A Grammar of Holy Mystery: Classical Christian Spirituality

By Larry Hart

A Grammar of Holy Mystery is about Christian spirituality. It is about mysticism as a firsthand encounter with the presence of God--unfathomable, unnamable, mysterious, fulfilling. It is about classical Christianity, the way of transforming truth found in Christ, taught in Scripture, lived by saints, sages, and mystics, and passed on as a sacred trust through the centuries. Being neither liberal nor conservative, but simply Christian, it is ecumenical in spirit. For those traumatized by harsh or shallow churches, A Grammar of Holy Mystery points the way out and shows the way to a faith that renews the mind, restores the spirit, and gladdens the heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Mar 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666765861

Larry Hart

Larry Hart is a Division I college football coach at the University of Houston, and the author of The Recruit’s Playbook: A 4-Year Guide to College Football Recruitment for High School Athletes. As a native Mississippian steeped in football and applying his skillset as an enthusiast, all-American college athlete, alumni NFL draft pick, and current outside linebackers coach with over a decade of firsthand knowledge of football athletics, Coach Hart has an experienced voice that efficiently guides readers and equips them with the tools and practical tips they need to succeed. Coach Hart has a master’s degree in communication studies, lives in Mobile, Alabama with his wife, Juliet, and dreams of making his mark as a part-time, bestselling author.

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Introduction

I danced in the morning

When the world was begun,

And I danced in the moon

And the stars and the sun,

And I came down from heaven

And I danced on the earth,

At Bethlehem

I had my birth.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he

I danced for the scribe

And the pharisee,

But they would not dance 

And they wouldn’t follow me.

I danced for the fishermen,

For James and John 

They came with me

And the Dance went on.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he

—Sydney Carter

¹

Following the Lord of the Dance

I once had a woman, a fairly recent immigrant to the United States, say to me, It’s too bad you don’t dance in America. When I expressed my puzzlement at what she was saying, she went on to explain that she did not mean two people in the gentle embrace of a waltz gliding across the dance floor, nor did she mean a couple moving in rhythm to a wild rock beat. What she meant was folk dancing. She recalled how in her country of origin, people, during times of national celebration, would gather in the streets of every city, town, and village in great laughing, singing, dancing circles. She thought that unlike the refined and disciplined grace of ballet, or the sophisticated elegance of a waltz, or the raw sensuality of rock and roll, the beauty of the folk dance is in its very simplicity and in its joy of the community bond.

Sometime after that I experienced what she meant at a retreat. Sixty of us had gathered in a circle beneath the ciborium (the chapel dome) to conclude one of our sessions with song and prayer. The tune and the rhythm of the song sounded very much like some ancient and joyous Middle Eastern folk song. As we all sang and clapped in time to the music, Richard, the member of our group who could always be expected to do the unexpected, suddenly started to dance all the way around inside our circle. When he got to where he had started, he grabbed someone’s hand and they danced around until that person reached out for someone else’s hand, and on it went until we were all laughing, singing, and dancing—round and round and round. That was nearly thirty years-ago, but I remember it like it was only a moment ago. In his little classic Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis describes the movement of eternal life within the Trinity as a dance into which Christ invites us all.² To repeat Sydney Carter’s chorus:

Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.³

So, then, what is this book about? Well, it’s about the dance into which we are all invited. It’s about hearing the music, clapping our hands in time, and singing the song. It’s about taking the inviting hand and following. It is written for dancers and for people who want to dance, even if their rhythm, like mine, is a little ragged. It is about the dance that was going on before us, continues with us, and will not end with our life on this earth.

Clarifications

There are several clarifications that probably should be made preliminary to your reading this book. The first is that it is written from the perspective of historic and ecumenical Christianity. By this I mean that it is grounded in the theological teaching and common beliefs of all the great streams of Christianity through the centuries. The people who are most likely to find what is said here of interest are those who have crossed the threshold and have embarked on what Joseph Campbell identified as the hero’s journey—the epic adventure into the spiritual mystery that surrounds the person of explicit Christian faith like some ancient, beautiful, and secret primeval forest.

Following the precedent of the apostle Paul (Acts 17:28), I have made use of non-Christian sources where I thought an idea or statement could contribute to the further understanding of Christian faith and practice. I mention this in large part because many years ago I submitted a manuscript to a publisher who rejected it because he did not agree with the theology of some of the people I quoted. So, whether you consider yourself as a conservative or liberal Christian (two rather meaningless terms) I want you to know that I write as a committed Christian who feels free to use any observation or expression, regardless of its source, that illuminates universal truth. As Henri J. M. Nouwen said, The authentic spiritual life finds its basis in the human condition which all people—whether they are Christians or not—have in common.⁴ The Buddhist understanding of humility as an emptying of the self has, for example, helped me immensely in understanding the spiritual meaning of the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians.

