Surrender, Part 2

Befriending Phoebe

Your name is 'The Sound a Breath Makes.'
Each creature calls your name. You respond with Life Overflowing.
May we, each and all, be idle enough to hear it. 
To recognize your blessing and to bear it. 
To fall to our knees in the dewy grass. 
To rejoice in your nearness. 
In your hereness. 
Amen

---

Mysticism has sent you an envoy. Let’s call her, I don’t know, Phoebe, for no particular reason other than it's a pleasant name, and one time you wanted to name your dog Phoebe, Phebes for short. Not scary at all. 

Phoebe has been showing up in unexpected places. Back in November, or maybe December as you were doing daily chemo and radiation, a dear friend wrote:

Maybe I can believe for just five minutes - or five weeks - that the radiation and chemo is going to work and the reason this thing is happening to you is so that you may become a full-blown mystic. 

You never responded to that part of the letter. At least not directly. You were probably afraid.

A different friend has been insisting that you are becoming, or have always been a mystic. You either go silent or change the topic whenever your friend does this. Fear again? Maybe? Probably.

And other friends, also dear, suggest that they and Phoebe are on good terms. Say, right out loud that they consider themselves mystics. You do not remember the exact words you say in response, but you are pretty sure they have usually been pickling in a brine of fear and shame for months. They are almost certainly dismissive. And you now find yourself regretting them. 

---

Phoebe doesn’t limit her visits to the daytime, emails, or to the words of friends. She usually shows up late at night.  Phoebe has been gently, patiently tapping on your imagination window, for months. It’s usually when it’s dark outside and there is nothing to distract your vision and the only sounds are the breaths of your loved one and the ceiling fan. 

When Phoebe wakes you at 2:30, as she is inclined to do these days (#steroid-perks), you reflexively reach for a screen, solve the Wordle, or read about some outrage, some war, some injustice that shoos sweet Phebes away. She doesn’t fight it, really. Doesn’t hang her head. She just returns to the night, hoping and believing you might pay attention the next time, or the time after that. As if she knows you will. As if she has been given an important message to deliver. As if she were Rowan, and you Garcia. She has no intention of giving up.

And when she leaves, you begin counting backwards from one-hundred. Or you remember the trick a client once gave you and trace a breath into your nose and into your lungs and into your blood, and through your heart to every part of your body - part by part. Usually you make it to seventy-five or your right big toe before you fall back asleep. 

---

Tonight you fear that reaching for your screen will wake Kathryn. Even though you continue to feel well and healthy, Kathryn knelt by your bed as you and Carley fell asleep last night, and you knew you were so deeply loved and all you want for Kathryn is a peace that is not yours to offer - and you certainly do not want to wake her. And with your dismissiveness toward your friends still weighing on your chest, you resolve that you cannot go on ignoring Phoebe and pushing past people, people you love, simply because you are afraid of one of their words.

So you decide to slip out of bed, hopeful and careful not to rustle the blankets. You invite Phoebe to follow you downstairs. She nods her agreement, and never mentions how you haven’t really been listening.  Not a word. Phebes is all grace.

It’s only when we get downstairs that she speaks at all. “Don’t be afraid,” she says. “Just ask a friend.”

It’s 2:36 AM eastern time. Your friends do not keep your hours. But Phoebe sits beside you on the white couch, still and silent. She does not waiver. “Ask a friend,” she repeats.

As you consider her suggestion, you also pause to consider the word mysticism, but more than that word alone. You consider how much we have loaded onto our words, or maybe, more accurately, how much we have stripped away. How we have culturally divided many words, perhaps even most words into ours-good and theirs-bad until they are no longer icons pointing to something deeper and more meaningful, but simply logos we wear on our t-shirts to tell the world which team we play for.  You pause to consider just how ubiquitous this has become. Perfectly lovely words stricken from entire subcultures because they belong to the other side: justice, inclusion, Christ, mercy, grace, compassion, responsibility, sacrifice, and even empathy .… Empathy?

“This is a tragedy,” you think. You wonder if Yeats was referring to this very moment when he said: The center cannot hold.

Phoebe clears her throat.

---

On your desk sits Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace. You admire her gift of recognizing the way we use words to divide ourselves into tribes, but also her gift of looking behind the letters and logos and paying closer attention to what a word is pointing to. On a whim, you check the table of contents. There it is. Mystic. (Page 284). Between Lectio Divina (277) and Trinity (287).  

