In his penetrating and provocative fashion Luke Timothy Johnson has recently reflected in Commonweal on "Why Religion Can't Live without Mysticism." The article, of course, needs to be read in its entirety. But this paragraph particularly caught my attention:

By so creatively fusing exoteric practice and esoteric passion, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam asserted that the deepest meaning of public practice was the transformation of the individual soul and the quest for the living God. Yet recent centuries have witnessed the steady diminution of the esoteric in these traditions. Bit by bit Christianity has succumbed to the worldview of modernity, which rejects and even ridicules the notion that a life of renunciation can be a pilgrimage toward God. With the collapse of a miracle-saturated world comes the loss of a robust sense of future life counterbalancing our present Vale of Tears. In the eyes of modernity, the very concept of self-renunciation appears as a form of psychopathology. The late turn to the world of a Thomas Merton, for instance, is celebrated precisely because it privileges the active over the contemplative, the political engagement over the monastic retreat. Contemplative houses barely maintain their existence; religious orders must have an apostolate conceived in expressly social terms. The marginalization of the mystical within Christianity reaches its epitome in movements like the social gospel or liberation theology, for which the esoteric life of the mystic is at best a form of self-indulgence and at worst counterrevolutionary.

The denizens of dotCommonweal will, I know, tolerate my observation that I find more than a few resonances here to the writings and homilies of Pope Benedict, especially his oft-repeated insistence that Christianity is not, in the first instance, a set of ideas or a moral code, but an encounter with a person: the living Jesus.Early this week I experienced the grace of participating in the taking of first vows by fifteen young men in the Community of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. One of them had been an outstanding student and fine athlete at Boston College.The Liturgy was "Novus Ordo" by the book, though celebrated with fine music and generous silence. The young men came forward to make their vows barefoot in simple gray habits. Some smiled, some were softly crying. The sense conveyed was one of creative fusion of "exoteric practice" and "esoteric passion," as they invoked the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, holy father Francis, and the saints. There was even a simple reference to the "Rule" approved by Pope Honorius.The vows are for one year and, clearly, the young men are only beginning their journey of fidelity and discernment. They ask our prayers, even as we are renewed by their vision and passion.

Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is a longtime Commonweal contributor.

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