The Mystics

What or who is a mystic? Difficult to define because mystics are sensitive to something that seems to transcend our everyday world, something transcendental and ultimate. Mystics perceive reality from a heart of love, non-judgement, compassion, and mercy while living responsibly in the practical, everyday world of work, families, and neighborhoods. Every religious or spiritual tradition has born mystics, people who seek holiness wherever they can find it. The glimpses of Christian mystics highlighted here are not all quoted in the book, My Dear Far-Nearness, but they truly inspired the author to wonder how their experiences of holiness might be viewed from within a trinitarian consciousness.

What is trinitarian consciousness? We begin with Jesus of Nazareth who was a faithful Jew who trusted and lived in accordance with his sacred Hebrew tradition. His teachings are based on a fundamental assertion found in the first book of the Bible: human beings are created in the image and likeness of God (imago Dei, in Genesis 1:26). We assume that Jesus realized his identity as the image and likeness of the Divine, and that, as the Nicene Creed affirmed, he was both a human being (born, living, and dying like all other humans), and fully divine. Christian mystics are awake to the deep realization that Jesus was and is a location of divinity in a mortal person in linear time. My Dear Far-Nearness follows the arc of this ancient doctrine, focusing on Jesus’ consciousness. This book is a prayerful wondering about Jesus’ own awareness. What is going on in someone’s awareness who is fully human and fully divine, and what can this investigation tell us about ourselves?

We have no direct access to Jesus’ human-divine awareness. But with diligent study of Jesus’ words and actions in scripture, we can begin to sketch the outlines of what St. Paul called “the mind of Christ” (1Cor. 2:16), and what contemporary contemplatives call “Christ consciousness.” As we listen to Jesus’ behavior and his words in the Gospel we notice that while he thought, spoke, and prayed according to his Jewish background, he often departed into new and refreshing understandings, metaphors, and declarations about love and justice. He lived a grounded, historical life among family and friends, among those who trusted him, and those who hated him. And yet, My Dear Far-Nearness assumes that Jesus’ awareness was not enclosed within his personality and ego identity. We might say that Jesus of Nazareth was a mystic, whose personal awareness in linear, mortal time was open to the infinite and timeless Presence and Mystery of the Creator. We might also say that the name of this person, Jesus Christ, points to one who lives a mortal life as Jesus of Nazareth, and one who simultaneously lives in eternity as Christ. They are one and the same person, and this way of living in linear time and eternity is, according to Jesus, available to everyone.

In Jesus’ Jewish tradition, Creator is not a Being among other beings. In fact, one cannot reduce Creator’s infinite majesty to any image or idea. Perhaps one cannot even say “the” Creator because this implies that Creator is a singular object of awareness, a thing among other things. In the depths of the Jewish-Christian tradition, Creator is infinite–beyond all words and concepts. And yet, Jesus spoke to Creator in an interpersonal way, using the pronoun “You.” He called his Creator by the endearing names of Father or Abba as when he prayed, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they [Jesus’ friends and followers] also be in us” (John 17:21 ). Jesus displays a vast and inclusive understanding of our collective human situation and human personhood. For Jesus, Creator was somehow active in the world, within him, and also within his friends and followers. We might say that Jesus perceived the infinite presence of Creator everywhere, having no location. He experienced Creator as a Presence that was both within him and others, and simultaneously transcending linear time and the cosmos. One can imagine that this vision of an infinite oneness in relationship is precisely, Paul’s “mind of Christ.” We who are followers of Jesus Christ trust that we have this mind. But we also know that realizing this mind of Christ is not simply a matter of believing it. Belief has a role in our spiritual life, but more is required. Realizing the mind of Christ requires that we take up certain daily and moment-to-moment spiritual practices in everything that we do.