A Pivotal Moment

But, to reiterate, I write from an explicitly Christian perspective. Many years ago, at a conference on Christin spirituality I experienced a pivotal moment. One of the presenters was a smart and articulate professor of religion who had only recently returned from a pilgrimage to Tibet. His enthusiastic talk was a kind of reinvention of Christianity and a rather novel interpretation of Buddhism based on what he had experienced on his trip. As he talked, I found myself thinking: This is interesting, but if I were a Tibetan Buddhist, the first thing I would want to know is what is Tibetan Buddhist spirituality within and of itself. And as a Christian, what I want to know, before anything else, is what is Christian spirituality within and of itself. My interest in twentieth century aberrations of any faith, but particularly the Christian faith, is limited.

Classical Christianity

If the term classical can, as I believe, be appropriately used to describe historic and ecumenical Christianity, then I would say that my intent is to look at spirituality from the viewpoint of classical Christianity. Since for classical Christianity scripture, as interpreted by the reason, tradition, and experience of the believing community as a whole, is normative for all questions of faith and practice, that is where I begin.⁵ The opening two chapters examine both the Hebrew and Christian foundations for a biblical spirituality or mysticism. The following three chapters look at the distinctive markings of Christian spirituality as taught and emphasized in historic and ecumenical theology. Taken together, then, the first five chapters form an introduction to the biblical and theological foundations of Christian spirituality. They present, so to speak, the theory. Chapters six and seven, Jesus’s Wisdom Spirituality and Wisdom of Love, Hope, and Beauty, reflect on the specific teachings of Jesus, indeed on Jesus himself, as the definitive image of what it means to be a spiritual person. Both of these chapters, then, focus on the Sermon on the Mount, particularly on the Beatitudes, as a kind of impressionistic portrait of the poetic or divine life, and of what we, as Christ’s disciples, are called to be. The final three chapters are oriented more toward practice. They discuss some of the Christian disciplines, or practices, by which we may cultivate a deeper, truer, more fulfilling inner life—a life more awake, more aware, more attentive and in tune with the mysterious presence of God in which we live, move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). They therefore add further definition to the picture of Christian spirituality and offer some help on how to reflect on our deeper inner experiences of Christ and join cooperatively with his transformative Spirit at work in us. As a whole all of the chapters are meant to furnish a simple introduction to the theory and practice of Christian spirituality.

About Systems and Theories

As a slight digression here I will note, given my repeated use of the word theory, that Christian spirituality cannot be reduced to a theoretical construct. One of my major personal complaints is that while postmodern men and women are hungry and thirsty for God, scholarly, academic, and clergy professionals want, for the most part, to instead give them a philosophical or theological system of thought (Matt 7:9). Christian spirituality is, however, not about a theory with which we agree or disagree, but rather a way of life. It is about a living reality to which we are either awake or not and how every moment of our life is an opportunity to actually live rather than merely think, or write, or talk about our ideas of that unfathomable reality. Indeed, aware or unaware we cannot do otherwise; that is, whether we attend to it or not, the awareness of that mysterious something more most of the world calls God is always there in the hidden depths of our being—it may be slumbering but it is always there.

Sensus Divinitatis

For centuries, at least as far back as Plato, philosophers have spoken of what in the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas referred to as the sensus divinitatis. The sensus divinitatis (sense of the divine) or sensus deitatis (sense of deity) posits that there exists within human beings a natural sense or awareness of the Good, of deity. This sense of the divine is to be understood as a faculty like our faculties of reason, or our five senses, or feelings, or powers of intuition which are all meant to lead us to knowledge. Just like our other faculties it is not infallible so that it has to be correlated with our other faculties of discernment. It is beginning to appear more and more that we are genetically hardwired for spirituality—for God. Augustine of Hippo put it more poetically: O Lord, you have made us for Yourself and our hearts are unquiet until they find their rest in you.⁶ David Bentley Hart, in his book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, defines consciousness in a way, that if I understand him correctly, means something like what I would call spirit. He says that God is an infinite act of consciousness. That feels a little abstract to me, but listen to what he writes, keeping in mind your own inner awareness of the presence of God—your own knowing, or sensus divinitatis:

For to say that God is being, consciousness, and bliss is also to say that God is the one reality in which all our existence, knowledge and love subsists, from which they come and to which they go, and therefore God is somehow present even to our simplest experience of the world and is approachable by way of a contemplative and moral refinement of that experience.⁷

What I want to emphasize here is that your longing for that mysterious unnamable something more to life, for ultimate meaning, for fulfillment, for the ineffable mystery of God, is as innate as your hunger for food and thirst for water.

