I have come to love the darkness—for I believe now that it is part of a very, very small part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth.
—Mother Teresa [1]
We sat in the car in the driveway of my sister-in-law Claire’s house talking for a while before we finally realized we’d been burning too much gas to keep the heat on and it was time to finish our Minnesota goodbye. In Minnesota, where I’m from, we call a goodbye that goes on and on a Minnesota goodbye because they are so common here. This time, it wasn’t because we had more family gossip to catch up on or funny stories to tell about my niece and nephew. It was one of those “the conversation just got real deep right before we had reached our destination” experiences.
Claire had been relatively open with me about the struggles she was having as she tried to relate to God and the church. Often, when you are in a time of deconstruction in your faith, it’s hard to put words to what you’re going through emotionally and spiritually. But it proved to be important that she tried and didn’t stay alone in her wrestling. She was full of questions, none with easy answers: “Maybe what I thought I had experienced with God in the past wasn’t real? Maybe I need to try another expression of church? Maybe I have been avoiding the questions because I am afraid of the answers?”
She was getting to the core of what she feared. That if she moved any further into the questions, if she began to overturn the stones along the path, she’d discover that there was nothing beneath them. That her quest to find an authentic spirituality would hit a dead end with a door that opened to reveal that there was nothing there all along.
I listened and tried to ask some good clarifying questions. As one of the pastors at her current church, I shared what I knew to be true. “Trust me. You’re not the only one who feels this way!” I exclaimed. An expression of doubt mixed with relief came over her face.
It’s common to hold back and not reveal the depth of our searching and our doubts, and it’s certainly rare for anyone to admit they are afraid. There are a lot of reasons that we find this difficult—particularly in forms of Christianity that don’t cultivate a sense of mystery around God. But it hasn’t always been that way, and I think things are beginning to change.
If you walk through the musty rows of a library at a theological school or seminary, you will find many books that seem to have been left untouched for decades. In the section labeled Church History, you will likely find some of the dustiest books of them all. It’s not always the most riveting subject.
The failure to truly look back so that we can move forward is a common human problem—not just for Christians. We often don’t recognize that where we’ve come from has shaped who we are. The church, in particular, has quite a sordid history. You don’t have to look too far to see the many groups of people who have been oppressed or even killed in the name of the God of the Bible.
Christians either tend to want to emphasize the glories of the church’s past or dwell on the church’s failures. The idea that history repeats itself is lauded by those hoping to return to the glory days and is suggested as a warning by those who understand that Christianity supported or undergirded tragedies like the Crusades and the Holocaust.
I tend to believe that history doesn’t repeat itself but rather echoes itself. There is something familiar from the past that can echo into future generations. An echo from church history is reverberating louder and transcending our current divisions. That is the echo of the voices of the Christian mystics, whose main life pursuit was the mystery of God. In the lives of these Jesus followers and their writings and practices, we find a rich and deep history.
Mysticism is difficult to encapsulate in a sentence. But my best definition would be “a finite human being’s intentional and relational pursuit of the mystery of the infinite reality of the Divine.” Humans are finite and limited. God, by very definition, is infinite. So in order for a human to go deeper in relating to an infinite being, the human must surrender to the concept of mystery and accept the limitations of their finite human mind. By transcending the confines of logic, reason, and the pursuit of knowledge, we can experience God more fully.
Many Catholics and Protestants are returning to Christian mysticism as I define it here. An echo of the mystics of the past is pushing people to embrace centering prayer, intentional spiritual listening, and lectio divina (divine listening through meditating on Scripture). These practices are all ways to engage with the Divine and transcend our physical human experience, which is why we call them spiritual practices. To be clear, for anyone who is a little uneasy, Christian mysticism is not any of the following: fortune-telling, mind-reading, astrology, or new-age spirituality. It is an ancient spiritual practice that our ancestors in the faith passed down to us. I’m intentionally using the prefix Christian for the type of mysticism I describe here, although nearly every religion attempts to transcend the physical and engage the spiritual.
This rich history of the pursuit of the mystery of God should give us not only the permission to stay curious but perhaps even the motivation and vision for why questions are so vital to a vibrant faith. When the uncertain aspects of God feel like they are the most daunting, the stories of those who were often given the title of being a “mystic” might give us the will to go on!
Mysticism has a long history within Christianity, going back to ancient Jewish forms that predate Christianity. Even in the Bible, we see encounters with God that transcend finite human reality. The Torah, which is the Jewish name for the first five books of the Bible, recounts the history of God and God’s people.
Genesis 12 describes the encounters between God and Abraham. Abraham must have had a mystical experience to believe that God was calling him to leave the land his family had lived on for generations to go to a new place. Unlike modern Western cultures, where young people can’t wait to go off to college or travel to new parts of the world, people in the ancient world stayed in their homelands for generations. They didn’t fill up their hatchback with all their material possessions and only return on holidays. Abraham’s choice to move to a new land was unprecedented in many ways!
And from that point on, one mystical experience at a time, God’s people were led by God’s Spirit. Jacob experienced God through visions and dreams,[2] and he wrestled with God at the ford of the Jabbok River.[3] Moses talked with God through a burning bush.[4] The people of God followed a supernatural cloud.[5] The prophet Anna fasted and prayed in the temple for decades and got one glimpse of the infant Jesus. Words about him poured out from her heart to all those listening. I like to consider this the first sermon about the newborn king.[6] The stories of divine mystery go on and on. You can follow Jewish mysticism right up to some present-day rabbinic traditions.
