c. 1998 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ Christmas is a holiday rich with time-honored festivities: warm family gatherings, convivial parties, gifts given and received, city streets strung with twinkling lights, plates heaped high with culinary treats.
However the lavish gaity that permeates this time of year all too-easily obscures the holiday’s spiritual heart _ Jesus’ birth. Indeed, like a candle illuminating the church from within, Jesus is the soul of Christmas _ the eternal gift offered by a loving Creator to a long-suffering humanity, according to Christian tradition.
Too often, however, God’s divine gift goes unopened in favor of more worldly presents.
But a new book _”Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ,”(Tarcher/Putnam) _ by English scholar Andrew Harvey offers sustenance to those who yearn to cultivate within themselves a more meaningful experience of the holiday and their faith.
Drawing on the Christian mystical tradition, Harvey says an intimate relationship with both Jesus and God is directly available to all.
Harvey, who has been described as a modern mystic, has devoted much of his life to studying the mystical traditions of the world’s religions. The seeds of his quest were planted early.
Born to devout English Protestant parents in the”naturally sacred atmosphere”of India, Harvey said that as a child he was cared for by”a driver who was a Muslim mystic, a cook who was a Hindu mystic and a nanny who was an ardent Catholic.” These caregivers, he said in an interview, each taught him that”you can talk to God wherever you are, and that to do that all you have to do is concentrate in your heart and that’s where God lives. In these simple truths are the highest mystical instructions.” At the age 9, however, Harvey returned to England where, he said, it was”like going into a refrigerator and having the door slammed shut. The English approach to religion was so cold and literal _ there was none of the gorgeous gods and incense and haunting liturgy and people clapping their hands and singing in the streets in colored robes”as he had experienced in India.
The culture shock of moving from India to England ushered in Harvey’s first disillusionment with mainstream Christianity.”On one hand I was being taught about a Jesus who loved all beings equally and worshipped the poor. Then what I was presented with in England was an extremely hierarchical culture, in which the church played a very undynamic part.” By 16, Harvey had become a Marxist with a formidable intellect; at 21 he became the youngest fellow ever elected to All Soul’s College at Oxford.
But the call of the spirit proved too persuasive to ignore, and at 25 Harvey returned to India, where he embarked upon a 30-year odyssey into the depths of Eastern mysticism. He immersed himself in Islam’s Sufi tradition, studied Buddhism under the tutelage of Tibetan masters in the Himalayas, and became an ardent disciple of the Hindu teacher Mother Meera.
More important than his travels and studies with various teachers, however, were what he called the steady”stream of mystical experiences”that opened him to nonmaterial spiritual realities _ experiences which resulted in an outpouring of books on the nature of the inner life.
Eventually returning to Europe and America to write, teach and continue his studies in mystical literature, Harvey’s spiritual path began to circle around to the place where he started as a child _ with Jesus. “I was always looking to understand Jesus more and more deeply,”Harvey said,”and what I found was that the journey into all of the other religions left a part of me secretly hungry for what I believed Jesus and the Christ path can give.” Harvey’s conversion of heart did not lead him to join a church; he did not consider himself a Christian in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, he said, he became a”lover of Christ”and began to plumb the mystical depths of the Christian tradition, much as he had Eastern spirituality. “The Christian mystical tradition is at least as rich as Hinduism or Buddhism,”he said.”It’s phenomenally powerful, and has produced a long, glorious panoply of mystics”such as St. Theresa of Avila, St. Francis of Assisi and St. John of the Cross.
And, as the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic scrolls in 1945 brought to light, this lineage stretched back to Christianity’s very origins; to the early Gnostic groups _ esoteric Christian orders that were suppressed by third-century church leaders who regarded Gnostic beliefs as heretical.
Today, with the recovery of the Gnostic texts, as well such classics as Thomas a Kempis’ 15th century devotional”Imitation of Christ,”Harvey said there now exists a wealth of mystical Christian literature whose wisdom can help guide contemporary seekers. In addition, he said, there has accumulated as well a body of spiritual instruction that include repetition of sacred phrases, vizualizations and meditations used by monks, nuns and saints down through the centuries to intensify their interior life.
