This week in our mystics class, we are reading Augustine of Hippo, Teresa of Avila, and C.S. Lewis. I love these three mystics and I really enjoyed reading them together. One of the reasons I like this class so much is that the people in my group are asking similar questions. We don’t necessarily need the answers, but it is very comforting to ask the questions together. This week’s question seems to be, “How do we live and follow our desire for God within human limitations?” Here are my reflections upon these fellow mystics who also raised their hearts and voices to ask this question. I am glad to be in such good company.
As the Quakers say, this week’s reading really spoke to my condition. (Translation: This week’s reading was exactly what I needed to read right now.) It seemed that each reading built upon one another. Whether Carole planned that (which would be brilliant on her part), or God’s design (and we all know God is brilliant), I found it absolutely rich in that mystical song I hear, each author adding a new harmony to the music.
Augustine first brings up my question, the question I did not have words for: “Why are thou cast down, O my soul, and why dost thou disquiet me?” (Page 65) With all the soul has known of God, with all the inward delights, the sight in the darkness, having touched the hand of God, Augustine wonders how on earth the soul without a doubt that God is and that God loves could be sad? And the soul answers an answer that my own soul is crying, “Because I am not yet there!” “Wouldst thou have me not disquiet thee, placed as I am yet in the world, and on pilgrimage from the house of God?” Augustine then assures the soul, and me, that hope in God is the answer. But I am still distraught.
Teresa of Avila then picks up the same question. She says while discussing her butterfly metaphor, which I love, “Oh, to see the restlessness of this little butterfly….and the difficulty is that it doesn’t know where to alight and rest. Since it has experienced such wonderful rest, all that it sees on earth displeases it, especially if God gives it this wine often….It now has wings. How can it be happy when it can fly?” (Page 445)
It seems that Teresa says those who have gone through the cocoon experience, which I believe I am correctly translating as the Dark Night, have a whole new set of trials to go through. Having felt the hand of God in the very deepest of places, having experienced that transformation and intimacy while in the cocoon, learning to see with different eyes, they feel “estranged from earthly things”, they don’t know where to go. Such souls have a very deep peace but are conflicted between the earthly world here and the world they know.
A picture that came to me while I was reading these selections was of a dirt hole in the ground, maybe built into the side of a hill. There is one window with thick tree branches imprisoning the soul within. There is no way out but I stand in this hole and reach out my arms through the branches toward the star-lit night sky. I may be imprisoned but past those branches holding me in, my hands are free under the stars. My hands can pray and touch God even though the rest of me cannot. Mysticism, I think, is lying on the dirt floor asleep while my soul escapes through the branches to dance with God in the night. Sometimes I am content to stay in the hole as I know it will not always be that way. At others, I go over to the bars and shake them with every ounce of strength I’ve got. I want OUT! I am tired of having to deal with all the limitations of this life, all it’s troubles and my own failings, when I’ve tasted and held the eternal. I can sense there is a whole world beyond my hole, the world I belong to but I’m not there, I am here and while there is definite joy in my hole, I know it was born of the stars.
C.S. Lewis says this hole is merely a stage, that it is not the real world but that it is a real stage, part of the real world. We are the actors and although we have lives beyond the stage, for now we are trapped in our roles and cannot go beyond them. It is in prayer this real person, the one beyond the stage, speaks to God, the director, producer, and audience. Lewis says, “The attempt is not to escape from space and time and from my creaturely situation as a subject facing objects. It is more modest: to re-awake the awareness of that situation….Here is the holy ground; the Bush is burning now.” The stage then, the hole, is holy. God is on the stage, God is in the hole.
All I’ve got to say is that if for now I’m stuck on the holy stage, it better be a good play.
365-09 #287