About Terminology

I hope it will not prove too confusing that sometimes I have used terms according to their technical meaning, and at other times I have used the same terms, as have other writers, in a broader and more general or connotative sense. For example, where I have wanted to refer to a spiritually transformed personality, and a more reflective lifestyle which is deeply appreciative of divine mystery, I have used saint, mystic, and contemplative somewhat interchangeably. Technically, contemplation is prayer which is not vocal or discursive; that is, it is without words or thoughts, and a contemplative is one who experiences communion with God through such prayer. Meditation is a more discursive and reflective spiritual exercise using our imagination, our intellect, and our will.⁸ A meditative lifestyle, then, would be one which is deeply thoughtful, insightful, and reflective. A saint as found in Scripture is one whose life is consecrated to God. I think this will suffice as a basic definition of saint whether in your actual practice you venerate the historical saints or with great respect regard them more as heroes of the faith. Spiritual formation refers to the practices and disciplines which enrich our faith, further our growth, deepen our level of spiritual surrender, and expand our receptivity.

Mystery, or mysterion in the original Greek New Testament, is another word you will find frequently used in this book, as well as in most other literature regarding spirituality. Its meaning is most likely both deeper and far simpler than what you have read in popular books. A mystery in the New Testament is a secret known and shared by those who have been initiated into the fellowship. This is because the mystery is not a teaching, doctrine, or idea that can be explained in words and understood in the mind as an intellectual concept, but rather is more like the experience of dancing the dance. The spirit of the dance is caught by dancing with dancers. Mystery is, therefore, not an ordinary secret. It is not like a puzzle where no secret remains once the puzzle has been solved. Nor is it like a mathematical problem that leaves no questions once the answer has been found. In fact, the knowledge of mystery will lead to ever deepening questions followed by ever deeper wisdom and insight. Mystery is the kind of secret known more through the faculties of appreciation, wonderment, awe, and trust than it is through ordinary human reason. Mysticism has been defined in many ways, but simply put, mysticism in the Judeo-Christian tradition has to do with experiencing the infinite nearness of God firsthand. The Christian mystic is very simply a man or woman who has discovered immediate communion with Christ, and, in unity with Christ, recognizes his or her connection to all others.

I have not, as is often done, drawn a contrast between religion and spirituality in these pages. Rather than dismissing the word religion I think it needs to be rehabilitated. It is a good word, and the difference between spirituality and religion is subtle. Paying attention to the infinite longing within us puts us on the spiritual path. When we value love, compassion, justice, kindness, generosity, gratitude, and wonder more than money, or power, or status, we are not far from the spiritual kingdom of Christ. The first time I ever heard something described as spiritual rather than religious was in regard to Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a statement meant to clarify that AA was not aligned with any denomination, faith, or philosophical school of thought but was committed to a set of practical principles found essential to discovering and maintaining sobriety—principles which could only be adequately described as spiritual. Thus, making it possible for everyone, even someone alienated from every religious faith, to find the sanity of sober living.

Religion is not, as often thought, the same thing as all that cumbersome baggage associated with institutional religion. The word religion comes from a term that means literally to bind back. Religion is what binds us, or continuously reconnects us, to life, to mystery, to God. Prayer, worship, reading scripture, meditation, acts of kindness, participating in the life of a faith community, practicing all the spiritual disciplines binds us intimately to Christ.

The kingdom of God, or the kingdom of Heaven, is one of the most characteristic expressions of Jesus found in the four Gospels. I recently read an author describing the kingdom of Heaven as a state of consciousness, and that’s not entirely wrong, but it is a little ethereal, ambiguous, and perhaps a little minimizing in the end in that it reduces consciousness to a philosophical concept. The article I was reading noted that scholars have discussed the meaning of the kingdom of God for centuries, but it did not mention that there is also considerable consensus among scholars as to what it means; namely, that it refers quite clearly to the rule, or actualization, of God’s will in the hearts and everyday lives of those who love and are called by God’s name. The kingdom of God is not about anxiously following a lot of trivial rules; nor, I can tell you as someone who grew up in a denomination that is more than a little conservative, has it historically been entirely equated with the reward of heaven for those who have been good in this life. And I must hasten on to add to this list, neither is it an ethereal concept whose meaning has just now been discovered in the twenty-first century. Although it will affect your thoughts and feelings it is not a thought or feeling. It is certainly not a metaphor for Hindu, Zen, or gnostic-like enlightenment. While it includes the church it is infinitely larger. It is about following the way of Jesus, about living a Christ-oriented life, and doing so with peace, joy, and sanity. And it is a renunciation of the toxic values of this world—values like greed, violence, and bigotry. It’s not very complicated at all if, in practice as well as theory, you love God and those around you as Jesus loved God and all those he met on the road; you have discovered the kingdom of Heaven. Of course, working out exactly what that means within the context of your daily existence is the difficult part.

