Meditations for Layfolks - Mysticism

This much-denounced and much-praised word has a real practical value for Catholics. It describes not so much a system or a doctrine as a definite attitude to life. The ordinary pious person, or indeed people who are far from pious and yet are much affected by the beauty of nature or of things and individuals in the world, are wont to say that these lift up their minds to God. They are so impressed by the loveliness of that which appears, that they are led to suppose that there must be a loveliness infinitely greater to account for that transient beauty, glimpses of which are vouchsafed them here on earth: " How beauteous must His beauties be who framed the glories of the day." Nor is it simply the sight of the beautiful things that God has made that produces this impression on the mind; for the handicrafts of man are also wonderful and make those who have in them any sense of the meaning of life exclaim in surprise at the amazing marvels of God's power; for whatever is in the creature must be even more excellently in the Creator. Hence all this wonderful increase in the scientific in ventions of man does not in any sense make our faith stagger; or perhaps it does make it stagger, not as though God could not be, or need not be, but at the more wonderful manifestations of His glory. If He who framed the glories of the day must be so beautiful Himself, then He too who gave man the power to do these marvellous things must be infinitely more marvellous Himself. From nature, from man's works, and still more from the wonders of man's own personality, his self-sacrifice, his humility, the fierceness and consuming fire of his love, we are led step by step to a more splendid appreciation of the meaning of our worship of God.

Now all this is very beautiful and is often called mysticism, but mysticism it certainly is not. The real meaning of mysticism is much more important, much more helpful, deeper, and more revolutionary. Take, for example, the things that make us say at once that they are mystic. We read the story of Saint Francis and we hear of how he called the wolf of Gubbio, that was doing so much harm to the inhabitants, "Brother Wolf"; how to him death was a sister, and the sun a brother; how, in fact, the moon and the stars and Christ our Lord were all his kinsfolk. We say at once that Saint Francis had a mystical vision of life. Or, again, when we find Saint Catharine of Siena receiving the head of a condemned man into her arms in order that she might comfort him in his last hours, and speaking at once when she found her white garments coloured with his blood in such a way as to make it difficult to distinguish whether she is referring to the Blood of Christ or the blood of the poor dead criminal, we cannot help seeing that she, too, has attained the mystic vision. The same sort of thing is to be found in the sayings and doings of every mystic. We may not be able to say quite what they have that makes them to be mystics, but we can recognize the mystical element as soon as we have heard of it. What, then, really is it? Perhaps the easiest way of expressing what is with great difficulty got into human language, is to say that the vision of the mystic makes him or her see that the whole of the universe is one. Thus Saint Francis was not lifted up to God by the thought of earthly things in the sense that he forgot earth in looking at heaven; but he was able (and this is surely the whole meaning of mysticism) to get such a vision of heaven as allowed earth also its place in the same plane. A mystic is not one who sees God in nature, but one for whom God and nature fit into one plane.

It is just this vision that is so essential in human life. The chief bother that exists for most of us is that everything seems so disconnected; there appears to be no plan of things, no design in them at all, but every dreary moment of our day is connected with the next simply because we happen to be continuous through it all. There is the sight of nature and the wonderful works of man, the sudden gleam of genius and the slow-plodding ways of honest toil, the kindly side of man's strange character, his self-sacrifice, his illogical generosity; then, too, come the mysteries of God's kingdom as we learn them from the Church the overwhelming truths that stand out against the skyline the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Redemption, the Indwelling of the Spirit of God. Now the difficulty is for me to see that all these are not separate, but one. To unite the petty details of our daily lives to the tremendous Being of God seems an impossible proposal, but to the mystic all things are possible not because he lowers God to the level of the ordinary things of life, but because he suddenly sees these glow with a divine transfiguration and can never again look upon anything in human life as common or unclean. I must train myself to realize, for example, that the Incarnation is not simply that Christ our Lord became man, though that itself is full enough of wonder, but that by so being tabernacled in the flesh, He lifted up all created things to Himself, and became a brother to all the world. I must pray very earnestly to see the connection between all things that are, to be conscious of the action of God working through earth and heaven, the experiences of life and the very being of the Divine Three in One.

- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.