"Our task," wrote Jean Pierre de Caussade, "is to offer ourselves up to God like a clean, smooth canvas and not bother ourselves about what God may choose to paint on it, but, at every moment, feel only the stroke of his brush." This is one of the readings in Teachings of the Christian Mystics edited by Andrew Harvey. The selections in this excellent anthology include writings from the New Testament, the Gospel of James, Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Merton, Teilhard de Chardin, and many others. Harvey believes that the present day spiritual renaissance will embrace "an authentic and unsparing recovery of the full range, power, and glory of the Christian mystical tradition." He hopes the writings of these celebrants of Jesus Christ as "the hero of love" can serve as antidotes to fundamentalism's vision of the faith as patriarchal, life-denying, and world-despising.
Some of the more poignant passages here are Saint Isaac the Syrian's concept of a charitable heart that softens in the face of the suffering of others, Jacopone da Toti's emphasis on the soul's finding God in all creatures through the senses, St. Therese of Lisieux's path of "The Little Way," Marguerite of Oingt's understanding of Jesus as her mother, and Angelus Silesius's startling image of humans giving birth to God. Teachings of the Christian Mystics affirms the sacred feminine and proclaims gratitude, imagination, humility, compassion, and justice as core spiritual practices.