A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

After 50 years, I’ve been wondering about what God has revealed to me on this journey into priesthood, what I’ve learnt? When I wrote it down, I found to my surprise that there was more there than I’d expected to see. I was also intrigued to notice the means by which  revelation had taken place, not for the most part by rational thought. Rather, its come in two ways: first by my awareness of being sometimes addressed by God from outside myself, and second from my awareness of insights arising from within me. These two ways are distinguishable in theory but are often less easy to distinguish in practice. I don’t think that matters: it’s the transcendent God beyond me, and the immanent God within me: two facets of the same divine reality.  

Its this wisdom from God that is my ‘guiding star’ in the most important areas of my life, and I’ve come to realise that this probably makes me a mystic, and to say that is to put a name on something I’ve known deep down for a long time. But naming it feels an awesome and presumptuous responsibility. I wonder why this insight has come to me now? And what difference it makes? Probably none at all. 

“A Mystic is a person who claims to attain, or believes in the possibility of attaining, insight into mysteries transcending ordinary human knowledge, as by direct communication with the divine or immediate intuition in a state of spiritual ecstasy.”

“The main difference between mysticism and mainstream religion is that mysticism says the key to salvation is to raise our state of consciousness. The key to our salvation is found inside ourselves and we have everything we need internally to manifest this goal. Mainstream religion says the key to salvation is found outside ourselves, even in an external church.”

I have struggled with this insight.  Mystics are people like Rumi and Hildegard of Bingen, people completely out of my class. But then I thought: on the one hand Rumi and Hildegard clearly had their mystic moments but they must have gone about their daily business much like anyone else; and on the other, everybody has mystic moments: most have religious experiences [see ‘The God you already know’], and all of us are guided in our decision making more by our inner wisdom than rational thinking: our ‘inner knowing‘ guides our choice of partner and friends, our choice of work and hobbies, probably the specific place where we live, the clothes we wear, the furnishing of our homes etc.  There’s a rational component to these decisions obviously, but our inner knowing is usually the driver. So we are all mystics to some degree, we all have that dimension to us, and it can lead us into ever deeper truth when we learn to trust it. It may be stronger in some than others, some may nourish it & use it more extensively, but its there in everyone.  These thoughts make it easier for me to own & accept the mystic in me.

Elizabeth Goudge wrote:  “Oftener than not what we call beginnings are fulfillments of things set in motion a long time ago…”

TS Eliot  wrote:  “We shall not cease from exploration

                   And the end of all our exploring

                   Will be to arrive where we started

                   And know the place for the first time”

I’ve been on an interesting and as yet incomplete journey.  I began asking questions of God and life, and was blessed with a friend who encouraged me to do so, and have been similarly blessed ever since.  It led me into institutional priesthood within the Church of England, and then out of it into something that’s felt richer, wider & deeper: first a free-lance ministry with one one foot in and one foot out, and then into an exploration of a ‘feral priesthood’ to all creation.  And now I see that, like an increasing number of people, I am a mystic, and that I’ve always been one.  Its been a shock to name it to myself but it seems to fit, it explains a lot, and having named it I can see it everywhere.