Mystic – someone who has undergone a transformation from which they emerge in the realized oneness of god, ourselves and all things. Although I am not God, I am not other than God either. That there is a oneness that wholly pervades the divisions and fragmentations of our lives, and the realization of this oneness the divisions and fragmentations loses their tyranny over our heart for we live in the intimate experience of the oneness that wholly pervades the divisions and fragmentations. And they live with a sense of joy and sense of freedom from fear, that fear has no foundations, a sense of peace in the midst of life as it is. Its not the peace that’s dependent on the outcome of our efforts to have the situation turn out the way we want it to. Rather it is a peace that invincibly pervades the whole process and the outcome itself regardless of the outcome. Mystics bear witness to this realized oneness with a sense of respect even reverence for life, for all things, manifested most concretely as love. As the Buddhists say, compassion is the body of emptiness, Aquinas, charity is the form of faith, that love is the shape of our faith, that faith configures itself as love.
The mystic is hidden in the world as God is hidden in the world, but some are called upon to be mystic teachers, called upon to offer guidance and encouragement to us who feel interiorly called to this path of realized oneness. To be amazed and humbled that this applies to you, to be interiorly awakened in this way to this oneness and to live in fidelity to it. They also know that at some point as you get into it that it is filled with unexpected obstacles and surprises and blessings and they offer suggestions of how to navigate through the intimacy of these things. When they speak of this path they use metaphors under the auspices of which it provides them a way to talk about these things. These are not easy things to talk about. One of the greatest things about being awakened to this path is the solitude of this path. That it’s so hard to find someone to talk about what’s happening to you. But a metaphor provides a language. So for Terese of Avila it is that the soul is a castle and that the journey to awakening is to the interior journey into ever deeper dimensions of the interiority of our own soul in the very center of which God lives. For John of the Cross, the dark night, that we journey through a dark night to the realization of oneness. For Mister Eckhart it is that of having a virgin mind in which we experience a birth and break through into the Godhead. For Guigo the Carthusian, it is a ladder to heaven. These metaphors are usually drawn from scripture. For Jesus “narrow is the gate that leads to life and few there are who enter it.” God has created us in such a way that there is in the depths of ourselves a gate that grants access to the depths of God. And through this gate god is granted access to us. And as we pass thru the gate back and forth, union deepens. (what level am I?) Merton - Isn’t it interesting that the spiritual life should free us from a preoccupation with ourself and all too often it is just another way to be preoccupied with ourself. We have to be cautious about how the ego is quick to own everything, including the process of being liberated from it.
Mystics are trying to help us, they really are. A framework a pattern of spiritual consciousness, and even though it manifests uniquely in me and uniquely in you we can notice these patterns.
Here we go. God says I created you with a gate in the depths of yourself through which you pass into me and I pass into you, endlessly. God says “I’ll go first and demostrate.” God passes into us in creation, in creating us in imago dei, creating us in the capacity to realize this and to say yes to it and to come home. The sad thing is we don’t get it. So God, not to be discouraged, passes through a second time, in consciousness as an intimate awaking in our hearts of God passing thru to where God already is in creation as the reality of our lives. In first passing through the gate you find in the mystics an understanding of a rich spiritual world view that’s revealed in all the scriptures in a different lexicon all over the world in all the religions, creation of all things, “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and all things were made thru him and without him has been made nothing that has been made.” Gothic cathedral, like consciousness in stone, what did this? Like walking into a space, I most benefited from the richness of the spiritual world view this boundryless, vast, gracious way of understanding the nature of our situation. One of the things that makes the spiritual life so difficult is that we do not live in a culture that provides this world view. In an impoverished world view it’s hard to get our footing, there’s no context in which to understand what’s happening to us when we begin to be awakened to the call to union.
