An Intelligent Mysticism

In our Creative Arts ministry at Eastridge, we’re undergoing a 90-day challenge in which we’re reading two books: Prayer by Timothy Keller and Worship Matters by Bob Kauflin. Part of this challenge is sharing our insights…so I thought, what better way to share than on this site. Here goes…

I just polished off Chapter 1 of Prayer. I knew I was going to fall in love with the book when Tim Keller quoted Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful Prayer Journal quite a bit in this chapter. You see, I’m a massive fan of Flannery O’Connor because she was an author from the South – Georgia, no less – and was a believer in Jesus. Heck, she even made her way into the title of my book (which I hope will be available again soon)!

One quote in particular struck me, and I think it will become a regular prayer of mine:

Oh God, please make my mind clear. Please make it clean… Please help me to get down under things and find where You are.

Why did this particular prayer jump out at me? I think it stems from my desire to be all-encompassingly in God’s presence. I want my mind to be uncluttered when I approach the the throne of God; I want my thought to only be on Him and to only be on what will bring Him glory. Flannery O’Connor expressed this sentiment in her gloriously inimitable way, and I love it!

Later on in the chapter, Keller recalls the words of Scottish theologian John Murray in another, longer quote that I really like:

It is necessary for us to recognize that there is an intelligent mysticism in the life of faith…of living union and communion with the exalted and ever-present Redeemer… He communes with His people and his people commune with Him in conscious reciprocal love… The life of true faith cannot be that of cold metallic assent. It must have the passion and warmth of love and communion because communion with God is the crown and apex of true religion.

I love the concept of “intelligent mysticism.” The idea brings together the head and the heart in a way that makes perfect sense when describing faith. For me, sometimes my relationship with God can be cerebral. I can ponder and overthink my spiritual life to a fault. At other times, it’s deep and emotional in a way that’s almost unreal.

These two approaches to faith aren’t opposites; in fact, they’re facets of the same thing. In the rarest and richest moments, the cerebral and the mysterious come together in a most satisfying way, and the phrase “intelligent mysticism” encapsulates that tension between the two extremes.

Cmacauley, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons