Episode 241: Demystifying Mysticism | A Conversation with Kathryn Knight Sonntag

Was Joseph Smith a mystic? Searching for the term ‘mysticism’ on the Church website yields, “See: False Doctrine, Sorcery, Superstitions; Traditions of Men.” So it’s no wonder many church members haven’t thought much about mysticism—the role it may have played in Joseph’s experience, or how it might inform their own everyday lives or transform their spiritual practices. But poet Kathryn Knight Sonntag describes it differently: “Trusting the groundless ground, trusting that the darkness or the chaos or the unknown place actually is deeply full of knowing and love and purpose. And that it’s ultimately the path into apotheosis. It’s ultimately where we begin that journey of becoming divine.” In Episode 241, Kathryn joins Susan and Cynthia to explore the concept of mysticism. What might it look like for Latter-day Saints to step off the prescribed map and onto the sacred ground of our own lives in pursuit of personal encounters with God?

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Notes & Quotes:

Find Kathryn’s website here
Find her Restore breakout session here
Find her books (The Mother Tree) here and (The Tree at the Center) here
ALSSI Ep. 30, The Mother Tree
ALSSI Ep. 113, Revisiting the Mother Tree
ALSSI Ep.119, Patriarchy as Sin
Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground, by Mirabai Starr
Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, by Diana Butler Bass
The Mary story Kathryn shares comes from The Infancy Gospel of James

“A mystic is someone who skips over the intermediaries (ordained clergy, prescribed prayers, rigid belief systems) and goes straight to God. […] Mysticism is not about concepts; it is about communion with ultimate reality. And ultimate reality is not some faraway prize we claim when we have proved ourselves worthy to perceive it. Ultimate reality blooms at the heart of regular life.” —Mirabai Starr (p. 1-2)

“Half of the American population now claims to have had “a mystical experience,” a statistic that suggests we are in the process of returning to the idea of faith as an encounter with God. As religion in the modern sense fails, we appear to be busily restitching the ancient fabric of belief.” —Diana Butler Bass (p. 120)

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance—
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave . . .
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

“Wisdom, by means of the images used to depict her, addresses such questions as the relationship between the human and the divine, the means of apotheosis, the stewardship of knowledge, and the power which knowledge gives to transform or to destroy.” —Margaret Barker

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