First gate; the way it is. This is the way it is. Then they talk about the extent to which we realize the way it is. We are who we are because God says so, the extent to which we realize who God says that we are, is another matter. They are trying to provide this spacious world view, in Buddhist terms, this would be Right View, to view spaciously, to see the god given godly nature of ourselves and all things, right view. And you’ll find them bearing witness to God awakening us to the god given godly nature of all things. And our god-given capacity to say yes to it. Love is always offered it is never imposed. It’s not yet actualized. It’s not that there is an objective revelation to which we are awakened of the god given godly nature of all things, and then the capacity to awaken to it, rather it is… What if we all close our eyes and we would all be interiorly awakened so that when you opened your eyes you’d see thru awakened eye to see all that you really are and are called to be, what would you see? You’d see God. The infinite reality, beginingless, endless, boundryless reality itself that we call God, you’d see god utterly emptying herself, utterly giving herself, utterly giving herself away as the reality of yourself, others and all things. You’d see that the generosity of the infinite is infinite and the infinite infinitely gives itself away as us, as all this moment is. Giving herself as the concrete immediacy of ourself, concrete immediacy of other and all things. In the beginning… God said. God is infinite, we are finite. God is reality itself giving reality to all things that are real. If god would cease loving you into your chair, your chair would be empty, the whole universe is god’s body and the whole universe is bodying forth the birthless, deathless love that’s uttering it into being as reality giving reality to all that is real. And so with you and so with me and so with all things. Theoria Physica. From a Trinitarian understanding of God, from all eternity God is eternally uttering himself as the word, and thru all eternity god is eternally contemplating his self-utterance, and through all eternity god is eternally contemplating the eternal possibility of all things. So in genesis when god say “fiat”, god wills into existence what god knows from all eternity everything is from before the origin of the universe. When god created fire, god didn’t have to think up what fire might be. From all eternity, God eternally knows what fire eternally is, and knowing what fire eternally is in god, before the creation of the universe, and fire in god before the origin of the universe is god. Because everything in god is god. This is the fire that never began, therefore it is the fire that will never go out. This is why we can contemplate fire. Fire is our brother, you can gaze into the flames and intimations of divinity in fire. There are intimations of that which never ends. Fire in god, as god. We are all siblings of the infinite. Carl Jung says “how can we claim that the years have taught us anything if we’ve not learned to sit and listen to the secret that whispers in the brooks?” The intimations of the divine in the sound of running water. Meister Eckhart, not that god gives more of god to us than to water or fire or birds or stones. Because infinity infinitely gives itself away completely to each grain of sand, to each bird, to every leaf, on every tree, but god endows us with a capacity to know it. God endows us to awaken to ourselves as being the manifestations of the unmanifested mystery of god in a world that is itself the manifestation of the unmanifested mystery of god. That’s the glory of being a human being and then god endows us with freedom to say yes to it, to accept who we are and come home and be who god eternally knows us to be. ST. John of the Cross - The infinite love that is the architect of our hearts has made our hearts in such a way that nothing less than an infinite union with the infinite will do. No finite union with a finite thing will do. And no finite union with the infinite will gratify, consolations of god are finite, and will not do. We were not created by god to have consolations of god, we were created by god beyond all consolations of god, that echoes in the consolations of god. We were not created by god to believe in god and ideas about god, because all ideas about god are finite, we were created by god beyond all ideas, beyond all thoughts, it hasn’t entered our minds what god has prepared for those who love god, which is the infinity of god. The infinite love that is the architect of our hearts has made our heart in such a way that nothing less than an infinite union with the infinite will do. Have you noticed people in love lift each other up, this is communion. We are created for this, and are awakened to it in moments of awakening, and in moments of awakening, we still don’t get it. May god go off somewhere and sit on a stone and weep! So god keeps endlessly awakening our heart, awakening our heart, awakening our heart, god does not keep score, keeps endless awakening our heart to who we eternally are before the origins of the universe. And then we wake up, we see it, and the awakening event creates desire. Once we’ve tasted that without which life remains forever incomplete, how might I find and learn to rest in the infinite love that I now know rests in me? That awakens me to itself. And that is to be on the path. The trouble is that it too sputters out, and gets relit, relit, relit, god does not keep score. Text of Merton – flock of birds, face of a child, splash of a frog. God comes at us, perpetually, making divinity to be the concrete immediacy of ourselves and all things, then there are moments we are awakened to it, when we hear the splash of a frog… Notice that these are not extacies or visions, these are utterly ordinary moments where something intimately flashes forth and accesses our heart and we recognize something. In such moments we serendipitously stumble upon the already holy nature of life as it is. For a fleeting instant we know that nothing is missing anywhere, but we forget, and we turn back to our ruminations and concerns until the next time it flashes forth, smell a rose, and it grants itself to you. That we are the generosity of God, nothing is missing anywhere, and we turn away, it touches us, touches us, touches us. And then we realize that we are involving ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair, sick and tired of being sick and tired. I want out of this, claustrophobic world that I’m walking I’m imagining I’m anything less than the infinity of God given to me as my life. I don’t want to live this way. I want to live in an habitual realization of God’s habitual abiding presence in me. I don’t like these momentary little visits then I wander off and fool around. I want to be in an abiding presence of God’s abiding presence in me. It is a grace to want this. So how do I do this? We learn that nothing less or contrary than the love of god revealed to us in the blessedness of our life, anything less than the love of god that is the source of our security that we try to take with us is rough! St. John of the Cross; A bird held by a slender thread is held just as much as prisoner as one held by a large cord. That’s why in the dark night, god slips in and takes from us what we’re afraid to let go of. (Dead couple at the gates of heaven with their baggage) Our ego is always trying to make a deal. I’m very serious about mystical union, but I want to keep my ego intact.
We sense our fear of obediential fidelity to that which awakens us. We want it but we’re afraid and distracted. And in this restlessness, we start to understand who the mystics are, by who they reveal us to be in their presence.
How’s it going in your surrender to the mystery that has intimately accessed your heart and has drawn you here that it might translate you into itself, that it might have its way with you? Because I’ll tell you something out in the world you can get away without being faithful to this, walking around in here and not being faithful to this, you look like a fool. One Zen master says, what is the greatest form of suffering?, it is to wear monks robes without having resolved the great matter. And the spiritual experience is the great matter.

This path marked out for us by the mystics is embodied in their habitual realization of god’s oneness with us in all things. An awareness of the god-given godly nature of every breath and heartbeat that we are the generosity of god. That this could be true, not just as a poetic statement, but as a kind of visceral, intimate, intuitive underlying recognition of our situation. That this could be true, that everything you are looking for is what you’re perfectly manifesting. Day by day you can find your way to this ever deeper realization of this boundless generosity of god – our very life. I’m going to make a way for you to enter into me and I can enter into you. By learning how to recognize this passage, by observing how this is occurring you can learn your way along this path. We won,t be so confused, we will know deep down what is really going on, surrender to it and let it have its way with us – this infinite love for us as precious in our frailty and fragility.
The experiential knowledge of the truth – wisdom (what’s going on?). God is often the word we use for the infinity of that love and the concrete immediacy of that infinite love is us just sitting here just the way we are. The mystics reflect deeply on the far reaching consequences of creation as truth. That in these words is the revelation of the nature of my situation – true regardless of the situation (birth, death, etc.) God manifested as birth, God giving herself away completely as death. But we don’t see it. We ask god for the grace to see life this way, we meditate on it and look for the sovereignty of this love giving itself away as the true nature, the one and only present moment. God wakes us up to where god already is. (Imagine you’re going to surprise your family, you show up, but they don’t see you right away). In seeing a flock of birds our heart is stirred and we experience god passing to the depths of our heart where he already perfectly is and giving himself to us as our very life. These awakenings, it’s almost like a free-fall, we cannot grasp it, that life already is unexplainably the fullness of the infinity that we’re looking for, that infinity is giving itself away as this moment that I’m now glimpsing in these birds. But we suffer from amnesia, we are so hypnotized by the spell of our confusion, we don’t stay awake for long but god keeps waking us up, waking us up. It eventually reaches critical mass and stirs desire. Desire For what? Desire to live in a daily abiding awareness of god’s abiding awareness of us. (Imagine you’ve inherited a large elaborate mansion, but you don’t have the keys, so you live in a tent in the back yard…). What if you’re actually in the mansion, but thru a tragic mental condition you think you’re in a tent in the back yard? So why do I spend so many of my waking hours trapped on the outer circumference of the inner richness of the life that I’m living? It’s like an ache in my heart, why am I content to live so discontented, when more than I could ever need is being completely given to me. And I don’t want to live like this anymore. The paradox now, we discover, is that anything less or other than love stops us from moving forward and getting closer. We are really attached to our stuff, our ideas. This is very intimate, very subtle and mysterious. Why am I so afraid to let go of what violates and compromises my heart’s desire? It calls for great honesty, compassion, understanding about ourselves as precious in our confusion. God is smitten by how precious we are in the sincerity of our confusion.
(text: ascent of mount carmel/st. john – substantial union and affective union (who god says we are and what gets stuck in the gate)). God says to us, I give myself to you, and I give myself to you so that you will give yourself to me, so that me giving myself to you and you giving yourself to me will consummate my infinite longings. We will rest satisfied together in this union. We’re off to a good start because I am giving myself completely to you, now I am waiting for you to give yourself completely to me. How can my will be conformed to gods will so that in this situation I might give myself completely to god so that I can have an infinite union with god? It is a purging of my heart of what compromises my heart by my attachment to what’s less than the infinite union with infinite love that infinite love wills for us. Clinging to this and clinging to that.
Meister Eckhart Galazenheit – god is very, very laid back about being god, god is not uptight about it at all. God is so laid back and casual, that god gives being god away. The generosity of the infinite is infinite, and gives itself away as the reality of all things. Our sorrow is that we do not know that we are the generosity of god. (Imagine you’re standing in front of a full length mirror and imagine the image of you as conscious. It goes to therapy. It informs you it doesn’t need you…). I’m not real! I disappeared! The image was real but not in the way it thought it was real, it was real as an image of you. The image owes no allegiances to anything except that of which it is the image, it owes no debts, there is nothing that has the authority to say what it is except that of which it is the image, and so it is with us. That we are the image of god, without god we are nothing, absolutely nothing, but being the image of god we owe no allegiances to anything other than the infinite love in whose image we are made. And the idolatry of diversions of the heart, where we wander off into cul de sacs with the imagined authority of anything less or other than infinite love to name who we are, this is the problem.
Mictelda Magberg – god revealed to her that god freely chose to be lovesick for her, so that god told her, he really doesn’t know if he can handle being god without her. And whe say, since you have freely chosen to be so smitten as to not be able to endure being god without me, she says, I’ll make you an offer, she say, “take me home with you and I’ll be your physician forever.” The radical love that waits for the reciprocity of radical love.

Well, how do we do this? What we tend to do is look for a method, Merton says don’t look for a method to master or a system, but cultivate an attitude and outlook – faith, openness, expectation, supplication, openness, attention, reverence, joy, trust. Allow these to permeate our being.
Merton – wouldn’t it be interesting if when you died, you found out god wasn’t even interested in your spirituality. What if the reason we’re so interested in our spirituality is that we’re afraid of the intimacy that god wants us as precious in our fragility. And we can’t bear the intimacy of it, so we decide to become spiritual. Because we can handle spirituality, what we can’t handle is the divinity of our heart in its poverty, it’s utterly an unmanageable situation. We have to cultivate attitudes of heart to conform our heart to the infinite love that has awakened and entered our heart. The problem is, you can make all the resolutions you want, I’m going to be more patient, and have trouble. Here’s where we realize we need a spiritual practice. A commitment to a daily rendezvous with god where there is no agenda but love, to stabilize ourself in this stance of transforming our heart into the love that has awakened us. We go to god like “here I am,” god says, “well good, here I am.” I’m going to come here every day, I want to be childlike, I want to be vulnerable, I want to be sincere. I will not count the cost, because where else am I to go. I’m like a flag flapping in the breeze here, I’ve got to stabilize my heart in allowing my heart to be transformed. And, this is our practice. This is reflective, discursive prayer.
Guigo the Carthusian: lectio divina – sustained receptivity to a beauty not yet thought about. This is why meditation practice replicates the moments where we are spontaneously awakened, birds flying. It doesn’t lie within our power to make the awakening happen but it does lie within our power to form an interior stance that offers the least resistance to the awakening happening. God doesn’t have to work so hard, is lower our resistance to the graced event. TS Eliot says to hope to soon is to hope for the wrong thing. We rush too soon to the conclusion and don’t rest long enough in the sustained humility to be interiorly accessed to a beauty not yet thought about. Read the text, allow the text to initiate an inner dialogue with god. You take a text, the story of the prodigal son… He is thrown completely off balance by the utter irrelevancy of his infidelities in the presence of the love that is never unfaithful to us in our infidelities to it. And he’s transfixed by it and rendered powerless by it. Amazing grace. And you say, I know this is true, but with regard to the thing that presently burdens me, I don’t feel it. I’m sitting here in your presence believing that I am what’s wrong with me, I can’t past what I did that hurt this person, or I can’t get past what this person did to me, I can’t get past what I’m like in my brokenness. And so you start a dialogue with god help me out! And that sincere plea is the prayer, the affectis of your heart it’s the love that arises in the dialogue. And you sit with it. And you sit with it. Look a picture, say a chosen word. I love you, I love you. As I exhale saying I love you as I exhale myself into god, as I inhale listening to god breathing into me the infinite love that is my very life. I go back to the text, ground myself, pick one word that struck me, write it out and take it with me and during the day when during the mishaps of the day when I get disgruntled or afraid, touch that little word and ask “do I really image that this event has the power to name who I am? Do I really imagine that this has authority over me? Do I imagine that my slippage in giving it authority has any power to diminish your infinite love for me in my slippage? The next morning you come back, you and god get back to business again, and you just do that every day, every day, every day, for 80 years. It is it’s own reward. It is the great way. Sometimes in mystical union we’re anxious to get beyond this. There’s sometimes a feeling that enlightenment and senility are in a race to the finish! We’re always kind of propelling forward to some kind of lofty thing and we really haven’t learned how to abide ourself. That god is smitten by us, not by who we think we need to be, god is smitten by us by the beauty of us in our fragility. The great revelation of Christ is that god’s response to us in our dilemma is to become identified with us as precious in our dilemma. And we’re always trying to get past this place which is the compassionate place where god enters into us and we enter into god.

Birth – no one would be born! So what happens when something that’s tearing your heart open with boundaryless preciousness is taking you to itself and you’re not in charge. But without it your life makes no sense. You learn to throw yourself on the mercy of god and to trust in god. “Take courage now frail mortal though you are, pursue your course relentlessly.”

Well, how do we do this? What we tend to do is look for a method, Merton says don’t look for a method to master or a system, but cultivate an attitude and outlook – faith, openness, expectation, supplication, attention, reverence, joy, trust. I allow these to permeate my being.
Merton – wouldn’t it be interesting if when you died, you found out god wasn’t even interested in your spirituality. What if the reason I’m so interested in my spirituality is that I’m afraid of the intimacy that god wants me as precious in my fragility. And I can’t bear the intimacy of it, so I decide to become spiritual. Because I can handle spirituality, what I can’t handle is the divinity of my heart in its poverty, it’s utterly an unmanageable situation. The thing then is that I realized that I have to cultivate attitudes of heart to conform my heart to the infinite love that has awakened and entered my heart. The problem is, I can make all the resolutions I want, I’m going to be more patient, and then I get impatient. Here’s where I realize I need a spiritual practice. A spiritual practice is a commitment to a daily rendezvous with god where there is no agenda but love, to stabilize myself in this stance of transforming my heart into the love that has awakened me. We go to god like “here I am,” god says, “well good, here I am.” I’m going to come here every day, I want to be childlike, I want to be vulnerable, I want to be sincere. I will not count the cost, because where else am I to go. I’m like a flag flapping in the breeze here, I’ve got to stabilize my heart in allowing my heart to be transformed into the love that you have awakened in me. And, this is my practice. This is reflective, discursive prayer.
Guigo the Carthusian: Guigo’s guidelines for what we do in our rendezvous with God . So, I take a text, the text is the story of the Prodigal Son, and I slowly read the text to myself, maybe several times and Guigo says this: lectio divina, spiritual reading, is sustained receptivity to a beauty not yet thought about. And this is why meditation practice replicates the moments where we are spontaneously awakened, by a flock of birds descending, children in a moment they are really children. It doesn’t lie within our power to make the awakening happen but it does lie within our power to form an interior stance that offers the least resistance to the awakening happening. God doesn’t have to work so hard, we can lower our resistance to the graced event. TS Eliot says “to hope to soon is to hope for the wrong thing.” We rush too soon to the conclusion and don’t rest long enough in the sustained humility to be interiorly accessed to a beauty not yet thought about. And so I read the text. Then I take the text and I allow the text to initiate an inner dialogue with God. God says this to me and now God is waiting for what I say back. And this is personal, it could go like this. Well, here comes the son…
That is, I am thrown completely off balance by the utter irrelevancy of my infidelities in the presence of the love that is never unfaithful to me in my infidelities to it. And I’m transfixed by it and rendered powerless by it. Amazing grace. And so I say, I know this is true, but with regard to the thing that presently burdens me, I don’t feel it. I’m sitting here in your presence believing that I am what’s wrong with me, I can’t past what I did that hurt this person, or I can’t get past what this person did to me, I can’t get past what I’m like in my brokenness. And I believe that I am what’s wrong with me. And so I start a dialogue with god help me out! And that sincere plea is the prayer, the prayer is the affectis of my heart it’s the love that arises in the dialogue. And you sit like that. Take some notes. Maybe I have an icon or picture, maybe I have a simple word. I love you, I love you. As I exhale saying I love you as I exhale myself into god, as I inhale listening to god breathing into me the infinite love that is my very life. I love you, I love you, I love you. I go back to the text, ground myself. Next, I pick one word that struck me, write it out in longhand, I put it over my heart and take it with me and during the day when during the mishaps of the day when I get disgruntled or afraid, touch that little word and ask “do I really image that this event has the power to name who I am? Do I really imagine that this has authority over me? Do I imagine that my slippage in giving it authority has any power to diminish your infinite love for me in my slippage? The next morning I come back, I light my candle, ring my bell, and me and god get back to business again, and do that every day, every day, every day, for 80 years. It is it’s own reward. It is the great way.