Glenn (Christian Mystic) wrote:

"Pastor Dave" <pastordave38@nospam-yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:j32ip09g2it145qi3frtqcglo6jajfo0vo@4ax.com...

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 17:39:53 +0100, while scaling the
Mt. Everest, Bob Brewer <Robert@Brewer-net.de>
pontificated:

Pastor Dave wrote:

On Sun, 14 Nov 2004 19:02:30 +0100, while scaling the
Mt. Everest, Bob Brewer <Robert@Brewer-net.de>
pontificated:

Pastor Dave wrote:

<snip>

The 'falsely named knowledge' is Gnosis, but what about Mystics?
Gnostics were known to oppose the church teaching and 'chose' an
alternative teaching which put them outside of the church. Mystics
have always preferred to remain inside the church and uphold church
teaching - although they had a wide variety of spiritual revelation.
The problem is that the church has only recently opened to other forms
of spirituality.
The one thing that impresses me is that Mystics in all religions have
a common vocabulary and have a special kind of ecumenical affinity
that mainstream religions have yet to achieve.

Christianity does not involve mysticism.

I see, so the Holy Spirit, and or meditation, doesn't exist in
Christianity, and we must get all our insight from a book ?

It is interesting that if you paraphrase Jesus, he sounds a lot like other
Mystics. However, that wouldn't have to surprise us, if we didn't assume
that he alone had found the 'truth'.

I hold on to this 'Way', without being dogmatic about it. Inner Ways are
always personal paths, but sometimes the paths of others can give us a
direction for our own Way - if we are attentive. I am grateful to Jörg
Zink for his work, he is an old man now and I would have liked to have a
conversation with him. He has done a lot to help people find their own
form of faith and brought out a book in the sixties called 'How we can
pray' and even then brought many meditative aspects into Prayer.

"The Inner Way is dependant upon a principle that we can't push aside,
even if we don't understand everything. When we go looking for something,
it must be able to be found. What we want to gain must be available to us.
Whoever we are searching for must come towards us. In religious language,
we would say that finding God is dependant upon him looking for us.

And yet we try, even though we know that nothing is dependant upon our
trying. We practise silence, we gather ourselves, we try to understand,
and we try to be humble, even though we know that success is not dependant
upon our trying.

When we encounter foreign religious practise, it would do us well to take
it seriously... it could show us paths that we can assimilate into our
Christian Tradition."

Zink differentiates between religious language and other language. He says
that religious language is only for the purpose of the inner Way and
cannot be taken literally. This is true of the language of most Religions.
The description of the inner path is made with metaphors taken out of the
physical world, but because it is an 'inner' Way, it describes something
otherwise difficult to describe.

Even Paul quoted greek Mystic in Athens: "The God that made the world, and
all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth
not in temples made with hands; neither is worshiped with men’s hands, as
though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and
all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all
the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and
the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply
they might feel after him, and find him, though he is not far from every
one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain
also of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring. Being
then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like
to gold, or silver, or stone graven by art and man’s device."

He makes it clear that the physical and spiritual world are very much
different, but "they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after
him, and find him, though he is not far from every one of us." This
'feeling' is not something that we do physically, but spiritually.
Similarly, the pictures of the apocalypse and the visions of the 'new
Jerusalem' are spiritual realities - not physical ones.

And yet, the physical world should feel the benefits of when the 'Sons of
God' are revealed (Romans 8: "For I reckon that the sufferings of the
present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory about to be
revealed in us; for the earnest looking out of the creation doth expect
the revelation of the sons of God; for to vanity was the creation made
subject—not of its will, but because of Him who did subject it —in hope,
that also the creation itself shall be set free from the servitude of the
corruption to the liberty of the glory of the children of God; for we have
known that all the creation doth groan together, and doth travail in pain
together till now."

Paul saw the whole of creation waiting impatiently for the true humankind
to be revealed and 'make a difference' - to be set free from the
corruption it is now suffering under. Perhaps a conservationalist would
agree. But the Inner Way is seen as the way to liberty, finally freed from
the odd servitude to 'sin' - the alienation from creation and from our
appointment as humankind.

Looking at our fundamentalists, who only want to get into heaven and hate
this world, that may be a disappointment.

Shalom
Bob