“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers– all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:15-17)
There is only one reality. There is only one truth about the one reality. Will reality itself speak to us? Will reality incorporate us? How can an incorporating and inclusive totality of reality fit its grand truth inside our finite, limited, distorted, diseased, and prejudiced minds?
Such a discussion of mystical reality is sometimes dubbed, mysticism or even Christian mysticism.
Joshua’s Mystical Apparition
Joshua–not the biblical Joshua but rather one of my students in Berkeley–was walking by the seashore. Suddenly the trees and hills and grass and water seemed to be giving way. They were there but Joshua could see through and beyond them. As he struggled to hold on to the reality he knew, he felt himself being carried into another dimension of reality. “I was conscious of who I was and where I was,” he told me, “but I felt this quick flash of knowledge in which all questions were answered. I felt the presence of Christ and I felt an overwhelming sense of unity, of oneness. I could see, hear, and feel that Christ was in everything and everything is in him. He is the logos that permeates and unites everything, and now I know it for sure.”
There’s more. Joshua was born a Japanese American in Hawaii. His parents were Buddhists. He became a Christian just three years before this experience. “I could see history before my eyes,” he exclaimed. “I could see Jesus dying and rising, I know now that it is a fact. There is no longer any doubt.”
There’s still more. “I felt myself drawn to the library,” he reports. “When I found the book I believe I was appointed to read, I pulled it off the shelf and opened it. There I found an account—somebody else’s account—of just what I too had experienced. There was a word for it. It is ‘mystical’. I now think of myself as a Buddhist-Christian.”
Although the everyday world seems divisive, for a moment Joshua could see a mystical unity. Although our mundane existence seems broken, for a split second Joshua could see a transcendent oneness that heals all brokenness.
Sigmund Freud would call this an ‘oceanic’ feeling. Rudolf Otto would say Joshua confronted the mysterium tremendum. Paul Tillich would call it ‘ecstasy’. Regardless of the nametag, Joshua has received immediate and direct knowledge that all things are tied together in Jesus Christ. All things! Even his Christian faith with his Buddhist family.
PRAYER
God of reconciling unity, realize in our hearts I not our minds that it is your will that all brokenness be healed, that all divisiveness be transformed into oneness. Amen.
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Ted Peters is a Lutheran pastor and emeritus seminary professor. He is author of Short Prayers and The Cosmic Self. His one volume systematic theology is now in its 3rd edition, God—The World’s Future (Fortress 2015). He has undertaken a thorough examination of the sin-and-grace dialectic in two works, Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society (Eerdmans 1994) and Sin Boldly! (Fortress 2015). Watch for his forthcoming, The Voice of Public Christian Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com.
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