Spiritual Temperaments: Mystical
May 2, 2002Miroslav Rolf is right. “The only proper ‘object’ of human insatiability is the mystery of God.” Translation: mystery is the only thing that will satisfy your spiritual thirst. It’s true that our level of worship is directly proportional to our level of knowledge. It’s true that the more you know God, the more you can worship God.
Butin the words of Edward Wilson, “the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery.” Worship always has been and always will be mysterious because God does not fit within the confines of the human mind. Human imagination is amazing, but Ephesians 3:20 says God is “able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine.”
“To say that God is infinite,” said A.W. Tozer, “is to say that he is measureless.” Humankind loves to measure. James Gleick says we crave “hyperprecision.” The reason is simple: we can manage what we can measure. It gives us a degree of control. So we measure anything and everything.
We measure money in dollars, time in minutes, height in inches, and weight in pounds. We measure wind and rain. We measure the height of mountains and the depth of oceans. We measure sound and light. We measure atoms and galaxies. No matter how big or how small--whether it’s light-years or femtoseconds--we find a way to measure it. We measure everything...except God.
God defies measurement. His grace is measureless. His power is measureless. His wisdom is measureless. Psalm 36 puts it in poetic terms, “His love is meteoric, his loyalty astronomic, His purpose titanic, His verdicts oceanic. Yet in His largeness, nothing gets lost.” In Isaiah 55:8, the Lord declares, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Astronomers have spied galaxies 12.3 billion light-years from earth. To put that distance into perspective, consider the fact that light traveling 186,000 miles per second only takes eight minutes to travel the 93 million miles between the sun and planet earth. Our light is eight minutes old. Light from the furthest galaxy takes 12.3 billion years to get here! That distance is virtually incomprehensible! And God says that’s about the distance between His thoughts and our thoughts, His ways and our ways. We underestimate God’s goodness and greatness by at least 12.3 billion light years.
There is part of us that wants to make God measurable because we can manage what we can measure, but as A.W. Tozer warns, “The end result is a God who can never surprise us, never astonish us, never overwhelm us, never transcend us.” G.K. Chesterton said, “How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be; if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.”
The Mystical Type
William Jennings Bryan, famous for his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial in the 1925, mused about the mystery of God, “I have observed the power of the watermelon seed. It has the power of drawing from the ground and through itself 200,000 times its weight. When you can tell me how it takes this material and out of it colors an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within that again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which in turn is capable of drawing through itself 200,000 times its weight--when you can explain to me the mystery of the watermelon, you can ask me to explain the mystery of God.”
God is mysterious. Just as pocket calculators have computation limits, the human mind can only compute a small fraction of God’s mystery. Dennis Covington says, “Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.”
In too many instances, we offer easy answers. Jesus asked tough questions! Philip Yancey says, “Churches that leave room for mystery, that do not pretend to spell out what God himself has not spelled out, create an environment conducive to worship.” One mark of spiritual maturity is feeling more comfortable with mystery than certainty!
Wrinkle in Time author, Madeliene L’Engle, says “I need questions that do not have answers.” She says, “We try to be too reasonable about what we believe. What I believe is not reasonable at all. In fact, it’s hilariously impossible. Possible things aren’t worth much. It’s these crazy impossible things keep us going.”
Kathleen Norris says, “Modern believers tend to trust more in therapy than mystery.” There’s nothing wrong with therapy, as long as we leave room for mystery. Carl Jung said, “A religion becomes impoverished when it cuts down its paradoxes; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life. Nonambiguity and noncontradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to explain the incomprehensible.” Jung concludes that paradox ought to afford us the highest degree of religious certainty. He says, “Spiritual weaklings make paradoxes dangerous.” It is the “petty reasoning mind which cannot endure paradox.” Our attempts to “de-mystify” only “dumb-down” Christianity. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
The Danger Zone
The danger of mysticism is spiritual relativism. If the objective standard of Scripture is ignored, then subjective experience supercedes objective truth and becomes the measuring stick of spirituality. We need to avoid that extreme at all costs. But there are three other extremes that need to be avoided as well: dogmatism, rationalism, and familiarization.
