Liberating Life

In this essay, Mary Engel shares her fitful, gradual discovery "that the life of a mystic [is] a liberating life" (152), a truly human way of living, that repudiates false humility, self-abnegation, and isolation. Indeed, Engel charts for us the obstacles she has overcome in understanding that liberating life as identical to daily following of the Way that Jesus of Nazareth taught. To follow his Way is to listen attentively, that is, "with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind," to enter into intimate, loving communion with the Divine, and to act in compassionate solidarity with the "least" of the world (Matthew 22:37–39). Moreover, following the Way is ordinary living, full of unease and heart-wrenching risks and joys small and large. Engel's discovery places her in the company of searchers and seekers of diverse religious traditions and sensibilities—all of whom quest for a whole, humane, truly human life.

In one characterization, the word mysticism conjures an esoteric, ethereal world of detachment and withdrawal, of extreme asceticism and privation, of passivity and surrender. On such presumption, mysticism appears strange, even bizarre. In another description, mysticism refers to a cluster of practices, traditions, and discourses emerging from religious experiences that turn and steady the human person in dynamic relationship with the Holy. On this presumption, mysticism stretches the contours of conventional religious traditions, settles on their borders, and searches restlessly for union with the holy, indeed, union with all creation.

Engel will affirm the latter account, but not without confronting, wrestling with, and embracing the paradoxes of the "spiritual life," or what Evelyn Underhill calls "that full and real life for which [one] is made; a life that is organic and social, essentially free yet with its own necessities and laws."¹ These necessities and laws, these paradoxes ring familiar: to save one's life is to lose it, self-control is to be found in self-surrender, self-fulfillment is to be achieved through self-emptying. "Nada, nada, nada," St. John of the Cross teaches us, leads to todo, to all. Nothing, nothing, nothing and even at the peak of the mountain nothing.²

Any woman who seeks authentically a path to holiness, to self-transcendence recognizes these difficulties and ambiguities, the fear and desire; like Engel, she trembles. Spiritualized notions such as annihilation or repression of self, dissolution or union, desire and passion, humility and surrender are coated decisively in Western cultures with patriarchal patina. Indeed, for a critical feminist, developing and sustaining a spiritual life is a serious challenge. This requires, as Engel observes, "Discerning the difference between this self-naughting humility that delights in God taught by mystics and the corrosive humiliation of self taught by those who profit from keeping the other in its place" (151).

Engel reminds us that Christian mysticism is one among several paths in living toward holiness, wisdom, or mystical knowledge; but each path calls for keen attentiveness to the situations of human others and of the world. This reminder echoes the writings of many seekers whether Buddhist nun Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron or Carmelite Teresa of Avila, whether the Dalai Lama or Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whether Mother Teresa of Calcutta or Muslim mystic Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi. Each woman and man in her and his own search of holiness sought to live out of the depths of spiritual experience, to enlarge consciousness and horizon, to include rather than exclude all creation.

A recurring leitmotif in Engel's essay is the paradox of hiddenness. From tacit acceptance of the hidden support work of women, whether at home or in the church, to a grasp of truths that had been hidden from her, from a notion of mystics as hiding from the world to an awareness of mystics hidden within the world, Engel sketches out her deepening understanding of mystics as women and men who exercise responsible interiority and asceticism for the common good. Reflecting on the life of her paternal grandmother, Willemina Meijer Potter, Engel comes to understand the immigrant woman's "unglamorous" (156) life as one that radiated enough beauty to transform...