How I became a mystic

The word "apocalypse", despite modern usage involving doomsday scenarios, comes from a Greek word meaning to uncover or unveil. An apocalypse is an event in which the veil is removed from our eyes and we are able to see the world in a new way. In a sense, this is the end of the world. We can't go back to seeing the world how we did before. The old way, our old world, has died.

My apocalypse occurred in 2017. But before I describe the events of 2017, a little background is needed.

I grew up as a conservative evangelical in a Southern Baptist church. My mother's family and my father's family all knew each other from the same church. I was "saved" and baptized at a young age, and sermons warning of eternal damnation if we didn't have true faith inspired me to get baptized again a few years later – just to be sure. My grandfather was a Southern Baptist deacon. My uncle was a Southern Baptist pastor. With all of the warnings I received about other Christian denominations, it was clear that Southern Baptists knew they were the only ones who got Christianity right. Everyone else was "distorting the gospel".

In a church culture that valued certainty and being able to argue against other beliefs (a practice called apologetics), there was immense pressure as a child to "get it right". Indeed, my eternal status depended on it. One wrong belief could send me to the bad place forever.

So, I dug in. I read books on systematic theology, apologetics, and unfortunately way too many books on "end times" prophesies involving the rapture when God would take all the Christians away to heaven before the great tribulation of those remaining on Earth – which I was told by my uncle would likely happen in 1998. (Did we both miss it?)

As I got older, I continued to dig in. I got involved in all the church ministries I could, went on all the mission trips I could, and even went to seminary after I graduated from college. I was committed to getting it right. Now with a seminary degree, perhaps I could finally be sure that I got it right.

But then 2017 happened. My fellow evangelicals, who had taught me to love others and follow the teachings of Jesus, were now aggressively advocating for a US president who seemed to violate every teaching of Jesus and promoted violence rather than love. I watched my fellow Christians, in what seemed like a very short span of time, turn away from the great commission to bring the good news to all the world, to now trying to insulate themselves from the world. Instead of loving our neighbor, we now made everyone else our enemy.

This evangelical shift certainly didn't begin in 2017 (see Kristen Kobes Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne for a thorough historical account of Christian nationalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy in the evangelical church), but 2017 is when my eyes were opened. I finally saw through the smiling facade of many of the evangelicals in my life. I went from being asked to pray at family gatherings to now being called a false prophet and heretic for not aligning with a political party.

Those events alone were enough to make me question my "right" beliefs and start seeing past the veil in front of my eyes, but there was another event in 2017 that completely ripped the veil. My grandmother, who as far as I know didn't consider herself a Christian, was dying from cancer. Shortly before her death I had a dream in which I saw her in the condition I knew before her illness. We sat at her dining room table and I hugged her just before her illness started to set in. Then, the night before she died, I had one last dream of her. We danced in her kitchen. It was the last time I saw her alive.

Now what do these dreams have to do with reality? I didn't see my actual grandmother in these dreams, so why make a big deal about them? That's the odd thing about dreams - they blur reality. In my former evangelical worldview, some would have said my grandmother was not "saved". But what do I make of the fact that I saw Christ most clearly in her? In the way she gave so much of herself to others. In the way that she loved us so deeply. How was it that she seemed to reflect the character and teachings of Jesus so much more than the religious folks who would condemn her for her beliefs? And what do I do with these dreams? Dreams that felt like a gift. Do I reject this gift because it doesn't fit with my beliefs about what is true?

The same day that I carried my grandmother's casket to be laid in the ground, my first daughter was born. In one day I carried my grandmother out of this world and carried my daughter into this world. The strange timing. The dreams. The overwhelming emotion of it all. What is the "right" way to think about it? That day, instead of trying to figure out what was right, I embraced what is. All of this was a gift. There were no answers, just the great mystery and beauty of the moment I was experiencing.

Without having a word for it at the time, I had become a mystic. The categories that I had forced everything into had broken down. Instead of obsessing over getting it right, I was now free to embrace reality as it is without the need for certainty about how it all works. In my previous post titled "What is a mystic?", I quoted Evelyn Underhill: "Mysticism is the art of union with reality." If reality is all that is, then to find ourselves in union with reality is to find ourselves in union with God, with humanity, and with the world itself. Rather that seeing ourselves as something separate, we can now see that we are part of a whole. Finally, the Bible passages about being branches on a vine, or one body with many parts, or the problem of dividing the world into good and evil categories, or Jesus praying that we would all be one - these all began to make sense. Discovering Christian mystics like Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Merton, Cynthia Bourgeault, and Richard Rohr, along with mystics from other religious traditions, have also been helpful guides.

I could no longer identify with a religious tradition that excludes others based on nationality, sexuality, gender, or "correct" beliefs. What I see when I read a sacred text written over 2,000 years ago is an account of humanity working to overcome the ethnic and religious boundaries that divide humanity. It's a story about returning from our exiled separation and finding our way back to Eden where all things exist in union with each other. The "knowledge of good and evil" was a futile quest that pulled humanity away from this place of union. Jesus, in ways both complex and mysterious, is showing us the way back. How strange that so many use this story to further divide humanity.

Now when I hear Jesus say to love your enemy, I realize that love eliminates the category of enemy altogether because nothing can exist apart when reality is embraced and we find ourselves as part of the whole.

Now I sit with gratitude as I observe what is happening around me and within me. Life and death, light and dark, joy and pain, communion and solitude; all part of this mysterious dance. It's a dance my grandmother taught me.