Everyday Mystics

Everyday Mystics

What is it about human being that propels us to reach out? What is it that drives our impulse to create? To explore? To discover? What is at the heart of the phenomenon of desire?
Isn’t there a fundamental desire for happiness? For joy? Something in us propels us to love, to hope, to dream. Many theologians speak of this as the experience of grace.

Grace is God’s self-communication to each of us. In some of us, we experience this in terms of a religious framework -we have all seen the athletes thanking Jesus for touchdowns. But simply an alcoholic grateful for a day of sobriety, a mother holding her child, lovers caught up in the bliss of affection; all of these can either be experienced within a religious framework as a willed gift of the personal God or simply experienced as a hint, a taste of something beyond ourselves.

Whenever we experience hope, love, or trust we are experiencing something gifted to us, something which propels us out of ourselves into the shared experience with the other. In these human experiences, we find our world opened up to something greater than our limited selves. We are experiencing grace. When we recognize that God is at the heart of all human experience, we can recognize the other as ultimate mystery.

Often we read of mystics and think of saints levitating, or Yogis surviving under water for ridiculous amounts of time. These may or may not be mystical events, but surely whenever any human being experiences something of God –faith, hope, love, mercy- we are having a mystical experience. Religious practice gives us a frame of reference, but is not required for our opening ourselves to God.

Karl Rahner ( Roman Catholic Systematic Theologian) said that whenever we say something of god, we say something of human being; and whenever we say something about human being, we say something about god. Human being is a mystery of love which opens in our hearts to the mystery which is God.

We are all everyday mystics.