Everday Mysticism

It seems like everybody wants to be a mystic. The mystical way is usually taken to be that of the extreme ascetic: your stereotypical bone-thin, gaunt-eyed, cave-dwelling kind of saint. That way may well have its place, but a path for the more everyday mystic is pointed to by Richard Mouw who writes in his Praying at Burger King that:

"I seldom find myself in a praying mood while sitting in a restaurant. But I typically don't pray because I am feeling especially 'spiritual.' If I had to wait for those moods to set in, I wouldn't pray very often!" [1]

Mouw goes on to draw the analogy between greeting or recognizing the presence of a person and recognizing the presence of God, noting that when we see someone we know, we don't usually ignore them because we don't feel like greeting them, but bring ourselves to greet the person because their very presence obliges us.

How does this relate to God? If God is everywhere all the time, we should be continually recognizing his presence. True, we should. This is clearly the impulse behind the scriptural imperative to pray without ceasing and the various forms of life that have tried to take this seriously. But alas, most of us struggle to focus on God for more than a minute without distraction.

Michael Himes writes in The Mystery of Faith: An Introduction to Catholicism that the basic idea behind everything from corporate worship to prayer is what he calls the sacramental principle: the idea that if something is true at all times and in all places one must pay attention to it at some time, and in some place. A finite human being just cannot attend to the infinite but in a timely way. (Moreover, this 'condition' of human experience should not, from a Christian perspective, be seen as simply negative but part of their originally good createdness. [2]) This picture of trying to recognize the infinity of God in some particular way is exactly what is given us in the image of someone like Professor Mouw trying to reach a momentary awareness of God sitting in a restaurant - a 'worldly' distracting Burger King of all places.

But isn't this type of activity, either greeting an acquaintance with a smile when you really wish they'd go away, or bowing one's head and praying when one's mind is anywhere but with God, just what we call hypocrisy? Well, it can be. The trap of hypocrisy is an ever-present danger for any of humanity's higher aims whether they be moral or spiritual. It is just false though to say that the choice is between either hypocritical pretending to be what one really isn't and just doing whatever the heck one feels like.

The other option is to act the way one wants to become. [3]

So a spiritual activity becomes hypocritical then, not when one has mixed feelings about it - otherwise spirituality would be only for the already perfect, but when it becomes the end in itself. Jesus compared people who evinced this kind of religion to white-washed tombs. But spiritual actions can also be a means to an end, a way of exercising an impulse one wants to become more and more spontaneous. It's no accident we call something like prayer a spiritual practice, because it is nothing other than training oneself to be aware of God's presence more fully and more consistently. [4]

This is why the discipline of prayer at fixed times, according to the clock or events like meals or waking and sleeping, is so important. It recognizes the infinity of God by immersing oneself more consciously into time as a way of reaching beyond it, and growing in awareness of that which is outside of time. The other option, of being 'spiritual' when one feels like it, far from getting us to God, just makes us more in thrall to ourselves and our own agendas.

To return to the comparison with a friend: we all recognize the difference between a friend we only like to see when we're in the right mood, and the deep friendship that is as important and as appreciated in the hard times as in the good. (Marriage should embody the ideal of the human relationship here.) What kind of a god would it be that was only there when we felt like turning to him? Truly that god would be one of our own making.

1. p.4

2. see Smith, James K.A., The Fall of Interpretation

3. I think there's a lot that could be said, if it hasn't been already, relating Christian ethics of character as in Hauerwas, and the theology of spiritual formation.

4. For further reflection on the spiritual life as training, see Willard, Dallas, The Divine Conspiracy