Sunday
We don’t need to be afraid of the word “mystic.” It simply means one who has moved from mere belief or belonging systems about God to actual inner experience.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Mysticism is pointing to something that is somehow hidden and cannot be easily seen or talked about. A mystic reveals that which is hidden to most of us, yet it is almost invariably what we also hope and imagine to be true.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
The sacred is always brimming from the heart of everything. If what it means to be a mystic is to walk through this world looking through the eyes of love, then anything and everything that we do with the intention and attention on the sacred, including our most difficult experiences, counts and belongs.
—Mirabai Starr
Wednesday
Mystics are men and women, who, through mystical experiences are touched by the realization that down in the deep-down depths of things, God is welling up and giving Herself away in and as every breath and heartbeat. They taste that oneness, and in moments, when we taste that oneness, we’re like a momentary mystic.
—James Finley
Thursday
Public mystics are leaders who embody the ineffable while attending to the ordinary, those who host the transcendent, the mystical, and the mundane while engaged in pragmatic justice-seeking acts.
—Barbara Holmes
Friday
Despite our denial, the mystical heartbeat never abates; its lifeblood courses through our veins, calling us home. And it is this insistent tug from the infinite that guides our souls on the mystic quest and compels openness of heart.
—Beverly Lanzetta
Week Seven Practice
Gathered in Prayer
Howard Thurman prays for the Holy Spirit to be present with people gathered in community:
In many-sided activities, there is so much that engages the mind, and ensnares the emotions, that again and again, we are wanderers, lost in the midst of our own private and collective wildernesses, with no sense of being at home anywhere, in anything, at any time. Our enthusiasms wax hot and cold….
It is wonderful therefore to sit together, to be enveloped by a single moment, and feel the presence, and sense the lights and shadows of those who sit near us. It is good to be caught in the creative silence, surrounded by the brooding presence of God. And perchance, as we wait together in the quietness, some new light may be thrown upon old problems, some fresh hope may give wings to spirit to which despair is the familiar. Perhaps a sense of forgiveness for sins committed, for errors done, for blundering stupidities that have wrought havoc in other people’s lives. All this may be the miracle for us, as we wait together in the quietness.
O love of God, without which life has no meaning, and no harbor, leave us not alone with our little lives, our broken dreams, our insistent problems, but invade our spirit with thy vitality, that we may be renewed in all the ways of our lives, that we may turn from this place, this day, with all that is within us, washed and purified and refreshed. We seek this with simplicity of heart, and with quiet faith and confidence that thou would not deny thy love to thy children.
Reference:
Howard Thurman, “Men Who Have Walked with God: The Mystics,” in The Way of the Mystics, ed. Peter Eisenstadt, Walter Earl Fluker (Orbis Books, 2021), 3.
Image credit and inspiration: Alexander Klarmann, Untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The leaf can be a doorway into being with what is, experiencing the ineffable and intangible nature of the Great Mystery.
