Joy

Mysticism, Part 1

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I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. On behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses.
—2 Corinthians 12:2-5

Why is it that so many in the Christian Church, especially in the West, live to throw the baby out with the bathwater?

I see this tendency especially from those petrified that God will come along and shake up His Church by doing something they would classify as “weird.” Detail from 'The Resurrection' by Matthias GrünewaldI think that if you took those folks and put them into every biblical scene featuring the miraculous, they’d be quaking with fear with their hands over their eyes. They’d be the ones frozen stiff before the parted Red Sea screaming, “No! You can’t make me go through there!”

So these poor saints live to attack anything that threatens to undo their dusty religiosity. Unfortunately, in too many cases, that “anything” just happens to be God.

Now I perfectly understand the need to filter out heretical and false manifestations, but that’s why the Lord gave us discernment. Blanket condemnation of all such experiences, instinctive in these fearful saints, fails the discernment test. Nowhere in the Scriptures will you find “One bad apple ruins the whole bunch.” (If that were true, I suspect all our churches would be ruined!)

Instead, the Holy Spirit empowers our discernment. The Bible provides some basis for making distinctions between wrong and right, while the Spirit fills in the particulars. This is life in the Spirit, and it requires us to know His voice when He speaks to us in our day to day existence.

This brings us to today’s tossed baby, Christian mysticism.

I don’t know about the baby-tossers, but I can’t read the Bible and not see the mystical. As noted in the passage that starts this post, the Apostle Paul himself thought nothing of mystical experiences, such as being caught up in a heavenly realm where inexpressible realities can be glimpsed. Paul goes so far as to boast about the man who experienced this (likely Paul, as most commentators note).

The prophet Isaiah had a vision of God, the Holy One’s train filling the temple. He saw angels and they symbolically purged his sin with a touch of coal to the lips. Ezekiel glimpsed his famous wheel within a wheel. John fell prostrate before an angelic messenger who delivered a vision of the end of all things. Jacob’s ladder. Abraham entertaining three visitors. The inner sanctum of disciples witnessing Jesus’s transfiguration.

The Bible overflows with the mystical. So how is mysticism bad?

Some would claim that all these things vanished with the death of the Apostle John. That mystical experiences do not happen today.

Tell that to the Irish, though.

Last weekend, we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day. One could argue that no evangelist exceeded Patrick, for 120,000 conversions are directly tied to his ministry in the Emerald Isle. But to what did Patrick attribute his burning desire to evangelize the Irish?

From a classically mystical source: a dream.

Patrick, ensconced in England, had a dream one night of Irish druids begging him to come preach the Gospel to them. He wasn’t reading the Scriptures for this revelation. He wasn’t down on his knees praying. He dreamed it.

The Bible says this:

But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them: “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. For these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel: “‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.
—Acts 2:14-18

Now as far as I can tell, we’re still in the last days. I think most of us would agree on this. So how is it NOT still true that God will speak to us through dreams and visions? I find it impossible for anyone to argue against the validity of dreams and visions for revelation. Consider what the 120,000 saved through Patrick’s ministry think about mystical revelation through dreams.

A.W. Tozer, one of Evangelicalism’s greatest prophets, had no qualms with the mystical. Even the most casual readings of his many books and sermons reveals Tozer’s heart that we Christians should pursue a mystical intimacy with God that defies earthly definitions. Tozer was known for his keen understanding of the writings of noted medieval mystics such as Julian of Norwich (who many of Tozer’s good friends referred to jokingly as his “girlfriend”), Teresa of Àvila, Meister Eckhart, and others. Tozer recommend that we Evangelicals read mystic literature such as The Cloud of Unknowing and The Dark Night of the Soul. Why? To cultivate a depth of intimacy with God that transcended the casual dabbling in Him afflicting so many of us time-burdened Evangelicals, to scry the secrets of the saints who have gone before us.

Because I hold Tozer in high regard, I’ve read many of those mystics and their writings. I’ve found them fascinating. But more than this, I found they relayed understandings of God I did not possess. Those mystics have been to the mountain of God, so they offer a valuable map, a treasured insight. Their talk of rapturous union with God should inspire us, not drive us to doubt the reality that we human beings can approach the Divine and know Him intimately! Sometimes I wonder if some of us merely wish to keep others from that deep intimacy for no other reason than we have not experienced it ourselves; our jealousy drives us to deny others the joy those few have found.

