The “All Chips In” Mystical Hunch
I am not sure exactly where this shift began. Like many personal paradigmatic shifts it likely was a gradual process. But I can point to specific moments when it started to take on a form. The first was probably a sermon I preached some fifteen years ago. “Moralism vs. Mysticism,” I titled it.
I probably have that sermon buried deep in some files somewhere, but pulling it up doesn’t really matter at this point. I remember the point I was trying to make—that religion, as we know it, seems to be shifting from playing a role in shaping people’s behavior to being the basis for a lived encounter with the very Soul of the world (sometimes called “God”). In other words, religion as the glue that keeps people from killing each other and hopefully acting kindly, generously, justly, and compassionately versus religion as the catalyst for life lived as a divine love affair.
When people ask me about the difference I often tell them this: “People who see religion as a moral foundation often say, “I love God.” People who see religion as the source of mysticism say, “I am in love with God.” It is a subtle, but profound difference. The former often relies on religious literature that commands the believer to love as the highest virtue in life. The latter speaks of personal encounters when “my heart skipped a beat,” “my knees went weak,” and “I fell hopelessly in love with Life.”
Love as a moral obligation versus love as a titillating romance with the Source of Life.
It’s hard to believe that it has been nearly a decade now since I embarked on what I called my “Rome to Rumi” pilgrimage, a cycling pilgrimage that began at the Vatican in Rome and ended at Rumi’s Tomb in Konya, Turkey. Over 3,000 kilometers I cycled through Catholic Italy, Greek Orthodox Greece and Muslim Turkey as I rode and wrote my way through this transition that I feel is happening in the Western world.
I titled my blog post, ‘The “All Chips In” Mystical Hunch.’ This is my hunch: That the Western world is experiencing a monumental and historic shift from religious orthodoxy to religious and modern mysticism. Very few people would actually use the term “mysticism” to describe this. They might say, “I encounter the Sacred in nature” or “I don’t believe in creeds, but I do know what is true in my heart” or “I don’t think one has to go to church, synagogue or a mosque to worship.”
The term today many use is “spirituality.”
What we moderns call “spirituality” looks awfully similar to what ancients called religious mysticism. There is really nothing new under the sun, it is said. If that is true, what is emerging today is not some completely new and novel expression, but is just a monumental swing of the religious pendulum heading back toward experience-based mysticism from belief-oriented moralism.
Moralism shows up when society needs the glue to stick together and act civilized. Mysticism shows up when the social fabric is fracturing and people are once again looking for the source, the essence, and the core of this experience called Life.
What does this have to do with my work to develop a pilgrimage culture? It seems to me that the hundreds of thousands of people who take pilgrimages every year are those who, whether they know it or not, are feeling called to a mystical orientation in life. They are looking for more than just a religion to believe in. They are looking a lived experience. They are looking for an encounter with the pulse of life.
Ask yourself this question: Do you love because it is the right thing to do or do you love because your soul is on fire and your heart is aching to dance with the divine?
Neither is better than the other, but one points to the glue that holds society together; the other points to the religious impulse to fall in love with the one who is the very Heartbeat of Life.
My “All Chips In” mystical hunch is that more and more people are tiring of the first and increasingly longing for the second.
More to come, I promise!
Brian Heron
Religious innovator and spiritual pilgrim