God’s Word Is Everything
We read the mystics for the same reason we read the Bible, because we find there an articulation of intimacy with God. Abraham and Moses have experiences of God; the writers of Genesis and Exodus relate these experiences. The prophets experience God; their prophecies find words to express that experience. We read the prophets to learn what God told them. But we also read, hoping, through them, to have a vicarious experience of God. As with Holy Scripture, in reading the mystics I feel that God is somehow there in the words. God created everything with words, and so through words I hope to be recreated. For those in the Judeo-Christian tradition, no mystical writing incarnates the divine power and presence as does the Bible…. No other Judeo-Christian text demands more of the reader because it demands the humility to listen to God, not our own prejudices. The Bible, in short, demands that we abdicate the ego’s need to be like God. The Bible’s truth is that God alone is God; God alone is. God is God, and we are but creatures dependent on God for everything yet endowed by God with a free will that can reject God’s primacy, privileging our will over God’s will.
Without God’s sustaining love we are nothing. God alone keeps us in existence. Once we realize that, we want to know more about this God. Who is God, and what does God have to do with us? That is the question, and so we go in search of words and other signs that can reveal to us who God is and, thereby, who we are. Thus, after Scripture and nature, we turn to those who have experienced God—the mystics. What has God revealed to them? Anything more or other than is in Scripture? Anything more than is revealed in the Word that is Jesus Christ? I have not found in the mystics anything more than God has revealed in Christ—at least not anything more that relates to the question, “Who is God, and what does God have to do with us?”
—from the book Mystics: Twelve Who Reveal God’s Love
by Murray Bodo, OFM
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