“Ask a friend.”

You ask Norris. She answers:

The word ‘mystic’ is as dangerous as the word ‘poet,’ if only because both words are so vulnerable to misunderstanding and abuse. When we describe someone as a ‘poet’ or a ‘mystic,’ we generally mean it as a warning  - here is someone whose head is in the clouds and who can’t get places on time.

…

…The term ‘mysticism’ came into use during the Renaissance, and today carries with it the unfortunate undertones of otherworldly experience, special revelations that come to a select few. Pulsating light, voice, angelic interventions, spectacular stuff…

You appreciate her speaking this so clearly.  You recognize her description all too well. When you hear the word mystic, you think of someone who always seems to be trying a little too hard to infuse some deeper meaning into the ordinary. Someone who believes their vision a little clearer, their theology a little purer, and then uses this special vision to justify all sorts of bullying and unloving behavior to their neighbors. Mysticism implies a piousness that can feel nearly unbearable to be with. Which is curious: this particular caricature describes absolutely none of your friends who embrace the term.

Or it describes someone who has simply lost his/her mind, but none of your friends have lost their minds, at least as far as you can tell.

Nonetheless, and either way, you realize that you have thrown the word mystic into the theirs-bad pile, without ever having taken the time to look at the word. It’s not a comfortable realization. You wonder if that was the point. If your work here is done.

---

But Phoebe doesn’t move, and of course, your work is not quite done here.

Kathleen continues by suggesting that mysticism has over time replaced the term, “contemplation” which conveyed the writers’ of the early church experiences of the presence of God; Paul speaks simply of “Christ living in me.” Kathleen then quotes Louis Depre, who defined mystical as “all that refers to faith as it directly affects human experience.”

You pause again, and look at Phoebe who has dozed off on the couch in your office, wrapped up in the blue knit blanket and is snoring a little. You turn back to Norris:

I find that I appreciate mysticism best in its most ordinary manifestation…A first-time mother or father, for example, engaged in giving their baby a bath, will suddenly realize that this is about more than getting an infant clean. Time will feel suspended; the light in the room, the splashing water, the infant’s cooing with delight, the skin-on-skin feel of loving touch - all of it might come together so powerfully that the parent inhabits in a more complete way this new and scary identity as ‘parent’ (of an image bearer of the divine). And, at this moment, it is pure joy.

In traditional contemplation, which always leads away from self, and back toward God, this realization would lead to a heightened empathy for all parents and children.

As a relatively new grandfather, this hits close to home. You recognize what she’s describing when you see your sons and their three daughters.

This is what you hear now. Your friend, Kathleen, seems to be suggesting that mysticism is not pride in one’s unique or special vision, but a more humble understanding of our spectacular and spectacularly common inheritance as beloved children of God. Not a special ability for a clever few to make every place thinner or to infuse every moment with deeper meaning, but the exact opposite; It is surrendering to the already-withness of God, the already-thinness of every place, the already-magnificence in every moment. Already-thinness and already-magnificence that are available to each person, each creature because they are already-beloved. Because they are already in this very place at this very moment. Already and always with God.

---

Paraphrasing Merton’s words (or Ghandi’s?) from last week, but only a little:

Suppose our fears arise from our deliberate dismissal of God from the ordinary places and ordinary moments, and then trying, and inevitably failing to recreate God as we wish God to be. We fail, and suddenly believing that we have been forsaken and standing alone at the edge of the abyss, we forget to breathe. Forget to speak the name of God.

But what if God never leaves the place or the moment, even if we try to dismiss Him?

You wonder if true mysticism isn’t simply learning to believe that while God always respects our choices - and might even slip out of sight when we dismiss him - God does not forsake. Not ever. Not ever. Not ever.

---

In this respect, you long to be a mystic, and to walk with God and hear and see Him ever more clearly, in a universe where the word mystic belongs to everyone. Not us. Not them. Everyone. And not because it will lead to joy or fearlessness or even life - although you suspect it will lead to all of those things.

But because God.

---

Phoebe is fast asleep on the couch, snoring loudly. You pull the blue blanket over her shoulders and turn to head back upstairs with coffee and a kiss for Kathryn.

Time to wake up.

Oremus,

Chris

(p.s. On the way to out of the neighborhood for your walk today, you notice Phoebe and Kathleen and Cancer speaking quietly in his front yard. Each offers you a silent nod, as if acknowledging your unspoken gratitude.)