Jesus’ life and his remarkable way of living has inspired millions of people to join the Jesus movement known as Christianity. This movement began in the midst of much community agony and conflict which led to Jesus’ execution in his early 30’s. After Jesus was executed, his followers struggled with their religious identity. Would they continue in the Hebrew tradition, or, through their relationship with Jesus, were they experiencing something really new? In the 4th and 5th centuries Christian leaders gathered in several councils to seek agreement on God’s identity, Jesus’ identity, and what followers of Jesus believe and experience. Their conclusion was that ultimate reality, the sacred Source of the cosmos, is an imperceptible dance of unconditional Love (Greek: perichoresis) among three simultaneous centers of subjectivity: Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit. They called these three centers “Persons” (Greek: hypostases or prosōpons), each one distinct from the others, but also identical with them (Greek: homoousios, “of one substance”). The conclusions of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and councils about the nature of God have significant implications for the nature of human identity and consciousness: for Christians, to be made in the image and likeness of God means that human beings are made in the image and likeness of the Holy Trinity as three subjective centers of our awareness. The Trinity is not a thing, and not outside of us as an object of our awareness. Therefore, the words “image” and “likeness” must be something subtle, something elusive and invisibly within our awareness. To perceive the dance of the Holy Trinity outside of us, we must be grounded in the Holy Trinity within us.

Christian mystics are followers of Jesus who have hungered for a direct experience of God’s three divine portals of Presence. Mystics are ordinary people who have looked deeply into their lives and awareness, and discovered a Trinitarian dimension – that is, they experience God as a sacred dance, a perichoresis (Greek: a dance-around of Love) in which each “Person” of the Holy Trinity is a microcosm or fractal of the whole, the whole of their personhood and awareness. Mystics experience themselves as living within this dance, and the dance as living within them. The presence of this trinitarian divinity transcends us, but is also within our very consciousness. Through study of the Gospels, meditation, contemplation, prayer, and community participation, Christians can experience a reformation and transformation of their awareness, one that mirrors Jesus’ personal consciousness. Our faith is that Jesus’ human-divine awareness is always circulating through the “Persons” of the Trinity who are within us and outside of us.

My Dear Far-Nearness explores each Person of the Holy Trinity (traditionally called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or First, Second, and Third Persons) as aspects of our awareness. In this section of the website, we offer glimpses of several mystics who, in their writings, tended to highlight the First, Second, or Third Persons. They could perceive the Holy Trinity that transcends them because they had inwardly rooted themselves in each aspect of awareness that corresponds to one of the Persons. This view of Christian life follows from the teachings of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Raimundo Panikkar who each surmised that what and who we see is what and who we are, and what and who we are is what and who we see. My Dear Far-Nearness explores these understandings by suggesting that we can only understand or glimpse the Holy Trinity from within our own trinitarian awareness. We can only glimpse the ineffable Mystery of God from within our own mystery; we can only experience the reality of Christ from the viewpoint of Christ within us–as in Paul’s exclamation, “Now, not I but Christ in me”; (Gal. 2:20); and we can only truly experience the Holy Spirit from the place of the Spirit within and among us. As the Dominican friar, Meister Eckhart once wrote, “The eyes through which I see God are the same eyes through which God sees me.” In a sense, God is relating to God within each of us. No separation–only the mystery of relationships that honor the other in trinitarian fashion.

The First Person of the Holy Trinity is Creator, a Mystery beyond words and images who is both within and beyond us, participating in linear time and space, and also transcending linear time and space. Scientists glimpse this Mystery when they note that we live in a cosmos composed of at least two trillion galaxies in the known universe, that each galaxy includes several billion suns, and that 99.9% of the cosmos is interstellar dust, “dark” matter, and “dark” energy — none of which can be directly observed. Science tells us that our cosmos was born from infinity, beyond time and space, and that our universe is expanding into eternity. Science will never achieve a final understanding of our ultimate cosmic situation. And science cannot tell us why we are here on this planet or who we are. But First Person awareness can help us to discern and to live what is ultimately true by perceiving ourselves, others, and everything from the “place” of Mystery within us. We can only understand ourselves as mystery if we detach from our everyday personalities, our opinions, and our embodied ego-selves. Our doorway to mystery is wide-open in every moment, as a form of “unknowing.” Walking forward in mystery, we can “know” that we’ll never intellectually understand who we are.

