Recently, as the priest of a small parish, I did a burial service at an old countryside cemetery. The drive to the burial was through a beautiful slice of mountainous upstate Pennsylvania. The scenery is spectacular in all seasons, but most especially in Spring when new growth has come upon trees and emerged as a flowered and carpet covering the fields and open spaces. The misty low clouds of the night linger among the mountain ranges even into mid-morning before ascending. The locals don't call this "God's Country" for nothing.
As I drove through the rural landscape I came upon a street sign called "Mystics View." In the span of a nano-second I readied myself for the beautiful view that was surely to follow down the lane of any street so named. But what I saw was jarring; it was the entrance into a very poorly kept trailer home park. Now I have seen quite a number of lower income neighborhoods whose upkeep and landscaping rival the gated communities of Hilton Head Island. But this was not one of them. Not one of the trailers appeared cared for. I wasn't even sure anyone even lived in them anymore. It was collection of plastic and metal; antithetical to the specter of beauty I was anticipating. Mystic's view? Hardly. It seemed that there was an ironic twist at work here.
It later occurred to me that this was not irony but rather a righting of my ideas about mysticism. Apparently, the ethereal ideals I had placed upon mystical writing was in need of grounding. I had placed the work of the mystic within the angelic realm, limited it to the earth's many and varied displays of beauty in every season. Therein lies the evidence of God in the created world... the end. But the true tradition of the mystic is seeing the divine in all manner and conditions of life. The mystic sees not what appears to be there, where there is raw beauty or raw dilapidation, but sees through what is, to expose another place that coexists along side it; "Out beyond right doing and wrong doing there is a field...." (Rumi). The mystic does not judge what is in front of them, but sees with different eyes, employing sight that transcends human understanding to reveal what is hidden.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a kind of mystic tale. The armoire is more then it appears; it is a portal to another place and time. In Harry Potter the children board a train that appears to be like any other to go off to school. But the train, moving at full steam, disappears through a solid wall and emerges in another world, another dimension, the world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. When Dorothy is caught in a tornado she is transported to a place that was as real as her own bed where at the very same time she lay unconscious. Perhaps the dilapidated trailer park too is more then it appears. Perhaps it is a thin place that can only be seen from the mystic's view. Perhaps it is the home of things unseen by those who are blinded by their lack of imagination. The mystic has regained the full faculty of their imagination and from that vantage point translates to us what is just out of sight; what is just beyond our understanding.
Mystics do not place signposts in places where the divine is obvious but rather post signs as to where to view the divine in the unexpected.
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