Recently I was asked to participate in an online class discussion on interfaith dialogue for a course on “religion and cultures”1 offered through North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago. The students had read an excerpt from my book Unteachable Lessons and were now presenting me with questions, most of which concerned best practices in interfaith dialogue. The course instructor, Dr. Paul de Neui, asked the students to create questions for me and submitted them to me to get my response. I was impressed by how thoughtful the questions were, and asked the instructor if I could use them to document this conversation on my Substack. With that permission granted, here are the questions (and my responses) for your perusal.

How does one break through the common sentiment that politics and religion have no place in polite conversation?

I think it’s helpful to keep in mind that this “common sentiment” seems to be intertwined with a certain measure of social privilege. We often avoid talking about religion or politics just to avoid conflict, especially when we have the kind of privilege that enables us to just opt out. I don’t think there’s any real benefit in pushing someone to have a conversation they don’t want to have, whether on religion or politics or finance. I also don’t think much is to be gained by trying to debate someone whose mind is made up, especially when they hold views contrary to ours. But I think if we can see that the prohibition on these discussions primarily benefits those who are privileged, then we are more at liberty to engage in these conversations ourselves, no matter how messy they might be.

Put another way: if someone doesn’t want to engage with you in a conversation about politics or religion, there could be a variety of reasons besides just social convention. They might not trust you. They might not see any point in getting embroiled in a debate or argument. If you want to share your faith with such a person, I invite you to consider the classic idea attributed to Francis of Assisi: “preach the good news at all times, but only use words when you have to.” In other words: don’t talk about the love of God or Christ: embody it.

When you have observed instances of interfaith dialogue breaking down is there a commonality you can note? For instance, does the dialogue cease to happen based on an unwillingness to proceed from one or more parties? Or maybe wrong intentions? Perhaps miscommunication due to cultural misunderstanding or language barrier?

I’m going to answer this as a Christian, not only because the audience I’m speaking to is a Christian audience but also because the single biggest problem I have seen in the breakdown of interfaith conversations has been bad faith among Christians: in other words, Christians who pretend to have a different agenda than what they really do. “I’m only here to learn about you” but really I want to get you to come to my church. That just smells bad and if people of other faiths did that to us, we would naturally find it offensive, but again, since I’m speaking as a Christian to other Christians I mainly want us to be mindful of our foibles. It’s the old “take the log out of your eye first” principle.

So what I have observed causing interfaith dialogue to break down: dishonesty and bad faith. If the only reason you want to have a conversation with a person whose faith is different from yours is to show them why your faith is the “true” faith, be aware: this is not interfaith dialogue; it’s proselytizing. So be honest. But then don’t be surprised if you have a hard time finding dialogue partners.

What is a mistake you made when entering an interfaith space and what did you learn from it?

One mistake I made was to soft-pedal my own faith identity as a Christian. That may seem paradoxical based on my strong message that Christians shouldn’t proselytize; but I’m actually not saying “don’t proselytize,” I’m saying, “don’t pretend you’re not proselytizing if that’s what you really want to do.” Likewise, even if you have no intention of proselytizing, good interfaith dialogue requires authenticity: so if you are a Christian, then don’t pretend otherwise, don’t apologize for what you believe, and don’t pretend to believe something other than what you actually do. Be real and be honest: just don’t be a jerk about it! You can be authentically Christian without attacking the other person’s faith or suggesting non-Christians are rejected by God, etc. Keep the focus on your own faith, your own experience, your own values and doctrines, and if the other person wants to engage with you then do so (but if they don’t want to engage, respect that as well. Interfaith dialogue, like physical intimacy, requires consent: no means no).

Western culture shies away from the type of long-term relationships required to connect and authentically dialogue with Eastern faith traditions, what can you suggest to us to help us recognize this and pursue these dialogical relationships?

I’m not sure I agree that Western culture shies away from long-term relationships — at least, not necessarily. Technology, individualism, late-stage capitalism, artificial intelligence, social media: there are lots of things in our society that can be used to undermine our capacity for meaningful, long-term relationships. But if we are willing to make meaningful relationships a priority in our lives, there are steps we can take to make it happen (or at least, make it more likely to happen). But to your question: I think to help us recognize the value of meaningful and sustainable relationships, we need to be modeling such relationships for one another whenever we can. Hopefully faith communities can be “labs” where long-term relationships can be fostered. We need to make a commitment to this on an individual level, but then also seek out communities where meaningful relationships are valued and hopefully nurtured.

Yes, long-term relationships can be a help to meaningful interfaith dialogue, but we also need to recognize that long-lasting relationships are valuable in their own right, and therefore are worth pursuing for no other reason than their intrinsic value.

How do you navigate the elephant in the room that all religions are incompatible with each other due to competing truth claims? Do you avoid it, soft-pedal it, redefine it, etc?

Why not simply accept it? If we recognize that there is a level on which religious truth claims will always bump up against each other, then we can have more honest and hopefully more constructive dialogue. I get it that many Christians might see it as a problem that competing truth claims exist, with the resulting incompatibility that means people from different religious backgrounds will never fully see eye to eye. But not all Christians consider this a problem nor do all adherents of other faiths. For some people, it is a positive thing that our creator has fashioned a world of such diversity. With this approach, the diversity of religions is not a problem to be lamented, but a reality to be celebrated.

In a diverse society like ours, what does effective interfaith engagement look like on a day-to-day level for believers?

I don’t think there’s a “one size fits all” answer to this question. Interfaith engagement can take on different forms depending on the person’s interest, knowledge, and background. Some may simply be happy learning about different faiths as a way to be informed in today’s world. Others might want to participate in shared activities, such as interfaith service projects (like building a Habitat for Humanity house together); still others might want to get involved in the academic study of comparative theology or religious diversity. The question is, finding a way of interacting with people from faiths other than your own in a way that works for you.

How do you handle situations where there is strong disagreement without damaging the relationship?

This question is bigger than just interfaith dialogue. How do we handle political disagreement, or conflict in marriage, or any other situation where people in some sort of relationship have to navigate significant differences? The short answer seems to me to be, “don’t be a jerk.” But of course that also means: be kind, be respectful, listen to one another, use “I” statements, refrain from the temptation to judge the other person or explain to them why you think they’re wrong, and so forth. Fortunately, there are resources available to help people navigate having conversations on difficult topics, and perhaps anyone who is serious about interfaith dialogue needs to become familiar with best practices for constructive dialogue. It is possible to talk about significant differences without destroying the relationship, it just takes a commitment to the relationship and a willingness to learn the necessary skills.

Within interfaith dialogue, where do you draw the line? Where do you draw the line between courageous conversation and offense?

I rather think this is a false dichotomy. One can be offensive without being particularly courageous — and vice versa. There’s nothing wrong, even in polite society, with disagreeing with one another or acknowledging that we have different values and see the world in different ways. The question is, can we share such convictions without attacking or denigrating those with whom we disagree? Are we willing to express what we hold to be true, and offer an equal willingness to listen to those who hold contrary views? That’s a problem I’ve seen among too many Christians: an insistence on dominating the conversation and refusing to offer any kind of respect toward those who disagree. Respect must be earned, and if we want others to respect us, we earn that respect by showing a similar courtesy toward them. So to me, the question is not “what’s the line separating courage and offense,” but rather “what’s the line separating kindness, respect and civility from the lack thereof?” If Christians don’t want to be offensive when sharing what we believe, we need to practice empathy, respect, goodwill, civility, and a genuine willingness to dialogue, which means, among other things, a commitment to listening as eagerly as we speak.

How has interfaith dialogue shaped your understanding of God and what is one way that interfaith engagement shaped your faith?

Interfaith dialogue has certainly deepened my faith, even though in ways that theological exclusivists would probably find alarming. I was raised a conservative Lutheran and then spent some time immersed in a non-denominational charismatic community, so in those contexts I was taught that God is resolutely opposed to any type of non-Christian religion or spirituality, and that as Christians it was our responsibility to bring others to Christ… or else. Even before I became engaged in interfaith work, I struggled with this image of God—it seemed inherently contradictory that a God of love and mercy would be so wasteful as to throw away most of his creation simply because they failed to conform to a particular cultural religious tradition.

I would say that interfaith work, and encountering sincere and ethically mature adherents of other faiths, helped me to more quickly abandon what I now believe to be a very toxic image of God. Over time, I came to understand that many Christians use Christian thinking to deconstruct the dominating/punishing God, but for me, interfaith work helped me on that journey. So I still believe that God wants to heal us of our sin and injustice, but I no longer equate holiness and sin with adherence to Christianity versus adherence to other faiths. I see sin not in terms of cultural purity but in terms of healthy or toxic human relationships. To hate another person is a sin, and to fear another person is, at least, a fault that needs to be healed. Ironically, many Christians seem to react to non-Christians (especially Muslims, but really all non-Christians) with either hatred or fear. This is what needs to be healed — not the fact that religious diversity exists.

What challenges do you consistently run into when it comes to interfaith dialogue? What are some ways that we can avoid those challenges? What are some ways that one can start interfaith dialogue if they have never done it before?

Alan Race’s taxonomy of religious exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism (which I discovered through the amazing work of Perry Schmidt-Leukel) has been very helpful for me to understand both the promise and the challenge of interreligious dialogue, interfaith encounters, and inter-spirituality. To answer your question, I’d say the most common challenge I run into is the hostility or opposition to interfaith dialogue that comes from the exclusivists and even the inclusivists. That is what tends to undermine this kind of work. As for what can we do to avoid this challenge: my thought would be for churches and other faith communities to work harder to promote a truly pluralist theology. But we all know that ideological purity does not exist, and trying to enforce a kind of theological conformity would just create as many problems as it solved. So I don’t know that I have a very promising answer to your question. I think those who feel called to interfaith dialogue need to keep doing it, and hopefully the culture of Christianity and the other faiths will move toward mutual respect over time.

As for how a beginner can get started in interfaith dialogue, I would recommend getting involved with interfaith initiatives at the community level. For example, here in Atlanta we have a number of organizations dedicated to promoting interfaith dialogue and understanding, including Interfaith Atlanta (formerly Faith Alliance of Metro Atlanta / FAMA), Interfaith Community Initiatives (ICI), Georgia Interfaith Power & Light (GIPL), the Interfaith Children’s Movement of Georgia (ICM), and the Georgia Interfaith Public Policy Center (GIPPC). And those are just the ones I’m aware of! Frankly, most churches simply don’t teach us how to do interfaith dialogue well, so the best bet for those interested in this work is to get involved with nonsectarian organizations where we can learn best practices. There’s also national or international organizations like the Parliament of World Religions or Spiritual Directors International; they may or may not have a local presence that you could plug into.

You’ve written several books on Celtic spirituality. Can you share a little more about the Celtic tradition and how this might be a form of Christianity that leans into the “pre-Christian spiritualities of Europe,” and comment on how we can learn from this tradition as Jesus followers?

What’s interesting about Christianity in the Celtic lands (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, etc.) is that it marked the first time that Christianity traveled beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire, at least in the west. So it marked an opportunity for the teachings of Jesus to be received by people who were not under the thrall of an imperial government. And while the literature of early Celtic Christianity can still feel very dualistic to us today, and still seems to be geared toward a very patriarchal and authoritarian understanding of God, what emerges over time is a beautiful expression of spirituality that is deeply mystical, celebratory of nature, communitarian, and anchored in story more so than in doctrine or theology. I don’t want to overstate it, and some scholars question the whole idea of “Celtic Christianity” as distinct from Christianity in general, but in our time it has come to represent a way of following Jesus that is more holistic, balanced, optimistic, and ecological. If nothing else, it is a reminder that it is impossible to separate our spiritual lives from our cultural context, but we need to remember that culture is not the same thing as spirit, and sometimes what we may chafe against in religion or spirituality might simply reflect the limitations of our culture. We can work to make culture better without having to throw spirituality under the bus.

Regarding your book Read the Bible like a Mystic. I am curious to understand more about how to read the Bible like a mystic and then how does one know when you’re truly encountering God in Scripture versus just your own thoughts or interpretations?

Well, to understand more about how to read the Bible like a mystic, please read my book! 😇 But to summarize, I’d say we need to learn how to read the Bible less like a legal document (or a policy manual) and more like a love letter, designed to foster intimacy and build a meaningful and lasting relationship. And the mystics can be trusted guides in this particular process.

Regarding how to know when we are truly encountering God in scripture (or in any aspect of our lives) versus merely having a subjective, imaginative experience, this of course is a question for discernment, and the mystics have long been concerned about bringing a wise, discerning heart to the question of how to evaluate and understand our experience of God. I think when it comes to discernment, it’s best not to go it alone: work with a trusted spiritual director or soul friend, and/or a peer group, prayer circle, or some other intimate setting with people we trust, to whom we can be accountable about both our sense of encounter with God, and also our spiritual blind spots. I do believe that the Spirit of Love wants to be felt and known in our lives; we just need some due diligence in sorting out what is an authentic sense of the loving presence, versus what can be just the dance of our ego. It’s a question of “trust and verify” — and it is in relationship with co-discerners that we can best do this work.

In the article we read (a chapter from Unteachable Lessons), you mentioned that if Christians were willing to look towards the riches of our own contemplative tradition, we might not need to look to other faiths for insights about how to connect with God in grounded, contemplative ways. Does this mean to you that the Christian who is well-versed and satisfied in Christian contemplative practices would not have as much to gain from interfaith dialogue?

Not at all. But I do think many people have abandoned Christianity out of a mistaken idea that other faiths will give them something that Christianity can’t. And in the years since I wrote that article, I’ll confess I’ve become more pessimistic about Christianity, as a culture, being biased against contemplative spirituality, which I think is not only the church’s fault but also very much the fault of Western culture, from Roman imperialism to modern capitalism. So, while I would still hold that Christian contemplative practice is just as full and rich as any practice found in other faith traditions, I have become less judgmental of Christians who learn from other traditions; indeed, I do that very much myself now. And I think there’s a place and a benefit for interfaith dialogue even for those who feel completely grounded and happy in the practice of Christian spirituality and have no desire to practice any other tradition. There’s still the benefit of being good neighbors and discovering ways we can work together for the benefit of all.

What factors do you think lead to the most fruitful interfaith conversations?

Curiosity is important. Trust — in God, and in the beauty of diverse cultures. No matter how high our theology of sin, it should remain subordinate to an even higher view of human beings created in God’s image.

But most important of all is a genuine desire to be in relationship: to “love our neighbors as ourselves.” We have to have enough confidence that we can meet them authentically and honestly, that they will accept us for who we are, but that means we also have to make a best-faith effort to accept them for who they are, and not for whom we think they should be. Like any other relationship, approaching the other person with an appreciative curiosity rather than a tendency to criticize or judge will go a long way toward fostering a fruitful conversation.

From the course instructor: What is your position when entering interfaith dialogue in regards to people from other faiths believing in Jesus Christ as Lord and God and becoming Christians as a result of the dialogue?

Do you take the “fulfillment” position (for example, no need to change, just become the best Buddhist (or whatever you are now) that you can be)? Or do you take the opportunity during the dialogue to explain to someone who is interested how to pursue faith in Christ even further (i.e. introduce them into that relationship)? Or do you completely divorce the concept of conversion from your thinking when engaged in interfaith dialogue?

If it is the latter, how do you reconcile that with the instruction to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that is in you?”

I spent years working in a neighborhood church supporting adults who were preparing to be baptized or confirmed, so I am not at all averse to sharing my faith or inviting others to become followers of Jesus. But especially when it comes to interfaith dialogue, I believe there is a danger: when our prime reason for interacting with others is to challenge or convert them, that undermines the clear teaching of Jesus that we are commanded to love them. How can we express a truly supportive and compassionate love, if we are bringing a hidden agenda to the relationship? And if we don’t have an agenda — in other words, we trust the person to respond to the Spirit in their hearts on their terms, without any influence on our part — then why bring up the question of conversion at all? In other words, if someone wants to follow Jesus, they can ask for help from us; and until then, we “share the gospel” through our love, not our words.

Relating to someone only for the purpose of wanting to share the gospel with them is a type of spiritual narcissism, is it not? And we have to ask, what does this say about our belief in God, and our understanding of how God deals with God’s own creation — that we truly believe someone is “not okay” unless they conform to our religion? Yuck. So, we need to do a lot of careful introspection here, so that we are clear that our engagement with others is truly anchored in love, and not some sneaky attempt to control. Let the Spirit be not only our guide but their guide. And if you want to share your faith with someone for the purpose of them joining your faith community, trust that if God really wants us to help people change their religion, God will send such people our way: we don’t have to drum up business!

