Not your friendly Instagram mystic

Christian mystics have a curious magnetism in these troubled times. Can we understand them on their own terms?

This is the concluding part of our series exploring the writings of St Paul of the Cross—Notes on Poverty, Death and Nothingness with David Benjamin Blower.

You can read the start of the series here, or revisit the most popular post so far. As always, feel free to share your own thoughts with us, in the comments.

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The present moment feels like a waiting room between the things that are ending and the things that are wanting to begin. Hannah Arendt once described “moments of truth […] when not only the later historians, but the actors and witnesses, the living themselves, become aware of an interval in time.” I’m sure the world always feels this way to somebody, but there is an undeniable collective anxiety these days. The bigger the eye, the bigger the storm.

The strangeness of this moment has drawn some curious attention to the lives of Christian mystics, and to the religious orders in which they often lived. When both religious and secular power structures are reaching their breaking points, there’s something compelling about these lives that seem to exist just outside the edge of it all. In environments flooded with noise and spectacle, where worship services and political rallies seem to mirror each other, the strange ideal of the contemplative tradition finds itself much talked about.

Having reflected on the writings of St Paul of the Cross, I can't help feeling that something is being skipped over in today’s idealised images of the contemplative tradition. Julian of Norwich is loved because she leans into the feminine language of God, because she gestures toward universalism, and because she is so believable when she pronounces from the depths of herself: “all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” But what about her alarming desire for experiences of suffering? What about her deference to authority and her self-diminishing language? More still, in a time when God is often talked about as an idea to be handled with thick gloves, or as an aura without the complications of personality or autonomy, what about Julian’s unbridled adoration of this Other with whom she converses?

Many of us are looking from the outside in. Some of us have known painful religious experiences that have left us scattered and wounded and un-contained. There is, naturally, much desire for a spirituality in which a person can authentically re-centre themselves. There is something beautiful in the contemplative image: a prayerful gathering of oneself, apart from all the noise. A space where truth can emerge of its own accord.

It’s not that I don’t think this can be found in St Paul of the Cross, or indeed in Julian of Norwich, or the Little Flowers of St Francis. I think it can. I’m just not sure how many of us would agree to their terms. Their language is radically self-relativising. God is always an autonomous other. God has God’s own opinions, so what are you going to do? These contemplatives saw themselves as small, sometimes wretched, and always duty-bound. They loved God more than themselves. They hoped to lose themselves, not to find themselves. In the most alarming language, they welcomed suffering as a gift. They embraced poverty as a friend. Their lives were absolutely conditioned by the principle of steadfast obedience. Is there a pattern here for “centering” oneself? I'm not sure. It depends what one means by that turn of phrase. They certainly seemed more inclined to recognise themselves as relative to some other centre. If they knew how to centre themselves, it was only by emptying themselves out, and by losing themselves like a drop in the ocean.

Judgement might pass in either direction. Perhaps the contemplative tradition is not what it has appeared to be in its cleaned-up reproductions. Perhaps it is a pattern for the crude abandonment of oneself, after all. On the other hand, perhaps today’s idealised images of the mystics are themselves conditioned by a consumerist search for satisfaction. Maybe both are true and maybe other things are true also. I have no need to conclude these questions.

However, in the interest of concluding this series on Death, Poverty and Nothingness: the Writings of St Paul of the Cross, I want to dwell a little on the two peculiar dynamics that have persistently struck me. One is that lost paradox between suffering and ecstasy. The other is the gentle friendship between piety and protest.

Religious narratives of the past and the present have sometimes been haunted by images of some anxious god whose ego has learned to find safety in power over all others. He finds pleasure in every performance of his own superiority, and his subjects learn that he is most pliable when he feels superior. They may gain more and more favour by humiliating themselves more and more.

 Is this the logic of monastic mortification? Is it a transaction between a god who loves suffering, and subjects who perform it to gain favour? Anyone who ever knew such a hellish court would be praised for renouncing its cowardly exchanges.

