Finally comes the Mystic (Part 1)
‘When I saw him walk out through those prison gates on Robben Island’, a young man with shining eyes declared on television after Nelson Mandela’s funeral, ’the deepest experience of a personal freedom surged through my heart.’ Listening to him speak, you just knew that his life had radically changed. Something precious had been unlocked in the core of his being and he would never forget.
We notice the same kind of phenomenon with regard to the presence of Pope Francis among us. Seemingly effortlessly he has reached into countless hearts and unlocked their blocked capacity for dreaming the possible, for seeing imaginatively. And once the first blindfold is removed, the rest follows. This chapter celebrates the recovery of their mystical essence for the human heart and for the Church.
Beyond anything the Pope may or may not achieve by way of structural reforms and re-building, this breath of inner freedom has already happened for innumerable seekers in the most profound regions of their souls. The veil has been lifted, the hunches of their hearts have been validated, their prophetic and mystical voices restored.
Every day that passes, Pope Francis is shifting the focus from the outside to the inside, from the abstract general principle to the living breathing human being. People feel trusted now – a divine gift that enables them to trust themselves. It is difficult to describe that surge, that lurch of the heart, that liberation of the soul when such a realisation happens. In ‘The Opening of Eyes’ poet David Whyte writes;
‘It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.’(1)
It may be once in a decade, or once in a lifetime that eyes are ready to open for this fragile recognition, this unrepeatable moment when something blurred comes into focus, when something vaguely known comes into sharp relief. An irreversible transformation takes place. And only transformed people transform others. Pope Francis talks like a man who, after much personal fear and anxiety, much personal distress and guilt, has found love, a wondrous love, a confident love, and wants nothing more than to share it.
Most of us, too, endure a hard apprenticeship for the giving and receiving of such revelatory moments – a painful darkness, the distress of being wrong, a lot of sins, maybe a winter of despair. The situation may seem hopeless, and then, one day, someone walks through our world and our souls come alive again, courage flows back into fearful hearts, eyes are opened and blink in the new light. Enter the mystic! A personal sense of something innately true emerges and people begin to see in a way they never saw before – but somehow suspected. It is something they have long waited for, something they were born for. Writer Maya Angelou has these lines in her ‘On the Pulse of the Morning’;
‘You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.’ (2)
The human spirit is diminished by constant constraint. There is a strait-jacket that prevents creativity, self-expression and becoming. Fearful religion, with its brainwashing, its threats, its self-obsession isolate people from their own inner wisdom and authority. And then there is a moment in people’s lives when, in this cellar of the sleeping soul, an awakening happens. At the most precious part of human nature a voice is heard, a finger beckons, a long-awaited dawn is breaking.
From the rubble of clericalism and narcissism, from the confusion and frustrations of decades, new and liberating paradigms of possibility, like a long-awaited summer, begin to bless the people, the Church, the world. Whyte ends his poem with a description of people’s astonishment at recognising the transcendent mystery in the solid realities of their lives.
‘It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.’ (3)
A whole other attractive space opens up for us, a way of seeing, of choosing, of being – an invitation to a radically renewed way of living the mystery. This is the work of the mystic. A compelling True North is calling us towards another horizon. Something within us, from the very beginning, is coded for this calling. There is a blueprint within us for recognising the inner truth of things, an imagination for finding the loving meaning at the heart of everything. Pope Francis describes this readiness as ‘a deep yearning, an unconscious kind of heart-knowing about the truth of God, the truth about humanity’ (EG n.265).
The new Pope’s liberating vision, ‘my one dogmatic certainty’, is that every single person is the home of God, that all created reality is the place of revelation. He is teaching us to sense a holy presence in everyone and in everything. This aching awareness was surely visible, etched into the lines of his face as he tenderly wrapped his arms around the head of the man disfigured by neurofibromatosis, when he kissed the feet of a Muslim woman who had committed a crime. There was something beautiful, uncontrived, and deeply sacramental in these instinctive gestures.
Here was a man who believed in the sacred power of the senses, those human conduits of divine love. On the spur of the moment he trusted the truth of the incarnational now. Mystics like Pope Francis are great champions of raw, real human happening. In poetic expression, writers know that nothing can match the magic of authentic experience. In his ‘Leaves of Grass’ Walt Whitman believes that by writing ‘in the gush, the throb, the flood of the moment, without deliberation or framing, the very heart-beat of life is caught.’
Poets and artists have kept alive the old and orthodox ‘catholic imagination’ that Pope Francis is making his own. It is this sacramental vision that distinguishes Catholic Christianity at its core – but it is a vision long forgotten, neglected and even denied. It is the water of life for people; the melody they were born to hear. In the light of Incarnation the Pope perceives the mystical disclosure in everything, feels the human pulse of God’s heart, adores the Real Presence in all that is really present. He looks, he sees, he recognises, he loves, he reaches out.
He knows that our spirit longs for the gift of seeing things truly, of recognising St Bonaventure’s vestigia Dei, the traces, the signature, the finger- and foot-prints of God everywhere. Priest and scientist Teilhard de Chardin wrote that, ‘by virtue of Creation, and still more of Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.’ This flash of recognition, the Pope explains, is not the fruit of doctrines, creeds, external rites. It is a contemplative gaze, the pure gift of the Holy Spirit. It cannot be merited, ‘only freely experienced’. And usually in the most unexpected places – in his visits to the slum dwellers, in the sacrament of their conversations, in the eucharist of their honest presence around a table sipping mate tea.
In The Snow Geese Mary Oliver tells of the day she was captivated by the sight of a flock of geese whose white wings, in the turning, caught, for an eternal instant, the reflected gold from the sinking sun:
‘The geese flew on,
I have never seen them again.
Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won’t.
It doesn’t matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them,
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.’ (4)
We must dig deep to understand that grace of how to see. Pope Francis had many a hard hour during which he acknowledged his sins, and painfully purified his motives. How did he cope with the accusations made against him of cowardice, of collusion with military atrocities, of supporting traditionalist clericalism, of being anti-Vatican II and the enemy of liberation theology? Or is it this very endurance of that winter of painful conversion, the crucifying embracing of those ambiguous episodes of his life, that are currently infusing the divine power into his human presence? He surely believes now, more than ever, that Incarnation is an invitation to find God in the midst, the mess and the mystery of his life; that there is no other way to learn humility than to experience the depth of things in the furnace of his soul.
References:
1 David Whyte, Songs for Coming Home (Washington: Many Rivers Press: 1984) p22
2 Maya Angelou, The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (New York: Random House: 1993) p269
3 Whyte, (D) p22
4 Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early (Boston: Beacon Press: 2005) p34
5 Pope Francis’ interview with Antonio Spadaro SJ; accessed November 10th 2013
6 Pope Francis’ interview with Eugenio Scalfari; accessed December 8th 2013
http://www.news.va/en/news/interview-with-pope-francis-by-eugenio-scalfari-ed
7 William Johnston, ‘We need a revolution’, The Tablet, 1 June, 2002, p12