By making mysticism more democratic, we’ve also made it more bourgeois, more comfortable, and more dilettantish. It’s become something we pursue as a complement to an upwardly mobile existence, rather than a radical alternative to the ladder of success. Going to yoga classes isn’t the same thing as becoming a yogi; spending a week in a retreat center doesn’t make me Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux. Our kind of mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.
What’s more, it’s possible that our horizons have become too broad, and that real spiritual breakthroughs require a kind of narrowing — the decision to pick a path and stick with it, rather than hopscotching around in search of a synthesis that “works for me.” The great mystics of the past were often committed to a particular tradition and community, and bound by the rules (and often the physical confines) of a specific religious institution. Without these kind of strictures and commitments, Johnson argues, mysticism drifts easily into a kind of solipsism: “Kabbalism apart from Torah-observance is playacting; Sufism disconnected from Shariah is vague theosophy; and Christian mysticism that finds no center in the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ drifts into a form of self-grooming.”
Most religious believers will never be great mystics, of course, and the American way of faith is kinder than many earlier eras to those of us who won’t. But maybe it’s become too kind, and too accommodating. Even ordinary belief — the kind that seeks epiphanies between deadlines, and struggles even with the meager self-discipline required to get through Lent — depends on extraordinary examples, whether they’re embedded in our communities or cloistered in the great silence of a monastery. Without them, faith can become just another form of worldliness, therapeutic rather than transcendent, and shorn of any claim to stand in judgment over our everyday choices and concerns.
Maybe getting through Lent is a struggle because deep down, people don't see giving up Hershey bars as ultimately meaning anything. As for a faith that stands in judgment, I have to wonder about someone who requires the supernatural in order to take the moral fork in the road when such choices come up. I always use the pepper-in-the-shopping-cart analogy: When you get into the parking lot at the supermarket, and you see a bell pepper wedged between the top basked and the rest of the cart that both you and the cashier missed, do you just take it, leave it in the cart, or go in and pay for it? I'm not a Christian, I don't really practice any religion, and I always go in and pay for it. BECAUSE IT IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO.
Why is that so difficult that people need to create a punitive imaginary figure in order to do it?
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