Someone left a comment regarding being a real hermit and a real mystic, including some misinformation and not citing sources, plus insisting that there is "no salvation outside the Catholic Church." There was so much disinformation and self-deceived notions in the comment, that to spare the person embarrassment, I did not share it here. And there is no point in going over the realities with the person, for his errant beliefs are set as in concrete.
I've written and asked my dear friend, a professor, scholar, and renowned expert on John of the Cross if one comment made has any truth to it. That is that Church officials had John of the Cross go about checking on mystics to see if they are "real" or not. Awaiting word back, but I've not read anything of the sort in my studies on John of the Cross' life. He had far greater matters to do and consider and "be" in his union with God while yet on earth.
Ask anyone who is not a Roman Catholic but a Christian and who has had a death experience and was sent back to tell about it and to live on for however long God deems, if they were and are "saved" and if there was "salvation" for them when they met with the Trinity or any One of the Three Persons following their dying.
At the time of my own death experience, I was a Lutheran and had been a Christian all my life; and I was not in any state of perfection, either; in fact, I was guilty of a sin a particular sin at the time even though not wanting to be. Upon my leaving my body and going onward, upward and out from the hospital recovery room, out into the universe, I was with God; it was glorious--so much love and joy as to be inexpressible in human and temporal terms!
Ask any Eastern Orthodox Catholic if there is no salvation outside the Roman Catholic Church. They will insist that there is no salvation outside the Orthodox Catholic Church! Well, not all will insist on that, nor will all Roman Catholics think that because some are further along in spiritual development and exist more in His Living Word to know better. Anyone who is a Christian--and that can occur at judgment--may choose to accept Christ as one's Savior! This is done with the mind, heart, and soul: to love the Holy Trinity and to follow Christ's teachings (in Scripture, His Living Word), to worship Him and to love God above all things and love others as God loves.
I will say that having been Protestant and having also studied and researched Buddhism, Judaism, some Hinduism, some New Age and some Sufism, Catholicism was Christ's answer to me when I asked "What is the Church that You [Jesus] founded?" (This was after having been in various Protestant churches over the first four decades or so of my life, and each denomination I learned in membership classes, three or four was the usual number of course meetings, was founded by this or that "man." I always found aspects lacking, as we would expect from human beings creating a church denomination. Thus, why I asked God, and how God answered me: He brought me into the Catholic Church (happened to be Latin rite as I lived in a small town, and Roman Catholic was the only rite, and the Holy Spirit in a dream vision led me repeatedly to that church.
The more I've come to know the Christian mystics over the past nearly three decades, I recognize in their writings and lives that at a certain point they as if "passed through the portal" from temporal to mystical, and this included the temporal to mystical Church. They might have participated in Mass now and then, but more often the hermits did not, and such as John of the Cross did not physically as was not allowed and eventually not the health to physically participate, either. But he was already passed through the mystic portal, and was not so much "present" in the temporal other than was his physical body.
One after another of the mystics I have read and studied, this was their eventual spiritual progression, leading to a type of "passing through" the mystic portal into the mystical church and mystical union in and with and through His Real Presence--yet functioning on this earth. The temporal did not tether them, yet they were technically "Catholic" and very much Christian. Nothing changed in their temporal church confirmation and membership.
So it is with me. I strive to live God's Law of Love: Love God above all things and others as God loves. I am in His Real Presence, in His Mass, in His Living Word, and in His Body of which He is the Head, my Head, my Spiritual Director, my Teacher, my. Father, my Spouse, my All.
Love in His Love, and God bless His Real Presence in us!
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