Many Protestants revere the Reformation, but they balk at anything that came before that. What a loss! As we stroll back in time to the Medieval era and Dark Ages, when some of the noted mystics lived, the less confident many of the mystic-bashers become, as if no big “c” Church existed at all during those times. That’s foolishness, though, and for some to act as if nothing can be learned from the Christians of those days, many of whom would be branded mystics by today’s Evangelicals, is nothing more than jealous pride.

Mysticism’s core ideal that knowledge of God and His ways can’t be explained in perfectly rational terms didn’t bother those Christians of that era. But it bothers those who live on the other side of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

If anything, the modern antagonism toward Christian mysticism has little of its basis in Scripture’s and the Holy Spirit’s illumination, and far more in the rationalism and anti-supernaturalism wrought by modernism (as ushered in by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment). Oddly enough, the real damage to Christianity came not from mysticism as practiced pre-Reformation, but from this post-Reformation upheaval in philosophy. Odder still, the stepchildren of the god-denying Enlightenment are those very Christians who oppose supernaturalism (especially as it pertains to the charismata), who endorse a sort of sanctified scientific rationalism that turns the tables and declares Christians being caught up into the third heaven not only not possible, but part of a damnable plot to subvert Christianity!

Who is the real wolf in sheep’s clothing? The mystics or the scientific rationalists? I would contend the latter far better fit the bill.

And so we’ve paid dearly within Christianity because of anti-mystic crusading. The rationalists have shoved the awesome God into a small box convenient enough to be understood. Miracles? Nah. Dreams and visions as guidance? No way. Only superstitious fools would embrace such nonsense.

Worse, any revival in mysticism within the Church is disingenuously labeled Gnosticism by the critics. But those who toss around the Gnosticism label do so haphazardly and with little regard for the truth.

Gnosticism is anti-matter, which Christian mysticism is not. As a result, Gnosticism denies the incarnation of Christ, which Christian mysticism certainly does not. Gnosticism holds to a dualistic worldview, which Christian mysticism does not . Gnosticism believes that secret knowledge necessary to salvation is held by a select few, and only a select few who seek that knowledge get it. Christian mysticism holds that deeper knowledge of God is the desire of all those filled by the Holy Spirit, but this knowledge is open to all and can be grasped by any who come to the Lord.

To stress that latter point, would anyone reading this doubt for one second that a great Christian who has sought the Lord through years of prayer would know more about God and His ways than the new convert? Does that righteous old saint (who may at some point in life have been swept up into the ecstasy of the third heaven by the Spirit) possess a deeper knowledge? Would anyone seriously label him a Gnostic? Or the third-heaven-visiting Paul for that matter?

No, in most cases the Gnosticism label is a fraudulent scare tactic.

This is not to say that all mysticism tagged “Christian” is. In the second part of this examination of mysticism, we’ll examine the criticism leveled against modern practices of mysticism and see in what cases the accusations against it should be heeded.

Love Your Lord? Love Your Staff!

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I once worked in professional ministry.

There, I confessed. 😉

People paid me to show the light of Christ to others. And while I’ll add to the lament that the pay seemed to amount to little more than the change from a vending machine, it was pay nonetheless.

Where there’s one paid employee, there’s usually more. I worked in camping ministry for several years, Your typical summer camp staffon staffs of about a dozen to almost three hundred—a half dozen staff experiences in all, split between mainline Protestant camps and Evangelical.

If I learned one truth during my tenure in professional ministry, it’s you can’t be a Christian organization and not have some kind of hierarchy of ministry focus. In my years as a paid Christian camping professional, I saw two different ministry focus hierarchies:

1. Our ministry focus is on God first, people who fall into our ministry objective second, and staff third.

2. Our ministry focus is on God first, staff second, and people who fall into our ministry objective third.

Let me tell you about the places I worked that employed that first hierarchy of ministry…

When you work at a Christian ministry that puts everyone else before staff, you discover that about halfway through your ministry objective timeline the well’s run dry. So much time has been spent pouring the life of the staff into the lives of the people they’re ministering to that in a few months time your staff’s inner lives resemble the Sahara Desert—during a drought. And with a plague of locusts, too.

Leaders of ministries who follow a staff third ministry model succeed in doing one thing exceptionally well: creating ministry burnouts.