The point of his book, said Harvey,”is to introduce people to the glory”of these treasures, so that they can”do the work with the Christ in the core of their lives.” Drawing upon the descriptions of the inner lives of Christian mystics, for instance, Harvey describes such practices as the”Jesus Prayer,”which is the constant repetition of the phrase”Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.”Also included among his collection of meditations are contemplations on the spiritual truths contained within”The Lord’s Prayer,”and the recitation of the rosary, as well as vizualizations _ such as imaging the sacred heart of Jesus based on the visions of the 15th century saint, Margaret Mary Alacoque of Burgundy.
Alacoque wrote that Jesus’ Sacred Heart appeared to her”as on a throne made entirely of fire and flames more brilliant and more radiant than a sun and as transparent as a crystal.” Indeed, an important key in opening the soul to a direct mystical relationship to Jesus, Harvey said, is a technique known as”sacred imagination.”The same creative faculty that we use for writing poetry or painting, he said, also comes into play during worshipful”acts of prayer and adoration.” Thus in a section on mental prayer, Harvey describes St. Theresa of Avila’s practice of engaging in conversation with Jesus: In this, people imagine themselves present at a scene from Jesus’ life _ such as his baptism in the river Jordan, or his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane _ and then imagine themselves speaking with Jesus within that scene. Consciously directing the imagination this way, Harvey said,”evokes the deepest emotions, thereby helping a person to enter into the sacred atmosphere of Christ, that in turn awakens the Christ within.” In fact, Harvey has crafted out of the rich compendium of classic writings and prayers a unique”Christ-path”of spiritual development. In”The Eight Thresholds and Mysteries,”for example, the seeker is guided through a meditation on the esoteric meanings of the different stages of Jesus’ life _ the Baptism, Temptation, Tranfiguration, Agony, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and Descent in-flame at Pentecost.
And while Harvey has grafted insights from Eastern contemplative practices to his template of Christian mysticism, he stressed that there is one important difference dividing the two systems _ Jesus’ radical, indeed political, passion to heal the human condition, as opposed to the Eastern spiritual attitude of detachment towards life.
As he explained,”Because so much of the emphasis in Hinduism and Buddhism is on transcendence, reality to them is just a play of illusion. But to Jesus, reality was a play of love.”Indeed Jesus, Harvey said,”was the supreme mystic of humanity because he didn’t just have a spiritual awakening, and then disappear into that.” Instead Jesus’ whole path, Harvey said,”was one of shattering all the icons and conventional wisdoms that separate us from each other. Anything that stops us from living the life of radical, empowered, divine human love is a block _ and must go.” If you read the beatitudes carefully, Harvey continued, it seems”obvious that Jesus was trying to train peaceful warriors. He makes no bones about it: If you take the Christ path on you’re taking on a path of suffering for righteous’ sake, to make justice triumph in the world.” Thus a genuine mystical experience of Jesus, he said,”makes a person acutely aware of what needs to be done in every arena of life, galvanizing them to take action.” (STORY MAY END HERE. OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)
Harvey said he experienced for himself the poignancy of Jesus’ love several years ago when he returned to India to help his father die.
Following a Mass he attended at a local church, during which he had a powerful vision of Jesus on the cross, Harvey said he stepped outside and”there in the dust at the open gate was a young man with no arms or legs, sitting with infinite resignation. I realized then that that was Jesus in his presence in the agony of the world, and that Jesus is on the cross in every poor person, wounded tree or frightened animal dying of pollution.”And in that moment,”he continued,”I experienced a miraculous change of heart when I knew I could no longer close my eyes another moment either to the passion of God or the pain in the world _ and that the purpose of my life was to serve that Jesus. It was a moment filled with such force of love, that I would have done anything just to dry one tear.” DEA END PEAY
