In the beginning, the Holy One spoke the universe into being: day and night, heaven and hell, earth and sky, fire and water, all spoken into the story of existence. The voice of the creator kept talking and life emerged, from single celled amoebas to the most complex of sentient beings. With the creation of humanity, it is said that we have been formed in the divine image and likeness, which means that we have been given that same capacity to speak. It matters not whether it took six days or six billion years to complete this creative act: the time came when the first human being uttered speech.
And God saw that it was good.
And then God was silent, knowing that the silence mattered as much as the words.
We wonder about the capacity for language on the part of whales and dolphins, bonobos and other evolved sentient beings. May they all find their voices. The more word-speakers there are, the better.
We have been given the capacity to speak. Created in the Divine image and likeness, when we speak, we do more than merely report information. When we speak, we create. It is our calling to speak well, and to create well.
Humankind has been speaking creative words ever since. Sometimes we have spoken well, and we have created wisdom, and beauty, and insight, and joy, and eros, and laughter, and justice, and mystery, and hope, and love, and faith, and Divine Union. Other times, alas, we have not spoken so well. Instead of blessings, we spoke curses. And we created hatred, and bitterness, and jealousy, and resentment, and exploitation, and racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and transphobia, and violence, and war, and despair.
We live out our brief lives in the midst of an unfinished poem, an ongoing story. Every time we speak, we create. Our words are incantations; they carry tremendous power. We all have the capacity to bless or to curse. Most of us tend to vacillate between the two. It has been said that it is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. I think it is even more terrifying to realize this gift we have been given, the power and responsibility that lies at the root of every word we birth.
There once was a Scottish harper named Thomas of Erceldoune, who lived in the thirteenth century, about the same time as Rumi or Francis of Assisi. One day, on a riverbank, Thomas encountered the Queen of Fair Elfland, whom he mistakenly took to be an apparition of the Virgin Mary. The fairy queen disabused him of this misconception, and she saucily dared him to kiss her. When he did, she bid him to come with her to her fair kingdom, for she required him to sing and play for her. What felt like a long weekend of revelry ensued — but actually seven earthly years passed by. When at last the time came for Thomas to return to bonny Scotland, the queen offered him a boon: she gave him a tongue that could never tell a lie. From then Thomas became known as True Thomas, but also as Thomas the Rhymer, for he used his newfound gift to utter poetic prophecies. There are some who say that Thomas came to see the gift of not being able to tell a lie as a curse, but that is a digression we can save for another time.
Here’s the more enchanting question: when Thomas spoke his words of prophecy, was he merely observing something fated to happen, or did his words somehow create the very energetic dynamic by which the prophecy would come to pass? Like the purported butterfly effect, do the words that we speak have a creative power far more subtle than any of us could ever measure, even though the effects may come to be felt, in a minute or in a millennium?
Clearly, not every word spoken comes to pass, or else every time an angry teenager spits out “I wish you were dead” to their parents, horror would ensue. None of us understand the relationship between the words we speak and the worlds we create. But we all know that the great ambitions of life begin with a spoken (aloud or even just silently thought) declaration to make it so. A few years ago, I was cleaning out an old file and found a document from my 20s, in which I listed all my life goals. A couple of decades later, and I was stunned to see that almost every item on the list had come to pass. Maybe I didn’t dream big enough — but even though I had long forgotten even making that particular list, somehow the magic still worked deep within me, and the words became the story of my life.
Which brings me to consider the relationship between poetry, prayer, and the mystics.
