Jan Hilton starts most days sitting in a living room chair, facing an iconic image of Jesus created 1,400 years ago in a Middle Eastern monastery.
Before she prays and meditates there for 20 minutes, she looks into the eyes of the picture.
“It creates the right frame of mind,” she said. “It’s just remembering that in awareness of the quiet is the divine.”
A spiritual director at an Episcopal church in Corpus Christi, Hilton said that same feeling of connection to God is one that has been enriched by her interest in mysticism. She has enrolled in a class about modern mystics that will begin next month in San Antonio.
Called “Christian Mysticism: History, Wisdom and Insights,” the course will include scholars talking about mystics from various Christian faith traditions, organizers said. In addition to talks about mystics, time is set aside in class for participants to practice prayer and meditation.
I’m curious as to why this article was posted. A great many Christians are interested in Christian mysticism which has a long tradition. Some people who are non Christians also have an interest in Christian mysticism. Was it the final quote about the “source of all is one God and one love” and the fact that she is a spiritual director at one Episcopal Church that made if of particular interest?
Its a mystery to me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88UukqH3kDQ&feature=related
I once used the phrase “Christian mysticism” en passant in class. Students gaped and nodded when one piped up, “You don’t usually associate Christianity with mysticism.” Their puzzlement is understandable because on the ground most churches don’t seem to have much to say about mysticism or religious experience. You associate Christianity with Sunday school, rummage sales and canned goods drives–not with mysticism. What a shame: there are apparently lots of takers out there for mysticism broadly construed, but the last place they think of looking for it is in the church–and with good reason. Why don’t all churches routinely do mysticism–classes, meditation sessions, instruction in techniques–and advertise it aggressively, to both members and the general public?
I was raised as a Congregationalist, attended services weekly, sang in the choir, went to Sunday School, and was confirmed by my church. In all those early years, I never heard anything about mysticism. When I a college student, the director of a university observatory invited me to visit to discuss a career in astrophysics. He was from India (later a Nobel laureate) and introduced me to Vedanta. Eventually, I received a Carnegie grant to study in India. Until recently, mysticism was only meaningful to me through Hinduism.
After my retirement, I began to study mysticism in the world’s religions and discovered that Christianity had it’s own rich tradition, especially in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. My book, “the greatest achievement in life,” was published online this year and summarizes the mystical traditions of the five major faiths.