And in summary, are you inclusivist, exclusivist, or pluralist? And if so or if not, how would you define and explain your position?

Definitely a pluralist. Which for me is an outgrowth both of my own sense of God as well as my experience of other people. “God is love,” as the first letter of John bluntly states. So I try to be loving as best I can in all my relationships. When it comes to interfaith dialogue and inter-spirituality, I believe the pluralist position is the most loving. So that’s what I go with.

A deep bow of gratitude to Dr. de Neui and the students in this “Religion and Cultures” course for reading my writing, inviting me to be in dialogue, and engaging with my ideas. I certainly enjoyed thinking about and answering these thoughtful questions.

I will not judge you if you don’t believe in God.
Please tell me the ways you express love in your life.

~

I will not reject you if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ.
Please tell me how you show compassion for others.

~

I will not condemn you if you don’t believe in the indwelling Spirit.
Please tell me how you manifest resilience and perseverance.

~

I will not scorn you if you don’t believe in the Bible.
Please tell me how you appreciate the wisdom of the past.

~

I will not shame you if you don’t believe in the Fall of Humankind.
Please tell me how you cope with our imperfect world.

~

I will not shun you if you don’t believe in the Cross.
Please tell me how you foster courage and humility.

~

I will not disdain you if you don’t believe in Salvation.
Please tell me the ways in which you express deep gratitude.

~

I will not ostracize you if you don’t believe in the Church.
Please tell me how you participate in community.

~

I will not disapprove of you if you don’t believe in the Sacraments.
Please tell me all the ways you nurture yourself and others.

~

I will not criticize you if you don’t believe in Holiness.
Please tell me how you safeguard your honor and integrity.

~

I will not reproach you if you don’t believe in the Last Judgment.
Please tell me how you work for justice, fairness, and equality.

~

I will not pity you if you don’t believe in Heaven.
Please join me in cultivating a life filled with wonder and awe.

This poem was inspired by a talk I gave at a retreat recently, where I told the retreatants I didn’t really care if people believed in God, so much as I hoped they believed in love. After giving it some thought, I realized that the older I get, and more I embrace and appreciate the wisdom of mystical traditions from around the world, the less I am worried about such things as orthodoxy, sound doctrine, or “believing the right things.” Jesus instructed his followers not to judge others — and yet Christians often are quite the judgmental bunch, especially toward those who don’t believe as we do. So at the risk of scandalizing those who have strict boundaries around their faith, I hope this poem makes it clear how I want to relate to society at large. Just because I refuse to judge others on their beliefs, don’t assume that means I don’t have convictions of my own. I hope these are beliefs that all people of good will can share.

My father lived from 1923 to 2013, dying just a few months before his 90th birthday. A child of the Great Depression, a veteran of World War II who also saw active duty in Vietnam, he was very much a man of his times: of the twentieth century. Although born into a family that was nominally Methodist (that came from my grandmother; the McColmans were Scottish and therefore Presbyterian), religion wasn’t much a part of the first half of his life; as a boy I remember him talking about attending a Protestant service at the military chapel before I was born, so that would have been sometime in the 1950s; dad wasn’t a regular churchgoer by any stretch, but this was either Christmas or Easter and I think mom wanted to observe the holiday. So the family gathered together, went off to church — which, of course, was packed — and sat through a sermon where the Air Force chaplain shamed all the visitors for just being “Christmas and Easter” Christians. Furious, Dad refused to darken the door of a church again except for weddings and funerals, and kept that promise for about twenty years.

When I was in sixth grade, I participated in my school’s Ecology Club, which had been formed in the wake of the first Earth Day celebration in 1970. One of the teachers who sponsored the club turned out to be a pastor’s wife; her husband was the minister at a small Lutheran Church in our neighborhood. My mom was raised Lutheran, and when I asked if we could go to church she managed to talk dad into getting over his decades-old anger and give religion another try. Time must have healed him, for soon we joined the church — and he, at the age of 49, was baptized (although to be fair, to the end of his life he found it profoundly annoying when a minister at Christmas or Easter was anything but kind and welcoming to the visitors, which of course I think was splendidly good theology on his part).

Dad became a pillar of the church, eventually serving on the church council and teaching Sunday School to both youth and adults. Mom’s and his ashes are interred at the columbarium at that church. He is a wonderful example of someone with almost no religious upbringing who had a decided bias against institutional religion, but went on to accept the teachings of mainline Protestant Christianity and even organized the second half of his life around his newfound faith.

But my dad was still a product of his times. And one quality that he carried with him steadily over all the years I knew him: he respected science, and insisted that his faith be reasonable and consistent with a scientific worldview.

And remember his times encompassed the 20th century. No quantum physics weirdness for him. Dad’s way of seeing the world was much more shaped by Isaac Newton than Albert Einstein; he loved the space program and the miracles of modern medicine and appreciated how science and math made the technology of flight possible; but I never saw that he was much interested in questions like how human consciousness shapes reality, or why writers like Fritjof Capra or Gary Zukav or Michael Talbot built their reputation on exploring the interface between Western science and Eastern mysticism.

In other words, my dad was a no-nonsense kind of guy, and this attitude extended not only to how he understood science, but also how he understood religion and spirituality.

By the time the first edition of my Big Book of Christian Mysticism was published (2010), dad was already a martyr to the dementia that would ultimately take his life. So we never had an opportunity to talk about my book, or for me to learn what he liked (and didn’t like) about it. But I can guess. He was an introvert, and a very caring and compassionate man, so I doubt if he would have readily criticized it to my face. But if I were able to get him to lower his guard, I can imagine he would ultimately confess that it just didn’t make much sense to him. If I tried to explain it to him, I imagine he would have listened to me with the kindness of a dad, but ultimately he would stick to his more practical, logical approach to life.

I may be projecting here (and he’s not around to defend himself), but I have a pretty strong hunch that, as deep as my dad’s faith ultimately was, nevertheless he would have thought mysticism ultimately just didn’t make much sense.

What is mysticism, and why is it controversial?

Is mysticism nonsense? Before we take this on, let me explain what I mean by mysticism. Although I appreciate all forms of mystical spirituality from around the world, my approach is informed primarily by western Christian spirituality. In this context, I define mysticism (which on one level can never be “defined”) as the spiritual experience of living in the mystery of the love of God.1

So mysticism is many things, but for the purpose of this essay, one way to understand it is an experiential spirituality that can involve a sense of encountering a loving presence that people of faith call “God.”2

Back to my question. Is this nonsense? One does not have to look hard to find philosophers or psychologists or even religious figures themselves who dismiss the mystical as incoherent,

Take, for example, British philosopher A.J. Ayer (1910–1989), who offers this nugget in his book Language, Truth and Logic:

If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it.3

So much for the mystery of ineffability! Meanwhile, Albert Ellis (1913–2007), the psychotherapist who founded cognitive behavioral therapy, was not only a noted atheist but also a firm critic of mysticism. He was the author of a scholarly article published in 1977 titled, “Why ‘Scientific’ Professionals Believe Mystical Nonsense,”4 in which he argued that psychologists and other scientists who accept the language and worldview of mysticism were therefore deficient in their ability to think logically.

Even religious professionals joined in on the fun, as evidenced by Saul Lieberman (1898–1983), a respected Jewish scholar and seminary professor; as a scholar, Lieberman adhered to historical criticism and therefore had little patience for metaphysical language or magical thinking. He is famous for introductory remarks he supposedly made when presenting the Kabbalistic scholar Gershom Scholem at a lecture at the Jewish Theological Seminary: “Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is science.” One might think that a Bible scholar would be a friend of mysticism: but with friends like these, who needs enemies?

Notice that all three of these quotations come from men who lived roughly the same time as my dad. And while dad was not a distinguished academic (he graduated from flight school, not college), he nevertheless, as best I could tell, shared their opinion that if you can’t prove it, then the likelihood that it is simply nonsense is pretty great.

Making sense of mysticism

The reason I am exploring this topic is not so much because I want to make sense of why my dad and I saw the world in such different ways (although that is certainly a fascinating question); rather, I got to thinking about this question recently when I was looking at chapter 2 of The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism which is called “The Mute Mystery: Making Sense of Mysticism.” The title alone of that chapter left me with this obvious question: can we make sense out of something that is often derided as nonsense (whether fairly or unfairly)?

