Philippians 3:4b-14 ; John 12:`1-11
March 21, 2010: Fifth Sunday of Lent
During Lent this year, we have been talking about different ways we can draw closer to God, depending on what spiritual “type” we might be. We are not all the same, and so how we come to know God or understand God will look different for each of us. Some are head types, learning about God through study and reflection. Some are heart types, who find God in life’s experiences and relationships. Some find God on the journey, spiritual pilgrims on a sacred path. Others find God when they serve the least among us. Today, we find that some come to know God through mystical encounters.
“Mystic” is not a word that makes it into our every day speech that often. Certainly not like “head”, “heart”, or “servant”. Even “pilgrim” finds more familiarity in our conversations. We do have Thanksgiving, after all. “Mystic” seems more distant as a concept and more formal in nature. When speaking of some of the great mystics of the middle ages, the word is almost a title, like priest or monk. Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Gregory the Great, St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, to name a few. These men and women were mystics in the formal sense of the word. They had extraordinary experiences that they then wrote about, leaving behind volumes of beautiful prose describing their encounters with God.
The goal of their lives was union with God. And union is not a word these people took lightly. It was ultimate intimacy. When you read some of their accounts, you find almost uncomfortable or embarrassing language describing their connection with God because it’s so intimate. Julian of Norwich, a 14th century mystic, writes: “And our Lord showed Himself to the soul…saying sweetly: “My darling I am glad thou art come to me: in all thy woe I have ever been with thee; and now seest thou my loving and we be oned in bliss.” “Oned in bliss.” It’s the language of courtship and marriage.
Mystics spent much of their lives in contemplation waiting for God to draw them into this union. Quiet, prayer, meditation, solitude. These are a part of a mystic’s life – often a large part when we are talking about the middle ages. Many were monks or nuns. Many spent years in solitude only to emerge after having one or more mystical experiences.
The other thing mystics share in common is that they all affirm the absolute mystery of God. It is even a little strange to talk about how a mystic best comes to “know” God. One does not ever know God. One is united with God and takes on, for a period of time, the nature of God. In fact, all mystics, in writing about their experiences, struggle to find the right words for God and this union. Ultimately words fail, because ultimately mysteries cannot be described with mere language.
Paul’s letters are filled with mystical language. We aren’t really trained to listen for it, because we think of Paul as being so dogmatic. But in this passage at least, his language is anything but…he’s trying to describe to people what he has experienced since his conversion on the road to Damascus, and he tries all sorts of images, words, and phrases. And they are poetic, imaginative and certainly mystical. He talks about being found in Christ, becoming like him, sharing his sufferings. The word translated “sharing” when Paul speaks of sharing sufferings is koinonia. Koinonia is incredibly evocative. It means fellowship, but it can also mean intercourse. It is extremely intimate. Obviously Paul is not talking about literally having intercourse. He is trying with words to describe something – a union or connection – that cannot be described with words alone. Paul had a mystical connection to God through Christ.
The scene with Mary and Jesus is equally as intimate; equally as uncomfortable for those gathered that day as it is for us to hear Paul use such intimate language about Christ. This is a mystical moment between Mary and the divine. In symbolically preparing Jesus for his burial, she is prefiguring his transformation from Jesus to Christ, and announcing her intention to join him in that transformation. Of all the people there – including Lazarus, who Jesus had just raised from the dead – Mary is the only one operating on this higher, mystical plane. She understands something the others do not…that this is the divine, and to be in relationship with Jesus is to be united with the divine. And that relationship, for her, is seen in intimate terms and found through touch and smell, passion and extravagance.
Of course, looking at the actual mystics of the bible and the middle ages only helps us understand this spirituality type a little bit today. Most of us will not have such experiences or spend our lives like these men and women did. Yet I still think there are people who can be described as mystic types in our day and age, even likely there are mystics among us here. “Mystic” needs to be looked at from within our own context. The themes will be the same – quiet, meditation, prayer, time “away” – but the way that looks in our daily lives will differ greatly.
We find some help from people I think are “modern day mystics.” I think of people like Thomas Merton, and Kathleen Norris. Marianne Williamson and Frederick Buechner. It’s true that some of these people spent some time in monasteries, but they also worked, were married, had children, and faced the daily joys and stresses we all do. What makes them mystics is not that they retreated from society and life full time, but that they talk in terms of mystery and union with God. They speak of experiences where the Holy Spirit moved them or reached out to them, even as they struggle to find the right words to describe it.
One of these modern mystics is a woman named Carter Heyward. I first “met” her while she was clearly in her “head” spirituality time of life. I read her dissertation, and in her thinking I found new understandings and theologies that helped me connect to God. Had I not read her most recent book, “Flying Changes”, I would have counted her as a solid “head-type” spiritual person. But, she started riding horses. For years and years, she read, wrote, taught, rethought, and wrote some more about God. All of which she still does. But, at one point – fairly late in her life – she started riding horses. And now, “mystic” is really the only word that describes her spirituality.
