Conceptualizing a Spiritual Communion with God
Why have we become “comfortably numb?” One compelling hypothesis posits the spiritual vacuum of the Christian worship of God. The emphasis on the cultural “external” enacts little if any understanding both cognively and spiritually of God. While reviewing the book Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics – written by Carol Lee Flinders — an interesting and compelling communion between humans and God materialized through Flinders’ chronicles of women mystics. Below is an edited — for this blog — of a segment of my review. I encourage anyone to read this book and wrestle with its concepts.
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Severing the connection between body and soul often required the women mystics to experience great suffering. Yet, Flinders discovers the women anticipated the suffering and even welcomed it. In interpreting Julian of Norwich’s writings, for example, she discovers that “whatever suffering you and I might be undergoing, even the sort that flows out of our own mistakes, is in a real sense analogous to Christ’s and is gradually uniting us with him. A magnificent picture emerges, one of creature and creator moving toward each other, kin in their suffering, immersed alike in their thirst for each other . . .“ (pp. 93-94). The thirst equates to a suffering or insatiable desire for union with God. Mechthild of Magdeburg fleshes out the “thirst,” employing evocative metaphors. Flinders notes, “She describes the longing for mystical union now as hunger, now as thirst, now as pain to be assuaged or a fever to be cooled, and of course as sexual yearning” (p. 54).
As such, the suffering experienced by the women mystics is not the product of physical, psychological or social deprivation, but the insatiable desire for their souls to unite with God. Suffering exists because the mystical union is unconsummated. Catherine of Genoa equates the suffering to the soul’s need for refinement. Flinders uses Dante’s depiction of souls in purgatory to clarify Catherine’s equation. “They may appear to be suffering terribly as they undergo what Dante called ‘the fire that refines,’ and in a real sense, Catherine acknowledges, they are suffering, but only because of the flaws in themselves that delay their full union with God” (p. 141). In the mystical context, then, suffering – by necessity – precedes communion, making understandable Jesus’ requirements made to his followers (Matt 16:24-25; Mark 8:34-35; Luke 9:23-24).
The necessary sufferings of the mystic women hold the key to the relevance of their experiences: their communion with God. According to Mechthild of Magdeburg, “The culmination of all religious life . . . is mystical union” (p. 58). The dynamics of the union runs counter to Constantinian Christianity that advocates a hierarchy of power from God down to human being. Mechthild conceptualizes “the relationship between human soul and God as being connective and dynamic” (p. 67) as well as one of “astonishing reciprocity” (p. 67). As such, the relationship connotes an egalitarian quality. Suffering makes the relationship possible through Jesus Christ.
In Dialogue, Flinders notes that Catherine of Siena’s “central metaphor is of Christ as the bridge: humanity at one end, divinity at the other, uniting at the center in the figure of Christ” (p. 123). Jesus Christ unites two entities of a “horizontal relationship” where power is not the issue. Consequently, the bridge metaphor provides humanity an opening for “free will” rendering gender irrelevant. Flinders acknowledges in her conclusion that “mystics of every tradition assure us that gender is absolutely irrelevant, for as we move toward the highest levels of spiritual awareness, we gradually ‘dis-identify’ ourselves from everything that normally constitutes identity – mind, body, intellect, ego” (p. 225). As such, a horizontal relationship provides a more viable metaphor than viewing the relationship between humanity and divine as “vertical,” with its emphasis on power and its potential to marginalize populations. Moreover, connecting the entities of humanity and divine with the bridge of Jesus Christ eventuates in mystics attaining a “unitive consciousness,” (p. 225). Unitive consciousness both emphasizes the “experience of a formless god, one who is not so much a being as a state of being” (pp. xxi-xxii) and one path to this state, Jesus Christ (p. xxii).
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Flinders book describes the importance of the internal, captured through the writings of and documentation about seven women mystics. One reason why the conceptualization of a spiritual communion with God is so difficult for Christians historically to grasp is the influence of Constantine and the Roman Empire to institutionalize the church, using as unifying cement as one way of keeping the peace. Therefore, Constantine viewed theological agreement as mandatory, marginalizing and persecuting “heretical” views. Therefore, the emerging church emphasized the “external,” its institutionalization and resulting hierarchies; a development seemingly antithetical to realizing a communion with God.
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