I want to chat with you this October about mysticism, a juicy topic that feels particularly relevant at this time of year when the veil is thin. I figure if academic and researcher Brené Brown can describe herself on NPR as a “mystical Catholic,” it’s a topic ripe for our exploration. (If anyone has my particular level of interest in this, Brown’s conversion here with one of my favorite Jesuits, Father James Martin, is fascinating!)
I’ll start with a story. After having a more medicalized birth with my first daughter in 2010, I decided with my second daughter I was going to have an incredible unmedicated VBAC. I was working as a lawyer in disability rights at the time but I read all the Ina May, did all the yoga and fetal positioning exercises, and watched an ecstatic birth VHS tape. When I was in the throes of active labor, I said to my husband and midwife, “I don’t know if lawyers can have ecstatic births.” (haha).
Now as I look back, it indeed may have been easier to have an ecstatic birth if I’d been living at The Farm in Tennessee instead of working at an office. But my lesson is that I had been working so hard toward an outcome that it was very hard for me to allow myself to let go – and the mystic always needs both.
Cultivating Mysticism – Two Parts
Cultivating mysticism often looks like A) inviting God in through both intentional acts and paying careful attention. For me this includes attending church services, prayer, engaging in spiritual practices, reading religious and spiritual texts, remembering and acting like I’m living in a body through intentional movement, and more. There’s also paying attention to the pull of the Divine in my life and paying attention to my intuition and to synchronicities. I need to be noticing, again and again.
And then there is the making space for B), which is all that is not in my control. Part A) is hard but this is harder. This is the part where I might get to pray to a God of my own understanding but it doesn’t mean this God is going to hate the same people I hate and in fact feeling that way means I’m definitely off track. This is the messy, uncertain, and never-finished part. Here I don’t get to be right about who is bad. Here I relate to the Jesus who is a Man of sorrrows, despised and rejected and acquainted with grief. Here I take in the painful things around me and instead of blaming and shaming and feeling righteous I stay soft with the world and show my strength and courage by being big enough to be small.
Although it’s core to my theology that “Bidden or not, God is present,” I am convinced that living in both the shiny good student of part A) and in the ick of part B), helps me see, hear, and feel God more. Sociologist Parker Palmer calls it living in the “tragic gap” – acknowledging that we are living inside of forces we cannot control (that’s part B) and yet also living like our job is to keep putting one foot after another so the gap between what is and what could and should be gets smaller and smaller (that’s part A).
The reason that I need part B) is that when I think everything and everyone is in my control and up to me, I don’t need God (or anyone else). Author and teacher Mirabi Starr describes mysticism as direct proximity to the sacred so that individual identity softens or dissolves. When I think I am in charge, my individual identity is not soft and dissolvable. It is strong and ready to fight to maintain its position of being correct and good and in charge forever. You can live your life like that – not needing God or anyone else – but what a bummer to miss out. If I miss that, I’m missing the point. Part A) is hard, part B) is harder, but the hardest thing is missing it all.
In the bigger picture, it’s not just that we personally miss out. We all have had enough terrible, unwanted things happen to us or people we love that we know it’s an illusion that we are in charge. Similarly, we’ve done enough stupid or imperfect things to know we are not always good or always right. This doesn’t mean that my theology is that God is always in charge; I cannot speak to that. I do know that when humans are allowed to act like they are perfectly in charge and on the infallibly good and right side, the conditions are ripe for evil to be perpetrated.
So What
As a social scientist who dared to use the word mystical, Brené gave me the cultural permission to write this to you without feeling like I’m going to scare you away. But the real reason I wanted to talk about this is that lately I have been feeling the strongest mystical pull of my life. I am being drawn to something more ancient and timeless, something that will outlast our current moment and that will also sustain me through it. Cultivating the attitude of a mystic – doing the work and then releasing it, taking steps forward in the dark, being grounded in both what I create and its inherent impermanence – is bringing me closer to God and is helping me grow stronger in this time.
Do you have any mystical experiences you want to share? I’ve had a couple classic experiences but I aspire to live in a quasi-mystical state – what about you? Have you ever considered having MysticalAF embroidered on an LL Bean Boat and Tote? (I was tempted but my Boat and Tote says “Nightmoves” and yep it’s amazing). If you don’t want to email me about mysticism, FINE :), but email me what your 10 letter Boat and Tote monogram is/would be. You have to use all 10 letters. Tell me, tell me, tell me!
