Advent “Langung”

Maranatha; from the King Alfred’s Old English Version of Augustine’s Soliloquies.

Maranatha – Our Lord Cometh!

During Advent this year I have been listening to “Mysticism A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness,” by Evelyn Underhill. She was an authority on her own subject of mysticism and respected for her research and scholarship. She had been asked by the University of Oxford to give the first of a new series of lectures on religion, and she was the first woman to gain such an honour. Underhill has been a traveling companion for decades, and her work on Christian mystics and the strange ground they cover with Jesus has been a kind of “rod and staff” during my rocky passages. I remember coming across her in college when trying to explain to those around me this ineffable sense of God’s presence, or force, moving through my life and the world around me. Sometimes folks would smile, wish me well, and not have a clue of what I was trying to describe. Some will know that profound gratitude that comes with finding others who have had the same experience; as CS Lewis once said about meeting other Christians, “What?! You too?!” And then we are off to the races embraced in a new sort of friendship with grateful hearts recognizing those who belong to our tribe. 

A good friend of mine, a priest named Craig, once said, You know you have been in a room full of drunks if you walk out and think that you are the one who is crazy. I have found the opposite is true of those who spend days meandering in the mystic path with Christ alone, and then find others with whom they share mutual recognition; you walk out of a room in which the ineffable Deity is recognized and affirmed, and you know for a fact that you are not crazy. Underhill is one who shores up what some of us often feel that lay beyond the reach of our worlds. Advent is something like being hungry and waiting in line for our table at the restaurant where they serve what is both delicious and healthy; we are willing to wait because we know that what is ahead is more protein than carbs. We are willing to wait because we know that we will leave feeling more alive and full of our sense of purpose. For now I am willing to wait in that line while my friend Evelyn Underhill keeps me company.

“The members of the human family have in common one peculiar characteristic. They tend to produce — sporadically it is true, and often in the teeth of adverse external circumstances — a curious and definite type of personality; a type which refuses to be satisfied with that which other men call experience, and is inclined, in the words of its enemies, to “deny the world in order that it may find reality.” We meet these persons in the east and the west; in the ancient, mediaeval, and modern worlds. Their one passion appears to be the prosecution of a certain spiritual and intangible quest: the finding of a “way out” or a “way back” to some desirable state in which alone they can satisfy their craving for absolute truth. This quest, for them, has constituted the whole meaning of life. They have made for it without effort sacrifices which have appeared enormous to other men: and it is an indirect testimony to its objective actuality, that whatever the place or period in which they have arisen, their aims, doctrines and methods have been substantially the same. Their experience, therefore, forms a body of evidence, curiously self-consistent and often mutually explanatory, which must be taken into account before we can add up the sum of the energies and potentialities of the human spirit, or reasonably speculate on its relations to the unknown world which lies outside the boundaries of sense . . .

Under whatsoever symbols they have objectified their quest, none of these seekers have ever been able to assure the world that they have found, seen face to face, the Reality behind the veil. But if we may trust the reports of the mystics — and they are reports given with a strange accent of certainty and good faith — they have succeeded where all these others have failed, in establishing immediate communication between the spirit of man, entangled as they declare amongst material things, and that “only Reality,” that immaterial and final Being, which some philosophers call the Absolute, and most theologians call God. This, they say — and here many who are not mystics agree with them — is the hidden Truth which is the object of man’s craving; the only satisfying goal of his quest. Hence, they should claim from us the same attention that we give to other explorers of countries in which we are not competent to adventure ourselves; for the mystics are the pioneers of the spiritual world, and we have no right to deny validity to their discoveries, merely because we lack the opportunity or the courage necessary to those who would prosecute such explorations for themselves.”