What does it mean to “be born again, to “be born from above”? If you’re an Evangelical or Baptist, you’ve probably already answered that for yourself. However, if you’re a Roman Catholic or a mainline Protestant then the phrase probably isn’t a normal part of your spiritual vocabulary and, indeed, might connote for you a biblical fundamentalism which confuses you.

What does it mean to “be born again”?  The expression appears in John’s Gospel in a conversation Jesus has with a man named, Nicodemus. Jesus tells him that he “must be born again from above”.  Nicodemus takes this literally and protests that it’s impossible for a grown man to re-enter his mother’s womb so as to be born a second time. So Jesus recasts the phrase metaphorically, telling Nicodemus that one’s second birth, unlike the first, is not from the flesh, but “from water and the Spirit”.  Well … that doesn’t clarify things much for Nicodemus, or for us. What does it mean to be born again from above?

Perhaps there are as many answers to that as there are people in the world. Spiritual birth, unlike physical birth, doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. I have Evangelical friends who share that for them this refers to a particularly powerful affective moment within their lives when, like Mary Magdala in the Garden with Jesus on Easter Sunday, they had a deep personal encounter with Jesus that indelibly affirmed his intimate love for them. In that moment, in their words, “they met Jesus Christ” and “were born again”, even though from their very childhood they had always known about Jesus Christ and been Christians.

Most Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants do not identify “knowing Jesus Christ” with one such personal affective experience. But then they’re left wondering what Jesus meant exactly when he challenges us “to be born again, from above”.

A priest that I know shares this story regarding his understanding of this. His mother, widowed sometime before his ordination, lived in the same parish where he had been assigned to minister. It was a mixed blessing, nice to see her every day in church but she, widowed and alone, began to lean pretty heavily upon him in terms of wanting his time and he, the dutiful son, now had to spend all his free time with his mother, taking her for meals, taking her for drives, and being her one vital contact with the world outside the narrow confines of the seniors’ home within which she lived. During their time together she reminisced a lot and not infrequently complained about being alone and lonely. But one day, on a drive with her, after a period of silence, she said something that surprised him and caught his deeper attention: “I’ve given up on fear!” she said, “I’m no longer afraid of anything. I’ve spent my whole life living in fear. But now, I’ve given up on it because I’ve nothing to lose! I’ve already lost everything, my husband, my youthful body, my health, my place in the world, and much of my pride and dignity. Now I’m free! I’m no longer afraid!”

Her son, who had only been half-listening to her for a long time, now began to listen. He began to spend longer hours with her, recognizing that she had something important to teach him.  After a couple of more years, she died. But, by then, she had been able to impart to her son some things that helped him understand his life more deeply. “My mother gave me birth twice; once from below, and once from above,” he says. He now understands something that Nicodemus couldn’t quite grasp.

We all, no doubt, have our own stories.

And what do the biblical scholars teach about this?  The Synoptic Gospels, scholars say, tell us that we can only enter the kingdom of God if we become like little children, meaning that we must, in our very way of living, acknowledge our dependence upon God and others. We are not self-sufficient and that means truly recognizing and living out our human dependence upon the gratuitous providence of God. To do that, is to be born from above.

John’s Gospel adds something to this. Raymond E Brown, commenting on John’s Gospel, puts it this way: To be born again from above means we must, at some point in our lives, come to understand that our life comes from beyond this world, from a place and source beyond out mother’s womb, and that deeper life and deeper meaning lie there. And so we must have two births, one that gives us biological life (births us into this world) and another that gives us eschatological life (births us into the world of faith, soul, love, and spirit). And sometimes, as was the case with my friend, it can be your own birthmother who does the major midwifing in that second birth. Nicodemus couldn’t quite get past his instinctual empiricism. In the end, he didn’t get it. Do we?

Simone Weil once commented that it’s not enough today to be merely a saint; rather “we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment.”

She’s surely right on that second premise; we need saints whose virtues speak to the times.

What kind of saint is needed today? Someone who can show us how we can actually forgive an enemy? Someone who can help us come together across the bitter divide within our communities and churches? Someone who can show us how to reach out to the poor?  Someone who can teach us how to actually pray? Someone who can show us how to find “Sabbath” inside the bombardment of ten thousand television channels, a million blogs, and a billion tweets? Someone who can show us how to sustain our childhood faith amidst the sophistication, complexity, and agnosticism of our adult lives?  Someone who, like Jesus, can go into singles’ bars and not sin? Someone who radiates a full-bodied humanity, even as he or she is, by faith, set apart? Someone who’s a mystic, but with a robust sense of humor? Someone who can be both chaste and healthily sexual at the same time?