The problem for leaders comes from always expecting staff to pour themselves out, while not lifting a finger to refill their earthen vessels. In the end, everything about the ministry fails. It may have started ministering by the Spirit, but when people dry up—and they will in this environment—they start ministering with the arm of flesh. And we all know what that means: failure.

One of the camps I worked for had a nationally-recognized name, multi-million dollar budget, and several hundred people going through its gates every week. But they also had a bizarre curfew on Sundays during the summer that made it nearly impossible for summer staff to make it to church and back under the curfew. As a result, a lot of staff had no chance to worship.

I worked on year-round staff. Because of some special skills I possessed, I transitioned from my regular duties into the summer duties and found myself bound by the curfew. My response? Start an in-camp worship service for staff on the one night of the week we all had free.

Seems reasonable enough.

But you’d be astonished at how much persecution came down on our worship—from the camp leaders! No, I wasn’t an ordained minister, but this was a Protestant camp right? Martin Luther, priesthood of all believers? And yes, we did offer communion, too. Or was that wrong, as well?

Honestly, I felt like the leader of an underground church right there in Evangelical land. But you know what? The folks who came to that worship service left filled. And those who begged off and complained stayed empty and later burned out.

The worship service persecution was just one of many ways that camp kept pouring out its staff and giving nothing back. The list went on and on. In fact, it could be the poster camp for how to grind up and spit out a staff.

And they LIVED for the staff third hierarchy. Practically engraved it on the walls of every cabin in the camp.

I worked at another Evangelical camp (see the trend?) that had strange rules in place, such as A-level staff couldn’t associate with B-level staff outside camp. I had no idea such a lamebrained rule existed until I told the camp director in passing that I was planning on taking the mildly-retarded camp janitor, who had no friends on staff that I could tell, out for an ice cream so he could get away from camp and talk with a real person. From the pummeling I received for merely attempting to minister to another staff person, you would’ve thought the whole idea was part of a scheme to murder the guy!

The sum of all the rules at that camp added up to a legalistic tangle of nonsense that proved…well, anti-human. In time, I feared I might be subjected to forty lashes minus one for ministering to the wrong person. Or the right person in the wrong place. Or the wrong way. At the wrong time, or—oh, the heck with it.

Conversely, the mainline camps I worked for—you know, liberals—went for the staff second approach. Their leadership perpetually worked to meet the spiritual, mental, physical, and social needs of the staff. They paid better. They threw special parties for staff. They celebrated milestones for everyone on staff, even the summer-only folks. They routinely asked each person on staff how his or her relationship with the Lord was going. They treated staff like real people and not underlings.

And they actually allowed staff to minister. To the visitors. To the other staff. To anyone.

Their success came from understanding that people cannot be perpetually poured out without something being poured back in. Yes, people can have a devotional life that provides some of that refreshing, but anyone in leadership knows that real leadership means giving something back.

Let’s be honest here. The amount of personal time we devote to interacting with the actual subjects of our ministry may pale compared with the amount of time we spend with other staff. Any wise person leading a ministry realizes that the lives most likely to be changed by the ministry are those who actually work for it. Yes, a ministry that works with the poor may very well touch the lives of the poor to whom they minister, but it’s far more likely that the ministry will forever change the staff that works in that ministry.

And I’ll go out on a limb and say that’s true for every single ministry on the face of this planet since the Day of Pentecost.

If you’re the leader of a ministry (doesn’t matter what kind), my charge to you is to lay down your life for your staff. Christ laid His down for the ones who follow Him. If your ministry model has been staff third, shred it—now. If you don’t, rather than building your staff, you might very well be creating burnouts who never darken the door of any ministry again. If you don’t believe me, I’ve got the e-mail addresses of a couple hundred ministry burnouts I can send you.

If you love the Lord, then love your staff. Show it in practical, tangible, life-changing ways. The Lord demonstrated that kind of love to His disciples, the ones He called friends. We can do no less for those people with whom we minister.

The F-World

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As a musician (I'm a drummer and guitarist), I've got an ear for challenging or snappy music. As a writer, I've got an appreciation for witty or deep lyrics. It should be no surprise then that most contemporary music bores me to tears. It lacks charm, and most of it suffers from a dearth of both musicality and lyrical excellence. Doesn't matter what the genre is.

