Today (October 15) is the feast day of Saint Teresa of Ávila, a fifteenth century Camelite nun and a radical mystic if ever there were one.

It is also the anniversary of the passing of Dr. Barbara Holmes (1943-2024), author of books like Joy Unspeakable and Crisis Contemplation. Another radical mystic, indeed.

We who seek to cultivate a meaningful contemplative spirituality today are truly indebted to the wisdom keepers and teachers who walked before us, and who now, I believe, watch over us as ancestors of the heart and soul.

Someone asked me this question yet again recently: so what exactly is radical mysticism? It’s hard enough trying to talk about mysticism in general — let alone radical mysticism!

Radical: rooted. Mysticism: mystery. Isn’t being a radical mystic simply being rooted in the Mystery?

And I do mean Mystery-with-a-capital-M. Just like my favorite definition of God (another word that’s impossible to pin down) is Love-with-a-capital-L.

There’s a bit of horticultural folk wisdom offered to those who feel that their life circumstances may not be ideal: bloom where you are planted. Most of us find that our lives have some sort of constraint: perhaps a physical constraint (like my daughter, who lived 26 of her 29 years confined to a wheelchair), or a limitation of ability or personality or resources. And while much of life’s adventure involves doing what we can to make the most of what we’ve got, some things are beyond our ability to fix or change. So do we give in to despair — or do we do our best to bloom where we are planted?

The Mystery-with-a-capital-M is a stark reminder that we cannot truly understand, or manage, or control, the pure weirdness of being alive. We didn’t ask to be born (or if we did, it pretty much is forgotten) and we don’t get to vote against the losses we will experience, including aging, sickness, and the most unavoidable of all: death.

Do we retreat into fundamentalist religion or bitter, cynical nihilism, to name two of our most common, if ineffective, strategies for attempting to control our experience of the mystery? Or — bloom where you are planted — can we somehow find a way to integrate the faith of religious devotion with the radical unknowing of both the best science and the best mysticism?

That’s what I think radical mysticism ultimately is: the commitment to bloom where we are planted, rooted in the Mystery. Debonee and I love to talk about mysticism on the edge, or the topics that some spiritually-minded people find hard to talk about: like gender and sexuality and psychedelics and politics. Yes, that’s all radical mysticism too. But it gets its radicalness from being rooted, and its mystical-ness (is that a word?) from being rooted in Mystery. So that, it seems to be, is really the heart of it all.

In the last two months the number of subscribers to this Substack has doubled. We ponder this with gratitude and humility. Thank you for being interested enough in this hard-to-define topic to get emails from us! We hope they are worthy of the time you spend reading them. But most important of all, thank you for your being rooted in the Mystery. I hope we can all get to know each other, as much as a medium like Substack will allow. May our respective immersion in the Mystery bring support and nurture to each other… and therefore, to the world.

This article is adapted from a talk I gave on March 3, 2024, to the annual retreat of Fortunate & Faithful Families, an affirming ministry of the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta for the friends and family of LGBTQ+ persons. Although I had written about my gender identity previously, it marked the first time I spoke about it publicly. It feels especially appropriate to share on National Coming Out Day.

Trauma warning: Please note that this piece includes a description of a serious car accident, including photos of the car after the accident and the injured driver of the car in the hospital afterward. Please take care of yourself as you read this article.

That Your Joy May Be Full: How the Spirit Calls Each and Every One of Us to a Life of Abundant Delight

I am so deeply honored to have been invited to spend this time with you today. Most places where I tend to speak I am often asked to speak about mysticism, contemplative prayer, that sort of thing. I imagine those topics will show up sooner or later this afternoon, since that’s my wheelhouse. But when I was first approached about speaking to Fortunate & Faithful Families, it seemed really important to focus my reflection on something a bit more down to earth, and also maybe a bit more personal — from my own heart. And so that’s what led to the twin topics of joy and delight that I hope we can join together and really consent to the invitation that the Spirit offers us to live with a heart filled with wonder and joy.