The roots of Christian mysticism can perhaps be traced all the way back to the many mind-bending experiences the disciples had with Jesus during his ministry. They were full of questions for Jesus! But, as I said earlier, Jesus isn’t an answer man but a question man. I would argue that Jesus was the father of Christian mysticism—deliberately ushering people into the mystery of God rather than giving succinct answers that would satisfy the curious. Jesus also engaged in the mystery as he mentioned the other members of the Trinity. Jesus described the Holy Spirit as a counselor and guide and referred to the additional person of the Trinity as Abba, an intimate, loving Father. At one point, when the Jewish religious leaders were trying yet again to trap him, Jesus responded with an interesting statement, “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed.”[7]
Jesus never described visibly seeing a physical manifestation of God the Father or the Holy Spirit. He was describing his ability to “see” what God the Father is doing and living into that reality in his human life on earth. I see this as inherently mystical, giving us a picture of how we too can attempt to discern what God is doing and join in.
The story of the early church, as told in the book of Acts, describes a whole slew of mysterious encounters with God. Pentecost is a paramount example: God’s Spirit falls in such a powerful way that people begin to speak all sorts of languages.[8] Early church leaders like Peter, Paul, Lydia, and others rely on mystical experiences with God in which they have visions for guidance.[9] They describe trying to go to a certain town, but “the spirit of Jesus would not allow them to.”[10] (I always wonder what exactly happened there. Was a hologram-like Jesus floating in the road blocking their way?) They say things like “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us,”[11] as though the Holy Spirit was an actual dove sitting on someone’s shoulder that they could just ask for directions.
From that point on, many in Christian history who pursued wonder and mystery as they sought God have been given the title of mystic: Origen of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and many other modern mystics, including some alive today!
Your deep questions can move from something you avoid to a spirituality you put into practice. This was the next step for my sister-in-law, Claire. She started small with some spiritual practices that she hadn’t tried before: forms of centering prayer and meditation with a focus on Jesus. She connected with a spiritual director, a person trained to listen spiritually as a coach and guide. My spiritual director has described their work as listening to me with one ear and the Holy Spirit with another.
Claire was beginning to pursue the mystery of God, breaking through the confining barriers and limitations that organized churches often cause. As someone who leads a church, I realize those limitations aren’t usually created on purpose but are often a byproduct of the way we structure and define church experiences. How open to God’s mystery can you be, spending an hour and fifteen minutes in a church building on Sundays? Claire’s experience of God had to expand beyond only scheduled church activities and worship services. She learned to pursue the mystery of God as much as she had pursued her career and her vision for her family. She couldn’t wait for the process to happen to her; she had to find the inner motivation to start and the resolve to sustain this intentional pursuit.
She had to be willing to be courageous in the face of fear and to begin to pursue her own faith, stepping one practice at a time into the unknown. This meant facing uncertainty in ways she had tried to avoid. She didn’t know what she would find if she overturned the stones on her path, and nine years of wandering had taken their toll. So she mustered up the bit of wonder she could find and started to bravely choose to engage her curiosity and not hold it back any longer. She knew that she could live forever in fear of what she might discover if she were to truly ask the questions she was avoiding—that what she would find there would be a void, disproving her whole spiritual framework. But she finally realized that her curiosity outweighed her fear. At this point it would be better to just go for it and find out if her fears would be realized or if she would discover something more vibrant than before.
Engaging the mystery of God through spiritual practices is best done as an experiment. Give something a try for a season of time and see what the results are! A few months of trying out a practice regularly will give you a good idea of how helpful it may or may not be to you in your current season of life.
My go-to spiritual practices are from what is now referred to as Ignatian spirituality, spiritual practices developed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a sixteenth-century Spanish priest who founded the Jesuit Order, also known as the Society of Jesus. They are still one of the most influential orders in the Catholic Church today given their extensive work in education and social-justice ministries to the poor and those in need. A quick google search will result in numerous practices from Ignatius’s collection, The Spiritual Exercises. If you are in a wilderness season of life, what experiment could you try that might help you become unstuck? If the results of the first experiment aren’t great, try something else. The mystery of God has been pursued for thousands of years; take your time, give yourself grace, and learn something new. In part 2 of this book, I will give you some ideas of experiments you can try.
Step by step, Claire began to overcome the fear she had been facing for almost a decade. It didn’t happen overnight, and it certainly wasn’t easy, but she started to see glimpses of the far side of complexity, which had seemed impossible for so long. It was the beginning of the end of her “dark night of the soul”—which is how prominent Christian mystic Saint John of the Cross describes a long season where God feels absent. Even Mother Teresa experienced dark nights of the soul. I’ve found that most devout Jesus followers have.
Inspired by those who have come before us, we can step into greater wonder with our eyes wide open, ready for our minds to expand. I think it’s about time Claire owns her rightful spot as a mystic—Claire of Minneapolis. Could you be next? Join my friends Keisha of Tampa, Laura of Columbia Heights, Matthew of Winnipeg, Heidi of Saint Paul, Steve of Maple Grove, and so many others whose main life pursuit is the mystery of God.