The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality

by Carl McColman

  Contemplation is a gift, but it's by no means a passive one. It is a gift that requires your cooperation and participation in order for the alchemy to work. Every day, you choose to turn the water into wine by choosing to acknowledge that everything you have is a gift. And you choose to keep your eyes and ears open for glimpses and whispers of the giver. In making that choice, you create the space for the Spirit to make a difference in your life which, in turn, changes everything.

  ALL You NEED Is LOVE

  A Christian rock singer named Larry Norman once made fun of the Beatles for singing "All you need is love," and then breaking up shortly thereafter. There's a cautionary tale here: Even if you know that all you need is love, you have to remind yourself of this continually, for, if you don't, it's far too easy to slip into less-than-loving choices and actions.

  There's good news, however. Yes, it's true: all you need is love. And every time you choose love, every time you lay down your resistance to God's love, you turn water into wine. Accepting love, and choosing love, and making choices both large and small that, to the best of your knowledge, are in alignment with the love of God and the love of your neighbors, is the heart of the heavenly life. Orienting yourself to love will not magically solve your problems or instantly set you free from your addictions or your imprisonment (real or metaphorical). However, choosing love will, sooner or later, inspire you and impel you to begin changing the water of your ordinary, messy life to the wine of a life radiant with the fruit of the Spirit.

  Love is like that. Even while it demands that you take responsibility for your actions, it also creates space in your life space where light can shine, where hope can emerge, and where a sense of God's joyous and peaceful and playful presence can be felt if you pay attention. And every time you choose love, that spaciousness within you grows a little bigger. Little by little, the mystery of divine love will transform your life, even while you are busy chopping wood and carrying water and turning water into wine this is the promise of the contemplative life.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Heart of the Mystery

  Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

  PSALM 37:4

  To comprehend and understand God as he is in himself, above and beyond all likenesses, is to be God with God... Contemplative persons will go out in accordance with the mode of their contemplation, above and beyond reason and distinction and their own created being. Through an eternal act of gazing accomplished by means of the inborn light, they are transformed and become one with that same light with which they see and which they see... the contemplative life is a heavenly life.

  JOHN RUUSBROEC44

  Christian mysticism is a path without a destination, for the point behind the journey is not to reach a goal, but rather to be reached by God.

  The only reason to embrace the mystical life is to foster intimacy with God, the Ultimate Mystery. Mysticism does not dangle benchmarks or objectives in front of you, like celestial carrots for which you must continually strive.The purpose of contemplation is only to be available for God and to open yourself up to his elusive presence. So the contemplative life is not about becoming someone different from who you are, but rather about being who you really are to begin with.

  Within contemplative spirituality exists a tension between being and becoming. In a very real sense, mysticism has no incremental objectives or measurable goals, nothing to strive for, since God is always present and already loves you regardless of what you do or don't do to cultivate or accept that love. And yet, you can only experience contemplation in the context of your human life, played out in a universe that is continually changing, evolving, expanding, and mutating. There is, therefore, an aspect of change and hopefully, growth and development to the ongoing process of the mystical life. The Triune God may be, in the words of The Book of Common Prayer, an "eternal changelessness," and yet it seems that, built into the very structure of the Ultimate Mystery, is the ever-renewing, alwaysblossoming flower of continual dynamic activity in other words, at the heart of eternal being is ever-evolving becoming.

  Creation, it seems, is the key. The Holy Trinity may be changeless, but is hardly static. The Source of love may have at its center an immovable serenity, yet love is hardly unmoving or unyielding. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God first appears in the act of creation, separating wind from water and giving form to chaos, working in a mythic six-day timeline to bring all of the world and the cosmos as we know it into being. And anyone familiar with scientific theories like evolution, mutation, and the continual expansion of the universe can see that God has been at it ever since.

  The contemplative life opens up the door to two simultaneous, and yet clearly paradoxical, possibilities: a state of being, and a state of becoming. In the state of being, you are always, already, one with God, immersed in his presence. You do not earn this, you do not create it, you do not make it more real by dint of effort or stretch of mind. It simply is; it always has been, and always will be. But the words we use to describe this state are words that imply a process of change (in other words, becoming) sanctification, deification, divinization, theosis. As these process-words imply, you are called to a state of continual change, growth, and development through creativity, expression, and the work of love made visible. Yet, this state of becoming can be described in a way that returns us to the eternality of being: it is the state of "being creative."

  Like everything about the contemplative life, the best approach for reconciling the being-becoming paradox is simply to try to live it, without necessarily figuring it out in a rational or logical way. Becoming united with God, and being eternally in God's presence, becoming more creative, and yet relaxing into our always-already deified being, this process-state is the summit to which holiness, meditation, contemplation, and simply living out the Christian life as best you can, leads.

