Pop 89: Into the Mystic
By Madonna Hamel
Some of you know that “Into the Mystic” is the title of a song by Van Morrison. I’ve sung along to this song driving down Tennessee highways, standing on West coast back porches, howling with friends over the rain, and most recently, driving home with my brother after a grocery and meds run to Swift Current.
Oh, I did want a mystical experience that day. I yearned for some kind of vision or sensation I could both feel and hear and “not have to fear”, as Morrison sang. Any Catholic knows that desire - raised on stories of the mystics- men and women, mostly young, receiving visions , hearing voices coming from heaven, piercing their hearts with love and assuring them, that, as Teresa of Avila was assured, to “Be not perplexed, be not afraid,” because “everything passes, God does not change.” Or, as another mystic put it: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, And all manner of things shall be well.” Some of you may think T.S. Eliot wrote that, but he lifted it from from Julian of Norwich who write it 600 years earlier. Like her mystic sister Teresa, Julian saw the big picture, played the long game.
To be a mystic always seemed like a practical and efficient way to link, or re-link, with the Divine. Eliminate the middle man, go directly to the Source. But certain conditions need be available in order to make the connection: silence, emptiness, and a significant isolation from the hustle and bustle of daily life. Come to think of it, that sounds like the road I’m on, literally.
Listening to Van the Man, driving home from Swift, especially the elegant stretch between Cadillac and Val Marie on Highway 4, or, as I like to call it, Grace Road, I glance at my brother leaning his head against the window, eyes closed. The vast open landscape, with so much unbroken land, is infused with unhindered and undiluted light. The kind of light that breaks through clouds and renders up to photographers The God Shot. I hope my brother, resting his swirling head, is absorbing the air that is rarefied that by the Light pouring it. “I felt, really felt, ”he told me later, “for one brief second, that everything’s alright.” All shall be well.
I am, at this very moment, studying the lives of the women of Helfta, a group of medieval monastics. Some of them heard voices or saw visions and these communications with the Divine kept them on a path of Love. As a Catholic kid I loved the stories of apparitions, especially of Mary, but as I grew up I wondered what would happen if I actually saw a saint floating before me.
In the late 90s I visited my sister and brother-in-law in Portugal. They were tending to the olive orchard his family owned. One night my sister suggested we sleep in the field in her tent. “Wouldn’t it be great if Mary appeared to us like she did to the children in Fatima,” she said as we lay out our sleeping bags. “Actually, no,” I said. “It’s not that I’d reject Mary. It’s that, knowing me, I’d get something existential. Like, there’d be a knock on the tent and I’d open it to me! I’d come face to face with myself!.”
What would it look like, sound like, to encounter the divine, to move deeply into a connection as ineffable and all-enveloping as those experienced by mystics? How do I move “into the mystic” - as Van says - without having to fear it? Do I need to see the ancients floating in mid-air, singing in Latin or talking in tongues, for it to be the real deal? And would I have to have someone there to authenticate it for me? If forced off this comfortable chair and out into the world to help others, have I had a mystical moment?
Or is a mystic more like the great minds the poet Keats describes: beings who become, “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Does that mean that a mystic is like a poet, able to be un-self-conscious to submerge into the whole story, the Uni-Verse?
Many of my fellow students in the Women of Helfta course ask the same questions, so our professor Jacqueline Small, posted a quote by Dorothee Soelle, a spiritual writer I’ve grown to love, about a young woman in a seminary class:
“She went out into the winter night, looked at the stars, and had a feeling of happiness that was unique for her, a feeling of unity with all of life, with God, an experience of overpowering clarity and joy, a sense of being cared for and borne up: No ill can befall me; I am indestructible; I am one with the All. This was the kind of language she used to describe her experience.
If this same young woman had lived in fourteenth-century Germany, she probably would have said, “I heard a voice, and it said to me, ‘I am with you’ ”—or something like that. Or she might have said, “I saw a light.” In the twentieth century, she can’t use that kind of language to communicate her experiences to others. She has to struggle with the language and with her own embarrassment. We have no language at all that can describe these experiences precisely, yet she had the courage to try to tell us what she had felt.
Mystical experience is not, then, something extraordinary, requiring some special talent or sixth sense. Thousands of people in other cultures have had such experiences, experiences of this happiness, this wholeness, this sense of being at home in the world, of being at one with God. It makes no difference—and this point has been confirmed by everyone who has ever reported on mystical experience.”
I don’t have to fear it.