Love is real, God is love, and God dwells in your heart
In the mystical journey, we discover these three truths.
Recently a friend of mine mentioned that he loved my way of describing the Trinity in the preface to my book on Christian mysticism:
Christian mystics from ancient times have proclaimed that these three faces of divinity, the transcendent Creator, the immanent Christ, and the indwelling Spirit, are in fact one…
Naturally, I was touched that he found these words helpful, but I told him that I thought the most important sentence in that preface — if not in the entire book — was the first sentence, which states simply:
Love is real, God is love, and God dwells in your heart.
If that is the only sentence that anyone reads of anything I have written, then I am happy that they have read what I believe is the essence of my understanding of mysticism — not only Christian mysticism, but all mysticism.
The Mystical Journey, as I understand it, is a journey toward discovering these three fundamental truths.
1. Love is real.
We live in a cynical age. Many people in our time doubt that love is real. They believe that only power shapes human relationships, and that even the passion of erotic desire or the tenderness of genuine friendship ultimately cannot last forever, that sooner or later the corrosive power of the human tendency and desire to dominate or control (or the abject willingness to be controlled, to submit) is the final word on how we relate. But the mystics, like all saints and prophets and visionaries, reject that profoundly limiting way of seeing things. Power may be real, and power may actually infect most of our relationships: but love is more real, and love will never in the end be vanquished: not be death, not by despair, and not by the will to dominate.
2. God is love.
We have a lot of toxic images of God in our culture (and our religious institutions). But the Bible says it best: God is love. Any God worth worshipping is only a God of infinite, joyful, confident, life-giving love. And the God of Love is worth worshipping: supremely so.
3. God (Love) dwells in your heart.
As one Irish friend of mine puts it: “God is not elsewhere.” Yes, God may be transcendent (bigger than the universe), but God is also immanent: existing right here and right now; and indwelling: our heart is God’s domicile in the human body. We host the infinite source of Love. We are children of the stars, custodians of silence, and conduits of love. When we remember this, life is a joyous adventure, even with all its inevitable suffering.
So there you have it: my one-word understanding of the Mystical Journey. Let’s continue the adventure!
Both of the quotations in this post are found on page 1 of The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism.