June 30, 2009

Mystic Village

A common criticism raised against the mystics is that they represent an unsocial type, of religion, they follow personal and individual spiritual enthusiasms, and that they shun the corporate life and institutions of the church or community they are part ofchristian mysticism Yet, as a matter of fact, the relation that does and should exist between personal religion and the corporate life of the church frequently appears in them in a peculiarly intense, a peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives, perhaps, more easily than elsewhere, we may discern the principles which do or should govern the relation of the individual to the community.definition of mysticism

True mystics, often mislabeled as "religious individualists can be viewed as taking personal religion to its optimal power. If we believe his account is true, it means he has had an interaction with the spiritual side of things and and is aware of it. This transcends the typical experience, and looks to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he/she belongs. The mystic does not speak with God as a member of a group but with God as a person. He survives by an immediate knowledge far greater than by belief; by a knowledge possessed in the hours of direct, uninterrupted intercourse with the Transcendent, which he calls 'an union with God'.A certitude was received by the certitude with which he can not be parted with and which is normally not diffused-oversees every consequence of the Universe. Even in his darkest times when he loses his entire sense of spiritual reality, it still continues to support him.

It seems at first that such a personality as his lacks the support generally given by a community of fellow-believers. By the very term “mystic” .we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest that he is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole does not and cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise. I think that much of the distrust with which he is often regarded comes from this sense of his independence of the herd; his apparent separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion, and the further fact that his own methods and results cannot be criticized or checked by those who have not shared them. “I spake as I saw,” said David; and those who did not see can only preserve a respectful or an exasperated silence.

Yet this common opinion is decisively contradicted by history, which shows us, again and again, the great mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human activity the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited together. Although there are those who have managed to escape the churches that they were raised in, many of them ended up attracting others who viewed them as powerful or insightful leaders and leading them to become the centers of their own new groups. If we can try the natural connection of a group of people linking to a network of great value to the server that leads the operation.

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