I’d like to begin with a bit of my own story — a moment of time from when I was in Graduate School. This would have been probably in the winter or spring of 1983, so over forty years ago now — eek! I pursued a master’s degree in professional writing and editing straight after graduating from college, so I was young and single and for a year I lived in campus housing, which at least back then was unusual for grad students. At the age of 22 I was the old-timer in the dorm. I shared a suite with three guys, all undergraduates who were several years younger than me. They were nice enough, but it became obvious really fast that I was… well, shall we say, different. This might be the easiest way to describe it: they were into football, and I was into Joni Mitchell. If you’re young here and need some context, imagine that next to all these beer-drinking jocks, I was a Taylor Swift fan. Which is not that far from the truth, actually, but I digress.

So on this particular night, my roomies had all gone out drinking, but I stayed in the dorm and eventually went to bed. I’d turned out the lights but hadn’t yet fallen asleep when two of the three guys came in to the suite. They saw I was sleeping so they went into the other room, but they were chatting and I could hear every word they said.

One of the guys was asking the other for advice. It turned out that he had a new girlfriend, and he had mentioned to her that he didn’t have anyone to go to the gym with, to work out together. This had turned out to be a grave tactical error, because the girl had perked right up and said, “I’d like to go to the gym with you.” So now the guy was stuck trying to figure out how to let the girl know he didn’t want to work out with her.

“So what you’re telling me is that you need a work-out buddy,” the other guy replied. The logic was elegant in its simplicity: then the first guy could just tell his girlfriend that he already had a friend that we went to the gym with. “That’s a great idea!” The first guy said. “Would you be willing to go to the gym with me?” The other guy said, “No, sorry, you know I’m so busy with ROTC and all my studies. I can’t commit to something like that on a regular basis.” Then they were silent for a few seconds. And the second guy said, “Why don’t you ask Carl to be your workout buddy?”

The first guy snorted, and said, “Come on! I just got done telling you I don’t like to work out with girls.” They both laughed heartily, unaware that I was lying in bed in the very next room, listening to every word.

Now, I suppose if I were just “one of the guys” — what today we might call a cisgender male — I would have just laughed that off. I would have rolled my eyes and just thought they were a couple of losers. And to be perfectly honest, after more than forty years I find this story somewhat amusing. But the reason why I find it amusing, or should I say ironic, is because, at that moment, those two undergraduate jocks knew me better than I knew myself. Or should I say, they knew me better than I was willing to admit to myself.

But what I remember about that moment, lying in that bed, was that I curled up into the fetal position and my eyes stung with a sense of shame.

And like your life flashing before your eyes, I thought about all the other times that I had been told that I act like a girl, I run like a girl, I laugh like a girl, I have feminine mannerisms. I thought about all the times when people would ask me if I were gay, or if word came back to me that this was a topic of conversation among friends when I wasn’t present. And as the years went by, more moments like that would continue to come, like the time in the late 1980s when a woman I was dating confided in me that after her brothers met me, they pulled her aside and told her she needed to dump me, because they could tell that I was either a closeted queer or simply effeminate, and either way they didn’t want someone like that in their family.

Needless to say, that relationship did not last much longer.

For so many years, when those kinds of conversations would get onto my radar, my embodied emotional response was simply one of shame. Burning, miserable shame. Somewhere along the way, I had learned to be ashamed of who I am, and all it took was a little conversation like that to stir up the embers and get that fire of self-targeted contempt roaring again.

So just for the record, let me share how I understand myself today. In the LGBTQ acronym, the letters B and T belong to me. I am a bisexual, and I have known this about myself since I was a kid; but since I do genuinely find women attractive and enjoy being in relationship with a woman partner, it’s been very easy to simply pass as a straight person. Today I am quite joyfully married to a woman and we’ve been together almost 31 years. And for both spiritual and practical reasons my wife and I both believe in monogamy, so I basically function in the world like a straight guy. But the truth is the truth, and while I am the kind of bisexual who leans more straight than gay, it would be dishonest to pretend that I am only or strictly heterosexual.

Then there’s the “T” which stands for trans but better words for my identity would include gender-fluid, gender-expansive or simply nonbinary. If you are not familiar with those words, they all describe, in slightly different nuanced ways, people who simply don’t fit in with the gender classification of masculine and feminine. Yes, I have a male body and I was assigned male at birth, although in 1960 that just meant the doctor saying “It’s a boy!” But I have known since childhood, even longer than I understood my sexuality, that I simply didn’t fit in as a boy. And I spent many many years holding that as what I thought was a closely guarded secret. People like my grad school roommates would occasionally point out to me that it wasn’t as secret as I thought it was. But I still tried to keep it under wraps. With close friends I would say things like “I’m very androgynous” or “I’m really in touch with my feminine side.” But to simply acknowledge that this was how God made me: a little bit bi, and a little bit trans, or nonbinary — I did not really begin to accept that about myself until I was well into midlife.