The list could go on. We’re in pioneer territory. The saints of old didn’t face our issues. They had their own demons to conquer and aren’t rolling over in their graves, shaking their fingers in disgust at us in our struggles and infidelities. They know the struggle, know that ours is new territory with new demons to conquer and new virtues asked for. The saints of old remain, of course, as essential templates of Christian discipleship, living gospels, but they walked in different times.

So what kind of saints do we need today?

We need saints who can honor the goodness of the world, even as they honor God. We need women and men who can show us how to walk with a living faith inside a culture which believes that world here is enough and that the issues of God and the next life are peripheral. We need saints who can walk with a steady, adult faith in the face of the world’s sophistication, its pathological restlessness, its over-stimulated grandiosity, its numbing distractions, and its overpowering temptations. We need saints who can empathize with those who have drifted away from the church, even as they themselves, without compromise, hold their own moral and religious ground. We need young saints who can romantically re-enflame the religious imagination of the world, as once did Francis and Clare. And we need old saints, who have walked the gamut and can show us how to meet all the challenges of today and yet retain our childhood faith.

As well, we need what Sarah Coakley calls “erotic saints”, women and men who can bring chastity and eros together in a way that speaks of the importance of both. We need saints who can model for us the goodness of sexuality, who can delight in its human joys and honor its God-given place within the spiritual journey, even as they never denigrate it by setting it against spirituality or cheapen it by making it simply another form of recreation.

Then too we need saints today who can, with compassion, help us to see our blind complicity with systems of all kinds which victimize the vulnerable in order to safeguard our own comfort, security, and historical privilege. We need saints who can speak prophetically for the poor, for the environment, for women, for refugees, for those with inadequate access to medical care and education, and for all who are stigmatized because of race, color, or creed.  We need saints, lonely prophets, who can stand as unanimity-minus one, and who can wage peace and who can point our eyes to a reality beyond our own shortsightedness.

And these saints need not be formally canonized; their lives need simply be lamps for our eyes and leaven for our lives. I don’t know who your present-day saints are, but I find have found mine among a very wide range of persons, old, young, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, liberal, conservative, religious, lay, clerical, secular, faith-filled, and agnostic. Full disclosure, the names I mention here are not persons whose lives I know in any detail. Mostly, I know what they’ve written, but their writings are a lamp which lights my path.  

Among those of my own generation, I’m indebted to are Raymond E. Brown, Charles Taylor, Daniel Berrigan, Jean Vanier, Mary Jo Leddy, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Keating, Jim Wallis, Richard Rohr, Elizabeth Johnson, Parker Palmer, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wendy Wright, Gerhard Lohfink, Kathleen Dowling Singh, Jim Forest, John Shea, James Hillman, Thomas Moore, and Marilynne Robinson.

Among the younger voices whose lives and writings speak as well to a generation younger than mine, I would mention Shane Claiborne, Rachel Held Evans, James Martin, Kerry Weber, Trevor Herriot, Macy Halford, Robert Barron, Bryan Stevenson, Robert Ellsberg, Bieke Vandekerckhove, and Annie Riggs.

Maybe these aren’t your saints, fair enough. So lean on those who help light your path.

Growing up as a Roman Catholic, like the rest of my generation, I was taught a prayer called, The Act of Contrition. Every Catholic back then had to memorize it and say it during or after going to confession. The prayer started this way: Oh, my God, I am truly sorry for having offended thee and I detest all of my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell.  …

To dread the loss of heaven and fear the pains of hell can seem like one and the same thing. They’re not. There’s a huge moral distance between dreading the loss of heaven and fearing the pains of hell. The prayer wisely separates them. Fear of hell is based upon a fear of punishment, dreading the loss of heaven is based upon a fear of not being a good, loving person. There’s a huge difference between living in fear of punishment and living in fear of not being a good a person.  We’re more mature, humanly and as Christians, when we’re more worried about not being loving enough than when we’re fearful that we will be punished for doing something wrong.

