Father Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, began writing his column “In Exile” in 1982. Franciscan Media is honored to publish one of Father Ron’s columns every month. Click here to read his weekly column or explore the column archives. Pre-order his new book here.
I teach a course on the renowned mystic John of the Cross. Since this is never a required course for any student, I usually begin the first class by asking each student why he or she is interested in this course. The answers vary widely: “I am taking this course because my spiritual director told me to take it.” “I’ve always been curious about mysticism.” “I’m majoring in whatever is taught on Tuesday evenings!” One night however a woman gave this answer: I’m taking this course because I’m a practicing mystic. That raised some eyebrows. Really? A practicing mystic?
Can someone be a practicing mystic?
That depends upon how you understand mystical experience. If you equate mystical experience with the extraordinary, with supernatural phenomena (religious visions, religious ecstasies, radically altered states of consciousness, or the miraculous appearance of Jesus, Mary, an angel, or a saint) then you cannot be a practicing mystic. While such extraordinary phenomena can in fact be mystical experience (and indeed do mark the experience of some classical mystics), normal mystical experience is not characterized by any extraordinary religious phenomena. Indeed, it generally distrusts anything extraordinary and asks that it be discerned with extra scrutiny.
Normal mystical experience, most mysticism, does not draw on the extraordinary. To the contrary, it draws on what is precisely the very ground of normality. What’s meant by this?
A renowned contemporary mystic, British Carmelite Ruth Burrows, defines mystical experience this way. Mystical experience is being touched by God in a way that is beyond what we can articulate, picture, or even consciously feel. It is something we know more than think.
In essence, an ineffable God touches us in an ineffable way; a God beyond concepts, touches us in a way that cannot be put into concepts; a God beyond language touches us in a way that can never be adequately put into words; and a God who is source of all being, touches us at the very source of our own being, so that we know, intuitively, both who we are and how we stand before God.
This may sound rather abstract, but it’s not, as Ruth Burrows explains, using her own story.
In her autobiography, Before the Living God, Ruth Burrows (who died in 2023) shares the story of how, just as she was finishing her initial education and making plans for university, a mystical experience marked her and radically changed her life.
At that time in her life, she was not particularly serious about her faith. The practice of her faith was more rote than fervorous, but she was on a retreat with a number of other young women her age. One of the things she was asked to do on that retreat was to sit in a chapel in silence for an hour several times a day. Those hours of silence wore heavily on her and she dreaded them.
However, one day, during one of those hours, sitting in silence, she had (what she later calls) a mystical experience. There were no supernatural visions, no religious ecstasy, no appearances of angels, but only a moment of extraordinarily graced clarity; a moment within which she knew herself clearly for the first time, beyond what she could think, put into concepts, or articulate. It was a moment where stripped of all pretense, stripped of all ideology, stripped of all false self-images, stripped of all posturing to others, emotionally and morally naked, she just knew—knew who she was and how she stood before God and others.
Her mystical moment was a moment of complete sincerity, a moment without wax, as the Latin roots of that word suggest (sine: without, and cere: wax). Like all mystics, she struggled to put into words something which is largely ineffable, but which branded her soul in a way that radically changed her life.
Given that definition of mysticism, we are all invited to be practicing mystics, that is, we are all invited in the silence of our hearts, or perhaps in an experience of being lifted up in soul or crushed in soul, to stand or kneel before God in complete sincerity, without wax, morally naked, stripped of all pretense, stripped of all that’s false, so that in that moment we can know in truth who we are and how we stand before God, others, and our true selves. We need to pray for that clarity and make that an explicit intention in our prayer.
How do we do that? We do that by trying very intentionally in prayer to center ourselves in sincerity and nakedness of soul, by asking God to see through all that’s false in us so that we can know how we are known by God.
Dag Hammarskjold, in his prayer, used to ask God, “allow me in clarity of mind to mirror life and in purity of heart mold it, and to have a conscious self-scrutiny that sets me on a path towards mirroring the greatness of life.”
To ask that in prayer is to be a practicing mystic.