A friend of mine who is a queer-identified woman, when I came out to her and said something very similar to what I’ve just said to you, she replied by saying, “well, you’re like so many people: you’re just a little bit queer.” And that feels right: I’m just a little bit queer. But the problem with being just “a little bit queer” is that it’s too easy to try to blend in with society as a straight or cisgender person. And that’s what I have done for most of my life and I can tell you, to this day when I’m in a situation that doesn’t feel safe, I put on my straight male mask. How effective it is (or isn’t) is another story.

Here’s the question: Why? Why would a bisexual person who is in a straight-appearing relationship hide their bisexuality? This is actually called bisexual erasure and it’s a topic of concern in the bi community: and the irony is that bisexual people can erase their bisexuality in either direction, either passing as straight or alternatively, passing as gay. Go figure. But the other question matters just as much: why try to pass as a cisgender man, when it’s pretty obvious that I’m not? What would I, or others like me, go to lengths to hide being bisexual, nonbinary, or queer?

And I’ve already given you the answer: we hide because we can. And with me, you can also add, because for too many years, I felt shame.

But our topic today is not shame — it’s joy.

Now, one of the dangers of talking about joy is that we can turn into Pollyanna’s1 — if we pretend everything is okay, then we think we can be happy. But that’s not true joy. That, frankly, is denial, or spiritual bypassing. So right away, let’s be discerning about how joy operates at a level deeper than mere comfort or affirmation. Joy is a gift from God, not in denial of the suffering in our world, but precisely in the midst of real suffering.

The Divine Comedy, the medieval Italian poem by Dante, takes the reader on a journey through hell (the Inferno), then purgatory, and finally to heaven. It’s a great metaphor for us today. Our journey into the heart of God’s joy does not involve bypassing the pain, suffering, and trauma of our world, but rather calls us to walk right into the fire, knowing that we are protected by the God who loves us. So let us allow the Holy Spirit to compassionately lead us through the valley of the shadow of death, or should I say, through the valley of trauma and shame, but only for the purpose of deep healing and inner transformation. Our goal is to reach the garden where we can taste the fruit of joy, but we are asked to be brave and courageous as we travel in the shadowy places that represent the wounds and brokenness of our world.

Let’s linger for a moment and take a closer look at both trauma and shame. What do these concepts mean, and how do they show up in our lives?

First, trauma. I was in a car accident in 1992 that left me with my jaw broken in three places. To this day, I live with chronic pain due to the less than perfect way my jaw was reassembled by the maxillofacial surgeon who operated on me. He did the best he could, of course, but it’s hard to put a puzzle back together when it’s that badly broken.

About a year after my accident, I ran in to one of the nurses who cared for me, and she commented on how they still talked about me in the ER at the rural Tennessee hospital where I was taken after my accident She said, “None of us had ever seen anyone who had experienced as much trauma as you but yet who was so positive and cheerful.” That introduced me to the standard of definition of trauma: physical injury. Here in Atlanta, Grady Hospital’s has a reputation as the best trauma center in Georgia — and one of the best in the country. So trauma is related to wounding, to injury. But notice also what my friend the nurse pointed out: it IS possible to pivot from trauma to joy.

But trauma has a larger meaning than the narrow sense of physical injury. We can experience emotional, mental, and even spiritual trauma. Clearly, this is not the same as a broken jaw from a motor vehicle collision, but in the words of Google, trauma is “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.” Fun fact: Google lists that definition of trauma before the medical definition of physical injury.

Trauma comes in all shapes and sizes. As a middle class white person, assigned as male, with a loving family and no childhood experience of addiction, mental illness or divorce, a present father with a stable job providing sufficient if not lavish income, it’s clear my childhood experience of trauma was actually quite mild. But it wasn’t non-existent. I was bullied as a child, beginning with my brother and later on with kids in the neighborhood. I learned to deal with it through careful avoidance. My sense of my mom and dad is that they trained me in my gender identity through a combination of teasing, humiliation and patiently redirecting me toward gender appropriate toys and behaviors. Did I experience trauma? Yes, even though I recognize that many people have it far, far worse, than I did. Everyone’s story is unique: but we all have a story to tell.