The English writer Evelyn Underhill suggested that visionary mystics naturally keep the company of “prophets, poets, artists, and dreamers” — which makes a kind of imaginal sense: just as poets and prophets create new ways of thinking and being through the magic of their words, so do the mystics and contemplatives create (or co-create) the mystery of ever-deepening intimacy with God, flowing into and opening up to the bracing, ecstatic non-duality of Divine Union. Is it arrogant to suggest that we create intimacy with the Holy One, or even Divine Union? Perhaps — but I am confident that we really do cooperate with heaven in creating a joyous relationship with God, just as surely as Ginger Rogers co-created the stunning beauty and grace of her dance routines with Fred Astaire. It has been said that “Ginger did everything Fred did, only backwards and in heels.” To be a mystic is to dance with God, and we are all doing it backwards and in heels (yes, even those of us assigned male!), , which is to say, challenged by the frustrations and foibles of the human condition and our creaturely limitations. The Holy Mystery wants to dance with us, to embrace us, to hold and kiss us, and to sweep us off our feet as confidently as the groom wooed the bride in The Song of Songs. We co-create this primarily by saying yes, but also by learning how to dance in those heels.
It amazes me how many of the world’s mystics were (and continue to be) poets. Some big names show up on the list: John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, Rumi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, William Blake, George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Umar Abubakar Sidi, and Thich Nhat Hanh, to name just a few. And it’s not just a boy’s club, as Evelyn Underhill, Catherine of Genoa, Rabi’a, Mirabai, Hadewijch, Chelan Harkin and Caryll Houselander make clear, although it seems perhaps fitting that many women mystic-poets are perhaps better known as poets than as mystics: in this category names like Mary Oliver, Kathleen Raine, Denise Levertov, Elizabeth Jennings and Kathleen Norris leap to mind. Then again, R. S. Thomas, Dante, and maybe even T. S. Eliot also pass muster as poets who were a bit more mysterious — and mystical — than our secular educational orthodoxies typically will admit.
What are we to make of this alarming confluence of word-artists and silence-seekers? How is it that prophets, poets, artists and dreamers live in that same bohemian hippie-pagan neighborhood where the contemplatives and mystics hang out? I think it has something to do with a deep unity between language and silence, that remains hidden (“mystical”) to us surface-dwellers, and yet is hard to miss once you begin to suspect what’s really going on. And the nexus, I believe, is the imagination — but not just our humdrum capacity to “make believe” and paint colorful pictures in our minds, like Barney the Dinosaur whisking a bunch of pre-schoolers off on yet another goofy adventure. That has its place (especially for the pre-schoolers), but the imagination that links silence and language, poetry and mystery, prayer and contemplation together goes much, much deeper into the human psyche, and perhaps even beyond the mere structure of human consciousness. It is the imagination that ushers us into the realm of mystery: the mystical realm. Don’t ask me to put this into words. It has something to do with the non-ordinary reality of Sufis or shamans or the otherworld where the druids encountered their gods and nature spirits. It’s a dreamspace, and it’s deeper than most of our ordinary dreams, filled as they are with the flotsam and jetsam of ordinary waking consciousness. Christian mystics speak of this using language of negation: the dark night of the soul, the cloud of unknowing, the dazzling darkness, the silent land. We can’t talk our way into it: at least, not using the syntax of prose. But we just might be able to poeticize our way there.
The ancient Celts believed that their bards were not just poets in the Robert Frost sense, but were seers — that there was something linked between writing poetry and speaking words of prophecy. The bards were linked with the druids and the vates, the oracles. Each of these types of wisdom-keepers relied on their incantatory use of language to both curate and convey knowledge, but also to shape and form the worlds they were speaking into being. Which brings us right back to the prologue of John’s Gospel and God calling the world into being through the Logos who became flesh and dwelt among us.
Are your eyes glazing over yet? This is one of the problems we have: the words that invite us into the creative possibilities of the imaginal realm, whether they come to us from Biblical canticles or mystical poetry or the bewildering proclamations of a shamanic philosopher like John Moriarty (whose prose reads like poetry), are words that we all to easily dismiss as either well-worn formulas we have heard so many times that we’ve decided they are bereft of power, or else they simply seem so confusing that we dismiss them as little more that artsy word-play, like the lyrics of bands like Yes or R.E.M.: playful, perhaps, but ultimately too easily dismissed as senseless. So when we encounter the poetry of the mystics, and dare to pray their words, it is perhaps a blessing when we are not overly familiar with their work. When we are still capable of being surprised but willing to receive their language in earnest: that’s when it becomes possible for the doors to the mysteries to truly open for us.
