Mystics

Twelve Who Reveal God's Love

Murray Bodo

• Publisher: Franciscan Media
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781632532855
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Dénominations chrétiennes

Christianity is a mysterious faith. Some of these mysteries can be described with Scripture or doctrine, but others can only be experienced. Those graced with these experiences, these intimate glimpses of God, are called mystics. Murray Bodo's sensitive guidance leads us into the heart of what these mystics have expressed about God and how their insight can deepen our own experience of the boundless mystery of a loving God. This updated and expanded edition includes new chapters on St. Clare and St. Bonaventure.

chapter one

MARY, MOTHER OF MYSTICS

If the mystic is one who experiences in an extraordinary way the intimacy with God offered to everyone, then Mary is the model and pattern of the mystical life. She literally carried God in her womb and gave birth to him.

Spiritual impregnation, gestation and giving birth are the initial stages of the mystical life. God invades our life, usually when we are not expecting it; we embrace that gift. Even if we are tempted to hoard it as ours alone, God will be born from us; we will serve others as a result of God’s own indwelling love.

Imagine Mary, a young girl at her prayers or perhaps performing her tasks or simply sitting and watching people pass by her window. Suddenly, there is a rush of wind like a flutter of wings, or a flash of light, and there is one like an angel addressing her: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). There it is: The Lord is with you. What can this mean? Gabriel, as if knowing her thoughts, continues, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus” (Luke 1:30–31).

Mary asks, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you...” (Luke 1:34–35).

All mystics wonder what is happening to them when the Holy Spirit asks them to believe the seemingly impossible, that God wants to enter their lives. They can, of course, refuse out of fear or doubt, and it is the glory of Mary that she does not refuse but says yes.

Each true mystic who says yes to God at some point is sent forth into the world as the Father sent the Son to announce and build up God’s kingdom. For Mary this moment comes almost immediately when the angel announces that her aged cousin Elizabeth is in her sixth month of pregnancy (for nothing is impossible with God). Mary says to the angel, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

And Mary sets out into the hill country to minister to her cousin Elizabeth. There God will be revealed in Mary’s deep charity, as God had been revealed in her deep prayer. For when she enters Elizabeth’s house, the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cries out, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.... And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord” (Luke 1:42, 45).

Mary’s decision and the truth of the angel’s message are confirmed, not when Mary is rapt in contemplation, but when she is doing charity. The truth of the mystic’s visions and intimacy with God is proven in the selfless charity of the mystic’s life.

Mary’s response to Elizabeth, her canticle, the Magnificat, distills the mystical life:

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done great things for me
and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and his descendants for ever. (Luke 1:46–55)

As with every true prayer, the Magnificat does just that: it magnifies the Lord, focuses on the Almighty, who does great things among us, the One whose name is holy.

As though already letting the child in her womb speak through her, Mary does more: She presages the major themes of Jesus’ future preaching and ministry. William Barclay, in his meditations on the Gospel of Luke, says that Mary ends her canticle with a moral, social and economic revolution.¹

The moral revolution is indicated in the line that God “scatters the proud in the plans of their hearts” (in Barclay’s translation). We begin to change when our own plans scatter us, bring us down; God’s plans replace them—God’s plans, in the case of the mystic, are revealed in a vision or a voice speaking to the soul. God’s plans work a revolution in our lives. We begin to change because of what we have seen and heard.

The social revolution is heralded in the line, “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones / and lifted up the lowly.” The mystic sees what the world does not see, that the lowly are the real authority, for they represent the kingdom of God in its fullness.

Jesus says in the first words of his first sermon, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). Jesus does not say, “Theirs will be the kingdom of heaven,” but “Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” This is a now promise. Where there is poverty of spirit, the real kingdom happens. How different this is from the kingdoms of earth that happen where there is power, not lowliness and littleness. How powerless the mystics are in terms of human power, how powerful in things of the spiritual kingdom within.