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I breathed in the spirituality and catechesis of the Roman Catholicism of the time. In the Catholic ethos then (and this was essentially the same for Protestants and Evangelicals) the eschatological emphasis was a lot more about the fear of going to hell than it was about being a loving person. As a Catholic kid, along with my peers, I worried a lot about not committing a mortal sin, that is, doing something out of selfishness or weakness that, if unconfessed before I died, would send me to hell for all eternity. My fear was that I might go to hell rather than that I might not be a very loving person who would miss out on love and community. And so I worried about not being bad rather than about being good. I worried that I would do something that was mortally sinful, that would send me to hell; but I didn’t worry as much about having a heart big enough to love as God loves. I didn’t worry as much about forgiving others, about letting go of hurts, about loving those who are different from me, about being judgmental, or about being so tribal, racist, sexist, nationalistic, or narrow in my religious views that I would be uncomfortable sitting down with certain others at the God’s banquet table.  

The heavenly table is open to all who are willing to sit down with all.  That’s a line from a John Shea poem and it spells out succinctly, I believe, a non-negotiable condition for going to heaven, namely, the willingness and capacity to love everyone and to sit down with everyone. It’s non-negotiable for this reason: How can we be at the heavenly table with everyone if for some reason of pride, wound, temperament, bitterness, bigotry, politics, nationalism, color, race, religion, or history, we aren’t open to sit down with everyone?

Jesus teaches this too, just in a different way. After giving us the Lord’s Prayer which ends with the words, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”, he adds this: “If you forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, your Father will not forgive you.” Why can’t God forgive us if we don’t forgive others? Has God arbitrarily singled out this one condition as his pet criterion for going to heaven? No.  

We cannot sit at the heavenly banquet table if we are still selective as to whom we can sit down with. If, in the next life, like here in this life, we are selective as to whom we love and embrace, then heaven would be the same as earth, with factions, bitterness, grudges, hurt, and every kind of racism, sexism, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism keeping us all in our separate silos. We can only sit at the heavenly banquet when are hearts are wide enough to embrace everyone else at the table. Heaven demands a heart open to universal embrace.

And so, as I get older, approach the end of my life, and accept that I will soon face my Maker, I worry less and less about going to hell and worry more and more about the bitterness, anger, ingratitude, and non-forgiveness that still remains in me. I worry less about committing a mortal sin and more about whether I’m gracious, respectful, and forgiving towards others. I worry more about the loss of heaven than the pains of hell, that is, I worry that I could end up like the older brother of the prodigal son, standing outside the Father’s house, excluded by anger rather than by sin.

Still, I’m grateful for the Act of Contrition of my youth. Fear of hell isn’t a bad place from which to start.

No community should botch its deaths. Mircea Eliade wrote those words and they’re a warning: If we do not properly celebrate the life of someone who has left us we do an injustice to that person and cheat ourselves of some of the gift that he or she left behind.

With this in mind, I want to underscore the loss that we, the Christian community, irrespective of denomination, suffered with the death of Rachel Held Evans who died, at age 37, on May the 4^th.

Who was Rachel Held Evans? She defies simple definition, beyond saying that she was a young religious writer who wrote with a depth and balance beyond her years as she chronicled her struggles to move from the deep, sincere, childlike faith she was raised in to eventually arrive at a questioning, but more mature, faith that was now willing to face all the hard questions within faith, religion, and church. And in this journey, she was beset with opposition from within (it’s hard to courageously scrutinize your own roots) and from without (churches generally don’t like being pressed by hard questions, especially from their own young). But the journey she made and articulates (with rare honesty and wit) is a journey that, in some way, all of us, young and old, have to make to come to a faith that can stand up to the hard questions coming from our world and the even harder ones coming from inside of us.

Carl Rogers once famously said: “What is most personal is also most universal.” The journey Rachel Held Evans traces out from her own life is, I submit, by and large, the universal one today, that is, the naïve faith of our childhood inevitably meets challenges, questions, and ridicule in adulthood and that demands of us a response beyond the Sunday School and catechism of our youth. Not least among these questions and challenges is the one of church, of justifying belonging to one, given the propensity within our churches for infidelity, narrowness, judgmental attitudes, reluctance to face doubt, and the perennial temptation to wed the Gospels to their favored political ideology. 

