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Jesus Christ was and is many things, so to speak. Among the attributes is mystic. Indeed, I affirm that this is the chief temporal trait of Jesus as Teacher. Jesus was a mystical teacher, for he saw the world with a mystical vision, which I will later call the eye of contemplation. When Jesus teaches, for example, of the immanence of the Kingdom of God, or Kingdom of Heaven, he uses signifiers from his own culture, speaking to persons of that culture, but points to the Reality indicated by those cultural signifiers. He implies, thereby, that “Kingdom” and “God” and “Heaven” point to a Meaning that the eye of flesh and the eye of mind cannot grasp. Again, hang in with me, as I will go into more detail about these three “eyes” or “seeing” below.
Likewise, Jesus more clearly points to the mystical Meaning within his teaching. Luke 8.10 reads: And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries (Greek, musta’rion) of the kingdom of God: but to the rest in parables; that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand (ASV). In the parallel passage from Matthew, Jesus adds, “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he hath” (Matthew 18.10, ASV). This seems to imply that a lack of insight evolves into less insight, while insight grows into more insight. That is, to be faithful to what you presently “see,” means you will “see” more deeply. To refuse to “see” what you now “see” leads to a decline in ability to “see.”
So, the Christian faith arose out of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. As such, he is an embodiment of the Mystery. His teaching articulates that Mystery. To understand that Mystery more fully, we must move more toward the eye of contemplation and, finally, see as a contemplative. Otherwise, we remain at the “seeing” of flesh and mind, we remain on the surface of materiality and reason. Therefore, then, we limit the Mystery to interpretation located in these two domains.
My point is simply this—Growing up spiritually entails a transformation of the less embracing, less insightful capacities of materiality and reason into contemplation. Contemplation is the result of the divinely natural emergence of matter and mind into contemplative insight, or seeing-within.
The Mystery of God means we need Mystics, or Contemplatives. Why do we need mystics? Mysticism has a gift to offer humankind and the living faiths. Indeed, any living faith Communion will become a dead faith group if it represses the mystical gift given to it by those who have the eye of contemplation.
Now, I am about to get into some heady sounding material. Forgive me, and bear with me, again. Hang in, and it will make sense by the end of this paper—I hope!
Mystics purport, notes Ken Wilber, in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, that “mystical validity claims are anchored in extralinguistic realities that, however much they are molded by cultural factors, are not merely the product of shifting cultural and provincial-only fashions.” Rather, “the referents of the transcendental signifiers exist in a worldspace [or, space of meaning, network of meaning] that is disclosed to those with the appropriate developmental signifieds, even if these are always already culturally situated.” Wilber compares this to natural science. Science can, within a cultural context and using the symbols of that context, make universal claims of what I call a transcontextual nature.
For some persons, the word “Christ” is a sign of a particular religion only, for others “Christ” is a sign of a Universal Presence, or Love always. The first have taken a cultural signifier and assigned it a particularized, or localized, meaning. The second have taken the cultural sign and assigned it a universal meaning. This means, the localized significance does not have to be abandoned, rather, the localized significance opens itself to the nonlocal significance.
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