The mystical dimension of Catholicism has always attracted and intrigued me.
Saints like John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Bernard of Clairvaux speak of their experience of God as the Divine Mystery, the Holy One who leads the soul on a path of inner purification to an ever-deepening awareness of the Lord.
These saints were attracted to the radical Otherness of God, His glory, majesty, and transcendence.
We had a glimpse of this in the readings several weeks ago at Sunday Mass when Isaiah had an overwhelming encounter with the glory of the Lord in the temple, which shook him to the core, even as it shook the door frames of the Temple, and when Simon fell at the knees of Jesus and cried, “Leave me Lord for I am a sinful man!” when the miraculous catch of fish astonished him.
The glory of God deeply moves those who encounter the power of the Divine.
Divine revelation
We come to know God through divine revelation. I spoke of this theme several weeks ago when reflecting on the Vatican II document, Dei Verbum.
God reveals Himself through creation, the history, writings, and prophets of the Old Testament, and ultimately through Jesus Christ.
Through the Son, the Father speaks everything to us that we need, in order to know the Lord and to be saved.
Through study of the New Testament, the sacraments, the catechism, Tradition, our own experience of God in prayer and in the myriad details of our lives, God is revealing Himself to us constantly, if we have the silence and recollection to listen and understand.
Even though we can come to know much about God, He is essentially an infinite, awesome, overwhelming Mystery, whom we will never be able to fully grasp.
As St. Augustine says, “If we think we have God completely figured out and understood, what we think we understand is not God.”
In other words, God is knowable, but never completely knowable.
We catch glimpses of God, but can never fully grasp Him entirely.
The Lord gives sufficient knowledge and grace through the Church for everyone to be saved if they desire and live by faith, but a richer and more profound experience of God awaits us if we desire to cast out into the deep water. The mystics show us the way of “unknowing.”
A painful purification
Saints like John of the Cross would say that God in His Essence is so beyond our comprehension, that His light will often appear to our senses as darkness, and His presence at times will seem like absence.
When I pray, and nothing at all seems to be happening, can I still trust that the Lord is working so deeply in me, that God is accomplishing a spiritual transformation in me, beyond anything my mind and my feelings can apprehend?
If I am faithful to prayer and meditation, even in the dry periods, the Lord will gradually purify my spiritual desire, and help me to move beyond the kindergarten of belief.
I will stop viewing God as simply a harsh judge marking down all of my failings with no mercy, or as a divine magician who will answer all of my requests the way I want if I pray hard enough, or as a puppet master who whimsically manipulates my existence.
In other words, He will help me to gradually unlearn or “unknow” who I thought God to be, and I will come into a more mature stance of belief.
This purification can be painful, as I am called to surrender my limited notions of God and to acknowledge that the way I prayed 20 years ago is no longer adequate.
Allowing God in our lives
God never imposes Himself on us, so that He will only take us as far as we allow Him to, but the spiritual adventure of the mystics teaches us that He has much to teach and show us if we have both the humility and perseverance to surrender to Him and continue to be faithful to prayer and meditation.
In the Old Testament, the Lord guided His Chosen People through the desert to the Promised Land by dwelling in a cloud, which always preceded them in their arduous journey.
Generations later, when Solomon celebrated the dedication of the newly-built Temple in Jerusalem, 1 Kings 8:10-12 tells us that “When the priests left the holy place, the cloud filled the temple of the Lord so that the priests could no longer minister because of the cloud, since the Lord’s glory had filled the temple of the Lord.”
Then Solomon said, “The Lord intends to dwell in the dark cloud.”
This experience expresses well the paradox of God’s hidden, yet available presence.
He dwells with the Israelites in the cloud in the temple, just as the Lord abides with us in the mystery of the Holy Eucharist, in the life of the Church.
God is here with us, but in such a transcendent way, that we can only apprehend Him through faith, love, and hope.
As Lent approaches, know that the Lord invites all of us to become mystics, to surrender to His love and mercy, to wait on Him in prayer and meditation, to surrender to the Divine Mystery which we will never fully understand or grasp in this life, yet is the guiding power which is leading us home to the promised land of Heaven.