Of Monks and Mystics

The following is a sermon preached on the Day of Pentecost.

Thanks to Netflix, my kids have discovered the X-Files, the longest running science fiction horror drama on television. The show’s success rested largely on the tension that existed between the two main characters, FBI Special Agents Mulder and Scully; and the tension that always exists between belief and unbelief.  The show is based on the experiences of two agents who work in a highly classified sector of the agency. They investigate the unexplainable: UFO sightings, suspicious deaths, reports of alien abductions and 97 other unsolved cases of involving paranormal phenomena that presses us to ponder the limits of our reality and the seemingly silent borders of our universe. Agent Mulder works from a position of complete belief in extraterrestrial life claiming that his own sister was a victim of alien abduction. His life’s work is to discover a greater truth; hence, the show’s motto:  The truth is out there.  Agent Scully however is a trained forensic scientist. For her there is no truth that cannot be gleaned by scientific deduction, reason and logic. Her role is, at best, to explain all the things Mulder believes to be inexplicable, and at worst, to undermine and debunk his work.  Their tension pulls in people like you and I who are fascinated by the idea of a life force outside our perceptions and who self-identify as either Mulder or Scully.  The stories themselves are merely a backdrop upon which we watch the two agents struggle against their own biases.  So strong is the magnetic bond that sometimes draws them closer together and sometimes caused them to repel one another, that after the show was finally cancelled after nine seasons – 202 shows, two full length movies were made to satisfy fans.

I totally self-identify as Mulder. I’m an ordained Christian minister after all.  The supernatural is the world I inhabit: a world in which the God we pray to and depend on reveals it’s self and purposes in ways that are not exactly straight forward. In fact, everything we know about God is shrouded in mystery and otherworldliness, including angels and archangels, clouds ascending and descending to earth, the otherworldly strength of Samson, a plague that turns rivers to blood, manna falling from heaven, the existence of a dark force of evil, the expulsion of demons, the blind see, the crippled walk, the dead live, Jesus walking on water and passing through locked doors; and this just scratches the surface.  In today’s lessons from Acts Christians around the world recall the sound of rushing wind, fire, and gift of tongues: the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that envelope the disciples who have gathered together on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem. The author of Acts, Luke, describes the scene:  “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filed the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.  All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, and the Spirit gave them ability.”  The crowds were bewildered, of course, because each of those gathered there could hear of God’s deeds of power in their native tongues, about 15 different languages by my count.

And so I’m amused when I’m asked if I believed in the supernatural.  It seems somehow surprising when I express my openness to such phenomenon.  And yet, how could it be otherwise, for me or for you?  God calls us to gradually move closer to Mulder’s understanding of life as complete mystery, to be open to possibilities far beyond our understanding, working ourselves free from Scully’s earthbound securities and limitations.  Commentator, David Gushee  notes that “the semi-collapse of Enlightment orthodoxy, with its elevation of reason and science as the only paths to true knowledge of the world, has opened the door to a recovery of a kind of pre/post Enlightenment religiosity in which once again people are open to, and therefore experience, “signs and wonders.”  This being the case, it should be no surprise to us that the fastest growing expression of Christianity in the global church is Pentecostalism.  I saw this for myself on my two trips to Brazil, where Pentecostal churches set up in busy shopping districts are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Worship services run all day and late into the night: ecstatic preaching, praying in tongues, the slaying of the spirit, teaching and healing without ceasing, and crowds whose songs of praise pour out ino the streets.  It bears no comparison to the tranquil, cerebral, ordered worship we understand in the Anglican Church.  And yet my personal understanding of the events recorded in Acts are made all the more real having witnessed the Pentecostal expression of our common faith in a place very far from here. 

This week I had the opportunity to hear one of my colleagues speak of her former life in a charismatic church.  While now an Episcopal priest she said that she continues to speak and to pray in tongues.  And I learned that there is a difference between praying and speaking in tongues; apparently they serve two different purposes, though I admit I could not follow the explanation for this.  Regardless, for them and for us, it all comes down to that one, singular question raised from the bewildered crowd in Jerusalem: What does this mean?

