Encountering the Mystery through Discipline
Mystical experience is beyond our control. Discipline opens us up to the possibility.
N.B. For the past couple of months, my friends on Patreon and I have been exploring the question “What is mysticism?” by drawing on the wisdom of Evelyn Underhill and Bernard McGinn. While I believe it is impossible to ever nail down a topic as nuanced as mysticism in a single definition, I think we can explore a variety of ways to at least approach the topic, if not definitively define it. This is the fourth of five posts where I offer brief invitations for some of the different ways people like you and I might be able to encounter the mystery at the heart of mysticism: a mystery that can never be fully captured in words or earthly ideas (Note: if you’d like to join this conversation with me in monthly Zoom meetings, join Patreon by clicking here).
Still Another Way to Encounter the Mystery: Discipline
Train yourself for a holy life. — I Timothy 4:7
I love—and often quote—a line that seems to have originated as a paraphrase of the wisdom of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and author of the contemporary classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:
Gaining enlightenment is an accident. Spiritual practice simply makes us accident-prone.
I first heard this from a dharma teacher in Atlanta, who framed it as “enlightenment is an accident, meditation makes us accident prone.” While its origin may be Buddhist, it pairs quite well with Western forms of mysticism. One could just as easily say, “Union with God is an accident; spiritual discipline makes us accident prone.”
In old school Catholic spirituality, there was a difference between mystical theology and ascetical theology. Mysticism covers the attempt to understand (and make ourselves available for) the action of the Spirit in our hearts and lives: action that fills us with transforming grace, but that we ourselves have no control over. By contrast, asceticism (which comes from the same Greek root—askēsis—that gives us ‘athlete and ‘athletics’) covers the practice of spiritual disciplines and exercises that we human beings do to make ourselves available for the Spirit’s work within and among us. Like an athlete, an ascetic trains and practices, rigorously and without compromise, to be prepared—not for competitive sports, but for complete self-giving to the Spirit of love.
Mysticism is an accident; asceticism makes us accident-prone.
The problem is that over the centuries asceticism get fouled up with the body/spirit dualism that has bedeviled Christianity since its entanglement with Greek philosophy. So asceticism became linked not to discipline, but to punishment: punishing the human body with self-flagellation, horsehair shirts, excessive fasting, and other practices that seem oriented not toward the love of God, but toward a dysfunctional hatred of the self. No wonder asceticism became a dirty word.
Thankfully, we live in an age where more and more people are reclaiming positive, nurturing practices like Centering Prayer or Ignatian spirituality to anchor and shape their spiritual lives. Building on the “accident” motif, it seems to be a misunderstanding to suggest that such disciplines can guarantee us a felt experience of the Divine. But if we make the effort to be mystical-prone, who knows how the Spirit of Love might surprise us—in an amazing moment, or even just gradually over time?
Quotation source: I Timothy 4:7 (Common English Bible); for more on the “accident-prone” principle, check out Enlightenment is an Accident: Ancient Wisdom and Simple Practices to Make You Accident Prone by Tim Burkett.