Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ stands at the center of the book’s account of Christian mysticism, not simply as a subject of belief but as the mediator through whom people seek and encounter God. The different accounts gathered around him resist a single formula: the encounter may be imagined as a lover’s kiss, understood as the Word made flesh, described as a direct but wordless presence, or recognized in the hungry and suffering person who needs care. Across these contrasts, Jesus Christ gives Christian mystical longing its relational shape and connects inward experience with transformed life.

The Beloved and the Word

Origen reads the opening of the Song of Songs as more than an erotic poem. Its bride’s urgent desire for her lover becomes an allegory of the Church’s longing for union with Jesus Christ. The law and prophets have given the Church knowledge of the Son of God to whom she is betrothed, and she has seen the work of his ministers; neither those gifts nor the messengers themselves satisfy her. She longs for Jesus Christ’s own words and teaching. Origen then shifts from the Church to the individual soul, which seeks fellowship with the Word made flesh and access to the mysteries of wisdom and knowledge. As the soul begins to understand what was obscure and untangle what was confused, Origen interprets that understanding as receiving the kiss of the Word. The image makes scriptural interpretation itself part of the soul’s relationship with Jesus Christ: the desire is not merely for information about him, but for his presence and teaching.

Bernard of Clairvaux develops the same image across his Sermons on the Song of Songs, beginning with the bride’s request for a kiss. He devoted the first four sermons to that opening, treated other subjects, and later returned to it for four more. For Bernard, the kiss is not a formal greeting or a passing gesture: it signifies the fulfillment of the longing soul’s desire and the union of God with humanity through Jesus Christ. He calls the living and active Word a kiss because it brings joy, reveals mysteries, and joins divine light with the enlightened mind. The image also answers a question of assurance: the person who is dust and ashes seeks confidence that Jesus Christ will not withdraw his promise, and asks for the kiss as the sign of the mediator’s faithfulness.

In Sermon 8, Bernard connects the kiss to the risen Jesus Christ breathing on the disciples and giving them the Holy Spirit. The bride receives both knowledge and devotion: reason is prepared for insight, and the will for wisdom. In Sermon 9, Bernard’s own desire remains unfulfilled; the favors he has received seem less than what he longs for. In Sermon 14, he recalls the coldness and hardness of heart he experienced early in his conversion, even as he sought God. Unexpected occasions could restore him, though he worried that memories of human goodness, rather than thoughts of God, had prompted the change. The kiss thus signifies both an intense experience and a continuing desire that can persist through spiritual dryness.

Mediator, Transformation, and Presence

The book presents Paul as a source for Christian mysticism while distinguishing his emphasis from the idea of becoming one with God. Albert Schweitzer calls Paul’s experience a Christ-mysticism rather than a God-mysticism: relationship with God comes through encounter with Jesus Christ. In the language of Galatians, Christ lives in the believer. This formulation makes mystical union relational and transformative, rather than a simple claim that human and divine identity have merged. The book also notes the limits of language in Paul’s account of being caught up to the third heaven and Paradise: the experience includes things that cannot be told, so mythical images serve as imperfect means of expression.

That mediating role becomes decisive in Augustine’s conversion. Reading Neoplatonism had led him inward, where he apprehended a light beyond his mind, but he came to recognize that knowing God required embracing the mediator between God and humanity, Jesus Christ. At first Augustine could regard Jesus as an exceptionally rational man without seeing him as the Word made flesh. His friend Alypius explained that Catholics believed Christ to be God clothed in flesh, a conviction that Neoplatonists, who treated flesh as inferior to spirit, did not share. Reading Paul helped Augustine join what he valued in Neoplatonism to the gift of grace, while exposing what philosophy alone lacked: humility, confession, the Holy Spirit, and instruction from the meek Jesus Christ.

During the crisis described in Confessions, a child’s repeated call to pick up and read led Augustine to open Paul’s letter to the Romans. The passage he encountered opposed the desires of the flesh and directed him to put on Jesus Christ. The book interprets this moment as the discovery that change depended not merely on force of will but on a new life in Christ. Augustine described relief and the dispersal of doubt; afterward he told his mother, Monica, was baptized with his son Adeodatus and Alypius, and returned to North Africa. The conversion narrative therefore gives mystical encounter consequences beyond the moment of inward certainty: it alters allegiance, relationships, and the course of a life.

Beyond Vision and Words

The book distinguishes the presence of Jesus Christ from spectacular sensory phenomena. Mystical experience may include visions or voices, but it need not. Rufus Jones was wary of expecting messages from angels; Bernard of Clairvaux reported no sensory experience in his encounter with God; and Thomas Merton, in Cuba, was certain that God was present before him without actually seeing anything. These contrasts matter because the book defines a mystic most basically as someone who experiences God’s presence directly and with certainty, while emphasizing that human language cannot adequately communicate what happened.

The account places this difficulty within broader descriptions of mystical experience. Bernard McGinn identifies mysticism as a dimension of religion, a process or way of life, and an attempt to express direct consciousness of God’s presence. William James’s four marks are ineffability, knowledge that exceeds reason, transience, and passivity: the experience cannot be adequately reported, yields a kind of knowing not reached by reasoning, passes even when time seems suspended, and arrives as an unearned gift rather than something a person can produce. These features help explain why encounters associated with Jesus Christ can be described through images such as light, breath, and a kiss without being reduced to those images.

Thomas Merton’s Cuban experience offers a concrete instance. In a Franciscan church, children entered in pairs and joined a brother in singing and reciting the creed in Spanish. Merton reported an abrupt certainty of God’s presence between himself and the altar, without a visual apparition. He understood the experience as an act of divine kindness, not a reward for virtue; it also made his own sins clearer to him. The episode illustrates a recurring distinction in the book: the decisive feature is not necessarily what the senses perceive, but the certainty of presence and its effect on the person who experiences it.

Presence in Attention and Service

The book also locates the relationship with Jesus Christ in ordinary attention and practical responsibility. In the story of Mary and Martha, Mary sits at Jesus’ feet listening while Martha is occupied with preparing for the visit. Jesus identifies Mary’s choice as the better part and warns against distraction from what he is saying. The episode gives contemplative attention priority without making the practical world irrelevant; rather, it asks what deserves a person’s attention and how an encounter with Jesus Christ reorders competing demands.

For Dorothy Day, that presence is encountered not through visions or a felt union but in people who are poor and troubled. She prayed the psalms, attended Mass daily, and read theologians, yet her basic mystical conviction was that God could be found in the people waiting for food and shelter. She grounded this in Jesus Christ’s teaching about feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting the prisoner: service to the least is service to Christ. Day’s Catholic Worker commitments joined this conviction to pacifism and social criticism. Even when some peace activists dismissed care for the poor as a mere Band-Aid on a larger social illness, she maintained that immediate aid was commanded while broader injustice also had to be confronted.

Howard Thurman’s encounters in Asia make a related connection between Jesus Christ, religious experience, and justice. In Ceylon, a college principal challenged him over the history of Christian participation in slavery and the racial oppression of Black Americans. Thurman distinguished Christianity from the religion of Jesus and argued that his critique of slavery and prejudice was not a defense of a declining Christian institution. Later, Gandhi told Thurman that Christianity’s identification with Western culture, civilization, and colonialism was a major obstacle to Jesus Christ in India. These encounters frame the book’s insistence that religious claims must be judged against their social effects. Jesus Christ remains the point of reference for a faith whose inward life must issue in freedom, justice, compassion, and service.