Mirabai Starr writes about mysticism we can experience in the “monasteries” of our everyday lives:
I think you get it: You don’t have to enter a monastery to be a mystic. You don’t have to renounce chocolate or forsake pop culture. It is not necessary to take formal vows and beat yourself up when you inevitably fail to uphold them. These are static notions of what it means to be committed to the life of the soul, and they probably have almost nothing to do with the warm and spicy sprawl of your days. To be a mystic in our times is not about renunciation; it is about intention.
Living as a mystic means orienting the whole of yourself toward the sacred. It’s a matter of purposely looking through the lens of love. Contemporary wise woman Anne Lamott says (quoting Father Ed, the priest who helped Bill Wilson start up Alcoholics Anonymous) that “sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.” [1] You know what it looks like when you wipe a lens clean of smears and dust. And you also know how it feels to bump into the furniture when your vision is fuzzy. When you say yes to cultivating a mystical gaze, the ordinary world becomes more luminous, imbued with flashes of beauty and moments of meaning. The universe responds to your willingness to behold the holy by revealing almost everything as holy. A plate of rice and beans, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, your new baby, the latest political scoundrel, the scary diagnosis, the restless nights.
Starr encourages us to commit to discovering the hidden depths of love in mundane situations:
You can start right here, in the middle of your messy life. Your beautiful, imperfect, perfect life. There is no other time, and the exact place you find yourself is the best place to enter. Despite what they might have taught you at Bible Camp or in yoga class, you are probably not on your way to some immaculate state in which you will eventually be calm and kindly enough to be worthy of a direct encounter with the divine. Set your intention to uncover the jewels buried in the heart of what already is. Choose to see the face of God in the face of the bus driver and the moody teenager, in peeling a tangerine or feeding the cat. Decide. Mean it. Open your heart, and then do everything you can to keep it open. Light every candle in the room….
When we make a pact with ourselves to show up for reality just as it is, reality rewards us by revealing its hidden holiness, its ordinary wonder, its fruitful shadows and radiant wounds. Not always, not everywhere, but more and more often and in the places we least expect.… This is what it means to be a mystic. To show up for what is, to be present to all that is, to take refuge in the boundless intimacy of exactly what is.
References:
[1] Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017), 12.
Mirabai Starr, Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground (New York: HarperCollins, 2024), 13–14, 15, 18–19. Excerpted from Ordinary Mysticism by Mirabai Starr and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2024.
Image credit and inspiration: Jacob Bentzinger, untitled (detail), 2023, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like the light of a stained-glass window making new patterns and shapes on a wall, we look at old things and old ways with new eyes and discover new ways of being.
Story from Our Community:
In the majestic landscape [of Kruger National Park], I strongly felt the consciousness of the Creator. I was overwhelmed by a sense of tranquility and also tension. I felt vulnerable to the unpredictable … forces of Nature like large wild animals and the changing weather. What might happen to our small community? This tension must be how religion began. I felt a burning need to fit all of life together in a sensible, beautiful circle. How do the grasses, trees, climate, reptiles, amphibians, mammals all relate to each other—and to us? It’s such a human need to classify everything around us and yet I felt grateful to perceive God in it all.
—Charles D.
