Finding the Secret Garden

Too often we only look for external beauty...when we have beauty right within ourselves.

When you desire some soul stirring spiritual experience, where do you look? Do you search for it in books? Or perhaps you find a service with a liturgy that inspires. Or you may seek it through the wonders of nature. In all of this, you've missed the most important place to seek out a true mystical experience...within your own heart.

The Jerusalem Community Rule of life states that "One single word expresses the place where the whole quest for holiness converges: your heart..."  It is within our hearts that we meet the Divine presence, walking as it were with God, sharing all we know, and realizing just  how much God cares. 


The mystics knew well the truth of these words, and drew heavily from this fountain. But we too are called to be mystics. It isn't something for the few; it is there for every serious seeker of truth. As Jean-Claude Baneau writes: "mysticism is as necessary to humanity as science, if not more so…For mysticism is an existential attitude, a way of living at a greater depth.” (Preface to Clément’s book, The Roots of Christian Mysticism). The call to mysticism is there.

Why, then, the scarcity of mystics? Because we look at mysticism as something esoteric, something “synonymous with spiritual illusions in fevered souls of sentimental spirituality, emotional, subject to ecstasies, visions, revelations…”(Ildegarde Sutto “Contemplative Experience in Cassian and in the Rule of Benedict from the American Benedictine Review, 54:2). True mysticism is attainable. It only requires our steadfast attention to the truth of Jesus words, The Kingdom of God is within you (Lk 17:24).

To return to the Jerusalem Community Rule: “let the word of God penetrate you as deep as the division of soul and spirit…Then all secrets will lie open before you in a way you could never have dreamed.” And so we are called to walk in this Garden with the Divine, to learn the secrets of life, to experience the beauty of the Divine.