Perhaps what truly makes a mystical poet mystical is this simple fact, that their poems are prayers (and their prayers are poems). Clearly not all are written as prayers, though some are. But mystical poetry refashions our very understanding of prayer itself. For the linear-minded person who equates prayer with petition or intercession — merely asking God for what they want — the language of the mystics will likely just be wasted upon them. But when prayer is understand primarily as intimacy with the Divine, the possibilities open up exponentially. Just as a satisfying friendship (or romance) includes the capacity to communicate about many different things, so too a mystical prayer will bring many ways of speaking to (or listening to) the Great Mystery, encoded in its words — and in its silence.
Take a work like Evelyn Underhill’s Immanence or John of the Cross’s One Dark Night or Thomas Merton’s Hagia Sophia — each invites us into the possibility not merely of encountering God, but of drawing close to God, embracing God, kissing and being kissed by God, and finally surrendering into the ecstasy of undifferentiated union with God. Every mystical poem/prayer might be understood as simply a variation of Julian of Norwich’s prayer:
God, of your goodness,
give me yourself,
for you are enough for me.
I may ask nothing less
that is fully to your worship,
and if I do ask anything less,
ever shall I be in want.
Only in you I have all.
Here we see a mystical prayer that is essentially a poem. To look at this from the other direction, consider this jewel from George Herbert, Love (III).
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack’d any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
On the surface, this is no prayer, at least not as prayer is commonly understood. It is not spoken to God, but rather about God — God-as-Love. But is this reason enough to disqualify it as prayer? After all, think of the New Testament Canticles such as the Benedictus (Luke 1:68-79) or the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) — these songs of praise to God have been recited prayerfully by monks and others, every day for many centuries now, and yet they too speak of God in the third person. Indeed, the Benedictus is addressed to a mortal human being, the infant John the Baptist. Part of the mystery of prayer is how it works even it is addressed to someone other than the One who is Mystery. Why? Because, once again, the words themselves have a creative function in the human heart: they literally form us as beings-in-relationship with the living Divine. We recite these words and they remind us who God is, and who we are in relation to God. This is the secret of mystical poetry, and why it works as a portal into mystical prayer.
The narrator of George Herbert’s poem has an encounter with Love: “Love-with-a-capital-L,” which anyone familiar with the first letter of John in the New Testament will recognize as God.
Their relationship gets off to a pretty rocky start, however, since the narrator meets love with a kind of binding shame or embarrassment, conscious of all the ways that they fail to live a Love-infused life. Yet this does not dissuade Love, who engages almost playfully in a dialogue with this hesitating one. When the narrator insists “I cannot look on thee,” Love replies with an intimate gesture (taking the narrator’s hand) and an almost flirtatious rejoinder: “Who made the eyes, but I?”
Finding their options diminishing, the narrator tries one last gambit, offering to serve at the table rather than to be served, but Love won’t hear of it. Finally yielding, the poems ends with six words as simple as they are sublime.
Thoroughly down to earth, this poem is filled with images of dust and tenderness — and meat.
Like the great Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, mystical poets are accustomed to finding God in all things (and all things in God). We do not need ecstatic poetry to usher us away from earth or the body or matter to find some otherworldly Creator in a celestial enclave. “All the way to heaven is heaven,” as St. Catherine of Siena proclaimed; a sentiment echoed by Elizabeth of the Trinity: “It seems to me that I have found my heaven on earth, because my heaven is you, my God, and you are in my soul: you in me, and I in you.” For the mystics, the spiritual life (including the life of prayer) is not about figuring out how to get into heaven after we die, but yielding to heaven’s insistent desire to get into us, right here and right now. When we accept that we are created in the image and likeness of the Holy One, that the Holy Spirit has been poured into our hearts, that we are partakers of the Divine Nature — then the poem/prayers of the mystics begin to glow with a heavenly light that is not an otherworldly radiance, but entirely of this place.