The economic revolution is foretold when Mary says, “[H]e has filled the hungry with good things, / and sent the rich away empty.” The kingdom Jesus will preach and that his disciples will model distributes wealth to the poor, embracing poverty as the fast track into the kingdom. “If you wish to be perfect,” Jesus says to the rich, young man, “go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21). The medieval mystic Francis of Assisi will become the personification of this kind of gospel poverty, having been a rich young man who knew all too well that it is “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24).

Mary’s life, like that of her son, will be a living out of her own canticle. She will enter into the mysteries of Christ’s life. Like the Christian mystics after her, she will participate in a more intense way in the very mystery that she is sharing. As the model of intimacy with God, Mary will enter into the death and resurrection of her son. She will stand beneath the cross of his dying; she will rise with him body and soul in the mystery of her Assumption into heaven.

Franciscans pray a seven-decade rosary, the Franciscan Crown, that for me summarizes what it means to enter into the mystery of how we are transformed by and into Christ. The mystic knows in a uniquely graced way these mysteries that we believe and live out as we try to be true to the mystery of our baptism.

As mentioned in the introduction, the very word mystic derives from the word mystery, and God does allow the mystics to see into mysteries, like the mystery of baptism, by way of visions or insights that transcend our usual way of seeing. They see and relate to us the wonder of what is happening within us, for example, as we live out the mysteries of our salvation. The mystics confirm that what we believe is indeed true.

The seven joys of Mary of the Franciscan Crown illustrate for me what happens in the lives of mystics.

1. Annunciation. Like Mary, the mystics have experienced some extraordinary visitation of God. They hear or see Christ or his messenger, and they are given a choice to respond or not. They realize that their experience of the Divine not only involves listening, but responding.

2. Visitation. The response to God’s annunciation ultimately involves a reaching out to others, as Mary does in the second mystery of the crown, the Visitation. When she hears of her cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy, Mary goes immediately to tend to her, to be her handmaid. She becomes her cousin’s servant as she became God’s servant in the Annunciation. The one leads to the other, and, indeed, to be handmaid to her cousin is to be handmaid to God. For, as her son will proclaim, when you serve the least of your brothers and sisters, you serve him.

3. Nativity. The mystical heart gives birth to God in poverty, littleness and often in obscurity. Mystics do not literally give birth to Christ, but they do so spiritually by their charity, by the gestures of their lives.

4. Adoration of the Magi. The mystics imitate the adoration of the magi symbolically and literally when they offer their newborn selves to God. They have a sense that they no longer belong wholly to themselves to do with their lives as they please, but they belong to God.

5. Finding Jesus in the Temple. The finding of the child Jesus in the temple speaks to the truth not only of the mystic’s life but of all our lives, namely, that we can’t hold onto God. God will be about God’s business, and nothing we do will make God our personal possession. We all experience this one way or another, but the mystics experience this most intensely because of the felt intimacy with God they’ve been gifted with. God at some point withdraws his presence, and the mystic is left in that dark night of soul, to use the language of John of the Cross, in which God seems to no longer exist, at least not for them. They long to experience God, but they cannot make it happen, because God is leading them through this dark night in order that they might love God for God’s own sake and not for the intimacy and gifts God gives them. And so they wait, and they go through the motions of prayer and charity; but there is no consolation, no joy in it, until God finds them again, and their joy is restored to a heart that has been purified of selfishness.

6. Resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection is prefigured by the transfiguration. When Jesus takes Peter, James and John up the mountain and is transfigured before them, they try to hold onto that experience the way other mystics have tried to hold onto their ecstatic experience of God. Jesus’ face is changed, and his clothing becomes dazzling white, and Moses and Elijah appear in glory, speaking of the passage Jesus will have to make in Jerusalem. Peter immediately wants to make three shelters there for Jesus, Moses and Elijah in order to keep them there. But the evangelist Luke says that Peter doesn’t know what he is saying because, as he is speaking, a cloud comes and covers them with a shadow, and the disciples are afraid. Then a voice comes from the cloud, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (Luke 9:35). Jesus is left standing there alone. The vision has passed, and shortly afterward Jesus enters Jerusalem, beginning his passion, death and resurrection.

