About the longing for God's touch — and about the path to it, which surprisingly does not lead through effort.
Three testimonies, one longing — and out of it a path opens up.
GOOD NEWS
God's touch is not a myth or a literary ornament — the testimonies keep recurring across centuries and across temperaments. Even the sober-minded Lewis writes that he “does not regard mystical experience as an illusion at all”. The catch (Vácha): as a rule it comes to those who are no longer really after it.
“God gives it only to the one he chooses — and often just when the soul is thinking about it least.”
Teresa of Ávila · The Interior Castle, fourth mansions, ch. 2
DEAD END
Chasing the experience itself leads nowhere. Lewis: everyone who puts out to sea “finds the same thing” — the land sinking below the horizon, gulls, a salty breeze; tourists, traders, pirates and missionaries alike. An experience can also be brought on “chemically or by holding your breath” (Vácha) — on its own it proves nothing. Craving one dose after another is bodily greed in spiritual disguise; that is why Lewis decides not to set sail at all.
“All departures are alike; it is the landing that crowns the voyage.”
C. S. Lewis · Letters to Malcolm, letter 12
WHAT HELPS
Teresa sees a lack of humility in the longing for consolations: imagining that our “wretched little services” have earned us so great a gift. Better prepared is the one who longs to suffer and to be like the Lord rather than to receive consolations. And Lewis adds: a saint proves, by being a saint, that his mysticism led him rightly — never the other way round.
“Humility, humility! By it God lets himself be won over — and through it he grants us everything we ask for.”
Teresa of Ávila · The Interior Castle, fourth mansions, ch. 2
WHAT GETS IN THE WAY
What is poured in cannot be manufactured. Teresa warns explicitly against trying to stop the mind by your own strength: “the very effort not to think about anything stirs the imagination up all the more”, and “forcing it does more harm than good”. Effort goes round in circles and keeps returning to itself — our part is faithfulness in prayer and surrender: “to put the soul into God's hands, for him to do with it whatever he wants”.
“This water does not come through pipes. If the spring does not give it, we toil in vain.”
Teresa of Ávila · The Interior Castle, fourth mansions, ch. 2
WHERE TO LOOK
Those who walk the way of love “look only for ways to serve the crucified Christ” (Teresa) — some even ask him not to give them any consolations in this life. Whoever looks at Christ stops watching himself. And that is exactly where God's touch may (or may not) happen: it is a by-product of closeness, not the goal of the journey.
“The Catholic faith is not primarily about experience. It is about relationship — about the decision to enter into a relationship.”
Marek Orko Vácha · Prayer of the Argentine Nights
The goal of the journey is not the experience but the One we are sailing towards. Experiences are allowed to happen along the way.
According to the historian Carlos Eire (The Christian Mysticism Podcast, season 1, episode 15)
LUTHER’S INNER STRUGGLE
Luther the monk read the mystics — Tauler and the anonymous German Theology, texts on God’s presence within the human self — and tried desperately to reach the states he read about. Instead: the more asceticism, the sharper the awareness of his own sinfulness and the greater the distance from God. In the classic triad purgation → illumination → union he remained stuck in purgation; he confessed so tirelessly that his brethren hid from him. His confessor Staupitz cut it short: stop counting individual sins, look at the whole — and go take a doctorate in Scripture. In Romans Luther then found his answer: salvation is not a performance but faith; a person is at once sinner and justified, and perfection is impossible. With that the mystical ladder falls too: moments of closeness yes, union no. (The Epistle of James, with its “faith without works is dead”, he dismissed as “straw” — the whole Bible is to be read through Romans.)
“I fasted and kept vigil so much — if ever a monk got to heaven through his monkery, it should have been me.”
Luther on his monastery years · Eire’s paraphrase
LUTHER × ZWINGLI
Luther had no use for metaphysics: he simply did not find union with God in Scripture. Zwingli of Zurich, a humanist and Platonist, arrived at the same point another way — matter is an obstacle to spirit, so away with the images (Luther disagreed), and the Lord’s Supper is a sign only: “this IS my body” Zwingli reads as “signifies”, Luther insists on IS, and their meeting in 1529 ends in a rift (“I am the vine — was Jesus a grapevine, then?”). On the essentials, though, they agreed: the medieval claims to union are a delusion, if not the devil’s deceit; asceticism brings heaven no closer; and the monastery — for over a thousand years the seedbed of Christian mysticism — both abolish, along with celibacy as a virtue.
