Karl Rahner famously opined that the Christian of the future will be a mystic -- one who experienced something -- or will not be. He clearly did not intend extraordinary mystical manifestations (think Bernini's "St. Teresa in Ecstasy"), but what he sometimes called "the mysticism of the everyday."Rahner's words came back to me this past weekend during the Twelfth Annual Cardinal Bernardin Conference, sponsored by the Catholic Common Ground Initiative founded by Bernardin and the late Monsignor Philip J. Murnion. This year's Conference was devoted to Ecclesial Movements and their Relation to the Local Church. As usual, it brought together lay people, priests, and bishops. But there was a special richness in the presence of active members of four ecclesial "movements:" Charismatic Renewal, Focolare, Communion and Liberation, and the Neo-Catechumenate Way. Hence the exchanges exhibited a unique blend of the experiential and the more conceptual.As part of a summary impression, I suggested that the movements, whatever the real differences among them, seemed to manifest certain experiential commonalities. First, the participants had, through the movements, experienced a notable encounter with the person of Jesus in the Holy Spirit that moved them from a merely "notional" understanding to a "real" apprehension" (to use Newman's terms) of the Gospel.Second, the movements provide a distinctive "mystagogical method," a specific way to deepen this realization and thus to promote a real integration of faith and daily life.Third, they offer continued communal support and challenge in contexts that are often indifferent or even hostile to religious commitment.Finally, the experience of the love and grace of God, intimately realized, impels the recipients to grateful witness and evangelical sharing.No one denied that at times tensions have arisen in the course of the interaction of the movements with dioceses or within particular parish situations. All conceded that the need for discernment of charisms and for spiritual maturation was imperative; but also that the promise of mutual enrichment, a sharing of gifts, was profound.A final observation: these movements are not a new phenomenon in the life of the Church: Benedictine monasticism, the mendicants of the Middle Ages, the Companions of Jesus began as movements. The perennial challenge is to put their vision and charism at the service of the whole body of Christ, Augustine's "totus Christus" which must be our "defining identity and loyalty."