I’m still savoring the memory of Cynthia Bourgeault’s book, Mystical Hope, laying in my lap, a tear trickling down my cheek and a smile broadening across my face in deep relief and joy. I had just reached the part in which she quoted a little piece of a Thomas Merton cassette (!) speaking to his novices. As I read it, I laughed out loud, since he recalled an image that was very similar to one I had experienced in prayer during a rich period of my thirties — an image that has sustained me ever since.
God is near to us at the point that is just before final destruction. Take away everything else down to that point of final destruction, and the last little bit that’s left before destruction, a little kernel of gold which is the essence of you–and there is God protecting it…And this is something terrific. …[We] don’t normally get into that center unless we’re brought to the edge of what looks like destruction. In other words, we have to be facing the possibility of the destruction of everything else to know this will not be destroyed.
Merton sounds a bit like he is inviting his novices to jump off a spiritual cliff, doesn’t he?! I suppose he is. I suppose I jumped. But he is also inviting relative beginners into a life of prayer, like my three previous posts have been doing. It is a life that leads to the place of surrender and revelation he describes in the quote above. It is a life filled with the mystical hope that does not come through ordinary means.
Meditation “puts us immediately in touch with that ‘little kernel of gold which is the essence of’ us and allows us to begin to recognize it and trust it.” That might be the best feeling in the world.
Unfortunately, your faith journey may not have led you into meditation yet. So much religion these days relies on a “good offense” or a “good defense.” On the one hand, many Christians offer victorious living when they promise an overcoming hope that seems hollow in the cancer ward, or when the baby is born with disabilities, or when the house is destroyed and a lifetime of memories seems washed away. On the other hand the Buddhist track and most of what “mindfulness” is about teaches us an equally deficient approach when they call us to release our preoccupation with death and suffering in order to experience blissful, mindless oneness with all life.
Deeper than having a good offense or good defense and more in line with the Lord’s example is mystical hope. On the other side of suffering and death is hope. Bourgeault says, “Only if we are still hanging on…only in the measure that we fail to yield completely into the mercy of God, will hope fail us. If we are willing to take it all the way, it will take us all the way.”
Jesus went beyond destruction to hope.
This the journey of yielding completely Jesus took all the way. When he was arrested, he told his disciples to put away their swords because he, like us, needed to pass through his own powerlessness and hopelessness. He purposely did not put his hope in some nuclear arsenal of angels or call on a victory-making God to save him. When he was in the garden praying and meditating (as the disciples fainted), he found that “protecting nearness” at the center of reality. How he went “to the edge of what looks like destruction” is an example for us. It is the Lord’s death as well as his resurrection that is our salvation.
Words on a page don’t work as well as art to explain this basic Christian truth. But this old song gets to it:
No light in the darkness you see?
There’s light for a look at the Savior,
And life more abundant and free.
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.
He passed, and we follow Him there;
The wonderful old movie, Babette’s Feast, gets at it, too. In this film the wonder centers around a sumptuous meal that reveals many secrets. It is like another last supper, only this one is full of old Danish people facing death. They are gathered full of faith and full of their regrets. The General gets up and names the wonder that is happening among them, the same wonder that was seen when Jesus, the living truth, yielded himself faithfully into the Mercy. The General says, “Mercy and faithfulness have met; justice and peace have embraced.” And all the joys and regrets become one in love as the Alpha and Omega is present in fullness.
There is hope
In our Transhistorical Body blog, we look toward the people who have gone before us for the assurance that this wild thought is true: if I move over the edge of destruction, God will still protect the golden kernel of the true me. If I dare to meet the living God, my old self — my fallen, scarred, angry, abandoned, intolerably vulnerable self, might die, but I will live. We get this assurance not only from our ultimate example, Jesus, but last week we celebrated Claire of Assisi, who could have quoted Albert Camus: “In the middle of winter I discovered in myself an invincible summer.”
There is hope.
I remember a letter to the our old church from a new member. He was telling the church his story before he made a covenant at the Love Feast. He had gone through so much — and went through a lot more, but even now he has hope. He wrote, “There had always been an emptiness inside me and after my mom passed, I fell into the grips of addiction. When I moved to Philadelphia to get sober, I was fortunate enough to meet Jimmy , in what will always be a “God shot” to me….I was immediately drawn to Circle of Hope and I now realize I was also being called to Christ. This journey brings me joy and deep connection. At times Circle Of Hope is all I felt I had, but the fellowship, my Cell, and my growing relationship with Christ have filled me and helped me to thrive again.”
There is hope.
God is protecting that golden true self at the heart of each of us, calling us to meet in that open-to-the-Spirit place where life moves us and draws us. The everyday way to living comfortably and securely outside our present-oriented injuries and fears and into our eternal now with God is the listening, feeling and releasing prayer of meditation. It seems like a new way, as Bourgeault says, “beyond linear, discursive thinking” into “inspired visionary knowing where Christianity finally becomes fully congruent with its own highest truth and its mystical treasures can be received into an awakened heart.”
If all that beautiful teaching from Merton and Bourgeault seem a bit much to you, just listen to Jesus and see where he leads. Or meditate on Claire of Assisi when you pray. Or appreciate the love that guards the members of the church, even when they have just been called back from far away.
There is hope.
More on Mystical Hope
Previous: Mystical hope in a deteriorating world
Swimming in the Mercy: The experience of hope
Anxious and tired: Meditation that turns us toward hope