You have a gift of picking nearly all my favorite artistic expressions of God-awareness (cathedrals, Bach, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day, the icons [see Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light], etc.). All of these testimonies abundantly support your main thesis here of mysticism as ‘a lot like love.’

And your analogy of “Mysticism is like a snail” is one of the most creative things I have ever heard you say! Brilliant. Like any great analogy, this one helps me to say something further about my experiences and preferences that may communicate to you something of what is inside me:

I have been fighting a lifelong battle in favor of content over form, life over structure, wine over wineskins, substance over appearance, real experience over pretense–you get the idea. I feel that life without structure has the potential to create its own necessary structure, whereas structure without life is, well, just dead. It could be a testimony of earlier life, perhaps a relic; but it is in itself dead. I could say the same thing in terms of another analogy: I much prefer zoology to paleontology, or counseling to literature, because one is interacting with current life and the other is reacting to its shadows or footprints (or ‘shells’!).

I offer no pretense that what I am doing is ‘balanced’ or ‘correct’ in any healthy way. I greatly enjoy reading all kinds of literature, including mystical literature, and my 9-year-old son’s favorite place to visit (with me) is the newly opened fossil museum about 15 miles from here. In fact, I will offer an even stronger disclaimer: I am naturally shy and avoid contact with people, especially new people, thus giving the lie to my stated commitment to interact with real living beings rather than their shadows.

I also agree with the fierce necessity of learning to discern the wheat from the chaff, and the guts it takes to wrestle through this and grow to maturity in our lives of service as well as in our personal tastes. Jesus told us to remain as little children, but there is an unhealthy childishness that fails or refuses to grow up in love, and stifles the growth of the expression of the Spirit in us. I sense that this grieves his heart as he intercedes for us to be blessed in the greatest possible way: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Thank you for continuing to live what you believe, and to give away what you have received!

Your brother in Jesus,
Peter