  THE ARTISTRY OF MYSTICISM

  Evelyn Underhill asserted that artists are those who, among all people, come closest to being natural mystics. And, indeed, many mystics throughout history were great artists. For example, Augustine, Aquinas, and Simone Weil were world-class philosophers, while George Herbert, John Donne, and John of the Cross were great poets. And many of the world's creative geniuses who achieved renown for their artistic work were almost certainly mystics as well. Consider musicians like Johann Sebastian Bach and Ralph Vaughan Williams; artists like Botticelli and Raphael; writers and poets like Dante, T. S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis; and the enigmatic artist/ poet William Blake. If the luminous, spiritual beauty of the music, art, and literature these figures gave us is any indication, I, for one, would include them in the community of great mystics. Moreover, the splendor and beauty of the Christian mysteries have, over the ages, inspired countless lesser-known artists and contemplatives who combined elements of mysticism and creativity in their lives, without achieving lasting fame or renown.

  The implication of this connection between art and spirituality is fairly clear: creativity supports contemplation and vice versa. If you have any yearning to live a contemplative life, sooner or later you may find God seeking to manifest in you through some form of creative expression. To the extent that contemplation opens us up to participation in the divine nature, one way to support this realization of the divine mystery is to develop your own capacity to create. Exploring some form of authentic, soulful creativity can be an important part of your overall commitment to ever-deepening intimacy with God.

  I'm not suggesting that in order to be a mystic you have to become an artist, writer, or musician. Granted, creative expression will often involve the performing arts like music, dance, or theater; or the visual arts like drawing, painting, sculpture, or computer-generated imagery; or literary arts such as poetry, fiction, and blogging. But your unique call may be to develop some other form of talent: in domestic arts like cooking, interior design, or scrapbooking; in crafts like carpentry or wood turning; or in mechanical or technical skills. Your creativity might fin
d expression through business, or a healing profession, or in landscaping. The key to the spirituality of creation lies not so much in artistry-as-livelihood, but in the pure pursuit of creativity for its own sake. When you open yourself up to the delight that comes from creating for the sake of creating and no other purpose, you more readily participate in God's own delight.

  In fostering your creative expression, you need not push yourself to be the very best; this is not about making sure you are as good as Michelangelo or Mozart. Nor it is necessarily about making a profit out of your creativity. Indeed, for contemplation and creativity to enhance one another, I recommend that you maintain a spirit of playful disregard for the normal demands of ambition. If you make your living doing one type of creative work, consider taking on an entirely different creative activity, with no goal other than having fun and enjoying the process. Offer up your creative efforts no matter how good or amateurish they may be to the love and delight of God.

  Your creative play does not have to be "religious" or "spiritual" in nature. A poem or painting or some other work need not be concerned with the Crucifixion in order for its artistry to be anchored in contemplation. If you keep your work honest and grounded, it will not contradict the hope and love that comes from the heart of God even if these themes are not explicit in your work.

  The first book of the Bible, Genesis, not only reveals that creativity is essential to God, it also describes the fundamental link between creativity and contemplation. In the initial creation story, God manifests everything the entire cosmos, the solar system, the earth, the ecosystems within the biosphere, eventually even the plants and animals and humankind itself over the course of six "days." On the seventh day, God rested. In his rest, he contemplated the fruits of his own creativity. Thus, creative effort and contemplative rest naturally complement one another. In fact, they complete each other. A work of art is not complete until the artist stands back from it, gazes upon it, and hopefully smiles in approval just as God "saw that it was good."

  Likewise, contemplation is not "completed" until you rise from your repose, and, nourished and refreshed by the silence and the resting in God's presence, are capable of responding to the universal call to bring new creativity and healing, hope, and love to the world. Any contemplative who feels that to endlessly gaze on the beauty of God is the ultimate end of the mystical life is simply unfamiliar with the wisdom of the Bible and of the Christian mystical tradition. Even those who retreated into desert solitude or monastic community found that a life shaped and seasoned by contemplation is a life meant to be given away through love, service, creativity, and care for family, friends, fellow members of a faith community, and the larger human family in all its need, hunger, and longing for God. Sharing your talents with others is, like resting in contemplative silence, a part of the overall process.

  The spiritual path thus incorporates creativity, community, and contemplation in an integral life practice that includes seeking after, experiencing, and letting go of the presence of God, who is the object of your contemplation, the inspiration of your creativity, and the love that binds your community together. And in this mysterious relationship between contemplation and creativity, we come finally to the threshold of the deepest mystery of mysticism: the mystery of theosis.

