Coming Out As a Mystic
Why It Took So Long To Admit What I Am
“The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.” — Karl Rahner
I have always had a mystic sensibility about the world. Even as a boy, I can remember through long days of climbing trees, or playing tag with my mates in the schoolyard, or making mud pies behind the house with an old rusty pan and water from the garden hose, I always knew that the mud was not only mud, that the grass at school was not only grass, and the trees I climbed were not only trees, but all of these were gateways, or shadows really, of a far richer realm. I could never quite look at that other place directly, but I could always see it was there, the way you can see the diamond sparkling of dappled sunlight through the trees on a windy day.
The car my father drove in those days had a generous shelf extending back behind the rear seat. On late night drives back to our house after church, he’d sometimes let me stretch out on that shelf and stare up at the stars through the rear window all the way home.1
I liked to think about how the stars were like grains of sand next to an ocean we couldn’t quite see, but I could very clearly feel. It was an ocean of love. And the stars were God’s thoughts about his love for us. Just like the grains of sand on any beach are God’s thoughts of love. Just like everything is.
Naturally, I assumed everyone experienced the world in this way. I didn’t think any of it was strange, or even shocking. It was simply the way the world was. It never once occurred to me that others might not see it the same way I did.
I was fairly quickly disabused of that assumption, however, both by my schoolmates, and by my church family. It only takes a few times being called a liar, or a weirdo, or a nutjob to take the lesson to heart. Terrified of being outcast, I stopped talking about the veil between the spiritual and the physical realm, or about my experiences crossing over what I now know as thin-place thresholds. I kept the tales of my life grounded in the material realm only, though this has always felt to me like I’m telling only half a story.
My life took on a lonely aspect from that point forward. I think this is a common experience for a lot of people with mystic sensibilities like mine. The world has a system to which it requires you to conform. If you don’t fit within its norms, then you have to choose whether to become an outcast, or else to lock away some portion of your vital nature where it cannot be seen. You have to lock this part of yourself away indefinitely, perhaps forever, all in service of fitting in. Most of us choose this latter option. I did.
Even now, having reclaimed my mystic heart, and welcomed him out of the shadowlands where I once banished him, and into the full light of day, I still feel these waves of jitters and nerves whenever I post things like “The Veil Is Thin” or “What Is It In Me That Keeps Running From Love?”, like someone is going to find me out, and report me to the Community Authorities, and there will be a vote, and the next thing you know my membership in the human race will be summarily revoked. And that will be it, then. I’ll be out on my bum, cast out from all human belonging, with nowhere to go, and no one to talk to, and no one to love.
I know it’s all rubbish. But I also know I’m not the only one who gets this feeling sometimes, like a jolt of lightning through our bodies that terrifies the hell out of us. We are made for belonging, and the fear of losing it is without question one of the worst fears we have. It’s right up there with the fear of death. In fact, it’s the same fear, actually; just hiding its face behind a tribal mask.
The ironic thing is, this mystic sensibility that I and so many others have, and that I have worked so hard to suppress and keep on the down low for most of my life…I honestly believe it is the very thing the whole world needs most right now. We’re all quite disenchanted with life on earth at the moment. We thought going fast would be magical. But it wasn’t really. And now we can’t slow down. We thought technology would be magical. But it’s not really. And now we can’t make it stop. We thought entertainment would be magical. And maybe it was at first, but now we know all the tricks, so all that’s left is spectacle. All of the magic, it seems, has gone out of the world.
But the universe never stopped being magical. We have just lost the ability to see it.
We need to rediscover what it is to live in communion with an enchanted universe. The mystics know how to do this better than anyone.
In recent years, I’ve noticed a surge in research into what wonder is, and understanding the science of awe. Honestly I think these are beautiful and noble endeavors to pursue. But they spring from a deeper hunger than books of this sort can satisfy, a longing for a mystical re-enchantment of the world. We ache with the longing to be reawakened to truths that live in places deeper than our analytical minds can go. We want know in our bones, and in our spirits, through means we cannot quantity or contain that the trees are not only trees, that the grass is not only grass, that the stars are not only stars, and the earth is not only the earth.
Our soul-weary world needs what the mystics have. We need it now. And we need it desperately.
WHAT THE MYSTICS KNOW
I’ll be sharing more specifics about my own mystic practice soon—including, I hope, some course offerings in the near future. But for now I’d like to share a few book recommendations that have been especially helpful in my own development and practice as a mystic.