Our personalities are formed in linear time and space, in particular familial contexts and cultures, but we sense that we are more than our personalities. This sense of “something more” is supported by the scientific evidence of a “Big Bang” about fourteen billion years ago which bore our cosmos and planet Earth from nowhere–from a non-place that is not bound by linear time and space. Science also tells us that our cosmos is expanding in a never-ending, eternal direction. We are born from and in eternity and being born toward eternity. We might say that, yes, we were born from our mothers, and generations of mothers before that, but we have also been born from eternity, from the non-place before and after linear time is born and died. Jesus Christ is our exemplar of someone who realizes this dual identity–a being who is solidly situated in time and space while living in eternity, in solid linear time and simultaneously transcending linear time and history. Christian Scriptures affirm that this eternal life is available to us (Matt. 19:16, 19:29, and 25:46; Matt. 25:46, Mark 10:17 and 10:30; Luke 10:25, 18:18, and 18:30; John 3:15, 3:16, 3:36, 4:14, 4:36, 5:24, 5:39, 6:27, 6:40, 6:47, 6:54, 6:68, 10:28, 12:25, 12:50, and 17:2; Acts 13:46, and 13:48; Rom 2:7, 5:21 and 6:22; Gal 6:8; 1Tim 1:16 and 6:12; Tim 1:16 and 6:12; Titus 1:2 and 3:7; 1John 1:2, 2:25, 3:15, 5:11 and 5:13; and Jude 21).

As Christians we can trust that right here, in the midst of our personal lives in families, neighborhoods, and nations, we can be grounded in our everyday responsibilities and care while simultaneously knowing that we are living in the midst of eternal time. God is not bound by clock-time, and neither are we. Very often our experience in clock-time is repetitive, one day like another. But eternal time is never repetitive. It’s always new. In every present moment we step into eternity. In each moment of cooking, shopping, talking, listening, hiking, swimming, making love and dying, we can be open to the possibility that we are becoming new in every Now. Who are we becoming? As St. Augustine often said, only God knows.

The Second Person of the Holy Trinity usually refers to the historical person Jesus of Nazareth, who, in his fullness embodies the Presence of Creator in linear time. However, because Jesus often said that all of us can embody the Creator’s presence My Dear Far-Nearness suggests that every person can live within Second Person awareness, that is, in Christ’s awareness, which is both in time, and eternal. As the Catholic priest and writer Fr. Henri Nouwen often said, “What is said of Jesus is said of you.” And as Jesus himself declared, “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20). Like Jesus, every person person can relate to Creator as his or her ultimate I-Thou relationship. This relational/interpersonal dimension in our awareness lives within the divine-human experience that St. Paul called the Mind of Christ.

The Third Person of the Holy Trinity is the Spirit, who moves among us, inspiring us to co-create just, safe, and beloved communities. When we live from within the dynamism of these three “Persons,” we unfold as free, whole persons — no longer merely poor or rich, consumers, owners, sellers, soldiers, civilians, or whatever social roles we play. When we live from within the mind of Christ we are always navigating through the boundaries of awareness from mystery, to I-Thou love, and to Spirit-inspired actions for justice, truth, and goodness in all beings. It’s a never-ending, dynamic, circular flow of awareness.

The mystics we glimpse here (all whom have passed away) are those who have shared a desire to experience God directly, in silence, solitude, and community. Our access to God is within us, in our very own awareness. But this access requires some personal work, something more than belief. The mystics below understood that God as Holy Trinity is not only “out there,” somewhere beyond us. For them, the Holy Trinity was not merely a doctrine to be believed, but more accurately a dynamic Presence right here within us and among us. Each of us can embody the mind of Christ. The following mystics and others have inspired My Dear Far-Nearness.

