A friend and I had a conversation about whether mysticism must be in contrast to theological learning, or orthodoxy, or obedience. I ventured a guess that most of the church fathers and famous ancient and medieval theologians had amazing prayer lives — e.g. I feel like I read or heard about some vision that Thomas Aquinas once had. I’m not looking to be a mystic on the order of Catherine of Siena or Julian of Norwich, but I am looking to feel, not just assent to, the loving presence of God. I’ve never heard anyone call St. Augustine a mystic, but even he heard a voice.
But sometimes the step is a distinct and vivid experience. Then we get the strange facts of conversion: when through some object or event–perhaps quite small object or event–in the external world, another world and its overwhelming attraction and demand is realized. An old and limited state of consciousness is suddenly, even violently, broken up and another takes its place. It was the voice of a child saying “Take, read!” which at last made St. Augustine cross the frontier on which he had been lingering, and turned a brilliant and selfish young professor into one of the giants of the Christian Church; and voice which to come seemed to come from the Crucifix, which literally made the young St. Francis, unsettled and unsatisfied, another man than he was before. It was while St. Ignatius sat by a stream and watched the running water, and while the strange old cobbler Jacob Bohme was looking at the pewter dish, that there was shown to each of them the mystery of the Nature of God. It was the sudden sight of a picture at a crucial moment of her life which revealed to St. Catherine of Genoa the beauty of Holiness, and by contrast her own horribleness; and made her for the rest of her life the friend and servant of the unseen Love. All these were various glimpses of one living Perfection, and woke up the love and desire for that living perfection, latent in every human creature, which is the same thing as the love of God, and the substance of a spiritual life. A spring is touched, a Reality always there discloses itself in its awe-inspiring majesty and intimate nearness, and becomes the ruling fact of existence; continually presenting its standards, and demanding a costly response. And so we get such an astonishing scene, when we reflect upon it, as that of the young boy Francis of Assisi, little more than a boy, asking all night long the one question which so many apparently mature persons have never asked at all: “My God and All, what art Thou and what am I?” and we realize with amazement what a human creature really is–a finite center of consciousness, which is able to apprehend, and long for, Infinity.
- The Spiritual Life
