Poetry...

Poetry is the language of choice for mystics in all traditions.

If you want to speak of the ineffable and the essential, there is no better medium than poetry. Poetry is the language of the spirit and the soul, not of the discursive mind. It compresses the lived truth of the poet’s experience into a beauty and wisdom that can slip under the skin of the reader and enter their bloodstream. When you don’t know what to say you cry out, and those cries are the beginning of poetry. They are the language informed not only by the mind but by the body and heart as well. Poetry is the language of choice for mystics in all traditions who have tried to communicate their insights and experiences for the benefit of those who will listen.

Poems from the Christian mystical experience is for lovers of God everywhere, because lovers of God are everywhere, whatever their race or creed may be. The mystics among us of any religion or none, put their faith less in external belief systems or dogma than in the more interior, personal experience of God and of existence itself. But the deeper and more interior these spiritual experiences become, the more universal they also tend to be, expressions of a common stream that feeds humanity and all its religions everywhere, no matter how different we may appear on the surface. That stream emerges in every tradition as the language of silence beyond thought, of longing and ecstasy, of a wisdom that can see beyond the limitations of forms and beyond language itself. Ultimately, it emerges in a celebration of union—the union on this earth and in this body of the human with the divine. This is the true spiritual marriage, the consummation of love that in one way or another is the aim of every ritual and every practice in every religion.

Mysticism and its contemplative practices continue to exist in Christianity, as in every religious tradition, because they represent the intrinsic human desire to return to the source of our humanity. As Saint Augustine said in The City of God, “we must fly to our beloved homeland. There the Father is, and there is everything.”

“May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your new day with dreams, possibiities, and promises.
May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.
May you go into the night blessed, sheltered, and protected.
May your soul calm, console, and renew you.”

— John O’Donohue

Excerpted from For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics by Roger Housden.