Abstract
In dialogue with contemplative spiritualities from across the Christian tradition, Douglas Christie’s new book offers a meditative exploration of loss, meaning, and community: How do we honestly navigate deep, even devastating, experiences of loss without succumbing to existential nihilism? Are our attempts to find meaning amid such losses ultimately futile? Can engaging these questions with others in communal vulnerability open new places for spiritual healing, possibly flourishing? These questions are relevant not only to personal experiences of loss, which C. explores with autobiographical narratives interspersed throughout the book, but also to large-scale communal losses such as the global ecological crisis, sociopolitical violence, and the Holocaust, issues to which C. dedicates attention in several chapters. In the midst of a contemporary reckoning with such considerable losses and their aftermaths, C. suggests that symbols of darkness, unknowing, and abyssal love resourced from early desert monastics and medieval Rhineland mystics offer language that can give voice to ineffable depths of loss and insights for mapping a topography for contemporary spiritualities committed to working for a just future. Drawing additionally from contemporary artists, poets, monastics, and activists, C. creates a wonderful tapestry of reflections that collectively demonstrate how a more expansive lexicon of loss retrieved from Christian mystical traditions facilitates wrestling with existential questions that admit no easy answers.
There are many strengths to this project, foremost of which is the wide range of contemplative interlocutors that C. creatively engages, evincing decades of study. He resists the temptation to attempt too much exegesis, thereby allowing his reader to sit with the discomforting and challenging statements of the mystics he cites. By placing the mystical imagery of emptiness, void, and silence in dialogue with contemporary challenges, C. uncovers new resonances of existential meaning for this imagery, which fruitfully confront a postmodern inclination to confine apophasis to the realms of critical theory or speculative theology. His elaboration on the communal dimensions of mystical contemplation, or the “common life” as named by the Rhineland mystics, contravenes characterizations of mysticism as a solitary enterprise. He argues that contemplative practices enlarge our capacities to engage the unknown other with love and enable modes of empathetic knowing that honor our dissimilarities. As C. himself learned from living in Argentina and from stays with monastic communities, hospitality bolstered by contemplative praxis opens spaces for mutual accompaniment along diverse spiritual journeys. Moreover, communal contemplative practices, especially those that ritually remember and grieve the victims of oppression, empower diverse coalitions working for justice, making the ideal of the “common life” especially salient for contemporary spiritualities. In addition to presenting an erudite and stimulating consideration of what mystical traditions of darkness and apophasis offer contemporary efforts to come to terms with personal and social loss, C. offers his own authenticity as a theologian to this project by punctuating theological insights with personal ruminations, which grounds this project in concrete human living and invites his reader to engage her own experiences of loss and her responsibilities to live in solidarity with others.
While there is much to savor in this book, there are a few methodological weaknesses that bear commenting on. C. is reluctant to distinguish between different kinds of mystical darkness, preferring instead to highlight the conceptual fluidity of apophatic imagery, but his analysis often presumes that such language is primarily descriptive of religious experience(s). Much recent scholarship on mysticism resists this experientialist hermeneutic, and at places I question the ease with which C. relates his mystical quotations to experiences of loss. In particular, C.’s engagement with the medieval Rhineland mystics is impoverished by his avoidance of the theological grounding of their mystical apophasis. Additionally, the category of sin is curiously muted in this book. To be silent on sin when speaking of oppression stemming from colonialism, racism, or political authoritarianism occludes how human sinfulness causes and perpetuates devastating losses for others and risks mitigating responsibility for reckoning with our participation therein. A deeper engagement with some of the mystical-political theologians C. mentions in passing—for example, Johann Baptist Metz and Gustavo Gutiérrez—may have remedied this lacuna.
Despite these critiques, C.’s book is a rich rumination on mystical themes of darkness that open imaginative horizons for wrestling with our personal losses and our sociopolitical realities. The range of mystical interlocutors and C.’s deft weaving of mystical voices with artists, intellectuals, and others engaged with ongoing struggles for justice make this work a fruitful read. It is a welcome addition for theologians who are seeking ways to bring the wisdom of the mystics to bear on the existential, political, and spiritual challenges of our time.