Reading the Mystics

Each Monday evening at 5:30 p.m. Good Shepherd parishioners and other friends gather in the worship space with Fr. Hendree to read and reflect on the works of select Christian Mystics. There are no prerequisites to joining our group. All are welcome!

Come when you can; don’t come when you can’t.

Current Author│Etty Hillesum

Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman from the Netherlands, died in Auschwitz Concentration Camp in 1943 at the age of twenty-nine. In March of 1941 she began a practice of journaling in a personal diary and writing letters to friends and family. We have her diary and we have a great many of her letters. In her writing we find the remarkable path she took into the depth of her own being where she found God, and then emerged from a place of union to love everyone including and especially her captors with a profoundly compassionate and wise heart. Etty was transformed by her suffering and that of her fellow Jews and came to the conclusion that while she understood that those who hate had reason to do so, she could not choose anything but love for herself.

An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork contains the collected works of Etty Hillesum from March of 1941 to September of 1943. In just a few short years Etty went through a remarkable spiritual transformation. 

“Become simple and live simply, not only within yourself but also in your everyday dealings. Don’t make ripples all around you, don’t try to be interesting, keep your distance, be honest, fight the desire to be thought fascinating by the outside world.”

Weekly Schedule

5:00 pm│Gather for brief Centering Prayer Instruction

5:10 pm│Centering Prayer Sit

5:30 pm│Introduction, Reading, and Discussion

7:00 pm│Conclude

Note:

  • If you would like to just come for Centering Prayer or just come for Mystics, you are more than welcome to come and go as you please

  • Whether its your first time or fifty-first, All are Welcome! 

  • You do not need to have read up to a certain point in the book... you can just jump on in!

Reading Schedule

From ‘An Interrupted Life’ by Etty Hillesum

September 9: Pages 173, 178 and 3-13

September 16: Pages 207-210 and 18-38

September 23: Mystics will NOT meet

September 30: Pages 211-212 and 42-64

October 7: Pages 224-225 and 66-97

October 14: Pages 255-256 and 99-131

October 21: Pages 137-161

October 28: Pages 170-231

November 4: Pages 235-253

November 11: Pages 254-274

November 18: Pages 275-325

November 25: Pages 326-the end

What is a Mystic?

This is the way Frederick Buechner describes the mystics, “There must be a God because every age and culture has produced mystics  who have experienced a Reality beyond reality and have  come back using different words and images but obviously  and without collusion describing with awed adoration the  same Indescribability.” 

James Finley writes, “The mystic is not somebody who says, “Look what I’ve experienced. Look what I’ve achieved.” The mystic is the one who says, “Look what love has done to me.” . . .  There’s nothing left, but the being of love itself giving itself away as . . . the concreteness of who you simply are.”

Meet our Mystics