If I have any musical weakness, I'm overly fond of jangly, "sunshine" pop with monster hooks that'll have you singing along all day.  That Rickenbacker 12-string sound brings a smile to my face. Think bands like The Association, The Zombies, The Byrds, and—of course—The Monkees. Think AM radio's golden age. That style of music largely passed into lore. No one writes music like that anymore. Worse, no recent band has the cleverness to pull it off consistently.

I don't buy a whole lot of music like I once did. The last CD I purchased was Derek Webb's She Must and Shall Go Free, which has a sort of folk and roots rock feel. Good music, stunning lyrics.

The other day, I followed a link looking for some trivial fact and it led to a site that played a random selection of "baroque pop," contemporary sunshine pop music that has the feel of the real thing. The song was by Belle & Sebastian, a band I'd not heard before. Not only was the song "Another Sunny Day" absolutely right on sound-wise, but the lyrics abounded in perfect touches.

So I did something I've rarely done: I downloaded the song from iTunes. Played it over and over at full volume. For about a half hour I was immensely pleased by the find.

Only one problem…

When you get to be my age, lyrics run past you and you don't get them with the same precision you did as a teenager. I caught that first stanza, but a couple jumbled ones followed. The British accents didn't help. So being the kind of person who cannot gain full satisfaction from something without knowing every trivial detail about it, I summoned the lyrics from one of a bazillion lyrics sites.

Awesome lyrics, clever and witty. And I'm reading and…oh.

The effenheimer. The F-bomb. Right there. Third stanza. And not in any grammatical usage that I've ever encountered before.

Ugh.

How I'd missed it the first hundred times I played the song, I can't say. After seeing it there in the lyrics, it was if the singer now shouted the word right in my ears, helped along by the background chorus who repeats it with the same emphasis.

Dang. The Monkees wouldn't have talked like that. And where was the "Explicit Lyrics" tag at iTunes? Nowhere to be found. I guess in the bizarre context used in the song, someone deemed it "Non-explicit."

That's what Apple gets for cozying up to Bono. What's an F-word between friends, right?

Because I write for a living, I'm attuned to the issue of censorship. I think I can also make a case that the F-word has legitimate uses. Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-Prize-winning photoI just don't want to hear it in my sunshine pop.

In fact, I don't want to live in a fallen world. I don't want to hear the "old familiar suggestion" coming out of the mouth of a twelve-year old girl. I don't want to hear about fathers decapitating their toddlers. I want to close my ears and scream at the top of my lungs to drown out the news telling me that the sex slave trade is alive and well  in the world, mostly populated by teenagers and tweens.

But we live in a fallen world—the F-World, for want of a more clever ID. Everything around us reeks of sin, as if some quark-sized evil implanted itself in every atom in existence.

Yet consider how easily we Christians believe two lies:

  1. We can play with that evil and not have it consume us from within.
  2. We can keep that evil at bay and never have to confront it. 

I see far too many Christians making excuses for the sins they justify in their own lives. We might even come up with clever renderings of particular Scriptures to cover our shame, but in the end, it's only amplified.

Or we'll scoff at some contemporary leader we don't like who goes down in flames, while we pat our man on the back. Then we're shocked—SHOCKED—when our man's feet prove to be clay.

So many of us navigate the F-World poorly. We mindlessly jump from church to church, forever running from whatever it is that we despise in its operation, unable to come to grips with the truth that the Church must live in the F-World until Christ returns. Or we do the opposite and embrace every piece of garbage the F-World throws at us as if its manna from heaven. Both are foolish. Both come to ruination.

I hear Christians talking all the time about the F-World. Why then do we seem to be more at the mercy of the F-World than at the mercy seat of Christ? For all our theology on a fallen world, we lurch from extreme to extreme in the ways we deal with it. One day we're burning all our hard rock albums because they're evil, and the next day we're buying them all back off eBay because to the pure all things are pure. 

It's bad enough that our incoherent message on how to deal with the F-World confuses the lost, but it confuses Christians even more. I've been a Christian for thirty years and I can honestly say that I don't think I've met another Christian who understands the tension of living in the F-World to the point that he or she deals with it as Christ did. Finding that narrow path must be far more difficult than we believe.

Bunkers or Excess. In the F-World, neither one makes sense. 

{Image: Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-Prize-winning photo of a vulture stalking a starving Sudanese child. Shortly after winning the prize, Carter committed suicide.}