The Way of the Mystics

THE WAY OF THE MYSTICS: ANCIENT WISDOM FOR EXPERIENCING GOD TODAY, by John Michael Talbot with Steve Rabey. Jossey-Bass (New York, 2005). 240 pp., $21.95.

John Michael Talbot’s “The Way of the Mystics” goes down easy, much like the music he plays as the “Troubadour for the Lord,” but that does not mean it is lean on substance.

Talbot is Catholic music’s No. 1 recording artist, selling 4 million records so far. That is nowhere near Christian rock star Amy Grant’s 25 million, or the hundreds of millions of records that a mainstream group like U2 has sold, but it gives the artist a large platform for a series of probing and thoughtful questions anchored in the lives of some of Christianity’s most beloved saints and mystics.

Talbot invites his readers to consider the role God plays in their lives, asking “is God a living and breathing reality in the core of your being or merely a cold theological abstraction? Do you experience the fullness of Christ or are you snacking on Christianity lite?”

These were not always the questions that Talbot asked. As a teenager, he started playing music with the folk rock group Mason Proffit. The band jammed with the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, but Talbot eventually came to the conclusion that the “rock star life seemed empty and sad. It wasn’t at all what I wanted my life to stand for.”

Soon afterward he saw a vision of Jesus in his Holiday Inn hotel room, propelling him from the spotlight to the sanctuary. After much searching, Talbot helped found the Little Portion Hermitage, a Franciscan community in Arkansas, where he now writes, prays and plays music.

“The Way of the Mystics,” co-authored by Steve Rabey, profiles 13 saints of the Catholic Church or Protestant exemplars of the faith. It is subtitled “Ancient Wisdom for Experiencing God Today.” While steering clear of “controversial figures,” Talbot and Rabey compile a compelling portrait of faithfulness and mysticism through their profiles of men and women who delved deep into the reality of God. Their goal is to “help the reader become a better mystic,” and explain that for all their differences the 13 mystics were all “ordinary people blessed by an extraordinary experience of God.”

But why would someone want to be a mystic? The stories in “The Way of the Mystics” are not all happy. St. Francis of Assisi “traded his fashionable clothes for the rags of a beggar man.” St. Anthony asked a “trusted friend to lock him in a nearby tomb.” St. Therese of Lisieux died of tuberculosis at the age of 24.

But here is where Talbot shines. He does more than just tell the stories of the lives of these and other luminaries like Hildegard of Bingen and Thomas Merton. The profiles are not just chronologies of woe and deprivation.

The lessons that the authors hope readers will draw from these lives are clear. In the chapter on Merton, readers are encouraged to learn “something about how we can live vital spiritual lives that reflect both our love of God and our concern for the complex and often chaotic world in which we find ourselves.”

The chapter describing the life of Therese of Lisieux ends with the “Little Flower” saying: “I am a little brush which Jesus has chosen in order to paint his own image in the souls you entrusted to my care.” Talbot remarks, “Perhaps by studying her brief and humble life, we can all learn a little bit more about how we can be God’s brushes, painting beautiful portraits of love, devotion and service.”

Author Fredrick Buechner observed that “religions start — as Frost says of poems — with a lump in the throat.” And through these sensitive and nuanced portraits of 13 men and women from across history, Talbot helps readers access this fundamental of faith: feeling.

Berrigan, raised in the faith-based nonviolent resistance community of Jonah House in Baltimore, works on arms control with a project of the World Policy Institute in New York.