An Invitation To A Journey

Experiencing God and Deepening Divine Communion

Do you ever feel like something’s missing? As if someone forgot to tell you something crucial and important about our faith, leaving a gap somewhere inside that you don’t know how to fill?

I have.

God has been the ache of me my entire adult life. I’ve been stung and affected by his love, utterly stuck on diving the deeps of him and obtaining a life of holy engulfment. I long for a God soaked life and I’ve wrestled tangibly with what that’s meant and how it feels to grasp it throughout my whole journey.

It wasn’t until seven years ago when I started a journey of chronic sickness that persists today that I started to un-peel my cultural assumptions about God. It took sickness for me, and being rid of all the usual tools for love-earning, to accept the God who can’t be domesticated or tamed by my works or theology.

I was stripped naked of it all. Not deconstructed, just de-robed. God shone a light on me.

After a few years of solitude spent in and out of a Franciscan Anglican Retreat Centre, recalibrating accidentally through the formative practice of illness, learning silence and beholding as a new language for communion with God, it was clear that I’d changed and could never go back.

My God-language transformed and so did my temperament and that led to people around me assuming I’d been reading the ancients, Mystics and Early Church Fathers & Mothers. Thoroughly charismatic, I was painfully ignorant of what any of that was. So I started reading.

Well, it was like returning home. Among the Saints I found a place of shared experience, language and desire. Reading their works felt like reading my own journal. I’d accidentally stumbled into something deep and rich.

That was five years ago now and I’ve spent my time since consuming literature from those brilliant writers and theologians, finding context for what felt at the time like dangerous senses of God in those solitudinal years of renewal. My experience of God has been enriched, my expectations blown away, my suffering has found meaning, and my charismatic nature and past has held itself in tact as it’s been expanded by the writings and lives of our history’s Saints.

So, I guess that’s what this space is about for me. I want to invite you into what for me has become a New Mysticism which is really just another way of saying, a continued experience of God’s withness in my life. A marriage of my charismatic foundations with historical maturity.

New not in content or nature, it is in fact very old. But new in its application to our lives and world today.

Not detached from working in the world, nor from the hard work of living The Way of Christ, but an invitation into loving union and God-experience as the centre and height of all else.

The Mystics aren’t named so for unorthodox beliefs or fringy behaviour, though some of them for sure lived confronting and unusual lives. What made someone a Mystic was their belief that God was to be fully experienced at all times in the believers life, and in often very different categories and ways than we expect. Because their theology and language is so experiential, it often seemed poetic and intangible to others - the language of the heart often does - hence the common misunderstanding that Christian Mystics weren’t to be trusted.

But their theology is often far more orthodox and centred than those who accuse them of being off the cliff-edge.

They were conscious of sin and the need for it to be overcome. They believed there were seasons of felt distance between us and God like the dark night of the soul even seeing God himself as cloaked in a cloud of mystery, unfitting for our catagorizations and best-shot language. They embraced wilderness as a necessity for divine discovery. They saw suffering as necessary participation in Christ, like intercession, rather than an aberration or sign of disapproval. They loved the body, saw it as an integrated whole, but also respected that it has very disordered desires due to our rebellion against Love that must be tamed in our journey toward closeness with God.

And most importantly, they believed in a process called Theosis, which see’s salvation as God’s promise to make us into Christ’s likeness in increasing measure, melding us together in union with God. A process that is centred in, begun with and ultimately saturates us in total and unequivocal godly love.

Often, to the Mystics, this was seen as a divine marriage between God and his people. A holy romance that was to be humanities greatest adventure.

It is to this goal, union with God for you and I, that I thought I’d start writing here through this medium. Sharing that faith, inviting you too into a God-soaked life. Not as a professional, nor as a teacher, but as a fellow sojourner and head over heals lover of God just looking to keep learning The Way.

And maybe my journey with chronic sickness and suffering, my learning to hold my charismatic past and experience with historical truth’s, and my longing for the God-soaked life might speak to you too.

So, if you’re in the rebuilding faith business, and you’re looking for restoration, not another tear-down movement or reaction to present day church trends, then this is your invitation to come along for the ride.

May we be ever learning and always finding the rich depth of Christ, in the love of God, through fellowship with the Holy Spirit, until we reach that magnificent union we were made and ache for.

Amen.

[This post was originally titled: An Invitation To A Renewed Mysticism; Who I Am & Why I’m Writing.]

Picture: Mosaic of Dionysius in Hosios Loukas monastery,
Source: Wikepedia.com