St Paul of the Cross doesn’t renounce suffering, nor does he perform it in exchange for favours. There is no sense of transaction here, where one bears suffering to receive something good back. He goes toward suffering because suffering itself carries some secret treasure. Joy, ecstasy, eros even, are somehow intrinsic to the places we avoid.

God, quite unlike the tyrant above, is not some Caesar watching the gladiatorial carnage. Nor does God sit waiting for libations of gloom. For St Paul of the Cross, God has wandered off from whichever throne anyone might expect to find them on. God is hidden where the suffering is, drawn there by love, empathy, solidarity and identification. St Paul empties and impoverishes himself and embraces suffering and humiliation, drawn by love to the God who is drawn by love to the suffering.

St Paul is in love. He doesn’t find joy in spite of suffering, or in recompense for it. That's just where it is for those who love, in a suffering world. He has no desire to find himself. He could not give himself away fast enough. And so the lost paradox is mortification and ecstasy.

This paradox leads to a neglected friendship, between piety and protest, or perhaps, worship and justice, or even prayer and activism. St Paul’s monastic order took vows of poverty and dedicated themselves to works of mercy, caring for the sick and the impoverished. And yet, there are very few words of anger against the forms of injustice that held the world down (though there are indeed a few). The general silence is awkward. I confess that part of me has been disappointed or deflated. I have come to associate compassionate action with anger.

The activism I have known has mostly been about speaking out against the wheels of injustice. It's quite possible to do this from a safe distance, though some have faced conflict, hunger, arrest and so on. St Paul's activism, like St Francis’ or Julian's, leans toward two other priorities: one is spending time caring for those wounded by the wheels of injustice. The other is extracting one's own life from systemic involvement in the wheels of injustice, through vows of poverty and common living. The absence of vocal anger is strange to my cultural sensibilities, and the leaning into a form of life dedicated to a healing commonality with the places of suffering is deeply compelling. In reading the thoughts of St Paul of the Cross, I came to associate this posture—both gentle and also dangerously compassionate—with a kind of prayerful contentment. There is some love at work in him. He is sad often, but his sadness rarely leans toward anger.

Again, one could pass judgement both ways. How could they be silent? Were they not then complicit? On the other hand, are there not questions hanging over a culture where talk is cheap and activism rarely brings people into lived contact, relationship and common life with those who suffer?

There is a feeling of timelessness about monastic patterns of life. They appear to be sat just outside all the sound and the fury. St Paul of the Cross doesn't seem to be at war with anybody, even if his pattern of life undermines so many structures of the world; even if he spends his time with those history has spat out. He seems oddly content in the world, though he stands in such contradiction to it. In the midst of history's storms and carnage, he seems to be sleeping in the rocking boat. This dubious virtue—which we might call xaris in Greek: that is “grace” or “kindness”— seems to spring from a sincerely loving prayerful way. All his ferocity is pointed toward the task of shaping his own life toward openness to suffering, and to solidarity. Is this wise? Is it liveable or sustainable?

To be clear, I don’t think today’s spiritual quests are all pain-averse (though I'm sure some are). I don't think there is a crude flight from suffering across the board. It is, rather, the contemplative view of the self that rings so awkwardly today. I want a centering practice as much as anyone. But the pattern I keep hitting in the writings of St Paul is a pattern of self-relativisation. We might call it mortification, in old speak. Love must know otherness in order to love. Where otherness suffers, love suffers with. I sense that centering and self-relativisation might not be a contradiction so much as a paradox. I also suspect that the first is an outcome of the second, done well.

Now, in any case, there comes a point when circling the matter in words gets me no closer. Here it becomes a matter of prayer, com-passion, and the work that emerges from these.

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If you’ve enjoyed David’s writings, you can also follow his own Substack over here, where he writes frequently on messianism, anarchy & ecology: global village folklore.