confessions of a closet mystic

As a child, she often saw people others could not see. When she told her mother, she was admonished and not believed until the day she saw the strange man in the entry hall of her home. She ran upstairs to tell her mother someone had come and described him. Her mother ran downstairs expecting to see a family member from Germany and there was no one there. Word came later of his death on the day she saw him. As an old woman, sitting on her front porch, she told me that was the day she decided it was too painful to have this vision... this second sight. So she began to choose not to see... not to know. Only in rare circumstances did she break her self-imposed blindness. She was sitting at the supper table one night with her family when she cried out, "Alvin has been wounded!" The telegram came the next day with the news of her son’s injury in London, England during World War II. The night before we received word of my first husband’s death in Viet Nam, she saw him sitting in her living room rocker... mute but present. My grandmother had a painful gift, one she could not understand or manage. She saw no saving grace in the foreknowledge of death’s coming or in the ability to see the unseen.
As a child, I was fascinated with her stories. She spoke of her second sight as a matter of fact. For her, there was no mystery attached to this gift/curse. She could not explain it. It had been a part of her for as far back as she could remember. She could not tell anyone else how to do it... how to practice it and get better...where it came from. It just was. There could not have been a more practical, down to earth, pragmatic, bottom line person than my Grandma. But there it was... a piece of her soul that was mystical, unseen, unspoken of outside the family.
Some of you have been asking me how I know... how I get there... how do I do it. The answer is, I don’t know. Like Grandma, I can tell you my stories. I can show you my path. The way I travel may not be the same route you are taking but we are headed for the same destination. The words I write are only my signposts... nothing more and nothing less. When our paths cross, we can share our discoveries with each other, knowing that our journeys are different. What I write may, I hope will, call out your sacred memories but your path is different from mine, and your calling is yours alone.
This much I do know for certain about my faith experience. I am a mystic. For me, the experience of God flows from a deep well of knowing whose source I cannot name. It has been there since my earliest memories... the blessed assurance that I am not alone in this world or the next... the joy that supports me in times of sorrow and grief... the love that surrounds me in both despair and celebration. Some folks find their major faith experience in practical works... doing good...supporting causes... focusing on the part of Jesus’ ministry to the disenfranchised. That part of my faith flows from my mystical self. I can only do good for a short period of time, emptying myself out, before I need to fill my soul again with the unseen Spirit. If I run on an empty soul tank for too long, I sputter to a halt and am unable to move in body or spirit.
How do I fill my tank? I read. I listen. I watch. I hear. I see. I ask. I touch. I am touched. But most of all, I pray. Like Brother Lawrence in "Practicing the Presence of God", I try to transform my daily life into prayer. Paying the bills (which I hate doing) and praying. Washing the dishes and praying. Driving into town and praying. Feeding the cows and praying. Seeing and hearing the mockingbird sing and praying. Like Anne Lamotte, some days all I can manage is please, please, please and oh, well. Other days the prayers are magnificats. Some days I can pray "This is the day the Lord has made and I will rejoice and be glad in it." Other days I can barely lift my prayers to the ceiling. But whatever the form or feeling that I have in my praying, the act of praying is the single best gift I can give my soul. During that time, I know that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
An old hymn asks the question "E’er you left your room this morning, did you think to pray?" This time of writing in the morning is the beginning of my daily prayers. I give thanks for you... for the gifts you give me when you read and respond... for the hard questions you ask for which I have no answers. For you, I am praying as I write... and for me... and for our world. So, Janet and Don... this is as much of an answer as I have for the question "How do you do it?" Go find your own answers. Pray your prayers that come from your hearts alone. Sing your own song to the One who made you and delights in your creation. Good luck and Godspeed on your journey.