Another two words readers may recognize that I use without philosophical precision are experience and encounter. I have always used them somewhat interchangeably and for the most part continue that habit here. However, in describing those times when we are most keenly aware of the mystery or love or work of God, encounter is generally to be preferred to experience. This is because technically experience is a one-way response to an action, whereas encounter or meeting implies a relationship of mutuality and reciprocity. An encounter, therefore, requires more than an emotional reaction. It requires response. This is why faith that really is faith includes but is more than mental assent. Faith is not so much an idea in our head as it is our response upon encountering Christ. But in the end your encounter with God and your experience of God as sacred mystery does not require a knowledge of precise definitions.

The awareness that God is with us, closer to us than we are to ourselves, and relates to us in a way that can only be described as like that of one person communicating intimately with another is what is meant by an encounter with divine presence; yet in the end the encounter itself is ineffable. Those who have experienced the presence of God can never really explain it to those who have not had the experience until they themselves have encountered God; just as they cannot explain how God is personal, yet exceeds all that is meant by person. Nevertheless, we cannot help but search for descriptive words, and so we say things like "to be present to presence is to be awake, aware, attentive, and alive to the immense reality of God." We may feel in quiet and prayer ourselves to have entered the region of awe and absolute wonder, encountering the One, communing with the One, for whom there are no words or images—though in returning from the experience we may feel compelled to whisper or exclaim or sing ten thousand explanations.

Although presence is not something we can describe analytically, any more than we can describe the taste of a peach, most of us know what it is when we feel or sense it. When we first met our dear friend Althea, she was already an older woman with many interesting anecdotes and stories to tell. I remember her relating how as a young woman dealing with a major crisis in her life, she had gone to see a Freudian psychoanalyst. One day, she was on the couch doing all this free association, saying whatever came into her mind, while the psychiatrist, following Freudian protocol, was seated out of view behind her. As she talked, she felt not the psychiatrist’s listening presence but his absence. She craned her neck to look back at him, and there he was sitting reading the newspaper. But many of us have had the opposite experience in which we have had satisfying moments of knowing someone was deeply and fully present to us.

While in the pages and chapters that follow I refer to the unitive experience in imaging Christian spirituality, I do so with a certain amount of caution. For one thing spirituality as a unitive experience very easily, particularly in a highly syncretistic age such as ours, morphs into the idea of a union of absorption in which the individual personality is lost, but there have been very, very, few in the history of Christianity that were mystics in this sense. In the history of Christian spirituality, union with God is not the most prominent paradigm for understanding mysticism. It is used, but it is only one model or metaphor, and while many have made use of it, as I do here in these pages, few have restricted themselves to it. Most have focused on mysticism as an indefinable, ineffable, noetic, and immediate consciousness of sacred presence, of divine mystery, of God—the God encountered in the pages of the Bible.

Union and Human Individuality

In Hinduism, of course, everything is one, and the name of this fundamental oneness is Brahman—a single, impersonal, and, not only ultimate, but sole reality. The human self, life force, consciousness, or soul is Atman, and Atman is the one true self, or Brahman. There is nothing, no feeling, no thought, no action that is not Brahman. Ultimately, there is no human individuality for everything is one. The human task, according to Hinduism, is to overcome all notions of separateness, all tendencies to think dualistically, and to realize there is no reality other than Brahman. The idea that we have an individual self or soul is maya—pure illusion. Atman is eternal and travels from one body to another after death and is repeatedly reincarnated until enlightenment is finally attained; that is, the devotee realizes he or she is Brahman and the self is absorbed into the cosmic consciousness, or self that is Brahman—like a drop of water absorbed into the ocean. The basic answer of the East to human suffering is, therefore, to disappear or dissolve the individual or personal self in what E. Stanley Jones called the ocean of Impersonal Essence.⁹ I am perhaps rambling on a bit here, but I want to be abundantly clear that this is not the sort of thing I mean by union, communion, or oneness with the Holy Trinity.

