Honesty About the Journey

During each Christmas season, God assigns me a role in the nativity scene so I can focus on something besides painful memories that can derail me at the holidays. A couple of years ago, God assigned me the role of the innkeeper. In that innkeeper role, I became the midwife for Jesus’s birth—and also a midwife for people who are experiencing their own rebirth at the manger. I felt this role as a profound calling and I was grateful for this compassionate gift from God. But God, in infinite wisdom, had more in store for me that Christmas.

As I join this conversation about mysticism, I think it best to confess, at the outset, a certain awkwardness. Adding my voice to a
discussion on this topic generates within me an emotion similar to what I imagine a guest at a formal dinner party might feel if
he arrived wearing torn jeans and a badly stained shirt. Other contributors are better equipped than I to describe and draw you into
experiences of prayer, meditation, and sacred reading that can satisfy the deep hunger in your soul for communion with God. Integrity
requires me to focus more on the hunger than its satisfaction.

After performing at the Ozark Mountain Folk Fair in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in 1973 John Michael Talbot began to reconsider his life. What seems so remarkable about this was his age—nineteen—and the fact that most would say he was on top of the world. After all, he and his brother, Terry Talbot, were the heart of a country-rock group known as Mason Proffit, which had fronted for some of the biggest acts of that era, including the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin. Nonetheless, John Michael had the sudden revelation that his life
was empty and sad.

Mystics have ears and hearts turned to another world, that of the Divine.  Amidst my busy modern life, I’ve tried to keep turning and tuning my heart to God.  However, one practice that the Holy Spirit quickened off the pages of a book fifteen years ago changed my spiritual life forever:  the night watch.

In his 2006 book by Paulist Press, Transforming Heart and Mind: Learning from the Mystics,
Peter N. Borys, Jr., shows that he is not afraid of tackling an ambitious project. He sets as his goal the synthesis of the most important insights from the history of Christian mysticism and the integration of this with Roman Catholic theology and select aspects of modern psychology. What he accomplishes
is impressive and definitely of value for us in this issue as we seek to mine the riches of our Christian mystical heritage.

Fr. Louis Bouyer, the great French scholar of Christian spirituality, suggests that the only true object of Christian mysticism is the Christian mystery. The mystery is “God’s eternal design of saving all things in Christ just as he was to create all things in him.” The mystery is Christ himself, revealed fully in
the cross, the ultimate revelation of God’s love for us. 

God led me to contemplative prayer through back roads.

I became active in church when I was a teenager and a very attractive girl invited me to youth group. God uses all kinds of ways to enlist people in His service! My next step was to be a Volunteer in Mission in the West Virginia Mountain Project after my junior year in college. Seeing the love and generosity of the Presbyterian men and women who served this group of churches in a poverty-stricken area profoundly challenged me; I wanted what they seemed to have.

This past summer, while awaiting the arrival of our fourth grandchild, I stayed at our son’s house in Salmon Arm, British Columbia. It’s an old house with small bedrooms and limited closet space. My bedroom, the smallest, presented minor living challenges. In the morning, my air mattress was pushed up against the wall to allow enough space to unfold the card table which held my laptop and working papers. This small room was where I studied, read, prayed, attended to wounds (the dog gashed my foot with her sharp claw), and wrote this article. It was also where I received guests; my two-year-old granddaughter came across the hallway each morning to do morning stretches with Grandma after she assisted me in pushing the air mattress against the wall.

What happens when two friends talk without a script for three hours about grace, and one of  them is Philip Yancey, arguably today’s premier Christian writer and author of the landmark book What’s So Amazing About Grace? Well, I’ll tell you one thing that happened: we (at least I) forgot that we were chatting to generate an article for Conversations. Our conversation over lunch took on a life of its own.

This place is different, I thought as I sat for the first time in the bleachers of a high school gymnasium that transformed itself every weekend into Church of the Open Door. The worship session filled me with hope, and David Johnson began to preach from the book of Matthew with passion and authenticity. I instinctively knew I was home.