None of us humans, not even Mary, can hold onto glory. The ordinary passages through life and death continue as they did for Mary after meeting her son as the Risen Lord following the Resurrection. The mystic, however, has indeed seen the vision, has heard God’s voice. Those of us who have not are encouraged by their visions and voices to believe more firmly that beneath the appearances of our ordinary lives God’s glory lies hidden. It flares out from time to time and is seen by those to whom God chooses to reveal this parallel world we believe in but do not see.

7. Assumption and Crowning of Mary. Like Mary in this last mystery, the mystics are assumed into heaven soul and body. By this I mean that only in the integration of soul and body do we enter paradise. Once one has had an intense experience of God, the temptation is to privilege the soul and denigrate the body, thereby splitting what God has made one person. Some mystics have seen the body as a problem, a source of sin, an inferior part of the self, and they have acted accordingly, often imposing extreme penances on the body, neglecting the needs of the body, even trying to become pure soul. This is another form of trying to hold onto God. Instead we must let God go, as Mary did when she saw her son die, saw him alive again, then saw him ascend into heaven. Following Jesus’ instructions, she went with John to his home to live out her days.

There is a beautiful poem by the English poet Anne Beresford that in its simple, homely gestures speaks beautifully of Mary, the integrated woman as seen through the eyes of Saint John.

On Patmos²

In the beginning silence

her hands cold

she would stroke my face

and murmur thanks

We share peace

on this island

My memories, visions

written down.

Work assigned to me

when Peter asked:

“And what of him?”

My mother of the Word

Sits in the centre of the universe

slowly dying into her thoughts.³

Here is Mary, the aging woman, not Mary, pure soul.

The coronation of Mary as queen of heaven and earth speaks to the truth of our relationship with God. Our coronation comes in the marriage of the soul to God, which the mystics experience in an ecstatic state, and which some of the mystics wrote about, as we will see in the pages that follow.

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One misconception about the mystics is that they are singularly holy people, set apart from us ordinary Christians by their holiness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mystics are singular and different because of their mystical experiences, their visions, not their holiness. Holiness is about living in the grace of God, about virtue, especially the virtue of charity, which is available to all; it is not about visions. Jesus says that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Peter, James and John are not holier than the other apostles because they saw Jesus transfigured; they are only different because they’ve had an experience the other apostles didn’t have. They knew something more than the others.

Holiness is about faith, not knowledge. Holiness is about abiding in faith, hope and charity. And such is available to everyone open to the Holy Spirit.

Another misconception is that the mystics are special friends of God, and the rest of us are not. Again, that is not true. We are all special friends of God if we keep God’s commandments. What is unique about the mystics is the revelations they receive. That makes them distinctive persons in the Body of Christ, but no more necessary. As Saint Paul says, there are many gifts of the Spirit, but the most important, and the only essential one, is the one available to all: charity. “Love never ends,” he says. “But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end” (1 Corinthians 13:8).

How, then, are these mysteries we believe and that the mystics have glimpsed lived out from day to day? Let’s imagine the Gospel stories as a series of scenes of which we ourselves are a part.

Mary and Joseph take Jesus to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord. Simeon is there waiting for the fulfillment of the Holy Spirit’s promise to him that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. And Mary knows, as soon as she sees him that he, too, is of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit that overshadowed her. He is aflame with a fire she recognizes as he takes the child Jesus in his arms and begins to praise God, saying,

Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
according to your word;

for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel. (Luke 2:29–32)

Mary and Joseph marvel that once again someone knows who their son is beneath all that littleness, that baby smile, those tiny, round cheeks. Mary is not prepared for what comes next as Simeon turns his eyes to her and the inspired words flow out from his aged body: “This child is destined for the falling an...