I’ve been studying mysticism again with the brilliant writer Evelyn Underhill of England, who is long dead. Her books and the Kabalah, the mystical tests of ancient Judaism, are tough. You must read each passage five times to fully grasp it, but they are always worth it.  I’m a seeker to the end.

These days, I pray with a flower; they seem to listen to me, and me to them.

When I read about mysticism, I read how mystics are wedded to flowers because flowers are about being, not talking, and growing without thinking; they are the mystics of the natural world. They are, that’s all. If anything unites with reality, it is the flower, growing up in mud and soil alone of its life. The question that divides the mystic from every other thinker is this: What, out of the mass of material offered to us, shall consciousness seize upon  – with what aspects of the universe shall it “unite?

Has this become the source of my love of flowers? Please don’t laugh, but yesterday, I thought Zip and I were both mystics, tied together by acceptance and union with our worlds. I would never have dreamed of writing this about five years ago, but spiritual life is about searching, not reading the news or looking at books.

In our world, thinking outside conventional wisdom is increasingly against the law; many in black pants and boots will come knocking at the door and hauling me out to some jail in the dark cells of the deep South.

 

 

In her classic book The Spiritual Life in 1941, Evelyn Underhill offered her definition. I’ve been going through it carefully recently, discovering the connection to the outside world   I have in how I live and what I think. More and more, mysticism and mysticism have the best grip on what a spiritual life is and what it feels like because it is a lot about feeling rather than filling one’s heart with junk. She has written that it means being, not wanting, or scratching one’s interior being.

 

 

Mysticism is an individual faith often practiced alone and cannot easily be explained.

I like that idea; I could never stand before a  Temple, mosque, Or church and try to preach. I only know what I feel, not what a preacher or rabbi tells me I feel.

Mystics can pray anywhere they wish, depending on their specific choices and traditions. I am learning that mysticism is a diverse tradition encompassing many different values and traditions. Could I have finally found my faith?

Prayer is a common element of mystical faith. Mystics pray if they pray at all, in their homes or other comfortable spaces. Not surprisingly, prayer in mystical traditions involves prayer and contemplation in nature—their homes.

I intend to see one of these places and go there.

 

 

Underhll’s perceptions are so strong I could easily think it was written for Americans in America in this surreal and often frightening time:

“Mysticism is the art of union with reality,” she says, and I believe she is right. “The mystic is a person who has attained that union in a greater or less degree, or who aims at and believes in such attainment.” I can’t know the whole world, but I can understand what the reality around me is,

The ultimate question, Underhill wrote, is “What is reality.” Something few of us thought much about but is exploding all around us. The trick, she adds, is that only mystics can answer in forms other mystics would understand.

 

 

“Because he has surrendered to it,’  says Underhill, “united with it,” the patriot knows his country, the artist knows the subject of the art, the lover his beloved, the saint his God, in a manner which is inconceivable as well as unattainable by the looker-on. Real knowledge, since it always implies an intuitive empathy that is more or less intense, is far more accurately evoked by the symbols of touch and taste than those of hearing and sight.”

Actual, analytic thought follows swiftly upon the contact, the union, and we, in our muddle-headed way, “she adds, ” have persuaded ourselves that this is the essential part of knowledge – that is, in fact, more important to cook the hare than to catch it.”

 

 

I struggled with the idea of mysticism for many years, not yet entirely sure about what it is or what it means, as Underhill suggests. She might have been writing about me when he wrote this in  her book.”

“It is notorious that the operations of the average human consciousness unite the self, not with things as they are, but with images, notions, aspects of things. The verb “to be,” which men and women use so lightly, does genuinely apply to any traditional ideas of faith.  The poet Walt Whitman, she wrote, can claim to be a mystic because he achieved in his poems a passionate communion with the deeper levels of life than those with which we usually deal. Great artists and writers do the same.

“For modern man and women,” she adds, “the reality is ready-jugged: he or she conceives not the icing, lovely, wild, swift, moving creature which has been sacrificed so that he may be bed on the deplorable dish he calls: things as they are.“