For Christian Mystics such as Meister Eckhart, the north star of their spiritual practice is Creator, the First Person of the Holy Trinity. In this dimension of awareness, people bow to ultimate, divine reality as a total mystery, a knowing called “unknowing.” Both Hebrew and Christian scripture tell us that the First Person experience can’t be nailed down with words, theories, theologies, stories, or images. The Creator is beyond sensual experience, and yet when mystics experience Creator, they will all use analogies and metaphors from the physical world for their experience. Most mystics will say that the only portal to the Creator is the time-portal of Now. We can’t remember, describe, or imagine Creator. Rather, it’s a direct experience of a sacred Nothing which can give one goosebumps, and glimpses of rapture and beauty. When one’s consciousness turns toward the First Person of the Trinity, one receives a glimpse of holy majesty that transcends all physical reality.

This experience can only be experienced Now, always Now. Now is the portal to what the Gospels call “eternal life.” Every moment Now is a window into eternity which dances within everyday time. When, as a twenty-something, I converted from Lutheran to Roman Catholic, I learned to make the sign of the cross over my body. Now I understand this cross-making as one way to remind myself that I live at the crossroad of eternity and time, just as Jesus did. In the vertical dimension, we live in eternity, and in the horizontal dimension we live in linear time. The two dimensions of time cross in our hearts.

Later in this website, we explore eleven mystics who speak from First Person awareness. Since most lived in previous centuries we must take into account some important changes of culture and language. As we read, we must keep four caveats in mind:

1) Most well-known contemplative or mystically-inclined Christians lived before the Enlightenment, before the modern scientific era, and before Freud. This is a challenge for us because we now know that in contrast with the teachings of pre-modern mystics, our experiences of God are understood to be interlaced with cultural, personal and relational experiences among family, friends, and colleagues. Today, in our post-psychological, technological and secular cultures, we have become increasingly skeptical of premodern mystics. For us, only actual embodied people and relationships with them are considered real interpersonal experiences. For most secular westerners, there are no gods and angels with whom we can communicate. Many of us think that the gods and angels of the past are actually, and only, intra-psychic phenomena. Therefore, reading pre-modern mystics must include this historical, hermeneutic discipline of discernment. As we read the pre-modern Christians we must imagine into their language and their hearts to discern meanings for ourselves.

2) Few of the “First Person” mystics we explore here share biographical facts about their lives. For many, we cannot know for sure how they actually lived their spiritual and religious lives.

3) Most of these mystics led pre-modern lives, usually in rural areas–without all the avenues of instantaneous digitized communication (social media, emails, Messages, and TV) that march across our screens every day. In our highly mobile Western culture boundary-crossings happen every day as we receive communications from other nations, cultures and religions. Our ease of quick communication and travel presents most American spiritual seekers with a diverse range of spiritual traditions and practices. The boundaries between religious faiths (and science) are often dissolving. Therefore, today it is not uncommon to meet “HinJews,” “BuJews,” Buddhist-Christians, Christian astrologers and astronomers, and Sufi-Christians. Like it or not, those of us who are drawn to the Christian contemplative tradition and read the mystics must always practice hermeneutics, “the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, as well as philosophical texts.” For example, if we are psychologically inclined, we need to interpret the words of mystics by imagining the psychological, cognitive, and affective sorts of experiences that the mystics experienced in their particular time-frame and culture. If we have experience in Buddhist practices such as mindfulness, we might find texts by mystics that could be interpreted as essentially Buddhist. But are they? For example, in My Dear Far-Nearness, Dr. Jonas tells us that his experience of Zen shunyata (Sanskrit: emptiness) opened his mind and heart to a contemplative meaning of Christ’s kénōsis (Greek: self-emptying), but he also asserts that while these “emptying” experiences resonate, they are not exactly the same. In other words, when we read the mystics, we must realize that we are interpreting their words from our personal history, and from the time-platform of the 21st century.

