WHY I AM NOT A MYSTIC

Mysticism is one of those words that is used in many different ways.  I mean here specifically the traditional meaning of the word, that is the teachings and practices that seek to culminate in a union with the divine, however conceived.

I’m not a mystic because my spiritual quest is not to go beyond who I am as a human.  Rather, I seek to fully embody what is possible as a human who is part of creation.  Mystics, it seems to me, seek to transcend their humanity and thus, in some sense, experience what it is like to not be human, but to be absorbed into something greater than being human. 

I think this is a fundamental denial of our humanity, though mystics might respond that the telos or goal of humans is to transcend ourselves and join or rejoin the divine.  But I think the telos of humans is to be fully human.  What does it mean to be human?  It means, or at least can mean, to be fully at home amidst all the other beings in our world.  It means to be intimate with a particular place and with a particular beloved community.  That beloved community includes humans, AND it includes domestic animals and crops, woods and water, wild plants and mammals and birds.  The squirrels who inhabit the hole in the standing dead tulip poplar at the edge of the woods behind my house are just as much part of the community of beings as I am.

I think it is a rare human in our world who is fully human.  I’m certainly not.  I’m not nearly as connected to my place as I would like to be (I’m not even sure how connected you can be to place in the context of urban or suburban settings).  I’m not part of a beloved community in a way that I would like to be; my relationship to my squirrels and the deer is better than my relationship to my white nationalist Christian neighbors.

My project is fundamentally religious because I can see a deep kind of connection to something far greater than I am, and I work to move towards that vision.  But it is not mystical, because I don’t seek to lose myself in that greater being.  Rather I seek to realize myself more fully as myself, a being amongst other beings

A mystic. Not me.