For her, the retreat from the world and the meditation and the prayer all happen through her relationship with horses. And instead of living in a monastery, where connection to God happens during the mundane, daily routine of prayer, quiet, work, worship and sleep, she goes to the stables. Heyward writes, “a mystic is, at heart, a girl who prays while mucking out a stall, the boy who meets God in the body of a horse, the woman who experiences time in slow motion while riding, the man who listens to horses.”
For Heyward, the divine is not only “out there” somewhere. The divine is present in all of creation – in you and me, in horses and the wind…everywhere. Mystical unions with anything in creation are unions with the divine. “Once in a while,” she writes, “the horse and the rider will seem to merge: to become the same living, breathing, moving organism. For the human rider, it’s an experience of sheer grace, a momentary immersion in the mystical realm of God.” To become the same, living, breathing moving organism. This is the kind of intimate union of which the old mystics speak. This is the kind of union Paul shares with Christ.
The key to mysticism for Heyward is what happens to time when she is riding and tending to the horses. She steps outside of the pace of the world into a “slow” time – a meditative time; a relational time with one of God’s mystical creatures. Obviously, it doesn’t have to be horses. It could be dogs or spiders, or music or cooking, or running or painting. Different people have different ways of slowing down. But, as Heyward says, “we must learn to wait quietly and patiently if we are to be loved by others.” And that includes God. We must learn to wait quietly and patiently if we are to be loved by God. Not because God will only love us if we are quiet, but because – as with any living creature – we won’t know that love until we stop long enough to know what that love feels like, what that love does to us and evokes in us.
Mystics draw close to God by slowing down and connecting to the divine through some transcendent experience. And so, the practices that make sense for mystic types are ones that cause them to slow down. Principally and most commonly that happens in prayer, meditation and retreat. And mystics know you do these things regularly, often, without fail, even when it’s hard or when it doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything at all. Julian of Norwich wrote that God told her to, “Pray inwardly, even though you think it is not worthwhile; even though you don’t feel, even though you don’t see; pray, even though you think you can’t. For in dryness and in barrenness, in sickness and in feebleness, then is prayer well.”
For mystics, prayer is not only saying words or asking God for things. It’s stepping out of time and space and trying to harmonize your soul with God’s. It’s trying to conform your breath to God’s breath. To synch up your heart beat with God’s. One mystic writes, “Prayer unites the soul to God, for although the soul may always be like God in nature and substance, it is often unlike God in condition, through human sin. Prayer makes the soul like God.”
Another spiritual practice for the mystic type is patience. As Carter Heyward writes, “there is nothing more important to human, creaturely and divine life than patience. Patience is a way of experiencing the movement of time. It’s a way of experiencing time as a passage more deeply into life itself and of experiencing life more fully as an opportunity to know and love ourselves, others and God, all in relation to one another. The greater our patience, the more connected with are with one another.” And again, Heyward finds this patience through riding horses. So mystic types should ride, or paint, or dance, or spend time with spiders watching them weave their webs. Anything that draws you into the practice of patience has the potential to draw you into the mystical knowing of the divine.
Even those of us who aren’t mystic types are invited by the church into mystical practices every now and then. The sacraments of baptism and communion are meant to take us out of ordinary time and space and connect us to language and images that point us beyond what we know logically and connect us to the holy and divine. Our sacraments are of the mystical realm. And today, we baptize a baby. Like Mary’s hair on Jesus’ feet, the water on the baby’s head is a lavish act of love and grace.
In baptism, we say that we die to sin and become alive in Christ. We go under the water with Jesus and emerge a new person. Not literally, obviously. But we proclaim that we can unite with Christ – just as Paul talks about. That Christ’s nature is ours, God’s nature is ours. We clothe ourselves in Christ. Julian of Norwich writes, “God is our clothing; the love which wraps and enfolds us.” That is what baptism is. The uniting of a baby to the very nature of Christ, reminding us all that we are in Christ – like Christ. Our former selves are gone and a new nature is affirmed.
Next week is Palm Sunday. Now is the time we should start to get a little nervous on our journey with Jesus during Lent. We are moving closer to the cross, and we remember where the cross is and what happens when we get there. You may have been walking steadily along with Jesus until now, but don’t be surprised if the urge to distance yourself from Jesus begins to grow the closer we get to Jerusalem. It is in those moments when we feel like distancing ourselves from Jesus, or from a God who demands too much of us, that mystics persist, irrationally and aggressively trying to “tie” themselves to God even as God walks into pain, suffering and death on the cross. Mystics are not fainthearted. Their goal – their prayer – is that God’s soul becomes theirs. And they know the whole story- they know what they are asking. But they trust that union with God is what the life of faith is all about. May God’s soul become ours. May we be clothed in Christ – may God’s love wrap and enfold us. Amen.
