Mystical Meaning of Easter
Prayer as Relationship
When people say they’re spiritual but not religious, what they usually mean is that they're mystical. People who are spiritual or mystical reject the necessity of clergy as a “middleman,” ie., a human mediator between them and God. They may gather with others in faith-based prayer and celebration, but look to an inner authority for guidance rather than to the codes of an outer authority. In ways unique, intimate and personal, a mystic directly communes with nonphysical energy/presence/intelligence/god, who exists beyond the perception of our five senses. Intuition is the human faculty that enables us to perceive these subtle energies. Through prayer, reflection and meditation, a mystic perceives subtle spiritual meaning in every aspect of life. Such attentive mindfulness activates nonphysical intelligence, making it available to help us comprehend matters great and small. Undeniably real, pure and trustworthy, intuitive messages may not be obvious to the five senses, but a mystic will interpret and act on what she knows and feels deeply within.
My Path to Mysticism
Most traditional religions, including Christianity, include a subset of mystical individuals who seek such a personal and intimate relationship with God. A religious child raised by a devout Catholic mother, I experienced a deeply felt sense of the invisible presence of God both during the rituals of mass and in my ordinary, everyday life. The essential prayers Help.Thanks.Wow arose in me spontaneously as I navigated life’s ordinary and extraordinary moments. Coming from a Catholic family, I was socialized to interpret faith through the teachings of the Roman Catholic church and practice religion in traditional ways. But the Church’s policies of inequality, exclusion and the spectacle of sexual scandals drove me from practicing my faith in the familiar spiritual home of my youth.
Seeking a new spiritual home through what I would now term synchronicity, I found myself drawn to a lay Christian contemplative community called Chrysalis House, where residents and guests lived a monastic life. Under the guidance of Fr. Thomas Keating, the talented son of a wealthy family who later became the abbot at St. Joseph's Abbey, in Spencer, Massachusetts, residents experienced the routines and rituals of a contemplative life. Fr. Thomas’ prescription for a world gone mad was to make friends with God, be of service, and live simply according to Divine inspiration. He modified ancient mystical teachings to create a template for living an ordinary life while praying unceasingly.
Contemplation in Action
The foundation for daily contemplative prayer taught by Fr. Thomas is called Centering Prayer. Centering Prayer is a receptive method of Christian silent prayer which deepens our relationship with God, the Indwelling Presence. It is a prayer in which we can experience God’s presence within us, closer than breathing, closer than thinking, closer than consciousness itself. Fr. Thomas likened our spiritual development to the process of psychotherapy: By consistently practicing Centering Prayer, we consent to Divine Therapy, whereby we are gradually healed of the wounds and traumas that can get reactivated and cause conflict and upset later in life. Over time, we experience greater peace and purpose as our relationship with God develops, mediated only by a benevolent and Holy Spirit.
"We are kept from the experience of Spirit because our inner world is cluttered with past traumas . . . As we begin to clear away this clutter, the energy of divine light and love begins to flow through our being." ~ Thomas Keating
Thus, for a mystic, prayer is relationship. It is the unmediated communion between an individual and God. It's the realization of being whole and holy, braided together body, mind and spirit. Jesus bridged the gap between heaven and earth by consciously blending them into one being: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. By braiding the threads of body, mind and spirit, he showed us what it means to be a spiritual being having a human experience. Jesus exemplified how to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God.
The Passion Play
Easter, one of the most sacred holy days in the Christian calendar, is a narrative that spans a week’s time in the life of Jesus, thus it’s celebrated by Christians as Holy Week. The story told is known as Christ’s Passion and is often performed as a dramatic play at this time of year. Mystically speaking, it is a story about a God-realized man who walked among less evolved beings to show us the way to unitive consciousness--the felt experience of wholeness, being right and good and one with God and the universe. In his teachings, he made us aware that we are both temporal and eternal, one with the finite timeline of our earthly life and one with the eternal creator of life.
In celebration of the Easter mystery, I’d like to share with you the work of an acquaintance of mine, Catherine de Vinck, poet, theologian and mystic. A gentle soul and prolific poet throughout her long life, she died recently at the age of 99. Her mystical relationship with God was revealed to her in life’s profound ordinariness. She wrote a version of the passion play that tells the story of Jesus‘s death and resurrection. Below I’ve copied a section from the final act of the play, where Jesus appears to the disciples upon his resurrection, and they are confused, thinking him a figment of their imagination. He reassures them that he is real by eating a piece of fish offered to him.
A Passion Play, by Catherine de Vinck
Jesus: The sun shines in your faces:
do you still need to fumble
with oil and lamp? Had I not died,
could I claim to be your brother?
could I share time with you
the ancient rhythm of the clock?
if death had rubbed me fine as sand
could I now call you back, could I say:
I am the Christ, I am the Lord, walking
the divided roads of history
feeling in my bones
the heaving of continents?
Since the beginning, I shape the world
and in the shaping, I am cast:
flesh, hair, eye, and hand, helter-skelter
for I am Son of Man, as well as son of God.
Yes, I have seen the earth ravaged
the worm at work in the wound;
I have seen children with bellies
like wrinkled gourds, women weeping
Men carved thin by the chisel of pain.
Everywhere
death was the talk of the town. No more!
Death is that deflated pouch, that bag
of toothless snakes.
They still lift hissing heads to your ankles
but no longer have the power
to pump poison in your blood.
A disciple: Lord, where are you going?
Jesus: I am going to my father
but I do not leave you: I am
root and grain, I am food on your tables
wine in your cups. Come to me
all who thirst and hunger:
see how I feed my beloved
not with cracked wishes
out of broken bowls, but with the meat of truth.
Another disciple: Lord, stay with us
through the day, through the night.
So many things remain for us
vague and incomplete. You must tell us
how to keep your memory with images, incense, litanies.
We don’t know how
to remember long and well…
Jesus: There is no memory to keep
no need to store
in some dusty drawer of the mind
the ancient photographs of my face.
I am not in the past: I am the presence
of all that is, the song
and the words of the song
carried by the wind from age to age
touching every human ear, entering
every human heart. Memory is an old woman
bent over a grave, picking at skull plates
with an inquiring stick.
I am with you
wherever you gather.
A woman: Lord, we need you here, now.
We need your power. The world
is still a strange place:
fear nests in our hearts
and there is shadow in the tree
and shadow in the house
and shadow, dragging at our heels.
Jesus: I breathe my spirit upon you:
he will make light, make fire
with your dry wood. You will speak
a new tongue, you will spill
a new scent over the world
a good waking odor, a ripening smell
of things, being born, of things aging
lovingly, and without fear.
I send you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
A disciple: Where to Lord?
For what business?
Jesus: I send you to shake the sleepers
to wake the dead, to say
past, present and future are solved
in life’s single thrust
in the power-dance of atoms
broken and re-assembled
of bones, stripped and fleshed anew.
To live forever, never to die:
such is the human craving
the dream drifting from age to age
formless as mist in fields of air.
I send you to announce
a deathless world emerging
from the sea of transformation
rising to the morning light.
The winters past, beloved
the night is over: wake
from your ancestral fears
and see the empty grave, the folded linen
the darkness rolled away.
You live, you are alive.
Fear not: I am with you always
until the end of the world.
Now we know how it will end: a sleep, arms crossed over our chest and on our closed lips shadows of last words: ‘O happiness, O God.~ Catherine de Vinck
This is a wonderful Easter inspiration! Thank you Katie!
Amazing, thank you🙏💞