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Karl Rahner (1904-1984) is a significant theologian, and mystic, of the 20^th century. His profound reflections on mysticism “are so much in accord with the earliest usage of the term mystical in the Fathers of the Church” (Downey, 1993, 687). Central to Rahner’s thinking is the view that:

…at the core of every person’s deepest experience, what haunts every human heart, is a God whose mystery, light, and love have embraced the total person. God works in every person’s life as the One to whom everyone must freely say his or her inmost yes or no. We may deny this, ignore it, or repress it, but deep down we know that God is in love with us and that we are all, at least secretly, in love with each other” (Egan, 1991, 599).

Thus, Rahner understands the human person “as a mystic in the world, as an ecstatic being created to surrender freely and lovingly to the holy mystery that

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gives its own self to all and embraces all” (Egan, 1991, 599). As Rahner states:

In human beings…there is something like an anonymous, unthematic, perhaps repressed, basic experience of being orientated to God, which is constitutive of man in his concrete makeup (of nature and grace), which can be repressed but not destroyed, which is ‘mystical’ or (if you prefer a more cautious terminology) has its climax what the older teachers called infused contemplation (Rahner, 1970, 125).

To Rahner, there are three kinds of mysticism. One is what he calls “everyday mysticism” (Downey, 1993, 688); another is the more intensive realizations of what we normally call “religious experience”; the other he calls a “purely nonconceptual experience of transcendence without imagery” (Downey, 1993, 688). In his writings on The Mysticism of Everyday Life, Rahner regards actual life experiences of the Spirit as mysticism of daily life. He gives a long list of examples to illustrate his point:

Here is someone who discovers that he can forgive though he receives no reward for it, and silent forgiveness from the other side is taken as self-evident. Here is someone who tries to love God although no response of love seems to come from God’s silent inconceivability… Here is someone who does his duty where it can apparently only be done with the terrible feeling that he is denying himself and doing something ludicrous, which no one will thank him for. Here is a person who is really good to someone from whom no echo of understanding and thankfulness of having been selfless, noble, and so on. Here is someone who is silent although he could defend himself, although he is unjustly treated; who keeps silent without feeling that his silence is his sovereign unimpeachability (Rahner, 1983, 81).

In these occasions, Rahner argues:

…there is God and his liberating grace. There we find what we Christians call the Holy Spirit of God. Then we experience something which is inescapable (even when suppressed) in life and which is offered to our freedom with the question whether we want to accept it or whether we want to shut ourselves up in a hell of freedom by trying to barricade ourselves against it. There is the mysticism of everyday life, the discovery of God in all things; there is the sober intoxication of the Spirit, of which the Fathers and the liturgy speaks, which we cannot reject or despise because it is real (Rahner, 1983, 84).

Besides the mysticism of everyday life which is at times “the unthematic and unreflective experience of being orientated to God”, there are “more intensive realizations which force this experience of transcendence more clearly on the reflective consciousness as well” (Downey, 1993, 688), for instance, when an individual has a powerful religious experience. William James describes such an experience, “the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite and there was a rushing together of the two

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worlds, the inner and the outer… I stood alone with Him who had made me, and ...felt the perfect unision of my spirit with Him” (Downey, 1993, 688).

There might even occur what Rahner called the “purely nonconceptual experience of transcendence without imagery”, an experience of the type that John of the Cross describes in his classic texts The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Downey, 1993, 688). This kind of experience is described by Harvey Egan as “unusually pure and intense psychological experiences of our graced orientation to the God of love”

(Downey, 1993, 688), and would be regarded as mystical union by many of the medieval mystics.

For Rahner, “God is the incomprehensible mystery that embraces everything”

(Egan, 1991, 602). God self-communicates to us through the whole of creation and the incarnation so that “the experience of God forms the ambience, the undertow, or the basal spiritual metabolism, of daily life” (Egan, 1991, 600).

Because of God’s universal self-communication, anyone who lives moderately, selflessly, honestly, courageously, and in silent service to others experiences the mysticism of daily life (Egan, 1991, 600). Rahner is of the opinion that, “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all” (Rahner, 1981, 149).

He speaks of the fact that God, and the experience of God, are, through grace, inescapably present in the human person, that God’s own self really is operative within us and meant to be experienced. For this reason, he believed that being initiated into Christianity is likewise an initiation into a mystical way of being.

Mystical experience is not supposed to be unique, or unusual and for the few, but rather a sign and manifestation of who and what we are meant to be as ordinary Christian men and women. For this reason the presence of God’s own self is understood as a constituent part of being fully human and fully alive (Endean, 2009, 33-34, 46).

In summary, the above contemplatives and writers are only a few examples among one hundred mystics recorded in Christian history. These “treasures of the Christian mystical heritage continue to surprise us, as previously unknown mystics are being brought to our attention” (King, 2004, 246). This brief historical overview of mystics and mysticism shows an enduring and richly significant

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contemplative tradition that has lasted throughout the two thousand years of Christianity. This great variety of contemplatives lived in different cultures and historical circumstances, but their fascinating narratives are still as rich and colourful as they are inspiring and energizing. Although the history of Christian mystics is extraordinarily rich with many interesting personalities from all walks of life, they all witnessed that “at the core of every person’s deepest experience, is a God whose mystery, light, and love have embraced the total person” (Egan, 1991, 599). They show that an intimate relationship with God is possible, that the mystical path to God is through contemplation, and the result of contemplation is love.