My Life with the Mystics by Maryanne Hannan

The Mystics Would Like a Word
By Shannon K. Evans
Convergent, 2024
$26   208 pp.

Shannon K. Evans’s latest book, The Mystics Would Like a Word: Six Women Who Met God and Found a Spirituality for Today, bursts with energy. Spiritual, incarnational energy. In the introduction, she invites us to “position ourselves under the wise spiritual mothership” of these women mystics in order to “grapple with questions of faith and liberation in our modern world.” She herself has done just that in this honest, generous, personal book.

Of the six women she profiles, five were nuns: Hildegard of Bingen (12th-century Germany); Catherine of Siena (14th-century Italy); Julian of Norwich (14th-century England); Teresa of Ávila (16th-century Spain); and Thérèse of Lisieux (19th-century France). Only one, Margery Kempe (14th-15th-century England), was married. Since they each produced written work, one of Evans’s criteria for consideration, the women can be heard in their own voices, rather than through third-person accounts. They all led vivid, idiosyncratic lives and made profound spiritual discoveries—and recorded much of it. Evans rues the lack of other voices, the lost, the marginalized, but so it goes in our Eurocentric, patriarchal society.

Evans devotes two chapters to each woman, and in the context of their lives and writing, she takes up a spiritual topic, either perennial or contemporary. She makes subtle connections and draws astute conclusions from the material, but does not give a full portrait of any of the women or settle thorny historic debates. The book is the author’s personal engagement with what she found in her study of the mystics, how it derives from or affects her own life. More importantly, she is eager to share the good news of spiritual motherhood, the feminine face of God, in the hopes it will change the trajectory of other people’s lives.

Studying Teresa of Ávila, whose love of God and love of life could be described as “lusty,” offers the opportunity to delink sexuality from sin. Following Teresa’s guidance, we see that sexuality and sensuality might enhance spirituality. Building on that connection, in the more traditionally feminine understanding, body-centered spirituality can even be a way to strengthen faith.

Margery Kempe, as the married mother of 14, extends and deepens this topic. After several years of marriage and motherhood, this English matron heard the mystical sounds of heaven. Full merry in heaven became her refrain. No going back after that experience. Henceforth, she had a new understanding of herself as a virgin, fully committed to the Lord, a wish her husband refused to grant for several years. How she ultimately fulfilled her new identity is the stuff of legend: a medieval married woman embarking on a multiyear, multicountry pilgrimage without her husband, confronting and defending herself to church authorities. To understand her, Evans introduces the term “self-belonging,” which, at its deepest level, is “God-belonging.”

If Margery was repeatedly raped, so, too, is the earth, according to Evans and the authors she liberally cites. Hildegard of Bingen shows a way forward for confronting climate change. This nun, anticipating the theology of Francis of Assisi, intuited the “greening” power of the divine, a force she called viriditas. To her, as all things moved by the Spirit grow toward wholeness, the changing earth mirrors our internal life, full of God. Again, citing multiple other discussions, Evans suggests that women’s bodies, long dominated in a patriarchal hierarchy, align with the exploitation of the body of Mother Earth. Hildegard, with her love of music and belief in God’s immanence, also models a positive path through art that is restorative, art that is praise.

Gender inequality in society and in some theological discourse is a central issue that The Mystics Would Like a Word grapples with. Evans assumes there is longing in the wider collective unconscious for the feminine face of God. In the discussion of Julian of Norwich, she asks, “If the divine eternal and created one has been packaged in exclusively male form, who benefits?” No one, really, but historically, those who have been elevated, the male gender. And here, in a book not discovered until the beginning of the 20th century, Revelations of Divine Love—a book which is actually the first in the English language written by a woman—we find a nearly shocking alternative: Jesus as mother. For that is what Julian experienced, God as equally father and mother, the total union with God we are made for.

In Thérèse of Lisieux, Evans discovers another life, giving witness to the depth of our collective and personal mother wound. Thérèse’s mother was ill from the moment of her conception and died when she was only four years old. Her writings, especially her autobiography, constantly refer to her “littleness” and insignificance, yet hidden in this so-called “little way” is profound strength and hunger. Today she is considered a historical precedent for women who want to be ordained. Notwithstanding her intense yearning to be nurtured, she expressed, in her writing, the intense desire felt by untold numbers of women: “I feel in me the vocation of the PRIEST.”

In the life of Catherine of Siena, Evans searches for a way to integrate a life devoted to taking care of ourselves to the exclusion of others, and vice versa. She does not find it, but she does find courage, wisdom, and a phenomenal “incarnational embrace of humanity.” Catherine, whose ecstasies are immortalized in word and sculpture, faced the shadow side of darkness. However unorthodox, she freed herself from the fear of death and rose to the challenge of living for God through the physical. How the author discovers personal relevance in this chapter, readers can discover on their own.

Evans is doing important work. In fact, the book could almost be subtitled My Life with the Mystics. She is as saucy, incisive, at times irreverent, funny, poignant, and deep as any modern-day mystic. As a fairly recent Catholic convert, her experiences are somewhat different from those of a cradle Catholic. For instance, in an early chapter, she shares her experience from a time and culture not so long ago, when young girls wore “purity rings” as an overt sign that they would remain virgins until marriage. She also has greater appreciation for church overtures, such as Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’, on the topic of climate justice.

But mainly, on all of these topics and for our own spiritual health, Evans is making an urgent call for us not to read and admire the women mystics from afar, but to journey with them on the path they have identified. In the famous words of Karl Rahner, whom she quotes, “The Christian of the future will either be a mystic, or will cease to exist.”

A poet and frequent book reviewer, Maryanne Hannan is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. A resident of upstate New York, she is the author of Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st-Century Psalm Responsorials (Wipf and Stock, 2019). More information at www.mhannan.com.

Image: Karlheinz Oswald, Hildegard von Bingen, 1998. Gerda Arendt / Wikimedia Commons