Margery Kempe

(my wednesday morning was too busy and I forgot to post this before I headed out for the day. Peace Mass was wonderful this evening, and we had some good discussion about Margery.)

September 28, 2011

Feast of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and Margery Kempe

Job 26: 1-14

Psalm 63:1-8

Matthew 5:43-48

I’ve never been quite sure what to do with mystics or monastics. I have such a ‘let’s go build something together’ (thanks Lowe’s) attitude about my faith that I am unsure what to do with people who want to go off by themselves. It seems anathema to what Christianity is about. Mystics fare no better with me. Either I am sure that they are getting some special communication from God that I am not or I blow them off with the sure and steady knowledge that they are to be pitied as sufferers of something out of the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. 

This attitude has been shifting in the last year. I have spent some time exploring my unmediated relationship with God. Not God and me and a soup kitchen, or God and me and an academic assignment, not God and me and my children, but God and me and me. The first thing I got was a dark night of the soul. I interpreted this as an absence of God, then I decided it was an absence in me. Eventually, I heard the noises that I make to fill the spaces of my silence. Some of them were quite unpleasant. Until finally I found the place that gets called “still small voice.” And I discovered that there is almost no point in trying to write this down. It is truly a place beyond words and the words don’t make any sense at all until after the experience. Of course, having been to that borderland, as William Countryman calls it, I am searching out and spending time with all the mystics I can find in order to find some words that resonate with my time there.

So, I am pleased to have discovered Margery Kempe today. This is a woman I can relate to. A woman who didn’t lock herself into a monastic community or a room off of a church. This is a woman who had to negotiate a husband and children and social strictures with that still small voice. This, and if you know me you will laugh, is a woman who was “gifted with tears.” This is a woman who just kept doing what she was called to do no matter how awkward that looked to the rest of the world. I would call her a first class fool for Jesus. 

And the question Margery helps me answer is this. How can mysticism or monasticism counter the tendency to “do something” FOR the kingdom of God rather than “be someone” IN the kingdom of God? I think that perhaps, whenever we belong to God while we are doing nothing at all, we are well on our way to living in the mystery.