Continuation of transference of posts from my other blog site....
[I had dared write B. as his video lectures somehow were as if I've known his voice for years and years, and that what he explains makes sense to me and is as if here is someone who understands what I contend with in life, and helps me feel all right about it all, encouraged, even. I was surprised with a response to my lengthy email of outpouring of more the chaotic aspects of my plight for the past 25 years as a Catholic and the difficulties of mystical experiences and temporal Catholic world including clerics. So I responded last night in some short expressions, but this morning woke up with all this aspect of which I realize the main if not only thought and point is that of seemingly no one that I know of (perhaps he has more than I am aware) has really captured the full reality of the suffering mystics undergo. So I sent this--in so much physical pain this morning I did not notice I did not address properly with professional title--as many do not address me with mine, either, nor do I care. However, I have the embarrassment of having written even more to a very busy person to whom I'd last night written I'd not bother again--yet here I am, for this thought of suffering of mystics seems somehow maybe after his major life work of History of Mysticism--maybe could write giving suffering the emphasis that it actually is in a mystic's actual life. And of course am thinking per usual that I've come off as a mental case as well as a pest. Internet can be tricky like that in someone like me writing so much and to a stranger who I have advantage of seemingly knowing the person after hours and hours of listening to his lectures and talks, but the other person does not know me, and the topic itself can be as if from a crazed hysteric. Even so, right now I realize that I did not include the reality that the mystic wants to die, and yet on the other hand has a compulsion to fulfill the mission of which I'm not even sure exactly what it is such as if to write, if I'm writing what I'm to be writing, or if suffering, if well enough which never seems as if suffering well enough. Part of the suffering, perhaps. Never quite knowing--for we cannot know other than to try to keep going, not knowing if what we are doing or thinking is what God wants. Am reminded that John the Baptist talked about this to me years ago, before I was Catholic, in early major spiritual encounters of unusual way involving God breaking through into the my temporal existence.]
Dear [Dr.] M,
Woke up with the usual horrific pain and first thought is no one seems to be capturing the intense suffering (of all types, for there are other sufferings far beyond temporal) that mystics endure, are brought through, not necessarily just Fridays through Sundays or such,
or like St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi of bedridden last three years of life, or of Julian of Norwich with her illness at age 301/2 that had her between life and death. But of the immense and deep and far reaching suffering bodily and spiritually, but also of mental torments and emotional. Perhaps that needs to be explored more in its reality if not too much of a "downer"!
People can envy or think how wonderful to be a mystic, or can talk of how everyone is called to be a mystic. Well, it is not that you can choose what degree of mystic. No one can fathom the amount and breadth and depth of all types of sufferings that a mystic might be given in the union of fire of soul subsumed into God. That is the word I've always used: subsumed. I am subsumed into God in His allness or nothingness--makes no difference in a way.
But my life is one of total suffering in the Trinity to the point that suffering has become love and love has become suffering, or as the Virgin Mary and Jesus once told me when they came each toward and hovered above in a type of ball of misty cloud, then the one of Mary was subsumed into the one of Jesus of which that ball of misty cloud had come out of the Tabernacle and each hovered above me, and Mary said as amorphous sphere was about to be subsumed and enter in Christ's sphere: You will find him in your pain.
Of the talks I've listened to, I've not come across one that deals with just how must raw and long-ranging suffering a mystic is called to, including that suffering of knowing one never fits in, or such as if people do not meet me, they imagine something totally other; and when I am out and about which is rare anymore, they'd have no idea of what is going on within and has for decades, not even do family or closest friends, for it is too much for them to absorb, or their then is the great suffering of rejection and of persecution of being denied acceptability or to even be allowed to be oneself--that self that is more of Christ crucified in perpetual crucifixion.
There is that terrible suffering of knowing one is not like others--and yes, as my dad said years ago when I was having major experiences and for first time had to face not perceiving or existing like most others--he said you have two arms and two legs like everyone else. My mother tried to say, "John, John, she is trying to tell us something more than that." But only after their deaths were they to grasp the life that I am impelled to live because I have agreed to this life. I agreed to it somewhere way back, perhaps before I was born. I don't know.
Anyway, I was not going to bother you further, but there seems no extensive writing or reality or recognition that being a mystic is not at all an easy life nor "fun" or somehow "koinky-cool." It might not just be a year or three or five; and you don't get to pick the amount or types or degrees of sufferings. But love of God agrees to whatever suffering, and
the human part cries out for mercy and then the body, mind, heart and soul re-commit and suffer all the more because those such as I, at least, will give all even if don't think we can manage another hour of suffering.
The mystical marriage is so glorious and the desire to have the marriage consummated causes the soul to endure more agony and even hell, with the remembrance of Jesus saying after the marriage that included at least in mine, a most joyous wedding feast after the marriage, and He said for me to wait, that He had to go away for awhile to other souls, and He showed me parishioners and priests in a gaggle jeering and gossiping and questioning, ridiculing, but He said, "Pay no attention to them. You are to wait and I will come back for you." So the mystic waits through even more suffering, particularly now great physical pain that has temporal reality so is real pain, causal, temporal pain that extends into the spiritual realm as well, and breeches into the mystical realm, even.
So maybe something once you finish your final volumes of the History, something of the immense and intensely PAINFUL reality of the suffering of mystics. People need to know it might not be as they imagine or think; we do not have control of the conditions, the job description. So there is that great unknowing of God--we cannot know God, but what is more, we cannot control God. That is what gets to us humans ontologically, perhaps the most, is that we cannot control God.
I think this is the last of my thoughts and perhaps the only valid of my previous chatter, lengthy as it was, that I am to express to you, a stranger other than my one-way meeting you providentially in taped video lectures and my research, then, of your life. And what a life lived for God--as could be said, "Well done, good and faithful servant."
And more suffering of a mystic is the horrible suffering of always feeling and thinking that one is not fulfilling the purpose God desires, and in the suffering, even, that one is not suffering well enough. Suffering is major, pervasive aspect of mysticism and the lives of mystics more than one can even read between the lines in a biography. There is a subsummation of the body, mind, heart, and soul that suffering is unique but necessary element, for one must "Love to suffer, and suffer to Love!"
[What one time St. Michael declared as he thrust a spear down through my heart after I was shown the gist of another assignment involving a sick priest, but taught me that in God's love, suffering is as if inherent in love itself, for the piercing was excruciatingly painful but also very sweet in mystifying way but in temporal way, too. (And another time when I was being as if graduated after another terrible suffering not so much of physical pain but far worse, I awoke one morning and Jesus stood beside my bed, and He held a cross with corpus of Him on it, about 4-5 inches long, and he took it with His right hand and put it right through my flesh and sternum and down into my human, physical heart area. That was so painful yet the burning, excruciating pain morphed into a sweetness, a sticky sweetness like blood itself. That cross remains in my chest and "heart" both. These experiences are the exclamation point of God's love and suffering, suffering and love.)]
God is love, love is pain; God is Suffering and Love. They meld into one like the Trinity.
The end--and apologies for my lengthy writing and peskiness. I don't think there is more and will refrain. You are so right that mystics have a compulsion to write and to try to express--I suppose in another form of desperation to be understood and
even human acceptable, to fit in, to normalize their lives as if they think they might be able to somehow ever just be themselves and be acceptable as such in this realm. But if they were, then they'd not be mystics--at least not evidently the more extreme of which the mystic has no control over what will be God's choosing or plan for that individual life. It simply is as it is.
[my name]
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