In the world of mental health and wellness, you will run into topics such as psychological trauma, emotional trauma, trauma related to abuse, neglect, bullying, and the witnessing of violence, crime or accidents. Hostile work environments, dysfunctional families, natural disasters and acts of terrorism can all traumatize us. We are all familiar with the concept of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), often experienced by veterans although it can be caused by other factors. The descendants of slaves understand how trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, known as historical trauma or intergenerational trauma. Although not nearly as serious as slavery, I saw a mild example of intergenerational trauma in my own life: my grandfather was physically abusive to my grandmother, my aunts and my mom, and my mom suffered with anxiety and depression her entire life. I am sure some of my own mental health challenges are woven into that. And yes, there is such a thing as religious or spiritual trauma as well: a child brought up in a household where God is seen as punishing but not loving, quick to judge and lacking in compassion, can easily develop emotional scars that could take a lifetime to heal.

In his book Gender Trauma the Italian therapist Alex Iantaffi suggests that one way we can understand trauma is as “the unresolved and unprocessed stories in our bodies.” When we experience pain and suffering, or even witness it in others, we carry the story of our experience in our bodies from then on. But if we do not proactively seek to heal and transform those disturbing stories into narratives that give us meaning, purpose and hope, then we become containers of unresolved trauma. And just like a broken bone cannot heal on its own, emotional and spiritual trauma does not go away if we just try to ignore it.

Now, on to shame. Once again, we can start with the everyday understanding of the word: Merriam Webster defines shame as “a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.” If someone feels they have done something wrong, or bad, or that they have failed or otherwise acted poorly, shame is the stinging emotion that can arise. But here’s the important part: we feel shame because of our actions, but it’s how we interpret those actions, and not the actions themselves, that cause the feeling of shame. Take for example the shame that comes when you feel that you have failed. But who gets to decide what is, or isn’t, a failure? What if you set a goal to start a business and earn a million dollars in five years. At the end of the five years you only have 800,000 dollars in the bank. You could easily feel shame for your failure, but you could also say, “I got 80% of the way there, that’s pretty good — and I have a lot more money in the wallet than I did a few years ago.” But you could just as easily bury your achievement under a cloud of self-recrimination and judgment.

So shame is both relative and interpretive: it’s linked in with our beliefs, with the stories we tell ourselves. I suspect all of us here in this room believe that horrible crimes or harmful actions, like murder or rape or infidelity, ought to lead to feelings of remorse and shame. That’s evidence that despite our terrible mistakes, we still have a conscience. But shame has a way of showing up when the problems aren’t nearly so cut and dried. For years, I felt ashamed because I was nonbinary (that word wasn’t even part of my vocabulary — but I knew there was “something wrong with me”!). Somewhere along the way, probably beginning in early childhood, I got the message that it wasn’t okay to be genderfluid. And I internalized it, and I punished myself for it — for about half a century.

It’s easy to see how trauma and shame lead us not to joy, but to suffering. In fact, I think we could say that trauma and shame can, if left unaddressed, leach the joy away from our souls. Unresolved trauma is a story about suffering that repeats endlessly, even if buried deep in our subconscious. And shame is really it’s own kind of trauma: for shame is the emotional response to a deep and profound experience of judging one’s self. I’m bad. I’m a failure. I’m a mistake. I cause suffering. My parents are ashamed of me. I should be ashamed of myself. What will the neighbors think?

Now, the story may be entirely bogus, completely inaccurate: as I eventually came to understand my internalized transphobia was completely bogus. But as long as I was under the story’s spell, it kept me in its thrall, and it kept me imprisoned in a jail cell built with self-contempt, shame diminishing my self-esteem like a poisonous IV drip.

Research has shown that chronic shame is linked to depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, suicidal ideation, cutting and other forms of self-harm, social isolation, and risky or addictive behavior. In other words, shame is a gateway drug to a life where joy is in profoundly short supply.

