The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on June 1, 2022 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
Many of us are mystified by mysticism. We imagine that direct, personal encounters with God are extraordinary—rather than extra-ordinary. Mystical experiences are not reserved for a spiritual elite. If they are rare, it is only because most of us have forgotten our fullness.
We’ve become so imbalanced that we function mostly—or exclusively—out of only one of our main centers for knowing (recognized in many lineages as mind, heart, and senses). But those who have direct, personal encounters with the Holy One are usually functioning in the fullness of their humanness. Their minds, hearts and senses are all online, and thus they more easily perceive the impressions that the Holy One is constantly communicating all throughout creation.
On the cosmic level, then, mystical experiences simply recognize the deep relationality and interconnectedness of all that is. The fully alive human is more able to perceive those deep relations, and therefore, carry a sense of being taken out of the self. Out-of body experience doesn’t actually take the mystic anywhere, other than deeply into the relational awareness of the connectivity of all things.
Whether it’s Julian and her hazelnut, or Merton and his shining diamond, or Teresa and her waters, the mystical encounter in prayer is simply an expression of the fullness of what already is. Certainly, nothing to fear, something to prepare for, and everything to recognize!
