Kyle as Mystic? Certainly my beliefs have evolved through my lifetime—as I reflect upon my lifetime of belief, I realize how much it has changed but stayed the same.
I would like to believe that I have had mystical experiences—but I can’t say that in the deepest sense of the word. I am not disciplined enough to be a mystic, but I truly believe that I have had mystical experiences.
My first mystical experience happened when I was in the first grade. On a beautiful, warm spring day in Apache, Oklahoma, I raced home (one block from the school) to change clothes and race back to school. Several friends and I had agreed to return to the playground as quickly as possible. I still remember how excited I was as I raced back to the schoolyard and how surprised to find that no one was there. I had returned before anyone else. OK, I would wait for them (I can’t remember who was suppose to return.).
I sat in the swing and began to kick off. Swinging, swinging—still no one returned. I kicked off again. Swinging, swinging. The swing went slower and slower as I watched my toe dragging in the dirt. Slowly, more slowly barely moving. I remember staring for some time at my foot in the dirt—the swing not moving. Suddenly I had the weirdest sensation of silence—no birds, no cars, no voices—it was verrrrry . eerily silent. I looked up. AsI looked around, there was a glow around the playground as if there was a halo around everything. At that moment, I felt as if I was the only person left on earth—I was totally alone—I was frozen in place but feeling like I was melting into space. I was frightened by the sensation.
Seriously. I don’t remember going home or any of others showing up that afternoon I just remember the almost out-of-body sensation.
I missed the class picnic on the last day of my 4th grade as mother took me to Hobart? (year was that?) where I was unceremoniously placed on a metal table, a rag placed over my face and ether sprinkled on the rag. You’ve heard this story many times—under the influence of ether! Some would call these dreams—they didn’t feel that way to me. Appendectomy in 1960; anesthesia and back into the same vision as if no time had passed at all—that I had gone from one timelessly to the other.
I often went into the empty church during the week–maybe to get away from everyone. I remember sitting in the balcony room of the Buffalo church. Initially, I was imagining how I would remodel that church to make it a big home. I was there for a very long time in complete stillness when I felt myself weightless and no longer alone. It was so surreal that I jumped up in fright and looked around for anyone else who was there. No one. That certainly broke the spell.
I have been to heaven—in my dreams–it was so real–I believe that there was reality in those dreams.
After four days of delightful play Wallis is on her way home to Hutto! Missing her already but I do want to take a few moments to respond to the question “Do I believe that Jesus was the Son of God?” Yes!
Jim Robert sent this to me this morning.
And he wrote this:
“. . .So my inspiration today is this pic took on my last night in Yangon Myanmar at the Shwedagon pagoda. Sun was near setting and this boy caught my eye. I nodded at his mom with my camera and pointed to her son and she nodded and smiled back. I sat down on the floor and he without any verbal communication stuck his pose. i could tell I made his night… he has absolutely no idea how healing my memory of that 5 minute relationship calms my soul tonight and many nights b4”
This picture speaks to me as well.
MY ASSUMPTIONS:
1. GOD is too great to be understood by any one person or religion.
2. John 10: 22-39 (this are the only verses from the NT that I will reference although there are many more that instruct me) and Psalm 82:1-8 (particularly verse 6 and 8 from the OT).
From the beginning of recorded history and archeological evidence, humans have experienced GOD. The oldest know sacred writings (2500 BC) acknowledged creation and creator of all the world they knew). Psalm 82: 8(written a 1000 years later) acknowledges the GOD of ALL nations. Jesus references this Psalm in his rebuttal to the Jews in John 10.
As human understanding of the universe has changed and as culture and geography shaped individuals, GOD can only be named as the great “I AM.” For all humankind, “HE IS.”
3. GOD is love. and the great religions all express that “I AM” love.
4. “This was revealed most fully in Jesus, as God’s Son. His love for enemies, his non-violent response to evil, his embrace of the marginalized, his condemnation of self-serving religious hypocrites, his compassion for the poor, his disregard for boundaries of social exclusion, his advocacy for the economically oppressed, and his certainty that God’s reign was breaking into the world all flowed from his complete, mutual participation in the Father’s love. Jesus didn’t merely show the way; he lived completely in the presence and power of God’s redeeming, transforming life. . . . His life embodied what God’s love intends for the world and demonstrated the Spirit’s power to transform, heal, and make whole what is broken. . . .” Richard Rohr.
“Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.” Teilhard de Charden
DeCarte life is a dream?
Everything is connected—everything—connected with a spirit that many called God—but this spirit is indescribable.
The Mystical Body of Christ
Friday, May 3, 2019
A cosmic notion of Christ takes mysticism beyond the mere individual level to the transpersonal, social, and collective levels. Cynthia Bourgeault, another of our core faculty members and an Episcopal priest, explores Jesus’ resurrection from a universal, mystical perspective:
What Jesus so profoundly demonstrates to us in his passage from death to life is that the walls between the realms are paper thin. Along the entire ray of creation, the “mansions” are interpenetrating and mutually permeable by love. The death of our physical form is not the death of our individual personhood. Our personhood remains alive and well, “hidden with Christ in God” (to use Paul’s beautiful phrase in Colossians 3:3) and here and now we can draw strength from it (and [Christ]) to live our temporal lives with all the fullness of eternity. If we can simply keep our hearts wrapped around this core point, the rest of the Christian path begins to fall into place.
Yes, [Jesus’] physical form no longer walks the planet. But if we take him at his word, that poses no disruption to intimacy if we merely learn to recognize him at that other level, just as he has modeled for his disciples during those first forty days of Eastertide.
Nor has that intimacy subsided in two thousand years—at least according to the testimony of a long lineage of Christian mystics, who in a single voice proclaim that our whole universe is profoundly permeated with the presence of Christ. He surrounds, fills, holds together from top to bottom this human sphere in which we dwell. The entire cosmos has become his body, so to speak, and the blood flowing through it is his love. These are not statements that can be scientifically corroborated, but they do seem to ring true to the mystically attuned heart. . . .
Without in any way denying or overriding the conditions of this earth plane, he has interpenetrated them fully, infused them with his own interior spaciousness, and invited us all into this invisible but profoundly coherent energetic field so that we may live as one body—the “Mystical Body of Christ,” as it’s known in Christian tradition—manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven here and now. Jesus in his ascended state is not farther removed from human beings but more intimately connected with them. He is the integral ground, the ambient wholeness within which our contingent human lives are always rooted and from which we are always receiving the help we need to keep moving ahead on the difficult walk we have to walk here. When the eye of our own heart is open and aligned within this field of perception, we recognize whom we’re walking with.
