The Origins of the New Testament, Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 10 December 2009 1 Comments
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Question

John Ford, via the Internet, writes:


I had to smile when reading your recent newsletter in which you suggest that you might be becoming a mystic. I have always read you as a mystic.


God's peace be with you.

Answer

Dear John,


I appreciate your words and even your insight. I don't believe one can volunteer to be a mystic, a prophet, a seer, an intellectual or a genius. Those are qualities attributed to you by others sometime well after your earthly pilgrimage is complete. It is meaningful, however, when another attributes one of those titles to you — so thank you.


Mysticism is to me primarily coming to terms with the limitations of words. That seems to be harder to do in religious circles than anywhere else. Words are always symbols or pointers. They are not the truth or the essence they seek to describe. They are always human, always time bound and always time warped. When any human experience is reduced to words, it is always distorted by time, place, one's level of knowledge, one's time in history and one's culturally conditioned language Nowhere is that more clear than when we try to frame who or what God is in the vehicle of human words. A horse cannot communicate to another horse what it means to be a human being, for a horse cannot escape its horse nature. A human being can never tell another human being what it means to be God, because human beings can never escape the limits of our human nature. Perhaps that is why all human images of God look very much like a great big human being.


The deeper I experience the reality and presence of God, the less my words seem like adequate vehicles to express that truth. Then words cease and one enters the experience of wordless wonder. Perhaps that is the realization of the mystic.


John Shelby Spong
 

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