A Gate In The Woods
St. Paul As Mystic
To obtain a true idea of St. Paul’s personality ... we must correct the view which sees him mainly as a theologian and organizer by that which recognizes in him a great contemplative. For here we have not only a sense of vivid contact with the Risen Jesus, translated into visionary terms—“I fell into a trance and saw him saying to me” [Acts 22:17]—but an immediate apprehension of the Being of God….
We misunderstand St. Paul’s mysticism if we confuse it with its more sensational expressions. As his spiritual life matured his conviction of union with the Spirit of Christ became deeper and more stable. It disclosed itself … as a source of more than natural power. Its keynote is struck in the great saying of his last authentic letter: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13). This statement has long ago been diluted to the pious level, and we have ceased to realize how startling it was and is. But St. Paul used it in the most practical sense, in a letter written from prison after twelve years of superhuman toil, privation, and ill-usage, accompanied by chronic ill-health; years which had included scourgings, stonings, shipwreck, imprisonments, "on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, … in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked" (2 Corinthians 11:26–27). 1
It is late, and I am young. Soon, my absence will be noticed. Dinner will be on the table. They will wonder where I am. Despite the hour and fading light, I am wandering in the woods behind the house. There is a dam, built by slaves over a hundred years ago. Flat stones, carefully laid one on top of another, are now covered with leaves, forming a natural bridge over a trickling creek. I should not be here. Walking on these stones is dangerous. It's late, I am young, and do not care.
Beyond the dam and past the familiar trees, there is the fence. My world, as I have come to think of it, ends here. I have never crossed over. Why not? There is risk involved. This boundary is fraught with danger. Not only will I be stepping into the unknown, but I will also be navigating carefully placed barbs and the electricity that flows through the wires. Caution, I decide, is the better part of valor. I have lost this battle. Time is not on my side. However, the war is not over. I will return.
It is tomorrow. I have found a new way to cross to the other side of the fence.
I am standing by a gate. The latch is stiff with rust, the hinges complain in a low, tired voice, and moss creeps patiently along the posts. When I push it open and step through, the air on the other side feels like it has a different weight. It seems to know what I am seeking before I can put it into words.
Evelyn Underhill saw St. Paul in this way. She did not see him as the hard-faced keeper of rules, nor as the voice that nails every board of a creed into place. She saw a man who had been blinded into sight, a man who stood in the radiance until the beat of his heart was altered. We have schooled ourselves to measure him with rulers, to straighten the lines of his sentences, to stake the borders of his thought. Yet his letters still carry a sense of love as the first and last thing and of dying as a gain without the strain of bravado.
Paul’s voice keeps turning us toward the gate. He does not ask us to guard it or to record its dimensions. He asks us to go through. For him, love is not the post or the hinge, not the plank or the latch, but the field beyond, wide under the sky, where the light waits to meet us. The end of the journey is not the triumph of an argument, but the crossing of that threshold.
We live in a time that prizes the fence over the field and the argument over the invitation. Nevertheless2, Paul’s mystic truth still speaks. The gate is here, as it was in his day. It opens for those who are willing to walk through, not to win, but to enter the light and let the light enter them.
The translation used here is the New Revised Standard Version; Underhill, however, used the King James Version.
Evelyn Underhill, The Mystics of the Church (Morehouse-Barlow, 1988), 42, 45–46, 48.
I cannot resist an opportunity to use “nevertheless “.
I often read Paul and wonder at how powerful that experience with the Risen Christ must have been to carry him through all the hardships he endured and in all of his letters to the churches I get a sense of him just hitting his head against the wall in regards to the blindness of the people. I can relate! I'm sure he would have given anything to be able to grant them the gift of a spiritual encounter such as the one he experienced to cure them of their blindness. Instead he uses logic and rhetoric to attempt to persuade. It may work for some, but nothing's as good as an encounter with the Risen Christ and we just don't have any control over that.
This post takes more than one reading and a lot of contemplative thought. On another note, I'd love to write like you with phrases like the silent creeping moss and the complaining of the hinges. Beautiful!