A Course in Christian Mysticism by Thomas Merton
Love Poems From God, compiled and edited by Daniel Ladinsky
Mystics and Zen Masters by Thomas Merton
The Roots of Christian Mysticism by Olivier Clement
The Divine Milieu by Teilhard de Chardin
The Gift by Hafiz
If you have other resources you have benefitted from in your own development as a mystic, and would recommend to others, I would love to hear about them in the comments below. I’m always looking to grow as well!2
A FEW QUOTES (with accompanying images from my camera)
“The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.” — Jack Kerouac
“Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.” ― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?” — Jack Kerouac
“Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.” ― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“The silence was an intense roar.” — Jack Kerouac
“By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.” ― Teilhard de Chardin
“There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.” — Meister Eckhart
“There is nothing so much like God in all the universe as silence.” — Meister Eckhart
“The loudest noise in the world is silence.” — Thelonious Monk
“In solitude we learn slowly to live face-to-face with a Presence that asks nothing of us but presence in return. When we become present to Presence, we experience the genuine birth of the soul. If we've never lived in the realm of pure Presence, at first we don't know how to breathe there. But eventually we allow ourselves to be defined by relationship itself instead of by the good or bad—or even the holy—things we've done. And it is relationship with everything: the rocks at our feet, the air that we breathe consciously, the little animals and birds, the God who is now obvious and praiseworthy in all things. Solitude can connect us to everything else.” — Richard Rohr
“The mystic sits inside the burning.” — Rumi
“In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life, I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions. Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.” — Mary Oliver
“We are already in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.” — Richard Rohr
“People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.” — Richard Rohr
“It may be that we have lost our ability to hold a blazing coal, to move unfettered through time, to walk on water, because we have been taught that such things have to be earned; we should deserve them; we must be qualified. We are suspicious of Grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift. But a child rejoices in presents!” — Madeleine L’Engle
“At the heart of human sin and idolatry is the desire to make God smaller, more controllable, and more containable. And, as C. S. Lewis rightly observes, God being God simply has to confront and bring down our idols. God is the great iconoclast, and it is an act of sheer grace that he shatters our small, idolatrous conceptions of him and liberates us to know him more truly. We must always remember that God transcends any human notion of him and therefore any move toward him will by definition always require metanoia … the willingness to have our minds thoroughly blown, time and time again! The metanoic mind is therefore a humble mind that is willing to learn, to change, to respond to new truths and information. Only in this way will we adapt to God's self-revelation and move beyond our own limited frames.” — Alan Hirsch
You must remember, I am GenX. Our parents weren’t so hypervigilant for our safety as parents are now. I was also a latchkey kid, walked or biked to and from school completely unsupervised, and drank copious amounts of water from more garden hoses than I can count. I suppose it’s a wonder any of us survived. :)
By the way, you may have noticed in this piece I did not define with any precision at all what I believe a mystic is. I’ll dive more deeply into this idea in later writings, but for now, I think it’s enough to say I align quite well with Merton on the topic. He held that a mystic is defined as someone in an active spiritual journey focused on these three aims: 1) lessening the ego, 2) serving both God and humanity, and 3) seeking intimate union with the Divine.
This! Gah. It is it painfully burned into my heart’s memory the first (and absolutely not the last) experience of sharing what was my reality, and having a deer-in-the-headlights response from the listener. Oh, the vows of silence I took, the locking away, the refusing to step through the veil. And not just in response to human rejection, but because there is no governor to control which side of the supernatural you are privy to experience at any given time.
All these years later I fear I have forgotten the language of that place, forgotten its smells and sounds, although I have found shadows of it in each of my children; and now I am desperately teaching them to be still, to allow awe to move them, to deeply wonder, and to not need the mystery explained away.
There was a moment of repentance, where I asked the Keeper of the lock to reopen the door to that Other Place. But I am still wary of speaking too freely of what I see and hear. I am rusty, to put it lightly. My heart feels hard and crusty with disappointment and disillusionment at the world I traded His for. And that coldness keeps me from finding Him in everything. But there is nothing else worth seeking. I have been ruined for His beauty alone.
I love the poem, “We Need To Teach The Children The Old Words,” by Caroline Mellor. It reminds me of the way I see the world, if I would just lift my eyes up and LOOK.
Thank you for being brave. It is terrifying to risk being sent away. But I suppose if you were sent away, you find your brothers and sisters had been sent off to the same, lonely place, and I suppose none of us would be very lonely in the end.
I too am afraid of using the title. It seems to set me apart, so I hide it. One thing I’ve noticed is that I just have a sense for spiritual ideas, and when I read say, Rohr, I’m confirmed ..”I knew It!”
Thanks for this post and courage!