Inner Life

BY DAVID TORKINGTON
Mystics get married
I WENT UP to London to spend Christmas with friends and saw over a dozen Kestrels searching for their Christmas dinner along the motorways. They reminded me of the first Kestrel I'd ever . seen high up on the Yorkshire moors just below the Ingleborough where we used to spend our summer holidays during the war.
Kestrels were comparatively rare in those days, at least to a "towny" like me, so I watched it for hours hunting in the heather. I loved the peat moorland and the Ingleborough towering over our little cottage. No other landscape has ever affected me more deeply, perhaps because it was my first love and there's always something special, something uniquely precious about your first love.
I loved that land where my forebears had lived for generations before me, but it was only that day as I gazed in wonder at the "windhover" balancing on high that I knew it loved me in a way I found hard to explain to anyone, so I didn't try.
The further the kestrel floated away on the wind the smaller it became, and the more it drew me together within myself and made me ever more open and sensitive to the scenery over which it soared.
From the beginning contemplatives haw always found that some sort of fixed point, real or imagined, can help concentrate the mind and heart on what they desire more than anything else.
I suppose it was the first "natural" mystical experience I ever had though I didn't quite know what it was at the time I just knew I wanted more of it, but found to my great disappointment that it was even rarer than the bird that had drawn me out of myself.
I don't want to give the impression that my youth was strewn with "mystical experiences" because it wasn't, but they did come to me frequently enough to make me wonder and pause to reflect on their meaning.
I thought they were unique to me at first and my religious upbringing made me associate the profound feeling that enveloped me with the One whose Spirit hovered over the chaos at the dawn of time and whose Word formed it into the paradise on earth that mirrored the paradise in heaven.
If the world was formed by His word at the beginning of time, couldn't it speak to people of every time and fill them with the Spirit who still hovers over it as the hawk that hovers on high.
I came to realise the experience I'd had on my moor was not unique to me, but was a commonplace experience to all humankind who learn how to be still and know their Creator through the creation that embodies His Word.
At first I thought my experience spoke to me of a special calling, perhaps to become a priest or a religious as many others have been, misinterpreting the mysterious touch that calls all to the fulness of Love in every way of life.
When I got beyond the stage when I couldn't talk to my Father about anything and began to talk to him about everything, I found he'd had the same experience that I'd had in 7ny youth. Then, when he met my mother he found in her a fuller and more complete embod
iment of what I had experienced on my beloved moorland.
If creation can speak to us of the goodness, beauty, and truth that it more than mirrors, how much more can its greatest masterworks? How much more can man and woman, made most particularly in His own image and likeness, speak to each other of the fullness of love that they both reflect in different complementary ways.
Only the blindness of pride and prejudice can prevent the would-be mystic from experiencing ever more fully, ever more completely the other-worldly love that surrounds them.
This is why the mystic way that is the only way to come to know and experience the fulness of love means sacrifice and involves much purifying suffering, for only the pure of heart can see God in the world He created and in the men and women He has formed in His own image and likeness.
If the whole of creation is a sacrament, then marriage is a sacrament par excellence, because it opens to everyone the hope and the opportunity of going beyond themselves through loving sacrifice, not just into each other but into the Other, who is uniquely but differently embodied in each.
Though He is the all in all, He still hovers over all, not like the Kestrel that threatens death but like the dove that promises peace to the searcher, whose heart will never rest till it rests in Him.
David Torkington's book "The Mystic" will be published this June by Hodder and Stoughton.