Is it any wonder that so many people who struggle with trauma and shame are at greater risk for addiction? They are grasping for some way to medicate away the pain, but of course, excessive drugs or drinking or other forms of addictive behaviors lead us just deeper onto the hamster wheel of suffering, shame, and acting out. This is why people who have addictions, even though they may cause us incredible suffering, deserve our prayer and compassion.

Clearly, the problems related to shame and trauma are not unique to the LGBTQ community or those of us who love queer people. I suppose that every one of us has our own story related to trauma and shame, in some form. I’ve already mentioned that for some, these stories are more debilitating than others. There’s no point in comparing notes. And for some of us, our stories are more distorted than others. My point here is that shame and trauma arise in pretty much everyone’s lives — which means we all need the healing power of Spirit-given joy in our lives.

I came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when no one had even heard of words like genderfluid or nonbinary, and the LGBT community simply did not have the public visibility or relative social acceptance as we do today. Frankly, I’m a bit envious of young people today, who are so brave and courageous about expressing their sexual orientation and gender identity. It’s gratifying to see heartwarming stories of young kids who find such acceptance and affirmation from their family and friends. But we all know that we haven’t made it to the promised land. I’m thinking about Nex Benedict, who died in February 2024, the day after being assaulted by three of their classmates in a junior high restroom. Nex was only 16, but identified as nonbinary. It seems like Nex was spared much of the shame that had constrained me when I was a teenager. Unfortunately, though, Nex could not escape trauma — including physical trauma. And while the county coroner ruled Nex’s death to be a suicide, I think it’s fair to believe that the trauma of the assault contributed on some level to this tragic loss.

Those who experience trauma often also experience shame. According to psychologist Heather McIntosh, “Shame is a common response to trauma because it is sometimes easier to believe that there is something wrong with you than to believe that your abuser, often a parent or loved one, could hurt you for no reason.”

Once again, here we can see how shame is built on a distortion of the facts: to feel shame when you have been hurt by someone else is a tragedy, for it’s simply not your fault. But if you think it’s your fault, or even merely assume that it might be, then the sting of shame that you may feel will be very real indeed.

For years I blamed my feelings of shame over being queer on myself — it was my own psychological weakness or moral failing. If I were stronger, or more courageous, or more self-confident, then I would not feel ashamed just for being the person God created me to be. I can tell you, as a child my narrative about myself was that I was a “broken” male, a failure as a boy. I’m sure sexism was embedded in there somewhere: I remember my mom speaking approvingly about my cousin Bette, who was very athletic and had a much tougher demeanor than I did; my mom called her a tomboy. I remember wondering why I couldn’t be a “tomgirl.” But no, in the world I grew up in, people like me were called wimps, or sissies — or something even more derogatory.

So somewhere — and I don’t know where, and at this point in my life it doesn’t really matter — somewhere I got the message loud and clear that boys don’t cry, boys play sports, boys are tough and self-confident and never back down from a fight. Boys don’t choose girls as their playmates, and certainly don’t show an interest in girl’s clothing or toys. Guess what? I failed in every single one of those markers. The only way I conformed to my gender expectations was an interest in science and math and dinosaurs. But football and guns and military aircraft? Sorry, couldn’t care less.

By the time puberty rolled around, I had learned to carefully police my behaviors and my mannerisms. I played attention like a hawk as to which kids got teased for acting like a girl or a sissy, and I worked hard to make sure my mannerisms were not like theirs. It was only as an adult that I realized that my way of being present in my body really was just like all the other gender-non-conforming kids. But I didn’t give myself the freedom to be my authentic self. Instead, I engaged in hostility toward my own self, all in the interest of fitting in and somehow proving that I was, or would be, “man enough.”

By the time I realized that I was sexually attracted to boys as well as girls, I knew enough to keep that hidden away as well. I spent forty years of my life pretending to be a straight, cisgender male because I was taught that it was simply not okay to be who I was. And while I cannot tell you today who taught me that, what I can tell you is that getting the message that you are fundamentally not okay is an experience of emotional trauma.

I’ve probably said enough about shame and trauma. So let’s pause right now, and ask ourselves a very simple question. In the face of a world where so many people experience different kinds of trauma, and so many trauma survivors are saddled with a sense of pervasive shame, is God more interested in our shame — or our joy?

