Apocalyptic Mysticism: A Film with The Work of the People

In 2019 Travis Reed and I got together to film some conversations for The Work of the People. 

If you know Travis' work, you're aware of his talent in capturing and expressing spiritual and theological messages in short films. Travis has done films with Richard Rohr, Brene Brown, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Miroslav Volf, and Stanley Hauerwas, to name a few. But so many others as well. Take some time to browse all the films at The Work of the People. You'll be overwhelmed by the riches Travis has captured and curated. 

Travis has been releasing videos of our wide-ranging conversation from 2019 and I'd like to share links to these over the next month or so.

The Work of the People is supported by a subscription-based model. So you'll only be able to view, with each film I share, the first two minutes as a preview. If you'd like to access the whole films, along with every other film at the site, it's only $7 a month for a personal subscription, which you can cancel anytime.

Here's a link to the film entitled "Apocalyptic Mysticism." 

As you'll see in that clip, in 2019 I was making my way toward the book that would become Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age. I didn't use the phrase "apocalyptic mysticism" in the book, but "apocalyptic mysticism" is the book's regulating idea. 

Specifically, by mysticism I mean an experiential encounter with God, "bumping into God" as I say in the film preview. Here's how I make the contrast between belief and experience in the Introduction to Hunting Magic Eels:

The issue is the difference between belief and experience. Belief is intellectual assent and agreement with the doctrinal propositions of faith. Experience exists prior to and drives belief. Experience gives birth to belief. It’s hard to “believe” in God if belief isn’t naming something in our lives, something we’ve felt, sensed, seen, or intuited. As the Christian mystical tradition teaches us, life with God is more about knowing than believing. The mystics didn’t believe in God; they encountered God.

So it’s crazy to demand or expect beliefs from people (or ourselves) where there is no experience. Without an experience of God, belief has no content, no reference, no object. No way to get to “Yes!” Demanding belief without experience is asking people to believe in nothing, for the word God would be hanging in thin air, pointing to a gaping hole in a person’s life. Belief without experience is an empty bucket, making it a very useless, discardable thing. But if there’s water in the bucket, if our beliefs are carrying precious experiences of Thanks, Help, and Wow, well, you’re going to hold onto that bucket for fear of spilling the water, especially if you’re standing in the middle of a disenchanted desert dying of thirst. I’d like us to spend less time talking about the bucket and start filling it with water.

Concerning the apocalyptic in apocalyptic mysticism I mean the way our attention and perception "unveils" or "reveals" deeper truths. (The word apocalypse means "to reveal" or "to unveil.") In Hunting Magic Eels I describe mystical encounters as primarily an act of seeing. Here's a passage describing this also from the book's Introduction:

We think religion is a matter of belief. [Andrew] Root points out that something deeper and more fundamental is going on. Faith is a matter of perception. Faith isn’t forcing yourself to believe in unbelievable things; faith is overcoming attentional blindness. Phrased differently, faith is about enchantment or, rather, a re-enchantment: the intentional recovery of a holy capacity to see and experience God in the world. Without this ability, pervasive cultural disenchantment erodes our faith, and we’re seeing the effects all around us, in our homes, in pews, and in the culture at large...

God is there, but we’re going to have to retrain ourselves to see. I like how Marilynne Robinson describes this in her novel Gilead: “It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light...Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.” Enchantment starts with this willingness to see. As the Christian mystic Simone Weil said, “Attention is the only faculty of the soul that gives access to God.” Disenchantment isn’t about disbelief. Disenchantment is a failure to attend.

That's apocalyptic mysticism.