“Finitum non est capax infiniti — the finite cannot contain the infinite.”
Huldrych Zwingli
THOMAS MÜNTZER († 1525)
An early follower of Luther who took the Reformation more mystically than Luther himself: he had visions, received revelations and reproached Luther for not going far enough — in his writings he does not even name him, writing of a “malicious black raven” and “godless flesh living in Wittenberg”. As an apocalyptic prophet he preached that Jesus will not return “until the godly wage war against the ungodly and defeat them” — meant literally. In the Peasants’ War of 1524–25 he pointed his army to a rainbow in the parting clouds as God’s sign to attack; the battle ended in a massacre of the peasants, and after the defeat Müntzer lost his life. For historians, the beginning of the “Radical Reformation”.
“All true pastors must have visions.”
Thomas Müntzer against Luther
THE CITY OF MÜNSTER (1534–1535)
A cruel joke from God, says Eire: after Müntzer there is also the city of Münster. Radicals of his stamp took it over and proclaimed the New Jerusalem: the community is ruled by elders in “direct contact with God”, and one of the leaders declared himself the reincarnated King David. They abolished money and private property and introduced polygamy — for a woman, refusing an elder’s offer meant the death penalty; the men fled in droves. Another leader trusted a revelation that he was immune to bullets and fell on the spot in a sortie. For the first time in the history of the Reformation a Lutheran and a Catholic army joined forces, took the city, had the leaders skinned alive and hoisted three bodies in iron cages up the tower of St Lambert’s until they crumbled to dust. The cages hang there to this day — destroyed by the air raids of the Second World War, they were put back after it. A warning: there is such a thing as bad mysticism.
“This is religion gone crazy.”
Carlos Eire in the episode
THE PENDULUM SWINGS BACK
The Reformers’ hard opposition eroded with time and mysticism kept returning to Protestantism — though never quite the same. Quakers and Shakers got their names from trembling during intense spiritual experiences: the physical manifestations are back (the Quakers, at that, are pacifists — the exact opposite of Münster; today’s Pentecostal movement belongs to the same end of the spectrum). And the Moravian Brethren — heirs of the Czech Unity of the Brethren who travelled via Herrnhut all the way to North Carolina — sound to Eire almost like medieval Catholic mystics: a student of his found texts of Moravian women about kissing the wound in Christ’s side.
“How do you get to that from Luther? Religion is always evolving.”
Carlos Eire in the episode
MYSTICISM AND AUTHORITY
Luther could be caustic: of his Wittenberg colleague Karlstadt, who also appealed to the Spirit, he declared that he “thinks he has swallowed the Holy Spirit, feathers and all”. Behind the joke stands a serious thesis Eire takes from his mentor Steven Ozment (Mysticism and Dissent): mysticism is inherently a claim — whoever has experienced God directly has little patience with the institution. Without a framework that discerns the experiences, it ends with Müntzer and in Münster; with one, the same spring yields a Quaker — or John of the Cross, to whom the next episode belongs. It is not a quarrel of experience against order, but the question of who may examine a revelation: an individual’s claim against the peace of the community.
“Mysticism is inherently dangerous, always. How are you going to keep the people in the church after they have seen God? Who is going to put up with the institution if you can have direct access to God?”
Steven Ozment, Eire’s doctoral adviser · Mysticism and Dissent
Luther and Zwingli closed the way upward — and experience returned all the same. The difference between Münster and the Quakers, in the end, is not the intensity of the experience but whether anyone is allowed to examine it.
Like the Jews of Jesus’s day, we keep waiting for some event that would confirm the success of our inner life, a proper catch in the form of a fully experienced presence of God that would give us complete satisfaction: the good feeling that we have finally made it, that we have won. How much more the illusion of glory matters to us than the truth of our own poverty! …
My prayer! How I would love to succeed at my prayer. I would like to become a master in this field, with the Lord always within reach, at my service. My conversation with him would consist of his constant assurance that he is pleased with me… as, after all, I am with myself…
The Lord, however, very quickly shows me the vanity of these things, and so I take a liking to poverty. … I will talk about it, I will wave it like some banner of honour! What a subtle contradiction — I become the owner of my poverty! … One must wait for the hour of real poverty of soul. The hour of nothing. … Blessed poverty, the key to the Beatitudes!
Pierre-Marie of the Cross · The Prayer of the Poor
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