Mystics—those who have experienced union with the Divine—are in love, in love with life and life for all. If they are not in love, they are not in union.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
"Contemplation"
"Being in Love"
Thursday, 11 September 2014
For saints, mystics, and budding contemplatives, “words have become flesh,” and experience has gone beyond words. Experience is always non-dual, an open field where both weeds and wheat are allowed (Matthew 13:30). As St. Paul put it, “My spirit is praying, but my mind is left barren” from its criticizing judgments (1 Corinthians 14:14). Words are mere guideposts now, and you recognize that most people have made them into hitching posts. Inside such broad and deep awareness, paradoxes are easily accepted and former mental contradictions seem to dissolve. That’s why mystics can forgive and let go and show mercy and love enemies, and why the rest of us can’t!
Abstract concepts and verbal dogma contain the air of mathematical or divine perfection, but mystics do not love concepts. They love the concrete and the particular. They have had at least one significant encounter with the Divine, which is all it takes, and which they themselves cannot understand or describe as a clear concept. “There is only Christ; he is everything, and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11), they might say. That may sound like an overstatement or mere poetry, but the mystics are not rebels against anything except all attempts to block that very kind of encounter in themselves or in others, which unfortunately a lot of religion itself does. (Which is why Jesus is so disapproving of so much of his own religion, almost more than anything else!)
Mystics—those who have experienced union with the Divine—are in love, in love with life and life for all. If they are not in love, they are not in union. Mystics usually look simplistic and even naive to those who have not shared a similar experience; and that is a burden they must forever carry. They have no time for being against; there is now so much to be for! Jesus was critical of religion, but that was only because he first recognized how right it could be.
Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, pages 130-131
Gateway to Silence: Christ is in me, and I am in Christ.
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