Religion and Mysticism
[“The lovers of God have no religion but God alone” (Jalál al-Din Muḥammad Rúmi [1207-73]; cited by Dag Hammarskjöld [1905-61] in his Markings).]
O Lover,
I am again reminded that this glimmering gift of life You have given me has had a generous religious component. My Mennonite familial and communitarian rootage laid the foundation and inadvertently served to nudge me toward graduate theological studies with Lutheran advisors. I resided for five years in the religiosity-drenched city of the three monotheistic faiths, al Quds. The end of the eighties found me completing nearly twenty-five years of pastoral, teaching and peace/justice work in Mennonite institutions. In 1991 I entered the Roman Catholic Church, its continuity, dogma and institutions arguably the apex of religiosity in the United States. Subsequent acceptance into the Order of Discalced Carmelites as a Secular (OCDS) further deepened this identity. For this pattern in the rich and beautiful tapestry of life with which You gifted me, the one positioning me to be drawn to You via Your Christ, I am profoundly grateful. About none of the above do I have regrets.
But, as well You know, the plot has been thickening. I understand the category of “religion” as including four elements: institution/community, creed/dogma, ritual/liturgy, and morality/prophetic. However, the gradual turning of my aspiration toward Christic mysticism, especially as open to the apophátic (“without images,” etc.), has mounted challenges within each of these components. First, mysticism’s weighting of the interior experiencing of You over external authorities, together with its implied critique of false absolutes, often loosens the hold of religious institutions. Historically, Christian mystics have more than infrequently proven to be unruly, even feral, vis-á-vis entrenched structures. Second, mysticism’s emphasis on awareness/consciousness over cognition/rationality nudges the center of spirituality out well beyond theological constructs. Third, mysticism, especially its more apophátic expressions, invariably penetrates through and beyond images, words, reason, imagination, affections and the sacrments, whether inside or outside the so-called “sacred” sphere. And finally, the moral and/or prophetic fruit of mysticism, its “journey outward,” especially in its more incarnational expressions, is often viewed as participation in Your constant, ubiquitous and loving embrace of all having being rather than being code-dictated. While I assuredly retain indebtedness to and engagement in all four of these dimensions of religion, the emerging center of longing for Tu sólus is qualifying each with a transformative asterisk.
Whether for reasons of agnosticism or lack of courage, I again find refuge in one of my special places: the interrogative. Is not the core of mysticism, the “panting” for You alone (a la Ps 42:1), the ultimate télos of all religious traditions, however frequently they may be compromised by fear, comfort, tribalism, or the sin of certitude? Would not most mystics concede that theirs is a path more of solitude, silence, darkness (“lights off!”), emptiness, and agnósis (a la The Cloud of Unknowing) than of the herd, the sonorous, luminescence (“lights on!”), satiation, and certitude? Must not one committed to loving Tu sólus be companioned into awareness that that journey, for the above reasons, is often a lonely one which, Your trinitarian manifoldness, ubiquity, and cosmic convergence notwithstanding, brings to mind Plotinus’s “the flight of the alone to the Alone”? Is there any human experience laying bare such a trekker’s solitariness more than the hour of death when we make passage from all with which we have been familiar to all which is not, this accompanied by none . . . but Tu sólus?
Whether alerted via the likes of Rumi’s pithy wisdom or Paul McCartney’s translucent “The Long and Winding Road,” the journey toward fulfilling Jesus’s Great Commandment in the synoptics—to love You and Your variegated artistry with all that we are—remains, both for Alfie and ourselves, “what’s it all about.” As that centrality of You and Yours above all else becomes increasingly apparent, aspects of that “all else,” religion not excluded, pale and fall away. In the end, as in both the beginning and the present, there is, finally, but one Reality, Tu sólus.
