God is a Circle
“God is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, whose center is everywhere.”
When I was in seminary I technically was enrolled at a non-denominational Christian school but in reality I took most of my classes with the Jesuits and Franciscans.
Although the Jesuits and I often disagreed theologically, I was totally in love with their zeal for learning. They valued an open mind more than their certainty and it made for some beautifully dynamic discussions where my opinion was always included and considered.
The Franciscans were where I went for mysticism and a theology of the Earth Herself. Franciscan theology is really quite pagan, in a certain sense, and very universal in another. When folks ask me about Franciscans I say that they believe that the Earth itself is the physical manifestation of God’s overflowing love for us. The hawks, the waters, the snow, the forest paths, the elephants, even the stars and moon and sun; all of this is God’s love made so we can touch it.
My favorite class with the Franciscans was about historical mystics, and what makes a mystic exactly. In addition to Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and the Desert Ammas and Abbas there are a ton of modern mystics recognized by the Catholic church. And of course, many that aren’t officially recognized at all.
We spent some time studying young bedridden girls whose statues of Mary weep tears of healing oil. We studied Indian converts who’s demon destroying powers matched those of Jesus. And one classmate even suggested that Terrence Malick might be a kind of modern mystic, or at least that his movies induced a mystical experience.
This led me to think about other artists with the same skill. At the time I had just seen some Vincent Van Gogh paintings in person at the Denver Art Museum and those certainly induced some kind of altered experience. So I dug in.
I discovered that Van Gogh was only a painter after he was booted from his chosen profession; ministry. He was such a zealous minister that he travelled far from home to minister to coal miners and slept in dirt huts to follow Christ’s mandate about ‘the least of these.’
He preached to the poor and the creatures of the Earth much like St. Francis. And he lived a life of such ascetic extremism that his ordaining body eventually revoked his ordination because it was just too much.
So he went on to painting, all the while composing endless letters to his brother Theo. You can read them all here and I did just that in seminary, an investigation which has given me endless beautiful ideas of God that I try to sneak into just about every sermon I preach.
Ideas like this: “Because there is a God there is love; because there is love there is a God. Although this may seem like an argument that goes round in a circle, nevertheless it’s true, because ‘that circle’ actually contains all things, and one can’t help, even if one wanted to, being in that circle oneself.”
All this is to say that at the beginning of this new year I still believe we are all within this Circle of Spirit, that you don’t have to be a Van Gogh or a Theresa to be a mystic, and that we are all included in this luminous circle and there is nothing we could ever do that would disqualify us from the spread of God’s grace.
Keep your eye out for modern mystics for they are all around us and I am certain that you, too, are one of them.
