Jesus and Mysticism
O Lover,
What, if anything, is distinctively “Christian” about Christian mysticism? If the mystical impulse can appear to have greater prevalence in interspiritual venues than in many explicitly Christian contexts, what is the role of Jesus? If much mysticism has strong universal similarities, why the particular Christ? What is signified when numerous Christian mystics, particularly apophatics (e.g., Juan de la Cruz), make relatively few (albeit often profound) references to the Christ? In an era in which the Christ whom I embrace can be trashed as the “woke Jesus,” when the distortion of his tradition has some of the faithful boycotting the term “Christian,” to say nothing of “evangelical,” how do I hold within myself my faith identity? In short, for one increasingly drawn by You toward the mystical edge across the last third of his life, why Jesus?
In response to the above questions, I offer my own confession of faith in You, a work ever in progress. The troika of the Bible, its ensuing tradition, and my personal experience with varied faith traditions has persuaded me that You are Reality Itself outside of which there is nothing. Yet we from the numerous faith families catch but glimpses, especially in the early stages, of Your universality via our respective particularities (nature, culture, imagery, cultus, etc.). Our resultant perception of You is thus wildly varied, highly limited, frequently distorted, and of very uneven receptivity. While Paul acknowledges that Your “eternal power and divine nature” are commonly known ”via what had been made” (Rom 1:20), what is not universally known is the Christ event which the apostle preaches. It is the claim of the Jesus tradition in its largest sense that in his particularity You have and continue to disclose Your core and universal identity. In the community of Jesus he is the embodied and definitive answer to the disciple Philip’s request: “show us the Father, and that will be enough” (Jn 14:8).
So who are You as viewed via the lens of the Christ, Your universality via his particularity? First, principally because of him we are shown that You are Love (Agápe [I Jn 4:8,16]). More than a stage or goal, attribute or characteristic, this is Your core identity, Your intrinsicality; it is who You are unable not to be. He models that You are ever and always drawing all peoples and beings into each other and into You. In his “humanese” he is ever communicating both via and to the creation that You invariably lead with compassion rather than judgment, reconciliation rather the recrimination, harmony rather than enmity, life rather than death. And so we confess this Jesus as You Incarnátio.
Second, Paul provides a yet more specific dynamic of the Christ event: kenósis (“self-emptying” [Phil 2:7]). Whether in his teachings, behavior or passion the Christ is depicted in the gospels as self-expending rather than self- preserving. Furthermore, in the subsequent mystical tradition the kenósis imagery has provided a rich lode for writing about Your Self-outpouring from creation to Incarnation to consummation Cynthia Bourgeault, for example, holds kenósis as characterizing both Your intrinsicness as mediated via the Christ, and the shape of the transformation of us trekkers into You. Here yet again the universe’s bevy of finites and the Cosmic Christ are held in a rich creative tension as both distinguished and inextricable. Teilhard de Chardin, Jürgen Moltmann, Matthew Fox, Ilia Delio, and Richard Rohr are among those setting forth this delicious paradox with fresh language like “Christification.”
Third, while the newer testament depicts Jesus as the “door,” the “way,” and the “true vine” (Jn 10:1-10, 14:6, 15:1-8, resp.), You, O Lover, are Télos, Home, and Vinedresser; while he in his concreteness seizes our attention, realigns and channels us toward You, albeit ever self-deferringly, it is You alone, finally, for whom we “pant” and “pine” (Ps 63:1). One encapsulation of Jesus’ consistent deference to You in his teaching, embodiment, and passion is found in Mark 10:18: ”Why do you call me good? No one is good—except God alone.” The Nazarene neither advocated nor suffered Jesusolatry, a lesson many Christian mystics have learned well.
I am quite aware of the danger of the above paragraph segueing into triumphalism over other faith traditions (e.g., supersessianism regarding Judaism). I reject all such proprietariness toward You. You, O Lover, are universal as is the variegated thirst of humans for You. Thus it was before a pagan audience in Athens’s Areopagus that Paul declared “in God we [all] live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Only those ignorant or obstinate would deny that aspects of directionality toward You are present outside of institutional Christianity. While no faith tradition, or absence thereof, is exempt from the multifaceted impact of Your Self-disclosure, the response—“The one having seen me has seen the Father” (14:9)—of Jesus to Philip’s request rings true in my experience. The human Christ guides us to You whom neither language nor reason, image nor imaginings, can encompass.
In short, although I find meaning using a term like ”Christic” in reference to Your universe-wide penchant for Self-disclosure and centripetality, I am able to make such a confession of faith only in the aftermath of encounter with the particular Jesus who is the Christ. Not totally unlike Teresa’s experiencing of the transverberation (“piercing by the arrow of Your Love”), I have in the Christ event been skewered by the Good News of Your disposition toward all You have wrought. And, to quote Philip the apostle, “it is enough” (Jn 14:8). Thus I aspire to be a Christian mystic.