It seems to me that there are (at least) two ways to approach this question. The first way might be the more pointless: can we make the case that mysticism is actually reasonable and logical, so much so that even the skeptics like Ellis and Ayer and Lieberman would have to admit that they were wrong?

I am not interested in debating those whose minds are made up (that mysticism, or any kind of subjective spiritual experience, is nonsense). To accept that mysticism (or really, any type of spirituality) is reasonable or logical requires accepting a way of seeing the world that many scientifically-minded people simply will not consider. It requires not only accepting, but trusting, that intuition, mythology, subjective experience, and ways of thinking or seeing that pre-date the rise of modern science have at least some value in terms of giving life meaning, purpose, and beauty. Thankfully, many scientifically-minded people do keep an open mind about such things, even if they believe that science is better than religion at explaining many things (and frankly, I would agree; if I am going to have surgery, I want my physician to be a scientist, not just a daydreamer). In his book The Marriage of Sense and Spirit, Ken Wilber offers an eloquent defense of this way of understanding science and spirituality as complementary ways of knowing and understanding life and our place in the cosmos. It’s important for both science and spirituality to stay in their lanes: but it’s possible to have a scientific appreciation of the natural world paired with a deeply mystical approach to the meaning of life as found within. And I’ll admit, those who advocate for spirituality don’t always stay in our lane — but to the extent that we keep mysticism as a contemplative practice rather than a pseudo-science, I believe we are acting with integrity.

This is where I think my dad landed in the second half of his life, and also how I try to approach the encounter between science and spirituality. But, to a convinced “hard atheist” such arguments make little sense, simply because their overall worldview seems to be strictly empirical and materialistic. I can respect that, but again, my purpose in writing this article is not to get into a philosophical debate. So from here on out, I’m speaking not to those who scoff at mysticism for being irrational, but rather to those who, like me, find meaning in the mystical life even though we don’t expect it to be a “scientific” spirituality.

Which leads me to the second way of approaching my question. Can we make sense out of mysticism, as something that is often derided as nonsense (whether fairly or unfairly)? If this question is being asked of those of us who already are disposed to accept and appreciate the worldview of mysticism, then the question takes on a different sensibility (pardon the pun). In other words, it’s no longer about defending mysticism, and has now become about the best way for us to understand mysticism. That’s the spirit in which I wrote my chapter on “making sense of mysticism,” and the point I am hoping to make now.

For me, making sense of mysticism is not about making mysticism logically defensible — I don’t think that’s possible. By its very nature, mysticism invites us into a place beyond the power and limitation of human logic. You either accept it on faith, or you reject it. It’s your choice, and I respect you for being true to your own convictions. No harm, no foul.

To make sense of mysticism, make mysticism sensible

But for those of us who do accept mysticism on faith — who see it as a kind of poetics of the soul that offers us a pathway of meaning, a sense of spiritual purpose, and a tradition that can help us make sense of our inner experience — then this question “Can mysticism make sense” is less about eliminating nonsense and more about affirming mysticism as an embodied (i.e., sensory) experience.

In other words, to make sense of mysticism, we need to find a way to “locate” mysticism in our sensory experience. It’s not just an idea in our minds, but rather it becomes a way of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, even tasting. Mysticism becomes an “interpretive filter” that we use to discern the spiritual value of the things we see, hear, touch, etc. It is tied in with Julian of Norwich’s principle: “The fullness of joy is to behold God in all,” or Ignatius of Loyola’s instruction for us to “find God in all things” or even St. Benedict, who said “we believe the divine presence is everywhere” — compare that to Thomas Merton, who almost 1,500 years later proclaimed “the gate of heaven is everywhere.”5

To make sense of mysticism means to accept the idea that nature, and the human body, and our most down-to-earth experiences, are not separate from God, or heaven, or angelic presence. This is not about abandoning logic or reason, but it is about daring to believe that we can see (hear, touch, etc.) the ordinary material world through a lens of wonder and ecstasy and deeply embedded joy. A sensible mysticism lets science be science, and lets reason and logic preside over the empirical world. But without refuting or rejecting the wisdom of science, a sensible mysticism always says “and there’s more.” There’s more hope. There’s more meaning. There’s more purpose. There’s more beauty. There’s more justice. There’s more ecstasy. There’s more peace. There’s more joy.

There’s more God. There’s more life. There’s more love. And there’s more even beyond the boundaries of life and death.

Sensible mysticism does not compete with reason. But it does invite us to consider that even the most advanced articulation of human logic cannot exhaust the splendor of divine presence. God always means there’s more than meets the eye.

It’s interesting to write this essay in 2026, at a time when many young people — even those who reject institutional religion — want spiritual meaning in their lives, and living mystics like the Dalai Lama or Richard Rohr are more popular than ever. My dad’s generation was uncomfortable with mysticism, but the generations that have come after mine seem to be increasingly open to mysticism having a place in life — even a life that respects science. I hope we can, as a society, continue to explore how to marry empirical logic with contemplative wonder. It seems to me this would make for a powerful approach to life indeed.

Note: Today’s Substack post is the transcript of a sermon I preached at Unity Atlanta Church on Sunday, April 19, 2026.

Hi friends. It’s so good to be here today. I believe the last time I visited Unity Atlanta was in the summer of 2019 — almost seven years ago now! Boy, hasn’t the world gone through some pretty radical transformations since then? COVID, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran… the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the first humans to travel to the moon in fifty years, it’s fascinating how different the world feels.

But I want to comment on something challenging about these times we find ourselves in. What I find particularly thought-provoking — and what inspired today’s message — is something I’ve learned from following research polls like the Gallup Poll and the Pew Research Center. The polls pretty consistently show that Americans are less hopeful today than we were seven to ten years ago—significantly less hopeful. Fewer people believe that their lives will get better in the next few years. More people have lost faith in our institutions like government, religion, or big business. I know there’s always going to be fluctuations in the mood of the general public, but it seems that we are in the midst of a heartbreaking trend here, and one that I think people of faith ought to be paying attention to.

Now, it would be very easy for me to wade into political waters here, but I want to remain mindful that we are gathered here as a spiritual, not a political, community. So I don’t want to spend a lot of time debating about why people seem to be losing hope. Based on the polls, it appears that the turn toward cynicism and even despair that many of our fellow Americans are experiencing is happening across the political spectrum. This is something far deeper than a political issue, it is a spiritual issue. And it requires a spiritual response.

But first, a message from our Buddhist friends.

Did you know that Buddhists — well, not all Buddhists I suppose, but at least some Buddhists — are suspicious of hope? Yes, it’s true. I remember the first time I stumbled across this, in an interview with the wonderful Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. She has written a number of amazing books, but here she was saying that she wasn’t very big on hope. I kind of wrinkled my nose like I had just smelled something unpleasant, but thankfully I did go ahead and read the interview, and I’m glad I did. Her gripe was not really with hope in itself, but rather with how people use hope — or should I say, misuse hope. You see, hope is always oriented toward the future. It makes sense, after all: we hope that tomorrow will be better than today. But this means that hope can actually distract us from the present, beguiling us into placing faith into something that does not yet exist, which can result in us ignoring what the present is asking of us, right here and right now.

It’s like the story of the very pious Christian whose house was caught in a flood. He climbed to the roof barely escaping the rushing waters. As he stood on the top of his house, he began to pray. “Lord, save me!” He pleaded. Just then, a canoe floated by with his next door neighbors in it. “Hey, jump into our canoe!” They shouted out to him, but he thought the canoe looked a little wobbly. So he shouted back, “That’s okay, I have faith in the Lord that he will deliver me!” The canoe soon was carried away downstream. Then along came a motorboat, put-putting along, and again the person in the boat shouted out, “I have a rope, you can get in my boat!” But our faithful believer waved him off, shouting that his faith was in the Lord. The water kept rising, and soon it was lapping at the very edge of the roof. Just then a helicopter flew by, and hovered over the house, and using a bullhorn the pilot shouted over the noise of the rotor, “We can drop you a ladder!” But the man shook his head, still confident that God would deliver him. Wouldn’t you know—the water continued to rise, and the man was swept away, and drowned. The next thing he knew, he was standing in front of the pearly gates, and there with him stood Saint Peter and Jesus himself. Our hero looked at Jesus and whined, “I had all my faith in you, why didn’t you save me?” Jesus rolled his eyes and said, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter, what more did you want?”