Rachel Held Evans struggled to make the journey from the naiveté of childhood, with all its innocence and magic, where one can believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny and take biblical stories literally, to what Paul Ricouer calls “second naiveté”, where, through a painful interplay between doubt and faith, one has been able to work through the conscriptive sophistication that comes with adulthood so as to reground the innocence and magic (and faith) of childhood on a foundation that has already taken seriously the doubt and disillusionment that beset us in the face of adulthood.

The Irish philosopher, John Moriarty, whose religious story plays out along similar lines as Rachel’s, coins an interesting expression to describe what happened to him. At one point in his religious journey, he tells us, “I fell out of my story”. The Roman Catholicism he had been raised into was no longer the story out of which he could live his life. Eventually, after sorting through some hard questions and realizing that the faith of his youth was, in the end, his “mother tongue”, he found his way back into his religious story.

Rachel Held Evans’ story is similar. Raised in the Southern USA Bible Belt inside a robust Evangelical Christianity she too, as she faced the questions of her own adulthood, fell out of her story and, like Moriarty, eventually found her way back into it, at least in essence.

In the end, she found her way back to a mature faith (which now can handle doubt), found a church (Episcopalian) within which she could worship, and, in effect, found her way back to her mother tongue. The church and faith of her youth, she writes, remain in her life like an old boyfriend. … Where, while not together anymore in the old way, you still end up checking Facebook each day to see what’s happening in his life.     

Many Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants, I suspect, may not be very familiar with Rachel Held Evans or have read her works. She wrote four best-selling books, Inspired, Searching for Sunday, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, and Faith Unraveled. The purpose of this column is therefore pretty straightforward: Read her!  Even more important, plant her books in the path of anyone struggling with faith or church:loved ones, children, spouses, family members, friends, colleagues.

Rachel Held Evans arose out of an Evangelical ecclesial tradition and out of the particular approach to Christian discipleship that generally flows from there. She and I come from very different ecclesial worlds. But, as Roman Catholic priest, solidly committed to the tradition I was raised in, and as a theologian and spiritual writer for more than 40 years, reading this young woman, I haven’t found a single line with which to disagree. She’s trusted food for the soul. She’s also a special person that we lost far too soon.

Our differences are not a threat but a treasure.

Jean Vanier, the Founder of A’Arche, who died in Paris on May 7^th wrote those words, but their truth is far from self-evident. One might question whether those words are simply a nice-sounding poetics or whether they contain an actual truth.  Our differences, in fact, are often a threat.

Moreover, it’s one thing to mouth those words; it’s quite another thing to have the moral authority to speak them. Few have that authority. Jean Vanier did. His whole life and work testify to the fact that our differences can indeed be a treasure and can, in the end, be that precise element of community that serves up for us the particular grace we need.

Vanier saw differences, whether of faith, religion, culture, language, gender, ideology, or genetic endowment, as graces to enrich a community rather than as threats to its unity. And while Vanier gave witness to this in all aspects of his life, he was of course best known for how he appropriated that apposite among the differences that have, seemingly since forever, separated people with intellectual disabilities from the rest of the community, isolating them, assigning them second-class status, and depriving the rest of us of the unique grace they bring.   Someone once described Vanier as initiating a new Copernican revolution in that, prior to him,we used to think of our service to the poor one-sidedly, we give to them. Now that we recognize our former arrogance and naiveté, the poor bring a great service to us.

One of the persons who gave a powerful personal testimony to that was Henri Nouwen, the renowned spiritual writer. Tenured at both Yale and Harvard, an immensely respected speaker, and a man loved and adulated by a large public, Nouwen, nursing his own disabilities, was for most of his life unable to healthily absorb very much from that immense amount of love that was being bestowed on him and remained deeply insecure within himself, unsure he was loved, until he went to live in one of Vanier’s communities. There, living with men and women who were completely unaware of his achievements and his fame and who offered him no adulation, he began for the first time in his life to finally sense his own worth and to feel himself as loved.  That great grace came from living with those who were different. We have Jean Vanier to thank for teaching that to the rest of us as well.   

I first heard Vanier speak when I was a twenty-two year-old seminarian. For many of my colleagues, he was a spiritual rock-star, but that idolization was a negative for me. I went to hear him with a certain bias: Nobody can be that good! But he was!

