Mystic Monday
Tomorrow is Lunar New Year. I realize this means little or nothing to my readers in the West. Groundhog Day, which follows one day later, is of more concern. Punxsutawney Phil will emerge from his den and if he sees his shadow, will scurry back inside, an indisputable sign of six more weeks of winter. In spite of Phil’s appearance and/or disappearance, as the case may be, let me say that I find a great deal more comfort and hope in Lunar New Year, which is also known as Spring Festival in China. I’d much rather anticipate the coming of Spring than dread the cold darkness of a long winter!
That said, we begin this week our new daily format for my Church on the Edge posts, podcasts, and reflections. Today is Mystic Monday, and it marks the beginning of time which I feel will be well spent as we reflect on the writings of the Christian mystics.
Christian Mysticism. The very term sounds kind of fishy, doesn’t it? Gnostic, New Age. Anything but the faith once for all delivered to the saints. (Jude 3)
I’ll be the first to say that there are those in our day who have, under the guise of Christian Mysticism, distorted and corrupted the gospel, communicated so clearly to us in the New Testament. I was on Amazon recently and did a search for books on Christian Mysticism. Among the overwhelming majority of books solidly built on the foundation of Scripture, I found a few that were way out in left field - the Kabbalah and the reading of Tarot cards are not practices I would recommend for disciples of Jesus.
However, as I seek to lay a foundation for the Mondays to follow, I’d like to point out something that I believe is a great need in the church today, and for me, books on the Tarot or Kabbalah are, as off-base as they may be, signs of this need -
There is a great need in much of the church in our day for a living faith; a faith not found exclusively in facts, data, doctrinal exactness, or intellectual certainty, but a faith like that described in Hebrews 11:1 as the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
There is a great mystery to God and His ways. The Lord Himself tells us this through the prophet Isaiah - “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Is. 55:9)
What makes the Christian mystics so relevant for us today is their emphasis on experiencing God’s presence through His Spirit, the very Spirit of Christ, who lives in all who have trusted him as Lord and Savior.
Lectio Divina or the quiet, contemplation of Scripture is a hallmark of Christian mystic teaching, and in recent years Christian teachers like Tim Keller, Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, John Ortberg, and others have embraced what has come to be known as Christian Formation but is in fact, a revival of Christian mysticism, and its emphasis on a growing awareness of God’s Spirit in our lives and world.
This is why I think we need to become more familiar with Christian men and women who lived centuries before us. Centuries before the Enlightenment and Age of Reason. Before science and rational thought. When the world was less connected and moved at a much slower pace than it does today.
In this day and age, we all need to take time to stop and “smell the roses.” More than that, we need to stop and take time to see and experience God in the roses! To learn to sense His presence and goodness, His guidance in our lives. The mystics help us do just this.
With that in mind, I’d like to leave you today with the words of Julian of Norwich. Julian lived in fourteenth-century England. Her book, Revelations of Divine Love, is the first known book in the English language by a woman. I’ll share more of Julian’s story in a future post, but knowing she lived during the Black Plague, which killed half the population of Norwich, should help you to understand the unshakeable living faith of this woman of God who is best known for the saying -
“All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Julian was a witness, and minister of the peace of God found in Jesus Christ during a time of fear and chaos. May we follow her example in Christ as we seek to be the same in our world today.
In Christ,
Dan
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