  In Chapter 6, I mentioned a monk who doesn't like the idea of the Beatific Vision, because it makes union with God seem to be a spectator sport; instead, he sees the mystery of human destiny in God as the Beatifying Communion, in which we join in the very heart of the loving relationships within the Trinity. I think this holds true not just for eternity, but equally for the contemplative life here and now. We are called not only to contemplation, but even beyond contemplation. We are called to the deifying life precisely so that we can share the presence of God with others. We receive the gifts of God's love and presence so that we can pass those same gifts on to our neighbors those we love as ourselves.

  Guigo II described lectio divina as involving four steps: reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. But his is not the final word on the spiritual exercise. In his book Conversing with God in Scripture. Stephen J. Binz suggests that contemplatio leads beyond itself to additional practices, such as operatio ("faithful witness in daily life") and collatio (forming community). When we offer to God our capacity to create, we are given the opportunity to witness to God's love through our prayerful activity, which includes the opportunity to help establish truly loving community here on earth. In a very real way, then, the spiritual life brings us full circle: we begin by finding nurture in community and in the wisdom of those who have gone before us, and in that wisdom we discern the call to enter ever more deeply into the loving mystery of God through prayer and contemplation, only to find that our highest destiny as contemplatives is to give back to our community, by the operation of our creative skill arising out of God's transforming and healing love.

  THE EVER-EXPANDING JOURNEY INTO GOD

  In her pioneering book on mysticism, Evelyn Underhill exhibits a wise reticence when describing what she calls "the unitive life." She knew that her critics would pounce if she tried to recount her own experience of the summit of Christian mysticism, so she prudently played the role of a journalist reporting what others had said (or done) as evidence of what the end of the mystical road looks like.

  The language of"decation"and of "spiritual marriage,"then, is temperamental language: and is related to subjective experience rather than to objective fact. It describes on the one hand the mystic's astonished recognition of a profound change effected in his own personality the transmutation of his salt, sulphur, and mercury into Spiritual Gold and on the other, the rapturous consummation of his love. Hence, by a comparison of these symbolic reconstructions, and by the discovery and isolation of the common factor latent in each, we may perhaps learn something of the fundamental fact that each is trying to portray."

  Likewise, Robert Hughes, in his wonderful study of spiritual theology Beloved Dust, accompanies his description of "Waves of Glory" with a disclaimer acknowledging that it is a topic of which little can be said. "The witness of all those who have tasted it, however, is that it cannot really be spoken but only alluded to by analogies and art."46

  Underhill and Hughes agree that deification, or theosis, is characterized primarily by humility, which in this context can be defined as "selfforgetfulness." In other words, the truly divinized mystic is perhaps the least likely person to waste a lot of time recounting his or her experience.

  It's not that mystics think their experience is unimportant. It's just that mysticism is, in the final analysis, an intimate, precious, and delicate matter. There is a personal, and even a private, dimension to the mystical life, as Jesus himself acknowledged when he said: "Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you" (Matthew 6:6). What begins as a closet where prayer is offered in secret becomes, entirely by the grace of God, the most beautiful and intimate marriage chamber, where you give yourself fully, completely, entirely to God.

  The spiritual marriage that gleams at the center of mystical experience is far more than just a comfortable intimacy between you and God. By the very nature of the Christian understanding of God, the mystical marriage urges you to join in a joyful circle of love and generativity with God-as-relationship: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And the mystery of the Christian understanding of the Body of Christ or the Communion of Saints means that this profound relationship is open to every human being who says "yes" in response to that call. Mysticism may begin in the privacy of intimate contemplation, but it blossoms into the joyful ecstasy of a communion that lasts forever with God in Three Persons beginning, sustaining, and completing the dance.

  THE DANCE BELONGS TO ALL OF US

  In a fully blossomed mystical life, the ecstasies and pleasures of knowing God intimately and fully are, as best I can tell, just a small fraction of the entire experience
. The beauty and splendor of mystical intimacy in some ways must forever remain hidden, to be shared privately between a contemplative and God. But this beauty will also, in some ways, spill endlessly over to others. Through the splendor of intimacy with God, the contemplative will find wisdom to share with others. Through this beauty, he or she will serve those in need and care for those who suffer. And the glory of the Christian mysteries will find expression in the contemplative's creative work, in whatever form that might take. Out of the silence which is the natural habitat of the contemplative, God leads all who love him to carry that love to others, even as they return again and again to the silence, for their own rest and renewal.

  Carmelite priest William McNamara, who has authored several idiosyncratic and visionary books about spirituality in the postmodern age, insists that "the mystic is not a special kind of person; each person is a special kind of mystic." I read this to mean that every Christian is, to a greater or lesser extent, already a participant in the unitive life. Consider the paradox: mysticism is a gift that can be given to anyone, even those who have never bothered to seek a holy life, who have never made a disciplined effort to pray or meditate, or who have not shown any particular interest in pursuing any kind of relationship with God. If God can give amazing mystical experiences to anyone, who are we to say that God cannot give some sort of mystical life to everyone?