Admittedly that’s ambiguous. Talent and charisma can seduce us towards selfishness just as easily as invite us towards nobility of soul. Someone can be a powerful speaker without that charisma witnessing at all to that person’s human and moral integrity and without that seductiveness inviting anyone to what’s more-noble inside him or her. But Vanier’s person, message, and charisma, through all his years, suffered from no such ambiguity.  The transparency, simplicity, depth, wisdom, and faith that were contained in his person and his word beckoned us only in one direction, that is, towards to all that’s one, good, true, and beautiful, which are the properties of God.  Meeting him made you want, like the disciples in the Gospels, to leave your boats and nets behind and set off on a new, more-radical road. Few persons have that power.

Perhaps the best criterion by which to judge Christian discipleship is look at who’s moving downwards, who fits this description of Jesus: “Though he was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God as something to be grasped at. Rather he emptied himself and took the form of a slave.” Jean Vanier was born into a world of privilege, blessed with exceptional parents, a gifted intelligence, a handsome body, enviable educational opportunities, financial security, and a famous name. Those are a lot of gifts for a person to carry and that kind of privilege has more often ruined a life than blessed it. For Jean Vanier, however, these gifts were never something to be grasped at. He emptied himself by immersing himself into the lives of the poor, letting his gifts bless them, even as he received a rich blessing in return. He modeled a true discipleship of Jesus, namely, stepping downward into a second-baptism, immersion into the poor, where community and joy are found. And to this he invited us.

In her poem, The Leaf and the Cloud, Mary Oliver wrote: “I will sing for the broken doors of the poor, and for the sorrow of the rich, who are mistaken and lonely.”  Jean Vanier, through all the years of his life, stepped through the broken doors of the poor and found community and joy there.  For him, our differences were not a threat but a treasure.

A reporter once asked two men at the construction site where a church was being built what each did for a living. The first man replied: “I’m a bricklayer.” The second said: “I’m building a cathedral!”  How we name an experience largely determines its meaning.

There are various languages within a language, and some speak more deeply than others.

Thirty years ago, the American Educator, Allan Bloom, wrote a book entitled, The Closing of the American Mind. This was his thesis: Our language today is becoming ever more empirical, one-dimensional, and devoid of depth.  This, he submits, is closing our minds by trivializing our experiences.

Twenty years earlier, in rather provocative essay, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff had already suggested the same thing. For Rieff, we live our lives under a certain “symbolic hedge”, that is, within a language and set of concepts by which we interpret our experience.  And that hedge can be high or low. We can understand our experience within a language and set of concepts that has us believe that things are very meaningful or that they are quite shallow and not very meaningful at all. Experience is rich or shallow, depending upon the language within which we interpret it.

For example: Imagine a man with a backache who sees his doctor. The doctor tells him that he’s suffering from arthritis. This brings some calm. He now knows what ails him. But he isn’t satisfied and sees a psychologist. The psychologist tells him that his symptoms are not just physical but that he’s also suffering from mid-life crisis. This affords him a richer understanding of his pain. But he’s still dissatisfied and sees a spiritual director. The spiritual director, while not denying him arthritis and mid-life crisis, tells him that this pain is really his Gethsemane, his cross to bear. Notice all three diagnoses speak of the same pain but that each places it under a different symbolic hedge.

The work of persons such as Carl Jung, James Hillman, and Thomas Moore have helped us understand more explicitly how there is a language which more deeply touches the soul.

For instance: We see the language of soul, among other places, in some of our great myths and fairy tales, many of them centuries old. Their seeming simplicity masks a disarming depth. To offer just one example, take the story of Cinderella: The first thing to notice is that the name, Cinderella, is not an actual name but a composite of two words: Cinder, meaning ashes; and Puella, meaning young girl. This is not a simple fairy tale about a lonely, beaten-down, young girl. It’s a myth that highlights a universal, paradoxical, paschal dynamic which we experience in our lives, where, before you are ready to wear the glass slipper, be the belle of the ball, marry the prince, and live happily ever after, you must first spend some prerequisite time sitting in the ashes, suffering humiliation, and being purified by that time in the dust.

Notice how this story speaks in its own way of what in Christian spirituality we call “lent”, a season of penance, wherein we mark ourselves with ashes in order to enter an ascetical space in order to prepare ourselves for the kind of joy which (for reasons we only know intuitively) can only be had after a time of renunciation and sublimation. Cinderella is a story that shines a certain light into the depth of our souls. Many of our famous myths do that.