Does God want us to go through life mired in shame, or radiant with joy? Just set aside for a moment everything you may have been taught about sin, or repentance, or holiness, sanctity, etc. etc. etc. I am not here to argue about theology with anyone. But no matter what anyone may or may not believe about God, this question still remains: Is God more interested in our shame or our joy?

I think the Bible gives us a very clear answer to this question, and we’re going to take a closer look at that. But unfortunately, we Christians often seem to get this one backwards.

Let me just give you a brief example. Take the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Many of you will be familiar with it; it was drawn up during the time of Pope John Paul II, and Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, presided over the commission of theologians and teachers who wrote this text. So it has plenty of weight in the institutional church. It’s not considered an infallible or inerrant text, which is good, because there are some real problems with this book. But it is supposed to represent the party line of church teaching.

So here’s the thing: in the Catechism’s glossary, the word joy does not appear. Not at all. Now, to be fair, there is no glossary entry for shame, either: but shame is not a fruit of the Holy Spirit, like joy is. And even in this entire thick book, the word joy only appears about sixty times. Love and faith both show up over five hundred times. Even sin shows up hundreds and hundreds of times in this book. But joy: only about 60 times.

Friends, I would like to suggest that this is a scandal.

Joy is, according to the Bible, a fruit of the Holy Spirit — and it is not only “a” fruit, it is listed second only to love. Joy comes before peace, kindness, goodness and faithfulness. For the apostle Paul, joy was almost as important as love in the spiritual life of the faithful. It breaks my heart that we have lost this. I do believe we have scandalously emphasized the wrongs things, and ignored some of the more important things, in our faith.

And because of this, I humbly submit to you that far too many people who grew up in Christian communities have been taught to have a much stronger experience of religious shame instead of spiritual joy. This, my friends, is a serious problem.

The self-help writer John Bradshaw, in his book Healing the Shame that Binds You, suggests a distinction between “healthy shame” and “toxic shame.” Healthy shame is the feeling that arises when we have done something wrong and we are stung by our conscience into recognizing this fact. In Catholic parlance, what Bradshaw is really describing here is contrition or remorse. We acknowledge that human beings sometimes do things that are hurtful: we hurt ourselves, we hurt one another, we hurt the earth, and we can even hurt our relationship with God (although God never stops loving us). The sharp pang of regret or remorse when we realize we’ve done something wrong is contrition, and as long as we don’t get obsessed over that sharp feeling, it can be a gift to us. It is meant to point us back to God, which is to say, to point us back to love. Feelings of contrition or remorse are never meant to be an end to themselves: they are always invitations to return to love.

What I mean by “shame” Bradshaw calls “toxic shame.” Unlike contrition, which is a feeling that intends for us to find healing and reconciliation with God and others, toxic shame does not move us toward grace. Instead, it causes us to turn in our ourselves. It cuts us off from joy and from trust in love.

Another writer, Rick Doblin, once said that “mysticism is the antidote to fundamentalism” (I told you I would mention mysticism sooner or later!). In other words, a loving relationship with God is the best way to heal ourselves from religion that is legalistic and based in fear. I mention this because I believe joy — the second fruit of the Spirit — is the antidote to shame. Joy brings us healing and abundance of life.

So what exactly is joy? Let’s turn to John Bradshaw again: John Bradshaw: “Joy is the exhilarating energy that emerges when all our needs are being met. We want to sing, run and jump with joy. The energy of joy signals that all is well.”

So joy is an emotion, but it is also an energy. Bradshaw believes it emerges in us spontaneously, when all our needs are being met. From the place of faith, I would frame that slightly differently: joy is a fruit of the Spirit in our hearts. When we are aligned to love, joy occurs naturally within us. So I’m not opposed to the idea that joy emerges when our needs are being met, but I would suggest it’s not just about needs, but it’s about love. Maybe no contradiction there, for the greatest need in the human heart is the need to love and be loved. And fortunately, God is love, and through the Holy Spirit, God’s love is poured into our hearts (that’s in the Bible: Romans 5:5, in case you don’t believe me).

John Bradshaw also suggests that when the energy of joy emerges in our lives, this is a signal that “all is well.” And this reminds me of the wisdom of one of greatest mystics of the Christian tradition: a 14th century woman named Julian of Norwich. Julian was a visionary who experienced sixteen life-changing visionary encounters with God and Christ and Mary. She is most famous for saying “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” But she also said “The fullness of joy is to behold God in all.”

