Of the Mind,Of The Self,and Observing Insects,Birds,Animals and Mankind or Not so Kind

drawing by marguerita

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.In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever. A would-be mystic can attend a Pentecostal healing service one day and a class on Buddhism the next, dabble in Kabbalah in February and experiment with crystals in March, practice yoga every morning and spend weekends at an Eastern Orthodox retreat center. Sufi prayer techniques, Eucharistic adoration, peyote, tantric sex — name your preferred path to spiritual epiphany, and it’s probably on the table.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.Without them, too, we give up on what’s supposed to be the deep promise of religious practice: that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.http://www.nytimes.com//2010/03/08/opinion/08douthat.html