<i>Earthy Mysticism</i>, chapters 1-4
I decided to begin the 77 Mystics journey with William McNamara’s Earthy Mysticism: Contemplation and the Life of Passionate Presence because I thought it would be a fun and fascinating starting point. After all, the integration of true mystery and true earthiness sounds like one of the few spiritual junctures where Christians and Pagans might actually find common ground.
The book is short (110 pages), highly poetic, earthy (but in a very elegant and erudite way), and polemic. The author is not so much trying to celebrate earthy mysticism as to make the case for an embodied spirituality, and then exhort his readers into making this approach to the inner life their own. By “earthy mysticism,” McNamara means an experience of relating to God through the body, through matter, through passion and risk and sweat.
The book is certainly intriguing, but after having read the first few chapters I don’t think it’s really a “fun” work. McNamara brings an intensity to his writing that is not altogether foreign to the mystical tradition (I’d hardly call John of the Cross or Richard Rolle laid back!), but is unusual in today’s world of therapeutic spirituality. This Carmelite monk couldn’t care a fig about using the life of prayer to become more integrated with such things as “feeling the presence of God’s love in your life.” No, McNamara isn’t worried about how good we feel: instead, he wants us to encounter the vastness of Divine Presence in such a way that it’s scary, world-view shattering, and ego-annihilating.
Transformational? You bet. Liberating? Certainly. Fun? Probably not.
Right away, this author annoyed me. Consider this cranky bit of defensiveness, from the book’s Introduction: ‘Even the lowliest of earthy mystics cherishes the languages of earth and refuses to do violence to his own language, and so, despite footling fads and popular pressures, he will never resort to awkward, messy, linguistic devises such as “(s)he,” “he or she,” or “woperson,” when a simple “he” or “person” will do the trick. Any truly liberated woman will understand this policy.’ Okay, so McNamara doesn’t like inclusive language—or diplomacy, for that matter. Indeed, this politically incorrect (remember, this book came out in 1983) salvo speaks volumes of what would come in the pages to follow: McNamara displays skill as a brilliant stylist, with a commanding use of the English language, a quirky and quite lovely vision of the wildness of the Divine eros, and a message that just never seems to take flight. I’m not sure if this is because he is being less than honest about how one of the chief obstacles to truly earthy spirituality is the Church Institutional, or if his discussions of sensuality, prayer, desire, and the mysticism of transgression all seem so, well, abstract. This book has lots of wonderful things to say (see the list of quotes I posted a few days ago, and I’ll post more later in the month). But for all its advocacy of earthiness, this book has (so far, I’m not done yet) left me feeling that the author confuses theory and practice. Please don’t get me wrong: to give birth to a truly radical, liberating, boundary-demolishing mysticism, we need visionaries to envision it as much as we need practitioners to make it real. McNamara is clearly a visionary, but he has left me with more unanswered questions than unexpected challenges. It seems to me that anyone who tries to be a prophet in today’s world (ie, who says, “this is where God is calling us to go”) needs to be at least somewhat of a tour guide (“follow me, I’ll show you how to get there”). That is the quality I find lacking in this book. Even at the end of chapter three when he offers seven suggestions for cultivating a life of prayer in today’s urban environment, the suggestions range from the banal (“Get up early in the morning”) to the vague (“Enjoy as much beauty as you can”).
Mind you, I think it’s a book worth reading. Chapter one, “God in the flesh” considers how the Christian theology of incarnation supports the idea of eros and desire within the heart of the Divine. Chapters two through four then look at different issues related to prayer: sensuality, longing, passion, staying alert, taking risks, encountering the terrifying power of a truly big God. Plenty of nuggets of wisdom. But we’ll have to see where McNamara is going—at this point, over a third of the way through this slender volume, I don’t have a sense of his destination.