That bears repeating: The fullness of joy is to behold God in all.

When we learn to find God in all things, we are given the fullness of joy. It’s a powerful assertion, and it makes sense to link the blessings of joy with the presence of God.

Speaking of which, the French novelist Léon Bloy famously said “Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.” If you want to experience God, cultivate a joyful heart. And if you want to experience joy, look for it through your connection with the infinite source of infinite love.

And if the wisdom of the mystics doesn’t persuade you, remember that the Bible instructs us to live a joyful life. In addition to joy’s status as one of the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit, the Apostle Paul invites us to “rejoice always” — in other words, make living a joyful life a priority. In the Gospel of John, Jesus instructs us to bring our prayers to God “so that your joy may be complete.” Likewise, Jesus promises us: “no one will take away your joy.” Of course, every translation of the Bible is different, but depending on which translation you use, joy is mentioned in the Bible between 180 and over 400 times!

But I’ll be the first to admit: talk is cheap. We can talk about joy all we want, but for so many people, joy seems elusive, almost out of reach. I spent the first half of this talk discussing the problems associated with trauma and joy. So here is the question: how do we cultivate a joyful life? How do we find the healing of our traumas and the release of our shame, so that those unhappy experiences can give way to the blessings that come from God’s joy?

To begin to answer that question, let’s go back to the nurse that cared for me in 1992 after my accident. A year later, she told me, “None of us had ever seen anyone who had experienced as much trauma as you but yet who was so positive and cheerful.” Again, the trauma I had experienced was physical trauma: a broken jaw, lacerations on my arm, several missing teeth. But they experienced me as happy, cheerful, dare we say it: joyful.

Now, I’m telling you this story not because I want to make a big deal out of my ability to find happiness in the middle of personal suffering. I’m telling you this story because I believe that what happened to me that night is available to anyone who truly wants to live a joyful life. I remember clearly lying in the ambulance as they were rushing me from the scene of the accident to the hospital emergency room. I couldn’t talk because my mouth was full of pieces of my jaw. My arms and legs were covered with blood. My glasses were missing and I was probably in shock. But what I remember is that in the midst of perhaps the single most frightening moment of my life, I was given the grace to remember to do one thing: to pray.

And when I began to pray, I felt cared for. I felt a wave of gratitude for those EMTs who had left their home late on a Thursday night to come care for me, a total stranger who had just had an accident. I didn’t know how badly I was hurt or what was going to happen in the hospital. But because I was a person with a prayer practice, I entered that emergency room feeling joy as a result of my ongoing practice of prayer.

This was the summer of 1992, when I had been practicing a daily discipline of silent prayer for almost a decade. I learned Christian meditation (what we now call Centering Prayer) in 1984. Eight years of prayer, offered up because I believe in God and I want to be faithful. But on that summer night in Tennessee, I reaped the fruit of those years of regular prayer. And at the heart of the fruit of my prayer was a spontaneous sense of joy.

Let’s be real. No one can promise you that every experience of trauma will automatically become an occasion for joy — even if you pray every day. God acts in mysterious ways, and a moment like the one where I felt flooded with joy might leave someone else caught up in suffering and fear. If my years of studying the mystics and practicing Centering Prayer has taught me one thing, it’s this: that God is present in our lives when we’re filled with joy, but just as present when it seems like everything is falling apart. The purpose behind a spiritual life is not just to fill us up with happy emotions, but to draw us closer to God. Of course, when we draw closer to God, a blessing that often arises from that is the experience of joy.

So, I don’t recommend that you go out and get in a serious car accident just to see if you have a clear sense of God’s joy in your life! But I do think there are some simple tasks that every one of us can undertake, to cultivate a more joyful heart — even when our hearts have been burdened by trauma or weighed down with shame. The same God who wants to fill us with joy also wants to transform our trauma into healing and our shame into delight.

Here, then, are a few simple steps that we can begin to take right here and now to open our hearts to the joy the comes from God.

We’ll begin with one of my favorite Bible verses, Psalm 37:4 — “Find your delight in the Lord, who grants your heartʼs desire.” If, like me, you have a heart that desires joy, one way to manifest that joy is through delighting in God — but to really appreciate this, we need to look at the original Hebrew. The word that gets translated as “delight” has a markedly sensual connotation: it could be translated not only as delight, but also as luxurious, soft, pliable, delicate, or even dainty. At least one Hebrew-English dictionary describes this word as meaning “effeminate.”

