862 words, 4 min read
The following is a rough translation of Xavier Melloni's "Qué es un místico hoy", recommended to me by PM and AC. I hope it - a true mystic's manifesto - will bring as much joy to English-speaking readers as it did to its original audience and to me:
Today, as in all times, a mystic is someone who is as necessary as they are useless for their own generation. They are useless because they produce nothing and what they offer can be neither bought nor sold. It has no price in the market. It escapes those who want to take it and confuses those who want to understand it. Therefore they have to be set aside, since they place themselves in front of the immediacy of what has to be achieved and produced. The mystic says: what truly is, already exists. One just has to learn to perceive it. They also irritate institutions, because they relativize them and remind them that the sky they have painted inside their vaults is not the authentic, open sky.
But, at the same time, their presence is indispensable because they indicates a mode of existence that all beings and institutions crave. They were born to foster the sacred flame that burns in everyone and everything. The fire of the mystic is different from that of the prophet. The prophet points to and shouts about what is missing, while the mystic indicates what is already. The prophet speaks of the not yet, while the mystic speaks of the already. Both things are necessary.
Paraphrasing Raimon Panikkar, “the mystic is not the one who has hope for the future but for the Invisible”.
The mystic is not naive, but innocent. Naivety is an immaturity that makes people blind and clumsy, because it prevents them from confronting the dark elements of reality and of themselves, while the innocent sees everything, perceives everything and, without backing away, surrenders.
Another thing that is proper to the mystic is their ability to reconcile paradoxes. On the one hand, they are someone exquisitely close to people and their situations, but they also remain unreachable, withdrawn to a strange distance. Being fully present, they are also absent. They find themselves in another place, and when they are in another place, their presence is perceived. Their speech is quiet and with their silence, they speak. Words are sacred to him - or her; that's why they do not squander them. And because of that, they also know how to listen, and understand what others do not understand. They speak, look, understand from a different place; at times so different, it seems madness. But their madness is nothing more than the shock that their anticipation of Reality produces in us.
They love every object, every plant, every petal, and is fascinated by them, but, at the same time, they can do without it. They are all tenderness, but also vigor, as Leonardo Boff says about Francis of Assisi. They are fragile and strong at the same time. They cannot stand the pain of the little ones. They see from them and for them, and their prayer is always for them.
They are concrete, rooted in their time and place, capable of speaking simply and giving examples that the smallest ones understand, and at the same time, they are universal, because they perceive what concerns the common human condition. They see the part in the all and the all in the part. We could say that they have a fractal instinct, which is just as scientists today understand that the framework of reality is constituted.
Theirs is a sovereign freedom but, at the same time, they are at the service of all, because they perceive the unrepeatability of each person and each thing, and this makes them walk on hallowed ground. They welcome each being as an epiphany and, shaken, submit themselves freely because they know that their self does not belong to them, but is only a receptacle and a witness to other existences.
They love their tradition, the one that has nourished and guided them, but they do not make an absolute of it. They know that “to be original is to return to the origins” (Gaudí), not to repeat them but to recreate them. And the origin of every tradition is beyond itself, before it emerged. They know the way of the Source, “although by night”. Their faith is transconfessional, because they know that Presence runs through existence and that is what all traditions celebrate. Their rejoice with them, for their diversity and their wealth.
Like a compass, with one foot they are rooted in their own center, and with the other one they wander the circles of otherness. This center is not only that of the tradition to which they belong, but a deeper Center that, by de-centering them, re-centers them.
They are all empty. Their existence is a passage through which others transit to discover themselves. Like an icon, their mere presence helps those around them to discover the depth that inhabits themselves. They only stay silent and see. And their joy, like their nostalgia, are immense.
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