A mystic is someone who values experience over words, mystery over conclusions and listening over talking. A mystic uses words only when necessary and refuses to use them as the hitching-post for all experience and truth. They understand that words must become flesh or they are just words. That’s why Jesus told his disciples “tell no one what you have seen.” He didn’t want them to dumb-down their experience into words. If your experience is allowed to live through you, you won’t have to use words to convince others you actually had one. Your testimony is what God looks like through you, not what you use words to describe in front of a group.
Inside such a broad and deep awareness, paradoxes are easily accepted and mental contradictions seem to fade. That’s why mystics can forgive, show mercy and love enemies so easily. They are not irritatingly always trying to convince others of “the truth.” (Evangelize). They understand they are the word made flesh and they don’t have to add anything to it to make it more true. They are free to be light, salt and leaven which makes things tastier and more visible while working out of sight, from the inside out. The ego hates not being seen or heard. BTW, salt is only visible when it’s huddled together in a container. Sound familiar? 😉 Once it’s sprinkled into life, its presence is tasted but not seen. People around you can then “taste and see that the Lord, He is good.”
Jesus used parables to turn our unconscious view of God and reality upside-down and expose its illusions to us and for us individually. Parables should make us a bit uncomfortable if we are really “hearing” them. If we fit them neatly inside our belief-system-as-usual world, they have not served their purpose and have no transformational power. Parables should unlock your view of life from the inside. What the church has done for centuries is give people moral and doctrinal teaching without rearranging their entire worldview. It does not work. It creates legalist, ritualist, minimalist, and literalist who kill the spirit of everyone and everything.
A parable confronts our world, our entire belief system and subverts it. It doesn’t call for discussion,debate, or question, for its not God as information. Rather, it’s God as invitation. It invites us out of blindness and into insight (in-to-sight). It’s not an invitation to endless analysis or Bible study. It’s either a flashing insight or it’s nothing. It’s not like a joke that you “get.” A parable gets you. You don’t Unlock it, it unlocks you.
~ Stan Tyra