Fr. Seán ÓLaoire

So I think the mystics have a dual role, that they're bringing in the energy of the cosmos itself, and they're trying to ground it in the energy of the planet,

And at the same time, they're living in a world in which, you know, there is all kinds of temptations to excesses.

And so the real mystic for me is somebody who can walk with a foot in both camps.

And I think different people have different talents, like in any team.

You know, one guy is a really good defensive player, another guy is an offensive player or whatever.

One guy is a great goalkeeper, one guy is a great penalty taker or whatever it is.

But that, you know, so we specialize, but that we're here as a team, and that the beauty of religion, the really great religious traditions are the ones who've honored their mystics, you know, and skewed the dogma.

And there's always this titanic struggle between the two.

And the mystics have held the fire of God alive, you know, in the throes of dogmatic and fundamentalist overlays.

I think I said this to you before.

When I was a kid growing up in Ireland, we would burn peat, what you call peat here, we call it turf in Ireland.

And so there were fires in Ireland which hadn't gone out for 300 years.

So, you know, the mother would keep the fire during the day.

She cooked in it, keep the family warm.

And then at night when everybody's going to bed, she'd take all the ashes and she'd heap them over the embers, keep them alive.

And in the morning she'd get up and she'd rake it and the embers are still alive and she'd add more turf and the fire would blaze again.

And so she was the keeper of the flame, literally for the household for hundreds of years.

So I think the mystics were the keepers of the flames and that dogma tended to kind of put the fires out and squelch the fires.

So the mystic's job was to kind of hide the embers until it was more opportune to blow upon them again and fan them into flame.

And it seems to me that that's the stage of world religions right now.