Mysticism and Its Linguistic Companions
O Lover,
It was in my early twenties that I had my first substantive encounter with the thought of Paul Tillich (1886-1965). In the autumn of his passing I recall a class discussion exploring his counsel that preaching be crafted so as to address simultaneously varied levels of spiritual maturity among the faithful. Embedded in this advice was the tradition of the multivalent/multidimentuality hermeneutic of Scripture going back to Origen, also new to me. Fresh out of a fundamentalist seminary program, I was still viewing preaching, sacred text interpretation, and god-talk other than at the literal level as evasive abuse of Your Word. While the urgency of that discussion’s core question—how can Christians’ language, particularly references to You, O Lover, take seriously human diversity?—is only heightened six decades later, my own response to it has shifted profoundly.
Of late I have been pondering that shift. Unfortunately the use of language regarding faith has often been primarily univocal, as having a contained, literal, and fixed bent. After all, truth, being singular, must be immutable, like Jesus “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8). Curiously, not least among Roman Catholics, such static language often functions prescriptively, encased in timeless dogma, even as its deeper meaning is rationally argued. Thus, for example, while at the entry level the bread and wine are apprehended by the complete sensorium, the apología for itsdeeper meaning, Your Real Presence, employs Aristotelian and Thomistic logic (transubstantiation).
But what if Your Presence, O Lover, Your ubiquity everywhere and always in all You have gifted with being, is what is glimpsed, whether in the Mass or elsewhere? What if the Eucharist is a peep-hole into the entire cosmos, heaven and earth, as full of Your glory (Is 6:3), Your Real Presence? Or, stated otherwise, what if reception of the bread and wine, their incorporation into our very body and blood, is a proleptic foretaste of our ultimate destiny with, in, and of (!) You (theósis)? What if the “source and summit,” whether or not beknownst to us, is simply You, ever abandoningly and promiscuously giving Your Self away, so that we might become deified into You? What if the Eucharist, ultimately, is an invitatory mystérium, a multidimensional depth only the surface levels of which we are usually aware? What if magisterium teaching on transubstantiation, whatever its utility in earlier eras, is today widely viewed as an unfortunate attempt to account for mystérium with logic, a delimitation often inhibiting deeper awareness and experience of Your ubiquity, Your Real Presence?
My pondering of the above questions has repeatedly bled over into the multivalent powers of poetry and the arts in general. Great poetry (e.g., Mary Oliver), while anchored in the particular, the concrete, the sensorium (both thematically and theoretically), is ever wide open to and expressive of what is timeless and straining the capacity of chrónos. Not dissimilarly, music (e.g., Francis Poulenc), its roots in physics, score, and technique, can be escort into the loftiest issues, emotions, and sensitivities of the human unfolding. And both the dynamism and directionality of stages of human spiritual development (e.g., James Fowler) progress from the mythic-literal (#2) toward the universalizing (#6), from prose to poetry, and beyond. Do not I in my anecdotage repeatedly marvel at Your universal reach as evidenced . . . everywhere?! In contrast to common predications regarding things, do not the greatest of the mystics leaving paper trails seek to name the Whirlwind who is You, Eckhart’s “No-thing,” with toolkits more stocked with poetry than prose, image than apologetic, the aesthetic thanthescientific, language more multivalent than univocal? What if seminary curricula contained less normative dogma and more formation in poetically exploring, communicating, and being, this in response to Your ambushing of us?
Finally, O You of the Word (Jn 1:1-5), whereas theology’s “sidekick of choice” in former eras was generally identified as philosophy, does not today’s companionate of spirituality, mysticism in particular, begin with poetry including as well music and other aesthetic endeavors, each more attuned to heart than head, intuition than knowledge, more self-transcending than less?