However no myth shines a light into the soul more deeply than does scripture. Its language and symbols name our experience in a way that helps us grasp the genuine depth inside our own experiences.

Thus, there are two ways of understanding ourselves: We can be confused or we can be inside the belly of the whale. We can be helpless before an addiction or we can be possessed by a demon. We can vacillate between joy and depression or we can alternate between being with Jesus ‘in Galilee’ or with him ‘in Jerusalem’. We can be paralyzed as we stand before globalization or we can be standing with Jesus on the borders of Samaria in a new conversation with a pagan woman. We can be struggling with fidelity in keeping our commitments or we can be standing with Joshua before God, receiving instructions to kill off the Canaanites so as to sustain ourselves in the Promised Land. We can be suffering from arthritis or we can be sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane.  The language we use to understand an experience defines what the experience means to us.

In the end, we can have a job or we can have a vocation; we can be lost or we can be spending our 40 days in the desert; we can be bitterly frustrated or we can be pondering with Mary; or we can be slaving away for a pay check or we can be building a cathedral. Meaning depends a lot on language.

“I’m a practicing mystic!” A woman said that in one of my classes some years ago and it raised lots of eyebrows. I was teaching a class in mysticism and asked the students why the topic of mysticism interested them. Their responses varied: Some were simply intrigued with the concept; others were spiritual directors who wanted more insight into what constitutes mystical experience; and a number of others were taking the course because their faculty advisor asked them to. But one woman answered: “Because I’m a practicing mystic!”

Can someone be a practicing mystic? Yes, providing both terms, practicing and mystic, are understood properly.  

What does it mean to be a mystic? In the popular mind, mysticism is most often associated with extraordinary and paranormal religious experience, namely, visions, revelations, apparitions, and the like. Sometimes in fact this is the case, as is true of some great mystics like Julian of Norwich and Theresa of Avila, but these are exceptions. That’s not the norm. Normally mystical experience is ordinary; no visions, no apparitions, no ecstasies, just everyday experience – but with a difference.

Ruth Burrows, the renowned British Carmelite, defines mysticism this way: Mystical experience is being touched by God at a level deeper than words, thought, imagination, and feeling. We have a mystical experience when we know ourselves and our world with clarity, even if just for a second. That can involve something extraordinary, like a vision or apparition, but normally it doesn’t. Normally a mystical experience is not a moment where an angel or some spirit appears to you or something paranormal happens to you. A mystical moment is extraordinary, but extraordinary because of its unique lucidity and clarity, extraordinary because for that moment we are extraordinarily centered, and extraordinary because in that moment we sense, beyond words and imagination, in some dark, unconscious, and inchoate way, what mystics call the indelible memory of God’s kiss on our soul, the primordial memory of once having experienced perfect love inside God’s womb before birth. Bernard Lonergan, using a different terminology, calls this the brand of the first principles on our soul, that is, the innate imprint of the transcendental properties of God, Oneness, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, inside us.  

We have a mystical experience when we are in touch with that part of our soul that was once touched by God, before we were born, that part of our soul that still bears, however unconsciously, the memory of that touch. Henri Nouwen calls this a dark memory of “first love”, of once having been caressed by far gentler hands than we have ever met in this life.

We all have experiences of this to some degree. We all have mystical experiences, though we aren’t all mystics. What’s the difference between having a mystical experience and being a mystic? It’s the difference between having aesthetic experiences and being an artist.  All of us have deep aesthetic experiences and are at times deeply moved in our souls by beauty, but only a few persons become great artists, great composers, and great musicians, not necessarily because they have deeper experiences than the rest of us, but because they can give exceptional aesthetic expression to their experience. Aesthetic expression is always according to more or less. Hence anyone can become a practicing artist, even if not a professional one.

The same holds true for mysticism. A mystic is someone who can give meaningful expression to mystical experience, just as an artist is someone who can give proper expression to aesthetic experience.  You can be a practicing mystic, akin to a practicing artist or practicing musician. Like a struggling artist, you can struggle to give meaningful, conscious expression to the deep movements you sense within your soul and, like an amateur artist, you will not be the Rembrandt or Picasso of the spiritual life, but your efforts can be immensely helpful to you in clarifying the movements within your own soul and psyche.