This, my friends, is an example of the kind of hope that a Buddhist like Pema Chödrön rejects. And she’s right! If we use hope as a kind of spiritual bypass to be so future focused that we stop doing the good work we need to do, right here, right now, in the present moment, then we have engaged in what I believe has been called “metaphysical malpractice.”

Creative, spiritual hope does not deny or avoid the present moment, but rather serves as a creative bridge that integrates the possibilities of the present with the promise of the future. Life-giving hope never avoids the present, for it is in the present that the seeds of the future are planted. But hope is a beacon of light, a clarion call that reminds us no matter how bleak or seemingly negative current circumstances might be, we carry within us everything we need to jump-start the miraculous transformation from apparent despair to manifest joy.

One thing I love about Unity is how this community uses affirmations to manifest a more healthy and abundant life. Those of you who work with affirmations know that they are always written in the present tense. Imagine a beautiful affirmation like “The Peace of God dwells within me.” But change that to “The Peace of God is going to dwell in me someday,” and it’s obvious that it is no longer an affirmation: it’s merely a wish. Now, I’m not here to fuss at anyone who’s been saying their affirmations all wrong! But we can all hear this invitation: the blessings that we hope for, we are invited to affirm—right here, and right now.

But perhaps the most important question about hope, is a world where too many people have lost hope, is simply this: what happens when we find it hard, or difficult or even impossible to hope?

Before I try to answer that, I’d like to talk about… guacamole.

Now, that may seem to be pretty much a random non sequitur, and I’ll admit, it is pretty random. But I love guacamole, and this is my message, after all, so humor me while I talk about guacamole just for a minute or so.

Here’s how much I love guacamole: many years ago, when Fran’s and my beautiful daughter Rhiannon was dying from kidney disease, I promised her that we would see each other again in heaven. When she asked me how we would find each other, I told her it would be very simple. All she had to do was go to the heavenly banquet, and look for me: she would find me between the chocolate fountain and the vats of guacamole.

Now everyone knows that guacamole is a lot more than just a mashed up avocado, even though that is its main ingredient. But to have really good guac, you need to blend that mashed up avocado with lime juice and salt, plus other ingredients like diced onions, peppers, salt, tomatoes, cilantro and just a hint of garlic. Mmmm! My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ll gladly enjoy plain avocado on toast, or in a salad, or even floating in gazpacho. There’s lots of great ways to eat an avocado! But by itself, it’s not guacamole. You need those extra ingredients to truly work the magic.

Now, when I think about guacamole, it automatically makes me more hopeful. But you’ve humored me long enough, so let’s get back to the central point of this message. So back to my question: what can we do when hope seems difficult or even impossible to find?

It seems to me that when it’s hard to manifest hope, we need to take a step back and work on manifesting what I like to call “the ingredients of hope.” Just like you can’t have guacamole without the lime juice and tomato and onions, et cetera, there are certain ingredients that are necessary for us to mix up a delicious batch of hope. And just like there are lots of different, delicious recipes, all slightly different, for guacamole, I’m sure we could come up with plenty of different recipes for hope. But this morning let’s concentrate on three main ingredients, plus a few other elements that I believe are really important for nurturing lasting hope.

The main ingredients are trust and courage and joy — sort of the avocado, lime juice and salt of hope. For the more optional ingredients, like garlic, onion, tomatoes and peppers, I would suggest that hope is also made up of patience, perseverance, gratitude and connection.

Let’s take a moment and reflect on each of these, one at a time.

Trust

When I was a high school senior, ready to graduate and move off to college, my dad gave me a magazine article that was a compendium of advice that someone wrote for his kids. My dad thought it was pretty good, and it did have some good pointers in it, like “Make friends with someone who has a swimming pool.” Although actually, my wife and I have learned that it’s even better to make friends with someone who has a vacation home on the Gulf Coast. Just saying!

But there was one terrible piece of advice in that article; it said, “Do not trust anyone. If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Now, maybe the author of the article was just trying to be funny, but if so, I think that particular attempt at humor really fell flat. Now, I understand that often trust needs to be earned, and not everyone deserves to be trusted. But when we’re talking about God, or even our own heart, then trust is really an important quality to cultivate. To trust in someone means to place our faith in them, and it orients us toward acknowledging that this person is a source of goodness and care. Yes, every human being makes mistakes, but God, who is love, is supremely trustworthy. But God’s trust-worthiness means nothing if we are not ready to trust God. Someone somewhere once said that the most fundamental question in life is simply this: is the universe safe, or not? Even with all the suffering, even with death and loss. God, who is Love, promises us that the universe IS safe, even when it doesn’t appear to be. Trust is an expression not just of emotion, but of the will. Trust is saying, I choose to believe, I choose to believe that LOVE ultimately wins.

Courage

I remember as a young child, watching The Wizard of Oz and feeling very curious about the cowardly lion’s quest for courage. I understood the Scarecrow needing a brain and the Tin Woodman wanting a heart. But courage was a bit too abstract for my young mind. I might have been surprised to learn that the Lion had more in common with the Tin Man than he realized. Courage, you see, literally means “to have a heart” — not just a physical heart that pumps blood, but a spiritual heart, filled with strength and fortitude, valor and bravery, a heart that is willing to meet whatever challenge comes its way.

If trust is a disposition, then courage is a call to action. You don’t manifest courage sitting on the sidelines, except to the extent that you are willing to get into the fray. Courage means standing up to be counted, volunteering for the difficult but necessary task, and standing up to the person who is frightening or intimidating. Now, as much as I believe that courage is an ingredient of hope, you could just as easily say that hope is an ingredient of courage. After all, in the realm of spirituality, anything is possible.

Rather than get lost in a “chicken or the egg” debate, I think we just need to accept that hope requires courage, and courage requires hope. The beautiful thing about courage is you don’t have to be perfect at it. The Grey Panthers activist Maggie Kuhn famously said, “Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind – even if your voice shakes.” Courage sometimes comes with a shaky voice or shaky hands. That’s okay: when you are faithful to your heart, sooner or later faith triumphs over fear.

Joy

Joy is the third major ingredient in the recipe for hope. And I want to be gentle here, because I recognize that many people have trauma or wounds that can make it difficult to access joy. But I think sometimes we lose sight of joy for no other reason than our lives are busy and stressful. Friends, I invite every one of us to consider what steps we can take to cultivate more joy in our lives. Joseph Campbell famously said that we need to follow our bliss: and Howard Thurman reminded us that the world needs people who have come alive. “Don’t ask what the world needs,” he said; “Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” And if you want to know what makes you come alive, then follow your bliss. Make joy a priority. It has been said that joy is an infallible sign of the presence of God. Friends, the fact that you are here at Unity tells me that you either know God is in your hearts, or you are actively seeking that Divine presence within. Either way, joy is the key to that sacred presence in your heart — and it is also a key to genuine, life-transforming hope.

Now, what are some of the extra ingredients we need for our recipe for hope?

Patience

There’s an old joke about the person who prayed, “God, I want patience, and I want it right now.” Watch a small child in December who is struggling with how slowly the days go by as they wait for Santa Claus, and it’s obvious that we human beings are just not naturally very patient. But just like we can learn to be kind, and compassionate, and forgiving, so we can also learn to practice the spiritual gift of patience. Interestingly, psychologists recommend something as simple as the practice of a pause to recalibrate our hearts and minds toward deep, confident patience. Impatience, you see, is rather like the opposite of hope: whereas hope trusts in the future, impatience is unhappy with the present. To be impatient is to reject what is here and now, anxiously wanting to manifest something different and better, but to do it immediately.

To break the grip of impatience and to relax into the precious present moment of infinite patience, it might only require that we remember simply to breathe: here, and now. When we breathe, we are present. Thich Nhat Hanh says when we are mindful of our breathing, we are mindful we are alive. In that mindful place, we do not have to manage the future — or the present. We simply are alive, and we recognize that the future we desire will come in perfect divine timing.

Perseverance

When I was working my first professional job, my boss used to talk to me about “follow through.” I’m the type of person who’s better at starting things than finishing them, so obviously he wanted me to up my game a little. But as I learned the professional value of seeing things through, I began to recognize how meaningful this quality was for me spiritually as well. Perseverance is the active side of patience. If you or someone you love is in recovery you know the classic serenity prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept that I cannot change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” This prayer is so popular — and powerful — because it is positively brimming with hope. Serenity helps us to be patient when things are out of our control; courage helps us to act when matters are within our control, and perseverance is the rocket fuel that keeps us going once we’ve activated the courage to act. Perseverance reminds us that life is a dance, not a pose: we are always in movement, always dynamic, always stepping in to new possibilities. Perseverance is that energy within that helps us to keep going.

