out for anyone who tries to tell you they have the answers to the mystery of God and try to give you answers rather then live with mystery. For to live with God is to live with mystery and to be swallowed up by mystery. 5
The mystic lies deep in every person, and to awaken the mystic in each of us we need to open ourselves to the mysteries all around us and in us and to the mysteries of God’s presence in our world and God’s Word alive in our lives. Again let me say, we do not need to study the Bible as much as we need to mediate on it; we do not need to look to it for answers as much as we need to look to it for empowerment; and we do not need to figure it our as much as we need to let it get under our skin and figure us out and tell us who we are and what we are all about, and what God is all about in our world and wants us to be all about too...for, as Dr. Rogness has said, “The Scriptures are the place where the Holy Spirit roams.” looking for a place in our hearts and lives. And that’s a great mystery!
And we can be sure of one thing when we do this, when we enter the mystery, compassion will be at the center of our lives and nothing will take priority over it. And this means justice will also be central, for compassion means that I live with a “keen awareness of the interdependence of all living things which are all part of one another and involved in one another.” (Thomas Merton, in Fox,p.50)
No one and no thing is unimportant or insignificant.
Lawrence Leshan tells the old story about a monk who prayed for a long time to have a visitation from the mystical world of spirits and angles...I believe it was the Virgin Mary he wanted to visit him. He prayed long and hard and finally one day she came. Just as they were about to start their visit, the bell rang signaling that it was time to feed the beggars at the gate, and it was his day to do this task. With great reluctance he left his state of trance and went to feed the poor, returning as fast as he could. When he got back, she was still there, waiting for him; which delighted him to no end.
Then she said told him, “If thou had stayed I must have fled.”
Which is to say that the end result of mysticism is to be more tuned in to what it is I can do in the here and now, in a most human and real way, to bring the Kingdom of God from heaven to earth, so that others too might share in its glory. Mysticism, which we have too little off, is not meant to make us less human but more human; not less in touch with reality but more in touch with reality and more ready to be
“servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.” I Cor. 4:1
in the real world in which we live.
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Everyone is a mystic...it is a part of our created being; and it is the task of all true religion to help us “enter the mystery” and be given, deep in our being,
“the power to comprehend,(and this means with the heart as well as the head) with all the saints,
what is the breath and length and height and depth,
and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,
so that (our world) may be filled with all the fulness of God.”
Eph. 3:18,19
Amen!
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