The Mystical Middle: Jesus’ Third Way
See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.
2021 has been... better? No tragic passing of a famous basketball player thus far, and the vaccines are now rolling out. If slowly.
Even though the elections are over, we are further removed from that event at the White House, and the stimulus package seems to be en route, the anxiety we have all been carrying for a year is still here.
But, if we are honest, we know we’ve been carrying this anxiety longer than a year. The radicalization, both of the left and the right, has long been entrenched in the social media warzones even before 2016. These echo chambers are akin to deep, dark and surprisingly crowded caves without any light and with far too much noise. We are still angry, still outraged, still livid. Yet for what?
With all the tech in the world, all the ideological allies at our fingertips, all the non stop news feeds with a press of a button, we are lonely. Isolated. Detached from reality and attached to fear based dogma.
The rectangle in our pocket and all its digital siblings are throwing us off from peace. From stillness. From still finding creative ways to be peacemakers.
Rather than pressing forward so earnestly in the future toward a particular political utopia (depending on your tribe’s version of utopia), it seems we need to seek for the wisdom of the past. If anything, our ongoing awareness of all the faults of the present is stealing our energy to help produce the kingdom of heaven in the here and now.
What sort of rhythms dispel this anxiety? What kind of habits produce real lasting peace? What methods of Christian spirituality offer comfort to rest and conviction to press forward?
For Henri Nouwen, the answer was the Desert Fathers and Mothers. He discovered it initially as “spirituality of the desert” and later called it “the way of the heart.” For modern times, I’m calling it the mystical middle. Here I propose four steps to avoid the polarization of our current era and actively pursue peacemaking, rooted in the way, the love, and the person of Christ.
A brief historical background on these Desert Fathers and Mothers before we begin. For starters, their time was at a crossroads of sorts, similar to our own. As the leader Constantine emerged, the Roman Empire fell, and church and state began to merge, these fourth and fifth century saints felt a call to “run” from the world. The cause? To pursue a new kind of martyrdom.
Simply put, now that Christianity was “in” and accepted within their society, subtle forms of compromise corroded the faith. Therefore, these ancient followers of Christ needed to escape, to break free from an easy kind of belief into a hardened trust in the God of the Old Testament and the New.
The comparison isn’t perfect for us in our modern world, what with Christianity in America seemingly being on the decline whereas for them it was on the rise, but the principles stand firm. There’s a war for your heart, with three factions at play.
Whether ideologically progressive or conservative, these two factions want your allegiance to them long before Jesus. Hear me out before tuning me out for sounding like that annoying preacher telling you just “need Jesus” (although he was actually right).
What I mean is that the extreme left and the extreme right will take your Jesus so long as you conform your Jesus when you need to for the sake of their cause. They don’t care about your spirituality, they care about your beliefs. Henri Nouwen puts it like this: “our society is not a community radiant with the love of Christ, but a dangerous network of domination and manipulation in which we can easily get entangled and lose our soul.“
Said simply, theirs is a religion of utter devotion, without any room for questioning, doubt, or interrogation. In a sense, it is almost like there is a cult of progressivism and a cult of conservatism. But we don’t believe in either cult. We believe in Jesus. His is a religion of love. A third path to the mystical middle.
And the first step toward the mystical middle is an all out sprint.
The first story I think of involving running in the Bible is Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. See, prior to his being tempted the way he was, Joseph was a good guy. Hard-working, diligent, and loyal, Joseph had the trappings of a good ole “Christian” boy without any secret sin patterns hidden behind a shining veneer.
And yet, at the onset of temptation, Joseph booked it. Aware of his own proclivity toward “flesh” desires, Joseph knew he couldn’t white knuckle past this sin.
In the same manner, whatever your “Potiphar’s wife” might be, you can’t defeat it through sheer willpower. Whether it be a particular sin issue OR the powerful voices from your particular tribal echo chamber, emerging from them obedient to Christ can only come from “running” away from these coercive voices. In fact, it is likely that your particular sin issue is endorsed by your echo chamber of choice, making it doubly difficult to overcome. Therefore, you have to run the heck out of there and not think, feel, or act twice.
And yet, where do we run? For that, let’s draw on the story of the Prodigal Son.
We all know this story super well, but we so often forget that this is the one where God ran.
Upon the end of the son’s quest to find His Father’s house, and unsure of whether his Father would accept him, God Himself booked it upon seeing his face. So must we remember that our act of running from sin will be met by a God running toward us. When we reject the tribal prejudices of our political group and turn from the vices associated from them, God Himself will meet us in these places with absurd grace.
Simply put, by running from the extreme left and extreme right, we must remember God will run toward us.
Pragmatically, this means bringing to prayer and to Christ the voices we are hearing and the vices that are coming with them. Further, we commit to “running” from them and listening instead to the voice of Christ, whether through Scripture, song, friends, or stories evoking Biblical truths. Jesus doesn’t care about the ways in which you run to Him, only that you do, in fact, run to Him.
Remember, too, He will always run toward you.
The nexts step in middle mysticism is to rest. 2021 is only marginally less taxing than 2020. Whatever your circumstances are, somehow this COVID nonsense has thrown you for a loop, drained your reserves physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and has taken shots at your faith in the goodness of God. Can I get an amen? Am I the only one? This is why we need to take our “15,” in a spiritual way.