Gratitude

The great metaphysical poet George Herbert offered this beautiful prayer:

I had a mentor many years ago who used to say that when we are living in gratitude, we don’t have the inner bandwidth to get caught up in the drama of playing the victim or being a martyr. Gratitude is the antidote to bitterness and envy and other corrosive energies that can leach the joy out of our lives. It’s a Biblical principle: in all things, give thanks — because the Biblical writers understood the power of gratitude to foster faith, joy, and all the other qualities we are celebrating today. I know it’s not always easy to live in gratitude, and that the same forces that make it difficult to hope can equally make it difficult to simply be grateful. But when hope seems elusive, let’s stay grounded in the present, and look for something, no matter how small, for which we may express a word of gratitude. The more gratitude we express, the more it flows. It’s the metaphysical principle of abundance in action. And like George Herbert, if you can’t access it on your own, ask Spirit for a helping hand. Grace is always available, and when it flows, it’s easy for gratitude to flow in its wake.

Connection

The last ingredient in my recipe for hope is connection. We need each other. We don’t always honor this truth, and all sorts of things can get in the way of it. I, for one, am an introvert, and I love to be alone. But even so, I know my life’s abundance and happiness depends on the presence of people whom I love, and who love me as well. When we are connected with each other, all the ingredients of hope can flow just a bit more easily into our lives.

I understand that so many of us are isolated, or we’re slowly healing after a difficult or traumatic relationship, or for any number of reasons we may feel lonely and disconnected. Unfortunately, this too is an epidemic in our society. While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem, I do believe that there is always ways to make connections — new connections if not old ones. We can volunteer, we can reach out to people online, we can choose to be more active in a loving community like Unity Atlanta. There are lots of good reasons to make connecting with others a priority — and one of those good reasons is that this makes hope more possible.

So that is my recipe for hope, my ingredient list for cultivating a more hopeful heart and hopeful life. Mix all these ingredients together and let them rise slowly in our hearts, until we can bake them into the nourishing bread of our dreams for a brighter tomorrow. You may have a different recipe. And that’s fine. Let’s support each other to continue to bake the bread of hope in the kitchen of our hearts. May these ingredients of hope activate our hearts so that under the loving guidance of the Spirit we may co-create a truly delicious and blessed life.

If you enjoy this and would like to participate in Zoom calls like this in the future, please join Patreon today: membership starts at just $11/month. Here’s the link: www.patreon.com/carlmccolman

Cheers!

Carl

The worst thing we ever did is pretend
God isn’t the easiest thing
in this Universe
available to every soul
in every breath. — Chelan Harkin

In “The Worst Thing,” the mystical poet Chelan Harkin reflects on the mistakes we human beings have made over the years as we have tried to make sense of God. We imagined God as a “cloud man” in the sky, far away from us and our embodied experience. We imagined a God incapable of dancing, of crying, of being present in our bones. “The worst thing we ever did,” she observes, “is pretend God isn’t the easiest thing in this Universe available to every soul in every breath.”1

Chelan is right. We’ve made God difficult.

Difficult to believe in. Difficult to relate to. Difficult to have a conversation about (it’s not easy to disagree with someone when they are convinced they have the ultimate truth). Too many of us labor under patriarchal, authoritarian images of God that reinforce all these difficulties and strip us of the possibility to re-connect with “the easiest thing” that is as close to us as our breath.

This is where contemplation comes in.

From Centering Prayer to the Prayer of the Heart to Christian meditation (or Jewish meditation, Muslim meditation, and so forth) to any other practice that invites us to rest in silence as a means of cultivating a deeper encounter with the divine, contemplation includes any spiritual exercise we undertake to weave together our embodied breath, our deep interior silence, and the sacred presence of the Spirit who is, after all, the easiest thing.

But here’s an irony. We work just as hard to make contemplation difficult as we do to make God difficult.

“I’m Not Very Good at Contemplation”

Through my work as a spiritual director, writer, speaker, and retreat leader, I have the honor of walking alongside many people, from different generations or backgrounds or professions or faiths, who are learning or seeking to go deeper in their practice of intentional silence. Again and again, people report to me, often with vulnerability, sometimes defensively, sometimes with an air of resignation, some variation of “I’m just not very good at this.”

I hear this so often that it doesn’t surprise me. It saddens me, but it doesn’t surprise me.

Usually I will ask, “Why do you say this?” And almost always, the answer will be some variation of this: “I can’t find the silence. All I have within me is an endless assault of distracting thoughts.”

If I’m feeling a little playful or snarky, I’ll reply, “Oh, you too, huh?” Because this is hardly unusual, even for seasoned contemplative old-timers like me. Most people find contemplative practice to be not some gentle doorway into blissful inner peace, but rather a humbling immersion into a torrent of seemingly chaotic thoughts, ideas, images, daydreams, fantasies, feelings, and so forth.

And when I point this out to people, they’ll say “I know, I know” as if this has all been reviewed time and time again. Any introductory course on contemplative practice will always include reminders of just how turbulent and jam-packed your ordinary stream of consciousness always seems to be.

But it’s one thing to be told this, in a theoretical and abstract way, and another thing altogether to settle your body and mind to the point that you experience it for yourself.

It’s actually a very good sign for beginning contemplatives — or even practitioners at any level of experience — to notice the flurry of activity within, even though it feels overwhelming and slightly crazy. It’s good because noticing the torrent means you’re paying attention — in contrast to how easy it can be to more or less sleepwalk through life, allowing our awareness to flit from thought to thought or idea to idea, without paying any mind to how much distracted thinking is flowing through our consciousness, at or just below the threshold of awareness.

Nevertheless, in our effort to make the easy practice of contemplation unnecessarily difficult, pretty much we all have fallen into the trap of judging our experience, naming it as “wrong” or “bad” or “inferior” because it is not living up to what we think it should be. We think that it should promptly, if not immediately, transport us into a place of delicious inner comfort and serenity. And of course, that’s not how it goes.

This is very much like getting cranky at the weather because the sky is not always sunny.

When that thought first occurred to me — that judging our meditation experience is about as useful as judging the weather — I had the insight that I’d like to share with you now. It involves the weather, the sky, and what I’d like to call “the firmament within.”

Sky Above, Sky Within

From the time that I was a child, I have loved the natural world. I love trees and the forest, the beach, the mountains, and sites of natural splendor like waterfalls or remarkable rock formations.

And above it all, always there is the beautiful sky.

In his luminous book exploring the basics of contemplative spirituality, Into the Silent Land, Martin Laird offers a fascinating metaphor to help us understand the difference between our truest and deepest identity and the mercurial changes and chances that mark the ordinary flow of human experience. “Who we truly are” he compares to a mountain, whereas the crazy and chaotic flow of life he likens to the weather that surrounds this mountain. The weather is always changing, the mountain (barring the slow process of erosion or other geological change) stays the same.

The marvelous world of thoughts, sensation, emotions, and inspiration, the spectacular world of creation around us, are all patterns of stunning weather on the holy mountain of God. But we are not the weather. We are the mountain… When the mind is brought to stillness we see that we are the mountain and not the changing patterns of weather appearing on the mountain. We are the awareness in which thoughts and feelings (what we take to be ourselves) appear like so much weather on Mount Zion… Stillness reveals that we are the silent, vast awareness… To glimpse this fundamental truth is to be liberated.2

Laird is a Catholic priest, and while the heart of his teaching is truly universal, he offers his wisdom to us using the language and symbolism of the Christian tradition (all spiritual teachers speak out of their own tradition, and so we who read them from a contemplative perspective are always invited to find the universal wisdom in their words that transcends the limitations of their own particular tradition). With this in mind, we see that Laird identifies the mountain — “Mount Zion, the Holy Mountain of God” — with divine union. We are already one with the mystery we call God, but we typically don’t see or realize this, because our attention is so riveted on the weather. How can we be gently still and silent and appreciate the stability and grandeur of the mountain, when we are dazzled by the thunder and lightning that is dancing in the sky all around us?

