June to December

I’m back! It’s the first day of summer, week one of Advent and six months since I last posted on Words from the Edge. I decided that I needed some time and space to work on a book that I had been trying to write since early 2019, the year after my first book, A Gentle Unfolding :  Circling and Spiralling into Meaning, had been published. 

Not exactly a follow-up to A Gentle Unfolding, but a depthing of the spirituality that under laid the story it told.  I wanted to write a book that might help me, and maybe others, to uncover the deeper, mystical meanings beneath the church-speak that we wrap around Christian spirituality.

Sometime in the 90s I read a quote by Jesuit Karl Rahner that has challenged me ever since: “In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic or nothing at all.” The word itself was a mystery, a churchy kind of mystery, applicable to women and men who lived in convents and monasteries where they prayed day and night. It was only as I learnt more about religious spirituality that I gradually began to accept, if not understand, that mysticism is not book knowledge of religion, or some kind of out-of-body experience. It’s not tagging along with an expert’s take on things mystical, but it’s trusting the value of our own inner experience. Mystics are women and men who recognise the mystery that underpins their life, even when it comes in forms that are utterly secular, and call it God.

There’s a phrase in the Pentecost story that always grips me; “each one heard them speaking their own language”. Today’s language could be called multi-media and I needed to write that language too. 

In the couple of years that followed I clicked my way through sites and blogs from all around the world, read lots of books and photocopied and highlighted hundreds of pages that might or might not be relevant. I found out more than my mind could accommodate. Under the title Everyday Mystics, I wrote- and rejected – three unfinished drafts of what I had hoped might be a book.

Early this year I began again, tapping out word-after-word, slowly learning to trust myself to write in MY own words – more scholarly presentations I leave to others. No, it’s not finished, but now I am two thirds of the way into what I trust will be the final draft. Hopefully my words will find an echo in the hearts and minds of all the everyday mystics that silently and sometimes unknowingly cast fire upon the face of the earth and plant seeds that will grow into new life.

And as it is Advent, meet the agapanthus that line one side of our driveway – each long legged stem   holding a deep blue image of summer warmth and light in their little almond shaped green embrace. What is your go-to Advent image?

Judith Scully   (judith@judithscully.com.au)