Christian Mystics

In the most recent entry here, I talked about the first of two problems with Christianity today — the clinging to the worldview of the First Century that the world is a kind of mechanistic construct, a machine, rather than something more akin to organic, living.

One other problem that lies within Christianity is something I’ve mentioned before — the change of the spirituality OF Jesus to the spirituality ABOUT Jesus. In that radical shift, one has to glean from the various sources what are closest to the words of Jesus and to the remarkable character of Jesus that peers out at us, often from behind constructs designed to support the Church’s existence and power, not to support and enhance the individual’s movement toward recognizing and celebrating the immediate Presence of the Kingdom of Heaven both within us and in this world right now.

The latter is what Jesus taught — not the importance of a religion which, according to some of his harshest words, are like sepulchers — well tended on the outside but, inside, full of dead mens bones. One of the groups identifiable in the New Testament story responsible for Jesus’ death was the religious right of it’s time, those who insisted on clinging to the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law. Those who would set up lofty goals by which people were to be judged as  religious or not and those who identified such goals as future-oriented, to be found in the created image of Jesus that awarded the growing orthodox Church absolute power in such things as penance, morals, and the right to kill or tortureor damn  those who did not toe the line. Frequently those were the ones — often identified as mystics such as Meister Eckhart and the list goes on and on — to whom each one of us is grateful for preserving as best she or he could the inner message of Jesus beneath the self-serving self-perpetuating veneer given to Christianity by its leaders.

The discovery in 1945 of the Gospel of Thomas intact (although at first it was misrepresented at a heretical gnostic gospel, which it plainly isn’t) took us back as if in a time machine to a period which I had grown up believing showed the unified block of believers with a lunatic fringe trying to take the train off the tracks. Instead, we had a wide range of communities dedicated to Jesus’ teachings and the interpretations. Today, the lunatic fringe is driving the train of their own design.

What you know to be true — what you feel in your heart that resonates with Jesus’ words when they are not being forced into his mouth to justify the cornerstone of this or that particular community — as in Peter in some traditions and James (the brother of Jesus) in another and Paul in a third — you are drawing close to Jesus’s heart of compassion as well as passion, of vision as well as insight, of encouragement instead of damnation.

All of the last three may very well be nothing except the briefest of summaries of what I’ve learned in over 55 years of living, of reading, of questioning, of experiencing and, even if they are “true” at best I can say that I believe they are true for me and that I am still growing, still deepening my searches. I think it doesn’t matter to God in the long run which branch of Christianity or which other Tribal identity you have when it comes to Religion. What matters is that the church, just like each one of us, should be there to encourage and to facilitate and to bless those who pass by on the path toward God, giving a temporary respite if needed and an embrace, words of support and joy at a prodigal son or daughter that one has had the pleasure, the uplifting and sweet pleasure, of knowing along the way.

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