Holy Boldness: Mysticism & Resistance

Nerds love grad school

Hi friends!

Yay, my project came together last week!

I came to some sorts of conclusions with some of the thousands of thoughts I was thoughting. At least enough to give a coherent presentation.

The assignment was basically “Present a Christian (or other) Mystic.”

Easy Peasy.

Except I didn’t want it to be easy. I mean, what’s the point if it’s not interesting?

At my first grad school program I learned to start a project or paper by asking an interesting question.

An interesting question is a question you don’t know the answer to.

Truly this notion unlocked a whole new understanding of what education can be. (You mean it’s not just trying to graduate with a 4.0?)

Dorothy Day faces sheriff deputies at Giumarra orchard picket with the United Farm Workers Union, American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1973, Lamont, CA. Photo by Bob Fitch. Painting by me. Quote from the epilogue of The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day.

If you’re just joining us, I’m doing a certificate program for Spiritual Direction and Social Transformation co-led by The Center for Prophetic Imagination and The Minnesota Institute of Contemplation & Healing.

Do the program and leaders sound supes lefty and contemplative and social justice-y and spiritual and progressive and maybe even radical? That’s because they are. It is.

Does it sound very Christian? It’s not, or at least not very. Kinda like how Quakers are Christian but not very.

Does it sound like the opposite of doing grad school at Harvard? It totally is and it totally isn’t. not different at all. Maybe I’ll talk about that another time.

Step 1: I ask myself, “Self, what do you want to ask? What do you want to think about?”

And I didn’t know what I wanted to know yet. Other than everything.

So I dove in. I researched the following mystical (or mystical-ish) resistors:

Martin Luther (for genealogy reasons), John Woolman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Ella Baker, Gloria Richardson, Howard Thurman, James Baldwin, and some others.

I read some books, including: The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day. (Revisited Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision… D.L. Mayfield). The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance by Dorothee Soelle. Mysticism and Social Transformation by Janet K. Ruffing (ed.). (Revisited The Way of the Mystics, Disciplines of the Spirit, and With Head and Heart by Howard Thurman.) Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther’s World… by Lyndal Roper. Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, by Lyndal Roper. Martin Luther: The Who Rediscovered God… by Eric Metaxas. (Revisited Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass and Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight.) My Religion and The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy. (Revisited Another Country and The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.) “Notes on the House of Bondage” in The Nation by James Baldwin. Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of Civil Rts… Lynne Olson.

What can I say, I like to read (and learn).

In my house we call this Digging and thinking.

As in what wombats do.

As in:

“Whatcha doing, Mom?”

“Not much.”

“Oh. You’re just digging a lot and thinking a lot?”

“Righto.”

Mysticism and Resistance

And then I came up with the three big questions I wanted to ponder in my project / presentation:

1. What’s the relationship between mysticism and resistance? Who are some folks whose mysticism and spirituality urged them into, or undergirded, their resistance to oppression? What forms did that resistance take? What were the oppressions they resisted? Did it work the other way, too? How did their resistance inform / affect their mysticism and understanding of Spirit?

2. What is mysticism anyway? What makes someone a mystic and not “just,” say, someone who believes in fairies? OR, OTOH, what’s the difference, if any, between a mystic and someone who has a deep religious faith or a deep spirituality? What are we talking about here?

3. What makes a mystic known or famous? Are we only talking about widely known mystics? I can name a lot of “unknown” (or at least not famous) mystic resistance-rs who I know personally, who are humble and inspiring. How is it determined who becomes well known?

Step 2: I make stuff

As you may know I write a lot for work (and here!) and I wanted a different way to engage my brain in these questions so I decided to make some art.

James Baldwin. I came back to James Baldwin. I always come back to James Baldwin. This is a photo of him (right) with James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March. Photo by Steve Shapiro, in The New Yorker. The quote is from Baldwin’s piece, “Notes on the House of Bondage” in the Nation. Painting by me.

Sometimes digging and thinking means reading and thinking.

Sometimes it means cleaning the bathroom and thinking.

Sometimes it means walking the dog and thinking.

Sometimes it means staring at the sky and thinking.

Sometimes, like the last couple of weeks, it means painting and thinking.

Gloria Richardson, then the head of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, pushes a National Guardsman's bayonet aside as she moves among a crowd of African Americans to convince them to disperse in Cambridge, Md., in 1963. AP Photo. Quote from an interview I can’t find the link to. Paining by me.

Step 3: I start synthesizing some ideas. Or stumble across cool things. Or dig and think more.

I learned I love my class and school and teachers because the whole time I was thinking to myself, “I’m so interested in what my classmates have to say about this.”

I stumble onto the term Holy Boldness.

And I was like aha! yes! That is what I’m looking for.

“Holy boldness is a stance and a practice that values ecstatic experiences as sources of knowledge and power, and that also assumes a critical consciousness toward oppressive systems and the urgency to confront and to challenge demonarchy* and the matrix of domination that supports it.” 

- Joy Bostic, “Mystical Experience, Radical Subjectification, and Activism in the Religious Traditions of African American Women” in Mysticism and Social Transformation, Janet K. Ruffing (ed.). 

*demonarchy – from Delores Williams – “demonic governance of black women’s lives by white male and white female ruled systems using racism, violence, violation… and death as instruments of social control… demonarchy is a traditional and collective expression of white government in relation to black women. – Dolores Williams, 1986. “The Color of Feminism: Or Speaking the Black Woman’s Tongue.” The Journal of Religious Thought 43, no. 1: 42-58.

And I’m like THANK YOU!

Holy Boldness is what I’ve been digging for.

Because it encapsulates the MIX of:

• mystical (ecstatic) experience(s) as a source of knowledge and power AND

• critical consciousness towards oppressive systems AND

• the urgency to confront and challenge those systems.

So… what does holy boldness lead to? What do the mystics I studied have in common?

Well I came up with four big commonalties.

But I think that’s a post for another time.

Oooh, cliff hanger.

Hope y’all are well. Thanks, always, for reading.

Keep digging and thinking, and I will, too.

XOXO

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