To get at the answer, we must understand the Christian life as a journey. And as we move through this journey, at any given time we can locate ourselves on certain points of the Mulder/Scully spectrum.  While as religious people we are, by definition, open to the mysteries of faith, that is, the work of the divine broadly, or the work of the Spirit in particular, how we engage this belief is where the rubber hits the road, as it were. 

The Feast of Pentecost, with its emphasis on the supernatural aspects of the divine invite believers to understand that a sustainable relationship with God requires a certain degree of withdrawal from things worldly.  For example, when Jesus speaks against the rich, I do not believe it is money in itself he finds objectionable, but the way in which money and all that can be bought with it tend to keep people strongly attached to those things. 

In Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics, author Marsha Sinetar examines the lives of hundreds of people in our own time who have responded to their spiritual experiences in two distinct expressions.  Explaining how she identifies the many people she has interviewed as either monk or mystic, she writes: "... I call the monk one who had detached emotionally from a known, familiar and comfortable way of life in order to embark on an uncharted inner journey. The monk responds to an inner call, reinterprets his/her basic way of being in the world - which might include reinterpreting the way s/he relates to others, work, marriage, Church or other organizational status, and even includes a renewed definition of self and his/her basic place in the scheme of things….

Of those who tend to identify as monks she says:  “In the silence and simplicity of their lives, monks learn to learn to their persistent, interior voice of discontent.  By abandoning worldly distractions, by assuming a conversion of manners, their newly structured life forces them into intimate and growing relationship with their inner ‘voice.’ Their absorption with this voice, their heightened listening powers, is not usually possible in the distracting environment of the world.  Thus various vows cultivate and strengthen a deep posture of inner awareness….[But] anyone who develops this critical, objective and conceptual sense in relation to society can, in the broadest sense, be called a monk.” 

Likewise, Sinetare identifies a life that tends toward the mystic in this way:  The mystic’s life-altering path always results in a radical dropping away of the former self and a restructuring of self in the discernment of God.  Gradually or suddenly the mystic relates differently to others, abandons social and material interests in favor of another realm, the Transcendent…. Alteration might range from the seemingly minor ego-bruising choices to the complete surrender of key comforts, securities or even life itself.  Consider Gandhi, who time and again put himself into harm’s way in order to express the Truth or Julian of Norwich, a Christian contemplative who lived and wrote in a tiny cell over the course of her adult life. … Mystics are the ones who hunger and thirst after righteousness, as the Bible puts it, the ones who yearn for continued or increased union with the Divine they themselves feel is real -- the Reality that heals and makes all things new again.... Unlike those I call monks, who wouldn't call themselves that, the mystics always knows that's what they are." 

Sinetar’s work provides ordinary people like you and I a venue in which to identify our tendencies toward monk or mystic in our own very personal spiritual journeys.  This is the work of the Holy Spirit within us, evermore calling us deeper into the mystery of the divine and pulling us farther away from the things of this world that are fleeting and temporary, dull and ultimately meaningless.  Do you feel that in your own life you are moving to one of these places?  Does silence and contemplation appeal far more than even the best of companionship?  Do you feel yourself increasingly longing to know God fully and completely and have contemplated sacrifices of material security in order to pursue this persistent calling?  Have you found that for all you have achieved or gain or earned that all is meaningless without God to give it purpose?  Do you secretly dream of the simplicity of the monk’s life and consciously work to claim a piece of that for yourself?  Are you like a sponge that perpetually drinks in all things spiritual and recognize that you are moving farther and farther into an understanding of life that no longer allows you to see even the minutest aspects apart from the divine?  Do you find yourself often asking, “What does this mean?”

I believe that regardless of how we experience it, the spirit of God is alive and at work both in us and in the world around us, in ways seen and unseen.  And I believe that it is the Holy Spirit that speaks wisdom to us as we navigate a world of foolishness.  I believe that on that Pentecost Day the world, in all its languages, heard that Jesus is Lord, and that God is Love.  I believe that we are called into a life that is more mysterious than obvious; that our various gifts and vocations call us deeper into that mystery; that prayer and contemplation, and degrees of sacrifice and separation are the ways and means by which we get to that place we are going.  And I am certain that at the end of our journey we will finally know what all this means.