I have read some of the lives and writing of the great mystics of the church, and I have always found them somewhat wanting. These women and men were all famous for their visions, revelations and direct experience of the very presence of God. Some of them were absolutely amazing. Others were just, well, kind of weird. I think a lot, maybe all of them, would be on medication and living in a locked ward, or under careful community supervision if they were alive today in the twenty-first century Canada. This isn't to say that any of them were actually certifiably crazy. Rather, now that few seem to believe in any god that is not themselves, spiritual experience is often held in suspicion, especially by the psychiatric industry. Being one myself who has a tendency towards spiritual and sometimes paranormal experiences my psychiatrist, whom I saw for four years decided, after I disclosed to him some of my experiences, to diagnose me with having schizotypal disorder, something he never informed me of. I only by accident became privy to this information just two years ago. Fortunately it is not a diagnosis that fits. But my shrink was of the old school, strongly influenced by Freud, and likely a confirmed atheist, so, how else was he going to interpret my spiritual experiences as I revealed them to him?
However, what I want to focus on here has more to do with just what I find to be lacking in the lives and writings of the great mystics. Including my own favourite, being Julian of Norwich, who wrote some really wonderful things, such as the invocation, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." She also told of her vision of God holding us in his hand, as though we were a hazelnut, completely safe in his palm. She was an anchoress, which is to say that she lived always in a tiny cell attached to the church. She never went out, though people did come to her for her wise counsel.
I am currently reading about Brother Laurence, famous for his Practice of the Presence of God. He was a very simple monk in the seventeenth century, French. He wrote and spoke of his simple daily experience of encountering God in all the small and trivial every day duties and activities in his life. It makes for wonderful reading. But this time I was left wondering, what is missing here?
I think I know now what is missing from the saints, the mystics and their writings. Very few seemed to really involve or connect themselves in loving, caring and redemptive ways with the lives of ordinary people, and especially those who suffered. I am thinking here specifically of the mystics. Among the Catholic saints we have Francis of Assisi, for example, whose entire life he dedicated to the care and service of the most vulnerable. But in the writings of and about Brother Laurence, or Lady Julian, or others, as inspiring as I find them, this vital human connection is sadly missing.
I myself have long felt and heard something similar to a monastic calling, but not to be lived within the walls of a monastery, nor in a church sanctioned and approved institution, but to live openly, vulnerably, in a way nakedly, as Christ among the people. As a brother among his siblings, a peer among his peers. Such was the call that God first gave me when I was on my knees following mass one day at St. James, some thirty-seven years ago, simply overcome with a most powerful sense of God's very and real presence. I saw in a vision a new born baby lying on the ground, and the words came to me, "I am calling you to live among those who are farthest from me, in the streets, your brothers and sisters who have been excluded from others, from society, the prostitutes, the drug addicts, the mentally ill, the lonely, the abandoned and the rejected, especially to your gay brothers and sisters. You are to be among them as my presence and you are to find me in them and be their friend. Not an evangelist, not a missionary, but their friend and their brother."
That is more or less how I heard the call, though I cannot recall the exact words. To this day, Gentle Reader, and in the last few months with renewed momentum, I have felt called to live this way, while maintaining a deep and close walk with our Saviour. Please pray for me and my calling as I renew and am renewed in this way over the coming months.
love,
Aaron
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