The Wounded Healer - Part 4 "The Mystical Way"

At the closing part of Chapter 1 Nouwen now moves into ways people can break out of these "cocoons". Nouwen calls these ways "Experimental Transcendence".

The first way Nouwen describes is the "Mystical Way". The mystical way is the inner way, looking inward through meditation/contemplation/prayer. Searching for the connection to the "Unseen", the "Source of being". Trying to move away from the false realities that surround us and towards what is truly real.

To me it's one word - Centered. He's talking about finding your center. Finding the one thing/place/person that is true and real. Life gets you out of balance and out of whack. Life pulls you in so many directions. Life is filled with so many false realities. We need to be pulled back to the center to be reoriented, refocused, and re-energized.

Upon being centered, Nouwen makes a reference to not being certain about past or future, but certain you have a place in the story. I'm also reminded about a book I read by John Elderidge years ago, I think "Sacred Romance" maybe "Wild at Heart". Elderidge talked about understanding in the Grand Story, we are not the lead actors. Truth be told we play small bit parts. When we focus only on the small dramas that make up our lives we lose focus on the much larger narrative. Realizing this world and everything in it is God's, its all by him, for him, and about him. He's the real star of the show. That's helped me find the center when I get out of whack. That brings me back to reality. Acts 17:28 - for in him we live, and move, and have our being.

Here's a great quote from Nouwen regarding this Mystical Way, once someone has reached the center place and transcended all the junk...

"There he comes to the shocking, but at the same time self-evident insight that prayer is not a pious decoration of life, but the breath of human existence."

Wow! That hit home for me. I've always and even to this day viewed prayer as window dressing for the spiritually mature/elite. It's a place I've always wanted to visit, but never been able to venture. It feels like my passports always being revoked. I know I've heard it before and it's not new but prayer needs to be the "breath of [our] human
existence".

Great song along that lines if you haven't heard it - "Breathing the breath" by Matt Redman

Sorry for the long and wandering post.

Traveling on,

Rich