The second edition of Maronite meditations is now available on Youtube and Spotify (see the link below). As with the first podcast, I offer some preliminary thoughts, and then after about ten minutes, move on to a contemplative exercise. Both the introduction and the meditation revise and build on the last programme.
In this podcast, I examine the term “mysticism.” When young, I was moved by the idea of a mystic union with God. I had starry notions of some sort of rapture that would lift me out of everyday consciousness, and show me eternal glory. But that also accentuated how remote I was from that: I saw no evidence that I would ever change, or my difficulties and problems would ever mitigate let alone disappear through what was available to me. The local church was at best a maintenance, not an advance. I could see that some people were more balanced and happier, more at ease with others, than I was. But then, they seemed to have been born that way. No one really changed unless they suffered catastrophes in their lives. They just became older editions of what they had always been.
Mysticism, as I understood it. seemed to promise a way out. I read many mystical works, such as the Cloud of Unknowing and the Showings of Mother Julian. They fired the imagination, they told me stories of people who had gone through the door, but they did not show me where it was, let alone how I could open and pass through it, except in my imagination. Gurdjieff, the modern mystic whom I have written a book about, showed me how I could think about it rightly, and see that there was something real in the faith, and where and how people would come to a standstill, and how it only needed a small change in me to be able to approach reality. One must have understanding, which itself needs a spiritual practice, said Gurdjieff, and for that one must work with one who knows. And thank God, I met George and Helen Adie.
But now let me go back to mysticism, and then I shall tie the strands together. Perhaps the most significant scholarly work on mysticism in Christianity’s Western tradition is Bernard McGinn’s six-volume The Presence of God. There are three significant insights in his general introduction. The first of these is that: “the mystical element in Christianity is that part of its belief and practices that concerns the preparation for the consciousness of, and the reaction to … the immediate or direct presence of God.”
That is, mysticism is consciousness of the presence of God, and the mystic path includes all which leads to or flows from consciousness. Of course, “consciousness” is not limited to “thinking about” or “having words in one’s head”, although sometimes words have a vital role to play. But a baby, for example, often is conscious of the presence of God even before the baby has a single word.
The second idea here is that mysticism can be considered in at least three ways: as an element of religion, as a process or way of life, and “as an attempt to express a direct consciousness of the presence of God” (xv-xvi). When considering this, says McGinn, everything that leads up to and prepares for the encounter with God, as well as all that flows from (it) … is also mystical, even if in a secondary sense.”
The third is that one must examine Christian mysticism “against the broader historical development of the Christian religion” (xv). That is, one must examine mysticism in the light of the whole faith.
His thesis is that “there have been mystical elements present in the Christian religion from its origins but that the first great tradition of explicit mysticism came to birth when a theory of mysticism first fully laid out by Origen in the third century found institutional embodiment in the new phenomenon of monasticism in the fourth century” (xvi).
A lot of the discussion of mysticism, he rightly says, emphasises “special altered states – visions, locutions, raptures, and the like …” (xvii). Yet, some mystics, not least Origen, Eckhart and St John of the Cross “have been downright hostile to such experiences, emphasising rather the new level of awareness, the special and heightened consciousness involving both loving and knowing that is given in the mystical meeting” (xviii).
What McGinn, and the very great mystics he refers to do not grasp, or at least, do not say, is that before one can come to the presence of God, and benefit permanently from that experience, one must come to one’s own presence. This coming to my own presence is a mystery, and it is intrinsically connected to the mystery of God, for as Gurdjieff said to Nicoll: “Behind real I lies God”.
Not so long ago, someone I know was driving home, pondering how he had suffered at the hands of a person who had been particularly nasty. He was telling himself, with some effect, that she was not to blame, that she had no will, that she acted as she had to, that she had not been there, and his negative emotions were unjustifiable. As this went on, and he was collecting himself with the benefit of these higher ideas, he was going past a clump of eucalyptus trees. The sun was setting, not yet having dipped beneath the horizon. The atmosphere was full of clear and pleasant yellow light. That light hit the eucalypts. Instantly, for the briefest moment, and maybe even that is to make it sound too long, he received that impression of light shining through leaves, and it was accepted somewhere deep inside. He understood. But how to put it in words? He saw that the eucalypts were because God is. That was part of the experience. It was the presence of God: which is always unique, always unrepeatable. He stood on a level above his negative emotion and turning thoughts. They lost their power. He did not reason himself out of the last of the negative emotions. They were just completely passive. He saw the unreality not of those emotions but of that state and way of living.
The point is that Gurdjieff did bring a system which allows one, if one works diligently and uses his system, and not modifications of it, to come to oneself and one’s presence, and so to receive the mysterious impression of the presence of God. It is a practical path to mysticism, and so to the heart of Christianity. This leads to the conclusion that the mystical path is not an escapist one, it is the most practical path of all for Christians.