Judaism and Christianity have a different understanding than that of the East. For one thing, while not dualistic in the sense of believing there are two equal and opposite spiritual forces, or powers, contending with one another Christians do believe that caritas and hate are antithetical to one another—as are faith and fear, hope and despair, kindness and cruelty, justice and injustice, or benevolence and malevolence. By the time of Israel’s apocalyptic movement (roughly from the time of the writing of the book of Daniel), there was a new evaluation of the significance of the individual. Judaism, guided by the work of the prophets, and Christians by the teaching of Jesus, which they believed to be the fulfillment of the prophets, experienced a deeper realization of both the worth and moral responsibility of the individual. In Christianity, then, the solution to human suffering is not the elimination of the self (which turns out to be a practical impossibility), but its transformation through maintaining what Alcoholics Anonymous calls conscious contact with God, or what Christians mean by living in a vital and loving union or communion with Christ—that placeless place we reach by following the path of self-surrender. To again quote E. Stanley Jones:

This passage (Gal

2

:

20

) is gloriously mixed—the human and divine intermingled, and yet the human is not lost in the divine and the divine is not merged into the human. Each is separate and both are one. The end is community, not identity, the most intimate communion possible or imaginable. Yet the communion is not sentimentality; it is a communion that has self-giving love for one another and for all.¹⁰

This may be far more than was necessary on the nature of unitive experiences, certainly it is wordier than I intended, but I hope it will give you a better sense of what I mean in these pages by mystical experiences of union, of communion, of oneness.

Keeping the Words Connected

To summarize all this business about words, then, I understand the mystic as someone who has discovered the joy of the dance and having discovered that joy seeks to include others by helping people to feel more loved and cared for—especially the poor, the outsider, the powerless, the desolate and the dispossessed. But that is enough about vocabulary. Just be aware that the more you develop an inner feeling for what words like prayer, contemplation, meditation, mystery, union, communion, mystic, saint, disciple, consciousness, awareness, justice, compassion, love, and presence have in common, the more you will intuitively understand the meaning of Christian spirituality.¹¹

Intellectual Integrity and Spiritual Depth

There is a good deal said in these pages about experiential knowledge, but I want you to know that I in no way mean to disparage the role of reason in Christian thought and practice. A truly Christian spirituality will both cultivate our intuitive capacities and enhance our rational powers. The quest, as E. Glenn Hinson points out, is for the suprarational which goes beyond the rationalism and scientism of our day.¹² But I certainly do not wish to encourage thinking which lacks intellectual integrity, nor do I want to contribute to the substitution of superficial self-help slogans or psychological fads for a firsthand experience of God. My simple but rather difficult intention to fulfill has been to write something characterized by simplicity, by common sense, by practicality, and by intellectual integrity and spiritual depth.

Spirituality Wears a Simple Dress

I have a great mistrust of any spiritual theory or teaching so complex it cannot be readily understood by ordinary people. I am absolutely convinced that if, as I believe, there is a God who wants to be known by mortal men and women with all their limitations, then any self-revelation of God must be one of utter simplicity. If it can be comprehended only by the intellectually elite then I find myself doubting its veracity, and if it is only for the few of extraordinary brilliance those such as myself are left in despair. Consequently, I have tried to present an understanding of classical Christian spirituality here in the simple dress in which she always appears.

A Manuscript Rediscovered

It may help you to know, especially if you have read other books, articles or essays I have written, that this is actually my first book. Although my first book written it is my last book published. I wrote it originally as an exercise in a spiritual formation program I participated in over twenty-five years ago. I was encouraged by colleagues and friends who read it at that time to submit it for publication, but after a couple of rejections I set it aside and went on to other things. Two years ago, I came across the original manuscript and began browsing through it. It occurred to me that it might, in fact, be helpful to those affectionately rooted in the Christian tradition, yet who sense that there is a still deeper, mysterious something more to their faith than what they have known so far, and which, if possible, they desire to touch. This book, then, is about that desire and that possibility and my hope to encourage both the desire and the possibility in some small way. I have made very few changes in the manuscript as first written so that it follows its original trajectory. In following this trajectory, it also becomes a book about freedom from a rigid, doctrinaire, moralistic, harsh expression of the faith. It follows a course that assumes as axiomatic that authentic Christianity is reasonable, gentle, and natural.

The End of All Exploring

Like many others of my generation my earliest church experience, my starting place in the spiritual life, was among people who displayed all the negative characteristics Marcus Borg ascribed to his boyhood church.¹³ In my case I grew up in the conservative and highly legalistic Churches of Christ. These strict biblicists insisted that all matters of faith were to be discussed using only the words and expressions of Scripture itself. Since the word inerrancy does not occur in the Bible it was not a term I ever heard, or was familiar with, until I was college age. But there were many sermons on the power of Scripture to effect change in the course of human life and on the Bible as absolutely authoritative.