What is a Mystic? Part One

There’s something that runs beneath every great religious tradition — something older than doctrine, older than institution, older than the arguments and wars people wage in its name.

A mystical current runs beneath the substrate, not exclusive to any faith, yet it occasionally surfaces in all of them.

Those open to learning from other traditions encounter it in the Sufi poets as they spin their way toward God. Kabbalists trace the hidden architecture of the divine, using a symbolic framework of spiritual structures that describe how the infinite God contracts and emanates to create the finite world.  

Desert Fathers and Mothers sought the holy through asceticism and stillness, sitting with silence in the Egyptian sand. They weren’t following the Eastern Zen path directly, but early Christian monks and Zen Buddhists arrived at strikingly similar practices, forming them on their own.

Mysticism surfaces in Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who traveled to Asia not to abandon his Christianity but to find, in conversation with Zen masters, something he already knew from the inside — confirmed now from the outside.

What these traditions, and others, share is not theology. Their theologies differ, sometimes sharply. What they share is a willingness to go further in — past the familiar words, past the comfort of certainty, into something that can only be described inadequately after the fact of a mystical experience.

Few Protestant traditions have sustained this current, perhaps because of a deep fidelity to the text itself, to the Word as the final arbiter of matters of faith and direction. But there are exceptions, and they are luminous. One of the few is Howard Thurman, mystic, theologian, mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., who carried within him something that had no institutional home in the Protestant tradition.

This may explain why what he carried went so deep, and why he became effective as a preacher and perennial wisdom teacher even outside the bounds of a well-bounded belief system.

When there’s no structure to hold you, you have to become the structure. For some, of any tradition or none, diving deeply into the wellspring of mysticism becomes the means of encountering the Nameless — the Mystery that animates and binds us as human beings.

What exactly makes a person a mystic? Nature, nurture, calling, or some combination, I suppose. I believe that suffering is somewhere near the center of it. Not suffering as punishment or a lesson, but suffering as pressure that forces a person through what they thought were their limits and into something they couldn’t have imagined from the other side.

This great stress is first encountered in tragedy, perhaps met with horror. It pushes people in all kinds of directions: toward bitterness, numbness, or hopelessness. Those able to endure, to stay with it long enough, may move toward something like transcendence. This provides neither escape nor relief from the pain of being human. It is an expansion of capacity, strength, and resilience arriving in its own time.

I hold all this tentatively. Staying with it is not guaranteed to lead anywhere in particular. Pain sustained without reflection invites fear and deepens wounds over time. In this sense, avoidance of the pain of memories, the “working through,” pushes people of every faith or background toward numbness or cruelty - a desire for amends or retribution.

Power dressed up as righteousness is another risk of glossing over the depth of human suffering.

Self-righteousness is not a failure of religion alone but also a failure of the human beings who carry it. Still, religion, precisely because it traffics in ultimacy, tends to amplify those failures catastrophically.

Add cultural inheritance to the mix, the long-baked stories about what a man must be, what a woman has to accept, who gets to speak and who must be silent, and we end up with the conditions for extraordinary harm, conducted by people who may genuinely believe they are doing good.

What believers, or “sense-makers” of any kind, proclaim matters less than what they do.