When we turn to the poetry of the mystics, and dare to read their poems as prayers, we find not only a supremely beautiful doorway into contemplation and ever-increasing intimacy with God, but to the extent that we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we shall also find ourselves ushered into the mystery at the very heart of God: the mystery of Divine Union, a gift freely given to all who choose to receive.
Wait — it gets better. For in words that get attributed to more than one contemplative author (so I don’t know who said them first): “The mystic is not a special kind of person; each person is a special kind of mystic.” Part of the nature of mysticism is to give itself away. One of the signs of spiritual maturity is the capacity to recognize the Holy Mystery in just about everyone. Mystical spirituality — mystical consciousness, mystical vision, mystical living — is not something one achieves so much as what one receives, and the funny part is that we’ve all received it, but most of us keep forgetting. We lionize spiritual masters like Jesus and the Buddha, or Howard Thurman and Evelyn Underhill and Teresa of Avila and Rumi because they seem to remember better than most of us, and also do a good job at reminding the rest of us, who we truly are.
When we learn to read mystical poetry like prayer, or mystical prayer like poetry, we not only get in touch with our own mystical essence, but gradually (or suddenly) we learn to see that mystical reality in others, even in those who might not normally be thought of as visionaries or contemplatives or even spiritual teachers (or whatever). I’ve long suspected that the greatest mystics in history are largely lost to us, because they never bothered to do what the more famous mystics do: become monks or nuns, write books (or poetry), get a following in their religious communities (or nowadays on Instagram). That humble woman who cleans your office at night while you’re at home spending money online — she could very well be the kind of contemplative that Simone Weil or Teilhard de Chardin would bow down before.
So read the mystical poets as prayer, and I suspect before too much longer you will be reading much poetry as mystical theology. Yes, God does show up rather frequently in poetry, so that makes it easy, but I don’t think we have to talk about God to encounter the Mystery: in fact, sometimes, talking about God is one of our favorite ways of shielding ourselves from the transforming presence of Divine Love. So I’ve stopped looking for God-talk, church-talk, pious language, or any other kind of performative spirituality when I read poetry. If it’s there, great; if it’s not, there’s still plenty to pay attention to. Does the poet make room for silence? For stillness? For wondering? For hope and love and compassion? Is the cry for justice dancing with a hope for reconciliation, or sullied by a blood-thirst for revenge? Then again, even the ones who scream for revenge can still surprise us with unannounced theophanies — this is a theme that plays out more than once in the sacred texts, after all.
A Buddhist friend of mine once told me that the heart of understanding the Dharma is understanding the concept of “the view” from the Noble Eightfold Path: a recognition that the key to following the Buddha lies not so much in mastering a bunch of propositional ideas so much as learning to see as the Buddha sees, to understand as the Buddha understands, or to allow a clarity of awareness to shape how one moves and relates in the world. There is a Christian corollary to this, as well; Franciscan author Richard Rohr hints at this more than once in his writings, inviting us to learn to “see as the mystics see.” Perhaps we can most easily access this “mystical view” in the words of the contemplative and mystical poets: words that form us, that shape us, that invite us to remember who we are and whose we are. Words that testify to Love, sometimes by testifying to the sorrows and horrors of the absence of Love (whether real or imagined). Love always gives us a choice, and that choice literally hums with possibilities. At this very moment, here and now, you and I can choose to create a future in which we draw closer to Love. What an exciting adventure. Pray the mystics. Let their words combine with yours to speak heaven into being. Choose to be one with Love.
N.B. This article originally was posted on Carl McColman’s Patreon page. It is scheduled to appear in the forthcoming anthology, Praying the Poets edited by Roger Butts (Gracelight, 2026).