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.

Gazing Toward the Divine

Work done by Sr. Mary Grace Thul,OP

Bede Jarrett writes To contemplate is perfectly simple; it is to gaze... The truth of that statement can only be realized with time and patience. For we will not immediately see the Divine when we look. We must take the hunter's stance and watch and wait. We must re-tune our senses to the spiritual world, and learn to see the light in the darkness. We must hear the whispers of God that only come from sustained silence. When we have done this, we have not yet contemplated.

For that, we must accept that God comes to us through the silence. He comes when the prayers we've said seemed unanswered. When the answers we've accepted fail to sustain. When what seemed solid begins to fail, and what seems straight becomes crooked. Then, when our world has been turned upside down, and we continue to believe, then we pierce the veil that shields the Divine from our soul. Then, we touch the untouchable with a sensitivity only given to the patient.

Jarrett says Gradually I find that there are inner meanings to all these sanctities of God, which come to those who patiently await the unfolding of the seed of the kingdom (Classic Catholic Meditations).

Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, Good things come to those who wait.

Gazing with the Eye of the Soul

Perception. It's how we live our lives. And it can be so faulty. Richard Rohr speaks of the need to see like the mystics see. He explains: In the West, religion became preoccupied with telling people what to know more than how to know, telling people what to see more than how to see (The Naked Now 33) The results? We have fewer and fewer contemplatives, real contemplatives, whose vision is formed by silence, reflection, and wisdom.

So often we make our faith a matter of believing in mysteries, and tell ourselves that it is impossible to understand, that we must just accept. Such an attitude robs us of knowing our God. Because when we believe we can't know, we don't search.

Or we make it a matter of deep theology, something academic, agonizing, only open to intellectuals. As though God were some kind of snob that only an elite few can know.

To see like the mystics sees implies stepping back, not stepping up. It requires not so much a willingness to dig into the mysteries in search of knowledge as it does a watching that discoveries a personality. And just as we form friendships over time, so too, the mystic gaze allows us to "know" God over time, and understand him with the eye of the soul rather than with the mind. For if it is true of anyone, it is true of God, to know him is to love him.

Silent Wonder of Presence

Ever notice how quiet things are when snow is falling? If you live in an area that gets snow regularly, you even "sense" snow by the special silence that accompanies the snowfall. Unlike rain, there is no pitter-patter. There is only silence, a wondrous, soul-filling, deep silence as it tumbles down from the sky.  As a kid, I used to love to look up as snow fell, watching the sky full of flakes crash together soundlessly as they whirled and floated through the air, down upon my face, settling and then melting.

God is sorta like snow. He comes in quiet and stillness. I think our major task in getting to really know God is learning how to be quiet and still. Be still and know that I am God says psalm 40:10. The second is dependant upon the first.

Richard Rohr makes this distinction absolutely necessary for the mystic gaze. It happens whenever, by some wondrous "coincidence," our heart space, our mind space, and our body awareness are all simultaneously open and nonresistant...It is experienced as a moment of deep inner connection, and it always pulls you, intensely satisfied, into the naked and undefended now, which can involve both profound joy and profound sadness. (Naked Now p 28)

As Christmas approaches, silence is a good way to appreciate the mystery. Jesus came in the month of December. Who can even say, that as he was brought forth, snow fell quietly from the sky, filling the world with the silent wonder that something new, something fresh was happening to the earth.