How, concretely, practically, might you practice being a mystic? By doing anything that helps you to more consciously get in touch with the deep movements of your soul and by doing things that help you steady and center your soul.

For example, in striving to get in touch with your soul you can be a practicing mystic by journaling, doing spiritual reading, taking spiritual direction, doing various spiritual exercises such as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and by prayer of any kind. In terms of centering and steadying your soul you can be a practicing mystic by more consciously and more deliberately giving yourself over to the biblical practice of Sabbath and by doing other soul-centering things like gardening, taking long walks, listening to good music, sharing wine and conversation with family and friends, making love with your spouse, holding a baby, visiting a person who is ill, or even just taking up a hobby that healthily breaks the obsession of your daily concerns.

There are ways of being a practicing mystic, even without taking a formal class on mysticism.

We are all, I suspect, familiar with the famous expression from Julian of Norwich, now an axiom in our language. She once famously wrote: In the end all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of being shall be well. To which Oscar Wilde is reported to have added: “And if it isn’t well, then it’s still not the end”

Few words better express what we celebrate in the resurrection of Jesus. Belief in the resurrection, belief that God raised Jesus from the dead, constitutes the very ground of our Christian faith. Everything else we believe in as Christians is grounded on that truth and, as St. Paul says, if that isn’t true, if Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, we are the most deluded of all people. But if God did raise Jesus, and we believe that he did, then not only can the rest of Jesus’ message be trusted, we can then live with the ultimate consolation that the end of our story has already been written and it is a happy, ecstatic ending. We will in the end, live happily ever after. Life is indeed a fairy tale.

How does the resurrection of Jesus guarantee that? Here’s how Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that wonderful scientist and mystic from the previous generation, answered. Once, having just made a presentation within which he presented a vision of how the cosmos and all of life will come together in one final harmony inside the Cosmic Christ at the end of time, he was challenged by a skeptic to this effect: “That’s a lot of wishful thinking and optimism. But suppose we blow up the world with a nuclear bomb, what happens to your wishful thinking then?” Teilhard’s answer wonderfully distinguishes genuine Christian hope both from wishful thinking and natural optimism, even as it affirms what the resurrection of Jesus guarantees. He responded in words to this effect: “If we blow up the world with a nuclear bomb, well that would be a two-million-year setback. But what I’m proposing will happen, not because I wish it so or have empirical evidence to warrant it. It will happen because Christ promised it, and in the resurrection, God showed that God has the power to deliver on that promise.”

What we believe in as Christians is not based on wishful thinking or natural optimism, it’s based on the word and promises of Jesus and the trustworthiness of that word and those promises is guaranteed by the resurrection of Jesus. When we believe this, we can live our lives without undue anxiety about anything, confident that the end of our story is already written and that it’s a happy ending.

If we believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, if we believe in the resurrection, then, in essence, we believe that the world is already saved. We don’t have to save the world; we only have to live in face of the fact that we believe it has already been saved. And if we live in face of that belief we can risk everything, risk our very lives, knowing that our ending of our story has already been written and that it’s a happy one, no matter how dire things might look at present.

We see a wonderful example of this kind of belief in Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the key figures in opposing and eventually bringing down apartheid in South Africa. At the heart of the struggle to bring down apartheid, facing every kind of threat, he remained steadfast and even joyful in face of threats and overwhelming odds. What anchored him in his steadiness and joy? Belief in the resurrection of Jesus.

Occasionally on a Sunday morning when he would be preaching, armed soldiers would come into the church and line-up along the isles with their weapons in hand, hoping to intimidate him. Tutu, for his part, would smile at them and say: “I am glad you’ve come to join the winning side! We’ve already won!” In saying this, he wasn’t talking about the battle over apartheid which, at that point, was still far from won. He was talking about the resurrection of Jesus, the definitive triumph of goodness over evil, which assures that, in the end, goodness will eventually triumph over evil, love over division, justice over injustice, and life over death.

Knowing that, we can live life in confidence and hope. It will end well, not because we wish it so or because things are looking that way for us. It will end well because Jesus promised it would and in the resurrection, God backs up that promise.

Hence there’s nothing to fear, nothing – not defeat, not threat, not loss, not sickness, not even death. The resurrection of Jesus assures us that in the end all shall be well, and all shall be well, and every manner of being shall be well; and if it isn’t well … well, then it’s still not the end!