Communio

After a two month hiatus, I went back to the Communio discussion group at the Holy Child bookstore. I've been busy, but if you find yourself divorced with children you had better make an effort to socialize or you can fall into non-social habits. The Communio group tackles obscure topics suggested by the Communio magazine. The articles are always dense and convoluted. Witness an article in the recent volume - The Concept of God after Theodicy.

The topic that we discussed tonight was mysticism in the Catholic understanding. Catholicism readily acknowledges mysteries. The Rosary calls Catholics to contemplate mysteries, such as the Incarnation, which are beyond human understanding. The Eucharist is both tangible and transcendent - bread and the Body of Christ. The mysteries involve events where the transcendent God becomes instantiated in his creation. Consider the Luminous mystery of the Baptism in the Jordan. Why did God need to be baptized? Don't answer. Stop there for a second. It doesn't need an answer. The answer will never be sufficient. Appreciate for a moment that God was baptized. What does that mean to us? Does it need to mean anything to us? Catholics are therefore called to be - in some sense - mystics. But what is mysticism?

The group's consensus was that mysticism is an attitude to God. Through a mystical approach to religion one attempts to "be" with God, to be with God and have some unity with God. A person contemplating a theological mystery can't unravel the mystery. God's becoming one of his creations cannot be parsed through logic, but it can be appreciated, accepted and contemplated.

How does the mystical experience differ from the Pentecostal experience? Both involve some kind of union with God. In the Pentecostal case, the union is with the Holy Spirit. But is there a difference? The mystical experience seems to involve the believer fitting himself to God. The mystic attempts through contemplation to seek God's presence. The Pentecostal experience seems to seek to have God fit the believer to Himself, to grab the believer into whatever that experience is. I am sure that that is a shallow formulation, but the interesting thing is the way that the difference highlights the different views that the two traditions have about the efficacy of human action. In general, for the Protestant tradition, humans have very little - or virtually no - capability to find God through their own effort. Catholicism, on the other hand, expects humans to use the powers that God has given man to seek and find God, of course, with God's assistance, sustenance and grace at all times. Consequently, because Pentecostalism emphasizes the Holy Spirit’s influence over believers may be very congenial to Protestants, whereas Catholicism may tend to mysticism inasmuch as that route nuances the believer’s pursuit of spiritual experience.

This is all speculation, of course. I don’t profess to be knowledgeable about either Pentecostalism or mysticism. Augustinian rationalism is more my forte. If you have a view, educate me.

Update Katherine at Not for Sheep... has her "rversion" story about her recent move from Budhism to Catholicism. I post this here because part of our Communio discussion was whether there was a difference between Budhist and Catholic mysticism. Naturally, thre are profound similirities in the attempt to find union with God, there are also differences. As a grounded rationalist, I submitted that one difference might be the divergent orientation of the two traditions to the physical world. Orthodox Christianity [i.e., non-gnostic] generally accepts that the real world is good since it was created by God. My understanding of Budhism is that it views the physical world as an illusion and seeks to get past the illusions of this world in a search for a loss of identity in Nirvana. Certainly, the Christian mystic is also trying to get past this world to the Real and the True in an attempt to find union with God, but I don't think it involves the same annihilation of personality as occurs in the Budhist tradition.

Katherine at Not for Sheep sketches the view that the real difference is love.

Well, she would know better than me.