What is Emerging?

We all have experienced many changes in our lives these past several years. In our evolutionary journey our consciousness keeps rising and as a consequence, we become aware of new things that are emerging and old things that emerge with new understandings. One of those is the interest in the mystical life. Maribai Starr is among many authors who have written about the recovery of mysticism and the life a mystic lives today. Since we humans are mystics at birth, it might be important to heed what Starr and other spiritual authors tell us about mysticism that appears in our day.

Starr describes mysticism as being in communion with the Divine. A mystical experience is an experience of the heart opening. Out of the open heart will flow the parts of us that get in the way of experiencing the Divine, and into the open heart flows grace: the love that creates within us the experience of our unity with all beings. The mystic becomes more aware that all life is a mystery. She or he walks through the world looking through the eyes of love, so that anything and everything that is done with the intention and attention on the sacred is holy. In becoming a mystic, one becomes more fully, deeply a human, human-being. Nothing is new to the reality of a mystical way of being, only that more attention is directed to how we all may discover and live the mystical life and that we recognize it being lived out in ordinary people. Would this be the Spirit’s voice calling us to the mystical life? We are aware of those in Loretto Community and Loretto Link who are mystics among us. What would Loretto be like if all of us aspired to what it is already in our hearts to be?

Sources: “Ordinary Mysticism,” Maribai Starr, 2024; Maribai Starr, Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, Feb. 11, 2025