4) One final note on hermeneutics: We inherit many centuries of philosophical, spiritual, sociological and psychological debate about whether or not all humans basically experience the world and reality in the same way. Those who say no–there is no common ground of knowing and awareness across cultures, religions and time-and-space–are identified as relativists. Those who say yes, there is a common ground of human experience are often called universalists. Relativists would say that Zen shunyata and Christian kenosis are completely different experiences, and universalists would say that they are essentially identical, as experienced by Japanese monks and Christian mystics. In My Dear Far-Nearness, Dr. Jonas argues the middle way, that experiences of shunyata and kenosis exhibit slightly different flavors or qualities of ultimate Mystery, but still share the common ground of “unknowing” in human consciousness, a ground that is always open Now. Dr. Jonas argues that the deepest experience of this present moment Now (always a taste of eternity, as in the First “Person”) can reveal truths in our lives that span past, present, and future. Jonas argues that we live in transparent time, where past and future are always circulating in every present moment.

Many Christian mystics prior to the 21st century were particularly drawn to the First Person (traditionally called Creator–the infinite, eternal dimension of God that transcends the material world, our five senses, and our capacity for cognition and image-making. The First Person of the Holy Trinity is called by many names–the Father/Mother, Ultimate Source, My Dear Far-Nearness, the unfettered Mystery of God, Dear One, Beloved Other, etc. The names of God are considered sacred, but they themselves are not God. In the Hebrew tradition there are almost one hundred names for God. Each one brings to mind a certain quality of experience. For example, the name Ein Sof, suggests an ambience of limitless time and space. Many Christians are familiar with the English name, “Creator” as a place-holder for the Holy Mystery and Source of the cosmos. This Source “existed” before time-and-space and is eternal, everywhere, both beyond and within us, and can only be experienced directly in each present Now, without words. Jesus felt the Presence of Creator, so dearly and vividly, almost like an ultimate interpersonal relationship, and therefore named Creator his Abba (Aramaic: Daddy, Papa). As mentioned, the German theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984), was convinced that Jesus himself entertained no particular image of Abba. When we go spelunking into our depths as persons who participate in Mystery, we can detach from our limited, self-referencing identities and discover that each of us is a boundless mystery, one that resonates with the limitless Mystery of God, the First Person.

Some of the well-known Christian mystics who focused on the First Person include Gregory of Nyssa (330-395), Pseudo-Dionysius (c. 500 CE), Maximus the Confessor (580-662), St. Gregory the Great (540-604), St. Bonaventure (1217-1274), Marguerite Porete (d. 1310), Meister Eckhart (1260-1327/8), the author of The Cloud of Unknowing (14th century), St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), and Thomas Merton (1915-1968).

Let’s take a closer look at some of these First Person Mystics:

Christian mystics trust in a personal Divinity who manifests in all interpersonal relationships. These mystics experience the divine as a reality that features subjectivity, consciousness, and intentionality. For them, the divine Unknown and Uncaused Source of everything became embodied in Jesus Christ. Trusting in Christ's eternal Presence, contemplative Christians enter an active I-Thou relationship with the transcendent and personal reality we call God. We come to feel deeply known and understood and we learn to surrender our self-centered ego preoccupations. Mystics report that as this surrender deepens, we become illumined with the eternal and universal qualities of Christ. In Jesus Christ, the First Person becomes accessible in our interpersonal relationships because there is an inter-Personal dimension in God.

Some of the well-known Christian mystics who focused on the Second Person include St. Augustine (354-430), St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), and Henri Nouwen (1932-1996)

Let’s take a closer look at some of these Second Person Mystics:

The Third Person of the Holy Trinity – the Holy Spirit – is named Ruach in the Hebrew tradition and Hagios Pneuma by Orthodox Greek Christians. For Christian mystics, the Spirit is the ever fresh, living presence of God who stirs within us and who gathers us into community. The Holy Spirit’s presence within and among us is recognized by what St. Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. In Christian scripture, the paradigmatic appearance of the Holy Spirit occurs in the Book of Acts (2:1-13).

Some of the well-known Christian mystics who focused on the Third Person include the Cappadocians (4th century), John Scotus Eriugena (810-877), Symeon the Theologian (949-1022), William of St. Thierry (1085-1148), Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), John Ruusbroec (1293-1381), Julian of Norwich (1342-1423), and Thomas Merton (1915-1968).

Let’s take a closer look at some of these Third Person Mystics: