christian living on Mysticism

A mystic is anyone who believes that, when you talk to God, God talks back.

My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with th...

Following the biblical pattern, the church has always assumed that God can communicate spiritual truths to people through their imaginations, especially through dreams and visions. Church history is r...

It is necessary for us to recognize that there is an intelligent mysticism in the life of faith . . . of living union and communion with the exalted and ever-present Redeemer. . . . He communes with h...

The truth is simpler… and more alarming. [This] is the end of religious experience, the very opposite of mysticism…. We have been going round the paths, and suddenly we see our path goes round a hole,...

Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to li...

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.

This is the ultimate in human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know Him.

The Boundless Mystery we call God is continuously at work in the life of every one of us. In everything that happens to us, God is always seeking to draw us—and all creation—into greater fullness of l...

Spirituality is that place where the utterly intimate and the vastly infinite meet.

To receive spiritual direction is to recognize that God does not solve our problems or answer all our questions, but leads us closer to the mystery of our existence where all questions cease.

May the Lord grant that we may engage in contemplating the mysteries of his heavenly wisdom with really increasing devotion, to his glory and our edification. Amen.

Now, in our lifetime, scientists are finding ever newer evidence for what some religious people called presence in the very organizing energy of the universe—from fractals, to holograms, to electro-ma...

The question our century puts before us is: is it possible to regain the lost dimension, the encounter with the Holy, the dimension which cuts through the world of subjectivity and objectivity and goe...

For prayer exists, no question about that. it is the peculiarly human response to the fact of this endless mystery of bliss and brutality, impersonal might and lyric intimacy that composes our experie...

Spiritual direction, therefore, explicitly acknowledges what is often only implicit in other forms of pastoral care: that the directees' desire for more life, more integration, more union with God...

Spiritual timekeeping is nourished by Jesus’s promise that the Spirit will guide us into all truth across time… This stands in contrast to what I’ll call the “primitivism” of so much American Christia...

God is often silent when we prefer that he speak, and he interrupts us when we prefer that he stay silent. His ways are not our ways. To live with the sacred God of creation means that we conduct our ...

Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all...

"Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and i...

Surprisingly, the Christian faith today is perceived as disconnected from the supernatural world – a dimension that the vast majority of outsiders believe can be accessed and influenced.

Contemplation reaches out to the knowledge and even to the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God. It knows God by seeming to touch Him. Or rather it knows Him as if it had been invisibl...

Desert spirituality is characterized by the pursuit of abundant simplicity—simplicity grounded in the possession of little and the abundance of God’s presence. Yearning for complete union with God, de...

“Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and ...

Thus, from the standpoint of the gospels, the mighty deeds of Jesus, healings and exorcisms alike, were the product of the power which flowed through him as a holy man. His powers were charismatic, th...

We have immense difficulty practicing God’s presence and keeping God’s reality before our mind’s eye because we have dismissed or denigrated our capacity to intuitively and imaginatively apprehend and...

The journey has to feel like night because it leads to the unknown. If Christianity meant mere maintenance, then bewilderment or darkness would spell disaster. But . . . darkness is a condition of the...

Spiritual guidance affirms the basic quest for meaning. It calls for the creation of space in which the validity of the questions does not depend on the availability of answers but on the questions...

Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near e...