CALLED TO BE MYSTICS
All saints and mystics speak to us of God One and Triune and of God’s love, and of their experience of the existential presence of God in their lives. They talk to us of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is their spiritual master, mystic par excellence and lover, and of the Holy Spirit, who dwells -with the Father and the Son - in the depth of the soul and gives divine grace and his Gifts. They talk affectively and effectively in their teachings and, above all, with the moving testimony of their life of love, humility, prayer, detachment, the cross, joy, contemplation and compassion.
After carefully studying the classics of Christian spirituality, theologian Peter John Cameron concludes that he finds in them seven recurrent themes: belief in God’s love (1); God’s mercy, sin, and the mode of the soul (2); the instrumentality of the Church and the communion of saints (3); the importance of prayer and struggles with aridity (4); the dynamics of detachment and holy indifference (5); the redemptive role of suffering (6), and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary (7).
Although mystical life has often been almost exclusively connected with extraordinary supernatural phenomena, in reality it is similar to spiritual/moral life, to a good Christian life, which begins with the presence of God’s grace (and the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity) in the soul and develops through the experiential realization of that loving presence in a virtuous life. Mystical life, writes H. C. Graef, “is nothing else but the life of grace lived at its highest level.” For Meister Eckhart the beginning of a mystical life consists in “living a Christian life in all seriousness and fulfilling the established moral duties.” For his part, his brother Dominican Henry de Suso adds: the mystical life is “the way to live everyday life in freedom and in serene interior abandonment, and to make of the daily conflicts and disappointments an opening to God.” “To reach perfection does not consist in obtaining mercies, neither in having the gift of tongues or the spirit of prophecy, but in conforming our own will to God’s will, in such a way that anything that He wants we want also, and accept it joyfully, whether it is tasteful or bitter” (St. Teresa of Avila).
The mystics are often sidelined by Christians, as if they were to be admired but not imitated. They are considered as unreachable; but they are reachable. We just have to read their lives and their teachings to convince ourselves of their accessibility. Besides, they themselves consider their visions, levitations, ecstasies as accidental. An expert on the matter tells us: “If we were more familiar with the masters of Christian spirituality, then it would be less likely for young people to go after some oriental guru to slake or quench their thirst for the spiritual” (Jacques Philippe).
All believers in God are called to holiness, that is, to a mystical life, which is an ascending loving union with Christ. We read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “God calls us all to this intimate union with him, even if the special graces or extraordinary signs of the mystical life are granted only to some for the sake of manifesting the gratuitous gift given to all” (CCC, 2014).
Mystical life, then, simply means loving union with Christ, which is called mystical “because it participates in the mystery of Christ through the sacraments – ‘the holy mysteries’ – and, in Him, in the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. Thus, for the disciples of Jesus, holiness means loving and intimate union with God the Father, through Jesus Christ - God and man - and in the Holy Spirit
There is within each human person a clear or obscure - mysterious - search for God, a longing for divinization in all religions. In the three Abrahamic religions, there is a desire to be one-with-God, to experience God in daily life. For the followers of Christ, experiencing God in Christ implies necessarily experiencing the presence of the neighbor, our brother or sister. St. Thomas Aquinas, theologian and mystic says that love of neighbor may be higher than contemplation: “Therefore, to labor for the salvation of our neighbor even at the expense of contemplation, for the love of God and neighbor, appears to be a higher perfection of charity than if he would cling so dearly to the sweetness of contemplation as to be totally unwilling to sacrifice it even for the salvation of others.” Pope Francis quotes the Angelic Doctor: The noblest deeds are the works of mercy, “even more than our acts of worship”; “Mercy is the beating heart of the Gospel,” and loving the needy neighbor is the priority, the distinguishing characteristic of all the followers of Jesus, “the great criterion” of holiness also today.
Words to ponder, from Pope Francis: Holiness “is not swooning in mystic rapture,” but in practicing the preferential love for the poor. This special love of the needy neighbor is not – cannot be – opposed to love of God in prayer and worship. The Argentine Pope adds: “I don’t believe in holiness without prayer.” Truly, “the primacy belongs to our relationship with God, but we cannot forget that the ultimate criterion on which our lives will be judged is what we have done for others” (Gaudete et Exultate; cf. Mt 25:40, 45).
Spiritual/Mystical life leads us progressively towards a deeper experience of God in our lives, to experiencing God One and Triune in ourselves, in others, in the needy and poor of the earth, and also in God’s creation. Indeed, in our time the mystical dimension of creation is especially felt: nature is our common home, which is permeated by the power and beauty of God. It is said of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) that her first book was the Breviary “after the stars and the flowers” (Perez de Urbel). She experienced ecstasy contemplating a flower or the sunset. A mystic of nature, Jakob Bohme (1575-1624) writes: “You will not find a better book that will help you to know in depth the divine wisdom than a walk through a green meadow: there you will smell and taste the marvelous energy of God.”
Let us close these pilgrim’s notes with the sublime verses of St. John of the Cross in his awesome Spiritual Canticle:
Pouring out a thousand graces, / He [Jesus] passed these groves in haste;
/ And having looked at them, / With his image alone, / clothed them in beauty.
(FGB)
