Some of the most painful letters that come to the fellowship are from Christians who have been rebuked by their own churches. One prays in silence for an hour before dawn and has been told it is Eastern. One has had a vision and been told it was the devil. One reads the Kabbalah, or the cards in the careful way the page The Lot and the Diviner describes, and has been asked not to come back. Some have left. Some are still in the pew, quieter than before, wondering whether the church is right about them. This is for them.
It is a strange thing that this should happen, because the one they follow was never afraid of mystics. He walked with them all his life.
At His Birth
Everyone knows the story of the wise men. Matthew tells of magi from the east who saw a star, understood it to announce the birth of a king, and set out on a long journey to find him before anyone in Jerusalem knew he had been born. They were not kings, whatever the carols say, and Matthew never says there were three. The Greek word for them belongs to the learned priests of Persia and Babylon, whose craft included the reading of the heavens. The page The Heavens and the Watchers considers what that means. Here it is enough to notice who was first to the cradle. Not the priests of the temple, and not the scribes, who knew from the prophet where the Messiah would be born and did not go. Mystics from a foreign land, following a light.
At the River
The most vivid mystic of the gospels is John who baptized. He lived in the wilderness, wore camel's hair, ate the food of the desert, and washed people in the Jordan. Israel washed often, as the desert community did, but this was something new even among a washing people: a single immersion, given by a prophet, in a river, as a sign of a heart turned around. The article The Voice in the Wilderness weighs how near he stood to the Essenes.
Jesus came to him and was washed. Afterward he said of him: among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist. And when he heard that Herod had killed John, he did not go to the city or to the crowds. He went by boat into a desert place apart, alone. Whatever else that was, it was grief for a friend and a teacher.
Along the Way
One day the disciples came to him indignant. They had seen a man casting out spirits in his name, a man who did not follow with them, and they had told him to stop. Jesus answered: forbid him not, for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me; for he that is not against us is on our part. He recognized spiritual power at work outside the circle of his own followers, and he would not police it.
And listen to what he taught. To the Samaritan woman at the well, a heretic in the eyes of his people: God is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. To the Pharisees who asked when the kingdom would come: the kingdom of God cometh not with observation; the kingdom of God is within you. In the sayings gospel found in Egypt he says: if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. He taught in parables and symbols. He spoke of light, of a second birth from above, of the vine and its branches, of being one with the Father as the Father was one with him. A letter of the Christian scriptures goes so far as to say that we may become partakers of the divine nature. These are mystical texts. They are in the Bible.
After Him
The company did not end with him. The monks of the Egyptian desert, whom the page The Way of Discernment quotes, went out to the dry places to pray without ceasing. An English book of the fourteenth century, whose author would not give his name, taught that God may be reached by love but never by thought, and that the soul must enter a cloud of unknowing to find him. A gospel of Mary Magdalene, found in a codex bought in Cairo at the end of the nineteenth century, has her comfort the frightened disciples and tell of the soul rising past the powers that would hold it. The church kept some of these and lost others, and it has made saints of many mystics it first suspected. They all point the same way. God is not confined to pulpits and pews. God dwells in silence, in mystery, and in the deep places of the soul.
The Test
None of this means that every inner experience is holy, and the fellowship would be doing the doubting mystic no kindness if it said so. The history of mysticism is full of delusion, and the church's suspicion has not always been wrong. The desert monks themselves feared zeal without discernment more than idleness.
But there is a test, and it is not membership. If a student's practice turns her toward God, toward healing and the setting right of her soul, toward union with God and the service of others in theirs, she stands inside the long tradition of biblical mysticism. The fellowship adds only the line that runs through the whole of the Discernment room: who is answering? A mysticism that asks and does not command, that reads what has been revealed and does not pry out what has not, stands squarely within scripture, as the page Asking and Commanding explains. A mysticism that crosses that line is in trouble wherever it happens, in a lodge or in a cathedral.
Staying, and Leaving
Should she stay in her church? The fellowship cannot answer that for anyone. We have said elsewhere, in the Questions and Answers, that the practices of the way can be kept inside almost any tradition with room for silence, gratitude, and kindness, and many of our students keep them so. The church's mystics have very often been its loyal irritants, staying when they were not wanted and praying for those who wished them gone. Some have had to leave. Neither path is a failure of faith.
What we would say to every one of these correspondents is this. You are not strange. You are not alone. The magi were there at his birth and John at his washing; a stranger cast out spirits in his name with his blessing; and after him the deserts and the cloisters filled with people who sought what you seek. The teacher you follow kept this company. He keeps it still.