At a recent dinner get together with friends, a couple approached me with a worried look on their faces. Seeing my clerical collar they felt I was the one who could perhaps help.
They told me that their twenty something son was giving up his middle class Christian life style and was leaving for Amsterdam, Holland to study Oriental Mysticism. The way they phrased it, sounded like he was going there to be treated for some rare disease. I asked them why their son had come to this decision, and they told me that he was bored with conventional Evangelical Christianity, and according to them, he was burned out on "hand clapping, hand waving, cutting edge musical WOW worship and pastors prancing around a stage, waving a bible." He wanted to experience the sublime mystical element. He wanted a deeper spiritual experience. The mother glancing about the room lowered her voice as not to be heard by the others asked: "What is a mystic? What is mysticism? We're worried for our son."
This isn't the kind of question I get everyday and I told her that from the Eastern Orthodox Christian point of view, "mysticism" was not something weird or exotic but a genuine part of Orthodox Christianity going back to the beginning of the Faith. The term unfortunately has been hijacked by those enamored with the so called trendier parts of Eastern religions and new age movements.
The Eastern Orthodox Faith teaches, and that is exclusively from where I am speaking, that a mystic is a spiritual person who has the Holy Spirit within and this is confirmed by the uninterrupted remembrance of God. The mystical life is a life in which the gifts of the Holy Spirit are pre-dominant over human effort. This life is not just for the elect. It is open to all who wish to discipline themselves in prayer, contemplation and meditation on the divine. It is to seek the transcendent God in the immanent person of Jesus Christ.
I'm not sure I satisfied the question of my two new friends, but at least I encouraged them to seek a deeper understanding of Christianity in the unending wealth of writings from the fathers and great saint theologians of the Eastern and Western Church.
I wish I could have spoken to that young man to at least introduce him to the writings and thoughts of the great Christian mystics of our Holy Tradition. St. Simeon the New Theologian, the 11th century saint and mystic of the Orthodox Church would have understood his spiritual hunger and yearning. For the great saint said: "We each carry within our hearts a divine element. Torn from the womb of existence and ushered, crying, into this world, we spend all our energies in the pursuit of a state of happiness. This restless, incessant drive is no more than that divine element within us seeking its origin."
Indeed in one form or another we are all seeking a deeper, more meaningful and personal experience of God. It seems that divine element is within all of us. We can never be truly content until the creature-us-connects with the creator-God.
Jesus beautifully reminds us of this in the Gospel of Matthew 6:33. "But seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you." Even for the mystic, the Kingdom of God is to experience the rule of God, to acknowledge the authority of God, to recognize God's right to be the formative and final voice for the decisions we make in our faith and practice. It is simply the power of the Holy Spirit leading us to the uninterrupted remembrance of God.