More on Messy Mystics

“You have given me the heritage of those who fear your name” (Psalm 61:5b TNIV)

A word of clarification about these messy mystics: I’m playing with words here. I’m not restricting myself to a tight and scholarly definition of “mystic.” And I’m identifying the stuff of ordinary life as “messy.” That doesn’t mean it’s bad or undesirable or to be avoided. It’s just there, and anyone who lives an ordinary life has to deal with all the details of that life. As a pithy southern colloquialism has it, “the fleas come with the dog.”

Here are some followers of Jesus who knew (or know) well what that southernism means.

Gregory of Nazianzus learned it the hard way. Born in 330 A.D. in a region we know as central Turkey, he was the son of a Bishop and a child of privilege. He was devout even as a child, and as he grew so did his yearning for the contemplative life. Elijah and John the Baptist were biblical role models. Poor Gregory was ordained against his will. As a Baptist-turned-Presbyterian I’m not exactly sure how that happened in the fourth century. His pastor father needed some help and that fact was certainly in the mix. But Gregory wanted something other than the headaches of dealing with the church and church people. He responded to his ordination by running away and hiding out for a while, no doubt praying fervently and attempting to convince God that a major celestial error had been made. God ignored Gregory. Gregory went back home – only to do the very same thing again about ten years later (this was his answer to being given a promotion in the church). Eventually Gregory embraced the pastoral life and had a fruitful ministry. He served the church in a turbulent time, endured threats of assassination, a produced some weighty stuff like a sermon series called “Five Orations on the Divinity of the Logos.” You don’t come up with stuff like that without being something of a mystic – but he did it in a messy time, in the heat of conflict.

Fast forward about 1300 years to a Carmelite monastery in Paris, France. There a monk known to us as Brother Lawrence lived for 42 years. Sounds escapist on the surface, but within the life of the community Brother Lawrence learned what it meant to live seamlessly between times of solitude and worship and times of labor. Brother Lawrence worked in the Kitchen – cleaning pots and pans and dishes until his fingers were shriveled and raisin like. For Lawrence, the Kitchen and the Chapel were both places of prayer. We don’t see him standing at the sink, pining away for the quiet of his cell. He prayed during designated times of worship. He prayed in the kitchen. That’s a tough one for me since I usually find our kitchen and the messes we make there to be a source of endless frustration and repeated labor (didn’t I just empty the dishwasher? My turn again?) I’ve got plenty to learn from Brother Lawrence.

I had the chance to hear Henri Nouwen in the spring of 1994 at the First Presbyterian Church of Fort Worth, Texas. Like many, I had long admired the man through his writings. The final season of Nouwen’s life intrigues me. In his little volume, In the Name of Jesus, Nowen describes the spiritual lethargy that had settled upon him as he climbed the ladder in academia. Notre Dame and Harvard looked good on the resume, but those names did little for the soul of this teacher-priest. In this state of barrenness he prayed for direction and eventually discerned this response: “go and live among the poor in spirit and they will heal you.” So this widely published and sought after teacher left the halls of the Ivy League and went to live among a community of mentally handicapped people- many of whom had not gone to school and couldn’t read (quite a career move). There among the broken and simple, pastoring by helping people to get ready for bed and go to the bathroom, Nouwen reflects on the nature of Christian Leadership and calls leaders to be people who are given to contemplative prayer. I don’t sense that many of us pastors are rushing to sign up for that kind of thing. That’s just a little too messy.

Among the living my regard for pastor-professor Eugene H. Peterson cannot be overstated. Again, as with Nowen, I know him only through his books. I did receive a personal letter from him years ago. This in itself is unusual. That a nobody seminary student could write to him to express gratitude or ask a question, and that he would actually write back seems extraordinary to me now (and it did then). A line from his letter of June 25, 1992 says it well. “Maybe that’s why you find my writings helpful, because they were all written in the middle of the traffic, trying to learn how to practice the contemplative life in the particular setting of the pastoral vocation.”

At this point I feel like the writer of Hebrews. After rehearsing the roll call of faith in chapter 11 the writer seems to lament that there are so many other faithful ones to be spoken of, other stories to be told. Same here. I haven’t said anything about Dallas Willard or Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Jonathan Edwards. Maybe another time. For now, I keep searching for role models among the living and the dead. I urge you to do the same.

The Psalmist says it well (yet again!). “You have given me the heritage of those who fear your name.”