Spiritual dogmatism requires everyone else to experience God exactly the way we do and anything that doesn’t fit our experience is wrong. It is self-centered spirituality. In essence, dogmatism is limiting God to our comfort zone. Oswald Chambers said, “Let God be as original with others as He was with you.”
In his book, Saints and Madmen, Russell Shorto makes a fascinating distinction between psychosis and mysticism. According to Shorto, a psychotic is inflated by his “supernatural” experience. The technical term is “grandiosity.” But a true mystic is always humbled by a genuine encounter with God. According to Tomas Agosin, the defining characteristic of genuine religious experience is selflessness. That is reminescent of John the Baptist saying, “He must become greater and I must become less.” A mystic is not seeking personal glory. The glory of God is their sole goal.
Another danger is spiritual rationalism--everything is reduced to what is “reasonable.” It leaves no room for mystery. Gary Zukav says, “Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of western religion. Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of western science.” Therein lies the tension between “science” and “spirituality.”
Faith is not rational or irrational. It is super-rational. It goes beyond human rationality. Spirituality cannot be reduced to the scientific method. If we don’t leave room for mystery we don’t leave room for God.
The final danger is spiritual familiarization. We need to know God, but we cannot afford to become “familiar” with God. John O’Donohue says, “Relationships suffer immense numbing through the mechanism of familiarization. We reduce the wildness and mystery of a person to the external, familiar image.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez was once asked about his relationship with is wife Mercedes. He said, “I know her so well now that I have not the slightest idea who she really is.” O’Donohue says, “Familiarity can be a quiet death, an arrangement that permits the routine to continue without offering any new challenge or nourishment.” Mystery is the antidote to familiarity.
The Inexpressible
Heinrich Zimmer said, “The best things in life can’t be said.” Think about your own life. The greatest moments can’t be reduced to words. Richard Cytowic says, “Not everything we are capable of knowing and doing is accessible to or expressible in language.”
There is a dimension of worship that fits into the “inexpressible” category. Peter talked of joy “unspeakable.” Paul spoke of peace “that passes understanding.” At the heart of the pentecostal and charismatic experience is “unknown tongues.” I Corinthians 14:2 says, “Anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God. Indeed, no one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit.” Even the Spirit of God intercedes for us “with groans that words cannot express” according to Romans 8:26. God works in “strange and mysterious ways.” There is a sacred part of our relationship with God that is unexplainable and inexpressible.
The Art of Contemplation
Mary was mystical. Luke 2:19 says, “She pondered these things in her heart.” She looked at life through the kaleidscope of contemplation. Webster defines contemplation as “space marked out for observation.” It’s more than a quick or cursory glance. It means “to meditate on.”
When I was in graduate school I remember reading a parable titled, “The Student, the Fish, and Agassiz.” It was actually based on a true story. Louis Agassiz was a famous 19th century ichthyologist. And he introduced an interesting teaching method. He discouraged text books. He wanted his students to observe fish firsthand. One of his students, Nathanael Stonegate Shaler, wrote in his autobiography about one of Agassiz’ assignments. Agassiz pulled out a specimen jar and said, “Take this fish and look at it; when I think you’re done I’ll question you.” After an hour, Shaler thought he’d seen everything there was to see, but Agassiz didn’t question Shaler that day or the next day. In fact, it was a week later than Agassiz said, “Tell me what you’ve seen.” During that time, Shaler, who thought he’d seen everything there was to see began to notice new things about the fish--the symmetry of the scales, the number of teeth, the position of the gills, the paired organs. But even at the end of the first week, Agassiz wasn’t satisfied that Shaler had seen everything there was to see. He spent another week of ten hours days looking at that fish from every angle imaginable. Shaler writes in his autobiography that at the end of two weeks he “had results that astonished myself and satisfied him [Agassiz].”
We are part of the generation that added the word “multitask” to the dictionary. We try to do more and more in less and less time. Leonard Sweet says, “Warp speed can warp the soul.” Leaving room for mystery is taking time for contemplation.
Albert Einstein said, “The important thing is to not stop questioning. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”
Here’s a final thought. The medieval mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing said, “The key to contemplation is love. Through love God is known, not through intellect.”