This idea of the weather as a metaphor for how changeable and intriguing the ordinary human stream of consciousness can be came to mind when I discovered the long tradition in Buddhism of using the sky — and the weather — as metaphors for the inner experience of meditation. Like meteorological conditions surrounding the mountain, the earthly sky is always changing with different weather patterns, cloud formations, and even levels of light, thanks to the sun, the moon, the stars, and phenomena like the northern lights.

Consider these insights drawn from recent writings by two contemporary Buddhist teachers, Sogyal Rinpoche and Pema Chödrön:

This essential nature of mind is the background to the whole of life and death, like the sky, which folds the whole universe in its embrace.3

Our true nature could be compared to the sky, and the confusion of the ordinary mind to clouds.4

Even when we’re feeling most confused and hopeless, bodhichitta—like the open sky—is always here, undiminished by the clouds that temporarily cover it.5

Let’s not forget Chelan Harkin’s wisdom: “The worst thing we ever did was put God in the sky, out of reach” she warns us. But maybe after exiling God to the sky, the second worst thing we did was to exile the sky out of us. If we cannot see the “sky within,” we are at greater risk of judging, rather than simply accepting, our changeable relationship to silence and stillness.

There is an old tradition of referring to the sky — and to the heavens at large — as “the firmament,” implying that there is something firm and stable about our celestial surroundings. In ancient and medieval times, people imagined that the heavens consisted of some sort of giant dome that the sun and moon and stars travelled across, not unlike the domed studio in the movie The Truman Show. Thanks to the wisdom of modern astronomy and physics, we now recognize that “the firmament” is not a solid dome at all, but a vast expanse of space, much of which is simply a vacuum, although mysterious phenomena like dark matter or nebulae keep it interesting. As our understanding of the heavens has changed this notion of “firmament” has fallen out of favor.

But the Buddhist idea of the sky and the heavens as a metaphor for meditative consciousness gives me two ideas. What if we resurrect this notion of the firmament, only thinking more in terms of the firmament within. In other words, can we imagine that the apparatus of our consciousness: our nervous system, clustered in the mind, the heart and even the belly, and perhaps even therefore the entire physical body, functions as a kind of firmament, as a metaphorical chalice into which the wine of our consciousness, our awareness, our very mind and soul, is poured? It’s not a perfect analogy: it’s a problem to think of “mind” and “body” as separate from each other, which the chalice and wine metaphor implies. But if we can expand this notion to recognize that the chalice and the wine belong together, that the existence of each depends on the other, then we are getting closer to how this way of seeing things can help us.

In this “sky within,” the human body and nervous system is our firmament, therefore the mind (or better said, the heart-mind) is the azure stratosphere of our being. Then the ordinary stream of consciousness, whether intuitive or sensory — what Laird calls “the marvelous world of thoughts, sensation, emotions, and inspiration, the spectacular world of creation around us” — is both the “weather” and rhythm of dark and light that is continually changing the way we experience the sky.

This, my friends, has immediate and practical implications to how we experience and understand the practice of contemplation.

For what if, when our experience of Centering Prayer (or any other contemplative practice) seems “bad” or “poor” or too infested with thoughts, what if that is just the equivalent of the sky on a cloudy or stormy day? While it may be normal to prefer sunny days to rainy ones, no one seriously rejects overcast days as “bad.” We don’t judge the weather, we accept it (and adapt to it). No one can control the weather (granted, we do influence the weather, as climate change reveals, but influence is not the same thing as control). What if, instead of judging our “noisy” or overly-distracted experiences of contemplation, we learn to simply watch what is arising, the same way we look out the window to gaze into the sky and see what the weather is like today? Then we respond appropriately to whatever we see, just like you use an umbrella during rainstorms and sunglasses on bright days. Using the sky as a symbol for the inner experience of contemplation, can we settle in to an idea that whatever is happening in the sky, we can be present to it and find beauty and meaning in it?

Contemplation with Curiosity, Not Judgment

When someone says “I’m not very good at contemplation because my silence is choked out by all my distracting thoughts,” there is a problem: but the problem is not all those chaotic thoughts. The problem is the tendency that so many of us have to always judge ourselves. That tendency, which can leach the joy out of so much of our lives, spills over into a practice as simple and gentle as silent contemplation. We assume we’re not very good at something because our experience of it doesn’t match up with our expectation. But what if the problem here is not the experience in itself, but the expectation: especially when paired with that all-too-human rush to self-judgment?

This is why I’d like to explore this notion that contemplation is a journey toward getting to know the firmament within, learning to observe the inner sky without expectation, without judgment, without criticism or aggression toward oneself.

To accept this way of seeing things, we’ll all have some learning to do.

Centering Prayer, the contemplative exercise that I both practice and teach, has four simple guidelines or instructions:

1. Choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God’s presence and action within.

2. Sitting comfortably and with eyes closed, settle briefly and silently introduce the sacred word as the symbol of your consent to God’s presence and action within.

3. When engaged with your thoughts (which include body sensations, feelings, images and reflections), return ever-so-gently to the sacred word.

4. At the end of the prayer period, remain in silence with eyes closed for a couple of minutes.

Maybe we need an unofficial “fifth guideline”:

5. Meet whatever arises during Centering Prayer with curiosity, not criticism. Practice accepting your Centering Prayer experience simply as it is, refraining from any impulse to judge it.

Boats on the River: Under the Ever-Changing Sky

I love Thomas Keating’s metaphor of “Boats on the River” as much as anyone; I’ve found it very helpful over the years, both for understanding my own practice and in helping others with theirs. This idea: that the water represents the stream of silent consciousness, boats on the water represent our various thoughts, feelings, etc. and our job is to simply let the boats float down the river, is elegant and practical. The instruction “don’t get on a boat!” is as helpful as it is whimsical, because there is always the temptation to get so engaged with this or that thought that we lose sight of our intention to simply watch the river.

I’m not suggesting we get rid of the boats and the river. I just propose we expand our field of awareness to include the beautiful sky above it all.

Just off the top of my head, I can draw up a list of at least twelve different ways we can experience the terrestrial sky, along with the rhythm of day and night and the weather. As you read over this list, see if you can imagine how our “inner sky” could likewise change as much, and as dramatically, as the earth’s sky.

1. Twilight: Whether dawn or dusk, represents a time when the sky is both beautiful and dramatic, filled with bold colors and perhaps even a planet or two twinkling over the horizon.

2. Sunny, Clear Sky: a clear blue sky on a sunny day is a wonder to behold. To say a day is “beautiful” often implies that radiant loveliness that seems to touch everything when the sky is bright and cloudless.

3. Sunny, with Cumulus Clouds: Maybe even more beautiful than the empty sky is a sky dotted by shining, luminous cumulus clouds. Strolling in the heavens like so many puffs of cotton candy, they inspire our imagination and can incite a sense of wonder.

4. Windy or Breezy Skies: Depending on the time of year, time of day, or incoming weather fronts, we might notice just how dynamic the wind is, rolling through the sky. Still beautiful, but a bit more dramatic.

5. Overcast Sky: “It looks like it’s going to rain.” Overcast skies feel dramatic and foreboding in contrast to the carefree wonder of a sunny sky. Like music shifting from a major to minor key, these skies seem somber and pensive.

6. Gentle Rain: The movie Singing in the Rain exploits the fact that we seek shelter from rainfall, but somehow love it anyway. The ions released by rain feel good, and of course the water nourishes the earth.

7. Thunderstorms: a little bit of rain might seem romantic, but a powerful thunderstorm can be a bit terrifying, or awe-inspiring. Thunder and lightning reminds us just how humble we really are.

8. Severe Weather: Unless you are a storm-chaser, you probably want to keep a respectful distance from tornadoes, hurricanes, or other forms of powerful weather. And with good reasons: such storms display mighty power, but can cause real damage.

9. Moonlit Sky: As beautiful as a sunny sky is, a night sky under the soft glow of moonlight has its own magical charm. Another “sky” associated with love and romance, and perhaps a bit of mystery.

10. Starlit Sky: When the moon is new, and we’re far enough away from city lights, the stars across the sky can evoke a powerful sense not only of awe, but of recognition just how little we truly are.

11. Northern or Southern Lights: Many people never see this spectacular celestial light show. But if you are among the lucky ones, you might see the entire firmament shimmering with colorful splendor.

12. Darkness: Sometimes the clouds roll in at night, and even the subtle light of moon and stars is obscured. Here is John of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul,” — an abyss where everything seems to disappear.

