One Thing to Change the World

When an ancient sage was asked if he could do just one thing to change the world for the better he said that he would give back to words their true meaning. Unfortunately, I cannot do that, but I would like to give back to just one word its true meaning because our life, our happiness, and our ultimate destiny depend more on this word more than on any other. The word is Love. Life without love is meaningless.

The Prayer of the Inner Room

The very essence of the God-given Spirituality that Jesus bequeathed to the early Church can be summed up in this simple word –  Love.  Not of course our love, but God’s love, as St John insisted. This love, God’s love that Jesus received in its fulness when he was glorified is continually pouring out of him. Prayer is the word we use to describe what we must do to turn and open our hearts to receive it.

Prayer of course existed before, but with Jesus, it received a new meaning and power that it had never had before, and a new name too. It came to be called mystical prayer. The word mystical comes from the Greek and it simply means unseen, invisible, or secret. Christ taught this new type of mystical prayer to his first followers, for it was the prayer that he himself used to communicate with his Father. In the Jewish religion in which he grew up, prayer was predominantly, audible for they would pray out loud.

This inevitably led to much hypocrisy that Christ did not want his followers to fall into, so he advised them accordingly. “When you pray,” he told them, “go into your private room and when you have closed the door, pray to your Father, who is in that secret place, and your father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6).

The Infused Virtues and Gifts

Later, this secret, unseen, invisible or mystical prayer, was given a totally new dimension and power. This happened after the first Pentecost when all who received the Holy Spirit were drawn up and into the mystical body of Christ, where they too would reside in the future. Here they would pray in, with, and through, him to the Father, who as Jesus had promised, would reward them. He rewarded them by pouring out onto and into them all the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit. It is this secret, invisible or mystical gifts that would enable them to say with St Paul, “I live, no it is not I who live but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians Chapter 2:20).  It was in this way that Christ continued his work by converting a pagan Roman Empire into a Christian empire through those who radically and daily opened themselves to allow him to possess them.

The Mystic Way

In this personal mystical prayer that took place alone in the ‘inner room,’ the faithful would travel along a spiritual journey called the ‘Mystic Way’. On this hidden, secret, journey, like Christ himself the first Mystic,  they would have to experience what it felt like when God seemed to be far away and terrible temptations and distractions would all but overcome them. This is what Christ had to experience for himself in the desert, in the garden of Gethsemane, and on the Cross. However, there would be other moments when he would be overwhelmed with joy as he prayed with his own family, his disciples, and with his apostles on  Mount Tabor.

A later mystical writer St John of the Cross would describe what it was like in the dark times in his book The Dark Night of the Soul, and St Teresa of Avila would describe what it was like when darkness was replaced by light and travellers would come to experience the presence of God in moments of unalloyed joy. These divine visitations were described in her masterwork, Interior Castle.

What she describes there can be found as experienced by St Paul when he wrote about the visions that he had and the revelations that he received. And most of all when he narrated what happened when he was raised up in the awesome experience of being caught up into what he called the ‘third heaven’ that he identified with paradise regained, the paradise that Jesus promised to the ‘good’ thief on the Cross.  (2 Corinthians 12:1-5). This is described by St Teresa of Avila and called the prayer of ‘Full Union’ or even ‘Ecstasy’ in her famous mystical masterpiece.

The First Mystics I Ever Met

Although I spent many years reading books on spiritual theology, it was in fact from my parents that   I came to understand the true meaning of the ‘Mystic Way’. After my mother died my Father told me that in the last years of their married life together he and my mother loved each other more deeply and more perfectly than at any other time in their lives. In the first days of what he described as their adolescent love, they were drawn to each other by powerful waves of emotional and passionate feelings that he could never forget. They acted like the boosters on a spaceship to raise it off the ground on its way to its final destination in outer space. Just as these powerful boosters fizzle out, so too do the powerful boosters of adolescent love in every marriage.

My father explained to me, that it was what happens between the moment when these powerful emotional feelings fizzle out, and the perfect love that is experienced at the end of our lives, that makes this perfect love possible. For many years, no decades, unknown to onlookers, unseen even to the closest friends and relatives, they practised selfless sacrificial or mystical loving, whether they felt like it or whether they did not, come hell or high water. It was this totally other considering mystical loving that gradually enabled them to be bonded ever closer together until, as perfect a union as is possible in this life, was the joy of their last years together.

Two Marriages Are Better Than One!

My mother told me something that I have never forgotten. She said that if she and my father had not already been married then their marriage could so easily have floundered and failed. She was referring to the marriage that they had already entered into when they were baptised. It was their marriage to Christ that gave them access to the grace of God that continually sustained and supported their weak human love. It enabled them to overcome the obstacles, that could have impeded, if not prevented the union that they finally attained.

If I had told my parents that they were mystics they would have laughed, but like so many other parents who had to battle against ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ to find the peace that they finally attained they were indeed mystics. They were quite clearly married mystics from whom celibates called to the mystic way could well learn what they have long since forgotten. First enthusiasm or first fervour at the beginning of both human and divine loving is clearly visible to the lovers themselves and to onlookers too, but the secret self-sacrificial loving that is the making of any marriage whether it takes place in a human or a divine marriage cannot be seen.

Into Christ Mystical Contemplation

The body of knowledge gathered together and written down by those who have travelled along the mystic way to help others is called mystical theology. That this sacred and sacrificial teaching has been all but forgotten and so rarely taught is the spiritual scandal of the contemporary Church and in particular of those older religious orders for whom it had once been the sacred well-spring from which they once drank.

God’s plan is not just that we should be drawn up into Christ’s life but be taken up into his action, into his contemplation of the Father. As the  Jesuit liturgist Josef Jungmann puts it:

Christ does not offer alone, His people are Joined to Him and offer with Him and through Him. Indeed, they are absorbed into Him and form one body with Him by the Holy Spirit who lives in all

The One Thing Necessary

In the early Church entering into the mystical body of Christ, and sharing in his mystical loving of his Father was the very essence of the early God-given Christian mystical spirituality. Because it required a perfect union with Christ for this loving to be made perfect, imperfect human beings needed to be purified. This purification took the form of daily choosing to take up their cross to follow Christ and practising what came to be called ‘White martyrdom’. This involved dying to self in all that they said and did each day, inside and outside of the prayer that was the place where they personally encountered their Risen Lord.

This is the only way to do for the Church what no other teaching can do, for once love is lost only love found and reintroduced can do for any family what nothing else can possibly do. Families were made by Love in the first place, they were made for love, and to propagate love above all else. That is why it is  the teaching of Mystical Theology that can alone teach us to do, and continually sustain us in doing,  what Christ himself called – ‘the one thing necessary.’ This ‘one thing necessary’ is the prayer that can alone bring about our own personal sanctification,  the sanctification of the Church and the sanctification of the world for which Christ founded his Church in the first place.

For even the love of God needs our freely given love in return to receive it. Prayer is simply the word we use to describe the way in which our intimate personal loving is directed to God to receive what only he can give. That is why St Teresa of Avila said,  ‘There is only one way to perfection and that is to pray. If anyone points you in another direction then they are deceiving you.

Wisdom from the Christian Mystics by David Torkington reintroduces us to the profound mystical spirituality which was the staple diet of the early Christians. His book Wisdom from the Western Isles teaches the reader how to pray, from the very beginning to what St Teresa of Avila calls – ‘The Mystical marriage’)