TIO Public Square
Mystics, Heretics and Other “Souls on Fire”
by Chris Highland
“Why do we get angry about what we believe? Because we do not really believe it.” (Thomas Merton, Asian Journal).
While I was a Parish Associate in a Protestant church for ten years, I taught an adult education course entitled: “The Way of the Mystic and Heretic.” Presenting this class gave me the opportunity to read and reflect on some of the most radical nonconformists in religious history. These were some of my earliest explorations in freethought, at least in terms of heretics who broke from the bastions of belief.
They were burned alive (Marguerite Porete), torn apart (Hallaj), condemned (Eckhart), silenced (Galileo), stabbed to death with the pens of their students (John the Scot), forced to drink poison (Socrates), excommunicated, exiled or simply ignored. They are the mystic teachers and contemplatives of many traditions who shake the world like tremors through fearless questioning of cherished views and beliefs.
Our history is full of these marginal men and women, thrown out of the community for their disturbing ideas (heterodoxy) that infuriate the protectors of acceptable beliefs (orthodoxy). Yet they have good company in their exclusion from the mainstream. In fact, if there is a main “stream” at all, these courageous people are not merely meandering tributaries but assume the role of rapids and waterfalls, stirring up sediment and bubbles, disrupting our comfortable creeds and systematic theologies.
Nevertheless, they wade in with some big names in religious waterfalls: thrown into wells (the Prophet Jeremiah), crucified (Jesus), beheaded (Paul), run out of town (Muhammad), murdered (Rumi’s teacher Shams), excommunicated (Luther) and on and on into our day. These are the people who were not afraid to speak of their intimately personal experience of the “holy” and to ask the most volcanic questions in the face of those who had built their comfortable religious homes on the slopes of the old dormant mountains of tradition. They are each rumbling, crumbling voices from our common history and they crossed all lines of religion, nationality and gender.
Many of their fearfully faithful judges believed they had also crossed the lines of decency, stumbling into blasphemy—certainly they offended God! Yet these mystic heretics often humbly and joyfully transgressed or even erased the artificial lines that separate us from each other, and perhaps separate us from anything considered sacred.
Mystics bend and break the mirrors that reflect who we think we are and warp our images of divinity. Perhaps they are the polishers of the mirrors. Marguerite Porete (burned at the stake in Paris, 1310) wrote “The Mirror of Simple Souls.” Ibn Arabi said the world is an unpolished mirror that we humans have the responsibility to keep clean. Catherine of Siena exclaimed: “In the gentle mirror of God the soul sees her own dignity.” The Iranian Muslim Shabestari taught every particle of the world is a mirror in which the Almighty makes a home. Shinto temples in Japan hold the mirror as a sacred symbol of the life of the gods among us.
Photo: StockCake
What is the primary symbolic lesson? We resist the illumination of our own true image reflected in the foggy face of the Creative Force gazing back. But the powerful masters of morality see only a spark threatening to burn down their fragile houses built on the sand of their own self-righteousness. Driven by fearful faith, they try to extinguish the spark with fire. To mix and mystify the metaphor, the life and testimony of each mystic lives on as a sacred waterfall, each droplet reflecting the face of the Source of all living water — The Creative One, The Friend, The Beloved, The Lover, Mother Nature … known by a thousand thirst-quenching names.
Waterfalls, volcanoes, mirrors. The way we describe the mystics is the way they speak of the Unspeakable. In metaphors, parables and body-images they seek to teach us the “simple way,” the “path,” the “practice of the presence” and further into more metaphors. They lead us into the wilds of our own minds/souls. They are the voices crying in the wilderness, preparing our way, and Love’s way to us.
Another John, not the Baptist or the writer of The Revelation, but John Muir, said: “No wilderness in the world is so desolate as to be without divine ministers. God’s love covers all the earth as the sky covers it, and also fills it in every pore. And this love has voices heard by all who have ears to hear.” Was Muir a mystic, or simply an explorer of Nature? Why not both? The mystics have always been those who transcended the “ordinary” and “normal” course of things to reach “higher” (or deeper, wider) meanings. Perhaps the most articulate naturalists have always been our best secular mystics.
Header Photo: StockCake