Only through resting in Jesus do we remember fondly why we follow Jesus. This is where the true “mysticism” comes in.
The first step in this path toward the mystical middle was an active one. When I said we “run” from our sins and our echo chambers, I only partially meant that metaphorically. But the second step is a passive one. Many in the church call it the grace of God. Jesus calls it abiding. I like to call it resting.
Simply put, this is the downstream, gentle, easy, actual good portion of “the good news” where you intentionally focus on God’s love FOR you. There is no striving here, no real “discipline” required for this discipline other than to avoid doing anything in order to give God space to love your everything.
Your badness, your goodness, your shortcomings, your successes, your fears, your insecurities, all of it. If you won’t allow God to meet you here, He can’t meet you period. Brennan Manning puts it like this: “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”
Only by focusing all of our awareness on Christ’s unending love for you can we rest from the tireless demands of the ideological left and right. They are, after all, relentless.
I am exhausted. You are exhausted. We are all far too aware of too many ills of the world thanks to the rectangles we carry in our pockets.
If there’s one thing we “must” do to rest in Christ away from the world, it is putting away our rectangles so that the world can’t notify us away from the voice of God calling us His Beloved.
After running from the world and resting in our Belovedness, we are then able to repent.
I will admit at some level “running” acts as somewhat of a repentance. But not all of it.
Quick sidebar: for me in my own spiritual journey, I’m still wrestling with the word repentance (let’s throw in obedience, wrath, and holiness for good measure). As a young boy, I internalized repentance as stopping bad things so that God doesn’t do bad things to me later. It was a bastard repentance, a faulty behavioral change module based on a petty, fear-based God.
But that isn’t the God we just ran toward and rested in. Our God is far sweeter than we were ever taught. No, only after the full and deep rest in Christ, abiding in complete union with Him, can we emerge with true repentance in our hearts.
If there’s any hiccups in my own personal implementation of this four step process, this is it. I deeply believe and love God. Particularly when I’m doing well.
But often when I choose repentance, in it’s bastardized form, it’s because of shame.
And these voices of shame have a liberal or conservative bent. Either “I’m too feminine” or “I’m too ignorant.” “You sin too much” or “it’s just a way to blow off steam.” You “don’t care about equality” or “you don’t care about freedom.”
I’m deeply convinced most people struggle with real repentance because of the lies they believe within their shame. We can’t change habits if the habits are informed by a false story we believe to be true. Said differently, if our identity is formed by a narrative, often with a conservative or liberal bent, which culminates in us not being “enough” for that tribe, we will continue to act in ways to conform to the tribe at the detriment of our True Selves in Christ.
This is where only in abiding, only in deep trust, only in a fervent belief of God’s love for you so core to your reality that it is the very air you breathe, will you ever come to Godly repentance.
Peter said, in fact, that it is God’s kindness which leads to repentance. So then, only after firmly taking hold of God’s loving stance toward you can you change your mind toward the things God calls you to.
We finally made it to revival. That fun buzzy word Pentecostals love to throw around and Baptists love to hate (kidding, mostly).
Now, backtracking here a bit, but before we revive, remember; we have to run, have to rest, have to repent. In some ways, the ideological left and right, with their extreme enthusiasm, push toward their own political “revival.” The problem, however, is they do this by skipping all other steps. Divorced from God in the secular God or chasing a false God in fundamentalism, the “revival” is the only thing that matters. Removed from the mystical, removed from grace, removed from the spiritual disciplines, their revival is an all out burst toward a frantic utopia with millions of exacerbated, lonely, and depleted followers along the way terrified that their side is “losing.”
But a spiritual revival, a push toward what Jesus called the kingdom of heaven, takes work even before the work. Simultaneously, however, it requires a lot of rest too. Said differently, discipleship is a long, frustrating, and rewarding journey toward union with God in order to be unified with ourselves in order to unify the world back to God. In some ways, what we do is harder AND easier than what the left or right would have us do, yet the finished product is far better and the contentment is far deeper.
By running, resting, and repenting, we are trusting in God’s formula for renewal by enacting His revival. We go inward, inside of our darkness, find Jesus there, dwell with Him in these places, become healed, and then begin to revive the world around us.
Mysticism is in the “middle” because Jesus is in the middle. Jesus was an equal opportunist for ticking people off. He told the conservatives to rid themselves of conservative idols; He told the progressives to rid themselves of progressive idols.
But He didn’t tell people off because of some petty, ego satisfaction. He told them these things because He saw these idols they clung to as the “ultimate thing” which, ultimately, had their heart. And Jesus’s ministry is of the heart.
Wherever you lean politically, understand that, particularly in such polarizing times such as these, what Jesus commanded ought to be our political leanings. This we land on not just because Jesus is really smart or because our parents are Christian or because the world is “near” an apocalypse.
We land where Jesus lands politically because Jesus, more than any teacher, preacher, guru, or spiritual guide, knows the human heart.
More than changed political legislation, we need laws written on our hearts. More than preaching the gospel of being right, we need to follow the gospel of being loving.
This third path is harder than the other two. I’m not going to sugar coat it; you will annoy your feminist sister as much as your racist uncle. You will hold yourself to a higher bar of morality than your Puritan mother and your woke, politically active brother. The reason why?
Because only Jesus goes to the lowest inside of us, the dirty, the sinful, the shameful, and offers healing. Offer love. And offers a better way forward for you, for me, for your community, for our world.