Contemplative practice can lead us to as many different experiences of the “inner firmament” as the sky gives us different experiences of life outdoors. Obviously, our “inner sky” may not look or feel the same as the azure chalice that cradles the horizon of our planet. The point here is not to try to imagine a “sky scene” when we settle in to silent contemplation, but rather to learn to see how whatever we may experience within our hearts and minds is no more solid or permanent than how we experience the sky outside. When we meet whatever comes our way in contemplation: whether it is an avalanche of thoughts, or graced moments of gentle serenity — with openness and acceptance rather than self-criticism or self-judgment, we are practicing hospitality to our own self, and meeting even our imperfections with kindness rather than evaluation, accusation or blame.

I hope you find this “expanded” metaphor of the boats, the river and the sky to be a helpful invitation to bring openness and gentleness into your contemplative practice. I hope over the next few weeks or months to write meditations inspired by the dynamics of the sky and the weather, to explore how contemplative practice can show up in our lives in a variety of ways. Through the metaphor of the sky, let’s explore the diversity and nuances of the experience of contemplation. I hope what emerges will be a new way to think about our encounter with silence, so that we can foster more curiosity, less judgment, and in getting to know our inner landscape better, we might also come to know the source of all silence and love better as well.

It’s kind of an occupational hazard for anyone, I imagine, who is so bold (or so foolish) as to write a book about mysticism. I get asked all the time: whether in a public interview, or a private one-on-one conversation:

“What’s your definition of mysticism?”

Every time that question comes to me, I briefly think about Fr. Anthony Delisi, OCSO (of blessed memory). Fr. Anthony was a Trappist monk whom I worked with, back when I worked at the Cistercian abbey here in Georgia. He was a burly fellow with a gruff exterior and a profoundly sweet and kind heart. And he wasn’t above a bit of good natured teasing and even a bit of snark.

When I was writing The Big Book of Christian Mysticism, Fr. Anthony was one of several monks who agreed to read chapters of the book and offer me feedback. One time, fairly early on in the writing process, I gave Fr. Anthony the first chapter of the book.

The next day he showed up at my office, and pulled me aside. “I read your chapter,” he said, in his characteristically blunt way.

“What did you think of it?” I asked him, anxious like a teenager for approval.

“I kept wondering when you would get around to actually giving a definition of mysticism.”

“But Father, you know it’s impossible to define.”

“Yes, you finally admitted as much on page 35, when you basically said you had no idea what it was.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Do you think I need to be more precise with my definition?”

“Oh no, your definition is fine,” he mused. “I just wish you had said as much right up front, that way I wouldn’t have had to wade through 35 pages just to learn that you have no more of an idea about what it is than I do!”

That chapter got revised several times, and I tried to be a bit more clear about my understanding of mysticism. But to this very day, any attempt I make to explain what mysticism is, or even just to admit what it means to me, always makes me think of how a humble monk who had lived in the cloister for more than half a century was just as much at a loss for explaining mysticism as I was.

Because there really is no explaining it. Mysticism is related to mystery. And so, no matter how clever or perceptive or theologically sophisticated you, or I, (or anyone) might be, it simply cannot be defined. It cannot be nailed down, it cannot be concisely explained in a few well-chosen words.

I think this is part of what makes mysticism such a rich and awe-inspiring dimension of spirituality. It can’t be summarized, it can’t be defined, it can’t be put into words. Even though we human beings keep wanting and trying to put it into words anyway.

“You are a God who hides himself” muttered the prophet Isaiah during prayer. Mysticism is a way for relating with the hidden God.

Sometimes when I’m asked to explain mysticism, I’ll try to evade the question by offering an evocative image rather than a cut-and-dried definition.

Mysticism is the silence between each heartbeat. It is the moment of spacious presence that hides between and below all our thoughts. Mysticism is the experience of being wooed by God. It is listening to what contemplative silence has to say to us or teach us. It is the humble recognition that our words inevitably distort our image of God as much as they might help us to create an image of God in the first place. Mysticism is what happens when we read the Bible not as a legal document, but as a passionate love letter.

Because in addition to being about silence and about mystery, mysticism is all about love.

Silence: we pray, we meditate, we listen, we walk a labyrinth with our heart and mind both slowing down. “Silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.” So said Thomas Keating, very likely having himself been inspired by Rumi or Meister Eckhart or John of the Cross. “Let all the earth keep silent before God,” declared the prophet Habbakuk, and mystics have been seeking to follow his instruction ever since.

Mystery: no words can ever contain God. Whatever reveals God ultimately betrays itself and conceals God as well. God is hidden, More wisdom from Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.” To be in a relationship with God (or Spirit, or the Divine —use the language you find the least objectionable) is to surrender our need to have things all figured out, to understand what we’re doing and who we’re doing it with, and to accept that we are in the cloud of unknowing, the dark night of the soul.

And finally, Love: mysticism is a love song. It is cosplaying The Song of Songs in real time. It’s forgetting all the crazy talk about God as wrathful or furious or at risk of sending us all to hell; and daring to believe that the One who created the stars and the galaxies is deeply interested in you and me and all of us, in our humility and our littleness and our bother. God is not bothered by us, for God loves us, and if we can truly accept and embody that love, we will be invited into some expression of ecstasy.

Words like these are so clunky and imperfect. Everything anyone can possibly say about mysticism is wrong. But we need to keep trying to say something anyway.

The Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu begins, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao, the name that can be named is not the eternal name.” In the Chinese translation of the New Testament, the Gospel of John beings, “In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God.” So it’s too far of a stretch to consider that the God who can be spoken of is not the eternal God.

Everything we say about God takes us away from God, even if it paradoxically also brings us closer to God. It can do both at the same time — but it will always guide us further and further into the house of mirrors. Anything that reveals God also conceals God. We encounter God in mystery, and mystery always enshrouds the divine in darkness and unknowing.

In his 1926 poem Ars Poetica, Archibald Macleish famously wrote, “A poem should not mean but be.” God (the ultimate Mystery) is like a poem, and therefore, mysticism is as well. To seek to understand the meaning of poetry, or mysticism, or the Mystery, is to miss the pure grace of encountering the beauty of being.

Perhaps the only way to truly experience the love of God begins with renouncing or surrendering all our efforts to manage or control God, to render God safe or tame by our efforts to comprehend God.

A friend of mine who taught many years in seminary once explained why he was no longer comfortable with the idea of evangelizing non-Christians: “You cannot love someone if you are mainly interested in changing them.” Perhaps we cannot truly love God — the Mystery at the heart of mysticism — if we are busy trying to figure God out.

The best way to define mysticism is to insist that mysticism cannot be defined. Therefore, the ineffability of mystical spirituality is an essential part of its beauty. Mysticism shines precisely because we cannot put it into words.

Poets accept this. So do Zen Buddhists, artists, intuitives and daydreamers.

Mysticism, after all, is not a problem to be solved. It is not a puzzle to be unpacked by scientists or philosophers or other linear thinkers. Not that there’s anything wrong with being an architect or an engineer —we need conscientious people who make amazing new things and who tell stories all about it. But sometimes, it seems that the very qualities that can make someone so skilled with the practical matters of living can ironically get in the way of the artistry of mystical intimacy, intimacy with the very heart of creation.

Mysticism sings silently between our heartbeats and illuminates the dark matter floating between the stars. It is a story that can never be told even though it has been chanted repeatedly since the dawn of time. It is the inner abyss and the playful lights that illuminate our deepest hopes and dreams.

Some might say that if mysticism cannot even be defined, then no wonder it exists only at the margins, the margins of faith, the margins that separate what is known from what is possible. This might be interpreted as dismissing the mystical, except for the fact that the mystics have always been on the margins. That was true two thousand years ago and it remains true today. Mystics are happy to hide in shadowy places and hold fast to liberating wisdom that only can be seen when we wander far away from the center of things.

Mysticism is ineffable, and in its ineffability, it is free. Not free in an American/consumer sense, the freedom of choosing if you want fries with that burger of if you’d rather drink a Coke or a Pepsi. Rather, mysticism embodies the deep and abiding freedom that always empowers us to do the one next right thing. To walk (or seek to walk) in the footsteps of Christ (and the Buddha) is to find the freedom that calls us into lives of compassion, care, and service. That may not seem like much to some, but to others it may seem like a life aflame with love. Increasingly, such freedom is rare — and radical. So mysticism is a doorway into a rare wisdom indeed. Just don’t try to put it into words.