My love letter to fellow mystics
The house on 42 Grove Ave
In college, I started hanging out with what some might call the “wrong crowd.” You know the type. Waking up at 5:00am to start the liturgy of the hours, wrapping up the night with a vespers service. I lived in a house with seven other young men. An eclectic group to say the least. All ragamuffin, trouble making, thorn-in-the-side types. Disillusioned yet strangely drawn to ritual. Social justice warriors who also found something cool about the monastic life. It had to do with the withdraw element. A clear “no” to society as is, but a delightful “yes” to intentional communities of resistance.
This was exactly the “wrong crowd” I had been warned about prior to leaving for college. I mean, I don’t think anyone was too worried about Mark Pratt-Russum doing keg stands in a frat house. That was never really my scene, but I always had a draw to outsiders, I guess. Those fringe, outsiders, weirdos…I was pulled in by their otherness. I think some people knew that about me, namely those who raised me in the faith. The hallway they showed me to walk down had very clear walls, “just keep on walking down there young man, and at the end is the rich reward of Heaven.” I think they knew I would want to peek over the walls. They were right. I peeked as soon as I knew they weren’t watching.
And what I found was a way of being a person of faith that was more interesting, wild, and wonderfully undefined. Was it more uncertain? Yep. And guess what, even uncertainty became comfortable too.
I didn’t always feel so proud or comfortable about the way I am. It seemed like something was wrong. I started to feel less concerned when I started to find more people like me, including all of you in this community. I also began to embrace the pull of otherness when I was able to see the joy and excitement I felt as good, and gosh darnit maybe even what God intended.
I recently discovered the work of Dorothee Soelle a german liberation theologian who died in 2003. One of her books, called The Silent Cry accompanied me camping this last week. I started reading her book while sitting in the shadow of Klickitat Mountain, otherwise known as Mt. Adams. Right at the beginning of the book she says this, “All living religion represents a unity of three elements that…we may call the institutional, the intellectual, and the mystical.”
Light bulbs folks. Light bulbs went off in my head, and I had to sit the book down and stare at a mountain for a long long time. Because all of a sudden a whole bunch of worry/shame/guilt about my “otherness” within Christianity was put into a helpful context. I was born a mystic, but was raised in an institutional church. They didn’t know what to do with me, and I didn’t really know another thing existed. All of this fussing and fighting could have been minimized had I had this revelation sooner.
God had their way of helping me find my people. That rag tag group of gnarly college students, waking up to pray at 5:00am sounds awfully institutional, but it never felt that way. It felt like we were on to something. God was speaking to us within the traditions and rituals of the ancient Church, and we were dreaming up some new stuff. We began to find our new heroes. Folks like Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Wendell Berry. All folks steeped in their religious traditions, but who had that mystic bend to them. In their lives we saw our own.
Mysticism defined is “cognitio Dei experimentalis or the knowledge of God through and from experience. Your Quaker ears should be tingling right now. We gather this morning in the legacy of this very definition. Perhaps the most famous Quaker quote is from George Fox who said “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition, and this I knew experimentally.”
Experimental knowing is scary knowing for folks who find comfort in the institutional and intellectual elements of a faith tradition. Experimentation is unpredictable and risky. Experimenters usually don’t dress the same as others do. They sometimes hang out in the desert, they grow their hair long, and eat locusts and wild honey.
But today I am feeling all sorts of gratitude for the mystical element that is part of the trinity of the Church, and I’m doing my best not to feel too judgmental or cynical about the intellectual and institutional parts of the family because even as I look at my screen this morning I see folks who I know find comfort in those elements.
I do think it is hard for any institution to know how to organize itself when it has, at its core, a deep appreciation and identity within mystical experience, like Quakerism. Dorothee Soelle says, “It is a complex relationship that exists between religion and mysticism, between the hierarchical forms of organized religion and ecstatic individuals or visionary groups setting out on their own.” Certainly early Quakers knew what this “complex relationship” meant for them. It often meant prison time and the gallows.
And I think Jesus himself knew all about this, as he consistently found himself at odds with the temple aristocracy of Jerusalem. And yet Jesus seemed capable of sustaining his ministry, mostly as someone who was hearing directly from God, often in mystical ways for several years before the aristocracy, or powers came down on him.
Here I want to revisit that image I mentioned earlier, of the ideal path I was put on as a young Christian, to walk down the hallway with defined walls. The fear of looking over the wall was that I could topple over and fall into nothingness. Phrases like “slippery slope” were used to worn about the impossibility of fighting momentum once one has already tipped over the edge. But what my experience into disillusionment, aka the peeking over the wall felt like was not a plunge, but like a space walk.
It feels now like a loving tethering to some kind of central point. I think that is why, when me and my housemates were waking to pray at 5:00am, it felt like a gentle reconnection with a center, that wasn’t about “reigning us in.” Soelle says, “mystics have very rarely separated themselves from existing historical religions; without externally changing a single letter, they understood the meaning of the religions more deeply.”
I realized I needed to start writing this very message after I started filling out a reference form for someone in our community who is seeking out an artist residency. When I was asked if I would recommend this person to go and engage in their artistic work for an entire month in a beautiful place I said this,
“When I think about the world, all of its trouble, and strife, I worry it is all going to fall apart. You know what gives me comfort? I think about the monks at the abbey, the buddhists at the monastery, the nuns at the convent. I think about the artists in their studios, writers at their desks. There are people who are holding this world, sometimes so subtly, gently in prayer, in intention. There are artists who are interpreting, who are taking the raw material of suffering and finding meaning in it.”
Each of us who find more of our home in different elements of our faith tradition, whether that be in the intellectual, institutional or mystical are bringing something needed for our survival and witness in the world. I think sometimes we can worry about the mystics, and their unruliness, or even what feels like their ineffectiveness. But for us who call ourselves Quaker, we are fundamentally engaging in mystical work, of knowing via experimentation about what God is asking of us. We might find those answers in tradition, but we often find them by peeking over the edge.
I honestly find comfort in knowing that among us, here in the human population, but also in the ranks of the faithful, we have the artists, poets, mystics, and wild-eyed theologians who are processing suffering, pain, uncertainty, fear, anger, and injustice with the promise of God speaking through our life experience in new ways. That, phew, that gives me goosebumps to think about. And it is not nothing. It is way more than nothing. There is hope in that for me.
Some queries:
Mystics can find it hard to be in institutions, knowing this, how might it help us understand how to organize ourselves?
When you think about your spiritual journey, when are times that you found yourself in new territory? What did you learn about yourself, or about God in these experimental and new places? What was it like for you to be in that experience while also wrestling with tradition, or the confines of “this is how it is supposed to be done?”