No wonder I am so drawn to it.

Another example of this word is found in Isaiah 66:11, where the prophet is describing the land of Zion using the metaphor of a woman: “So that you may nurse and be satisfied from her consoling breast; That you may drink with delight at her abundant breasts!”

Us Americans tend to have a very puritanical approach to our religion, but the Hebrews were much more earthy, sensual and down to earth. It seems pretty apparent that when the Psalmist invites us to take delight in God, it’s like how a baby takes delight in mommy’s breast, or how a bride takes delight in her spouse’s love. In other words, we take delight in God by letting God love us, letting God nurture us, and learning to accept God’s unconditional love.

Especially those of us who have been traumatized by religious symbols of God as so angry and mean, this may be a life-long journey of learning to feel in our bones just how much God loves us — all of us, no exceptions. My friends, I believe that is a journey worth taking.

So let God fill you with love, and that will give you the desire of your heart. This of course brings me back to Romans 5:5, where Paul writes: “hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Listen carefully: the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Notice that Paul doesn’t say, the love of God has been poured into the hearts of saints, or the love of God has been poured into people who fit in with mainstream ideas about sexuality and gender. Paul makes it very clear that the Holy Spirit, and the Love of God, is available to everyone. In fact, the only stipulation he makes is that it is important to have faith. Which makes sense: because if we don’t have faith in God, we’ll never dare to believe that God’s Spirit and God’s love are so freely and unconditionally given to us all.

As I say these words, I realize that many people may feel like this is all too good to be true: believing that God is unconditional love, that God pours that love into our hearts and wants us to take delight in that love, and the Spirit will bless us with divine joy. I get that.

In order to move from shame to joy, many of us also need to learn to see God in a different light. In the ministry of spiritual direction, we speak of having an “image of God.” The reality is, every human being has ideas about who God is, what God is like, and how God relates to us. These ideas may or may not have anything to do with the teachings of Jesus and the Church. In fact, it’s been my experience that many of us have grown up with an image of God that is angry, vindictive, judgmental, condemning, filled with wrath, implacably hostile to human foibles, and will punish most of us in everlasting hell.

My friends, that image of God is traumatizing. And many of us grew up with that image of God, exposed to it in the tender years of childhood. Far too many Christians hold on to that image of God, toxic though it may be, throughout their lives.

To experience the joy of the Holy Spirit, many of us may need to give the image of God in our hearts a makeover. We need to think about how joy, and unconditional love, are much better filters through which we can begin to understand God, much better than wrath or judgment. As I’ve already said, I’m not trying to argue about theology. I do believe that God is a God of justice as well as mercy, and that God wants human beings to stop causing so much suffering in each others’ lives. I’m not attacking what we believe — but I’d like to suggest that many of us have been taught to ignore the most important aspects of Christian teaching. God is love. God loves us unconditionally. God wants us to experience divine love and the Holy Spirit in our hearts. And all of the above leads us to joy.

A seventh century bishop, theologian and mystic named Isaac of Syria can help us with recalibrating our image of God. St. Isaac once said, “As a grain of sand weighed against a large amount of gold, so, in God, is the demand for justice weighed against his compassion. As a handful of sand in the boundless ocean, so are the sins of humankind in comparison with God’s providence and mercy.” Imagine that: if you could hold all the aggression and violence and harmful behavior of all humankind in your hands like a clump of dirt, by comparison God’s love and mercy is as vast and endless as the ocean. And the cleansing waters of the ocean of God’s compassion would quickly wash away all of the pain and suffering we inflict on others — or ourselves, or have received from others who probably just didn’t know better.

Christians have an obligation to make love the center of our faith. The Bible says that God is love, so anything we believe or think we believe must be held in the light of love. Is my theology loving? Is my theology compassionate? Is my theology affirming of life? These are the questions we must be asking ourselves — and if not, perhaps some recalibration is necessary.

Related to this, we need a very clear understanding that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. This is difficult, because we all have people in our lives that drive us up the wall. It is humbling to remember that God infinitely loves the person who is so very different from ourselves. But what is at stake here?

We can still fight for what is right, and advocate for justice. I stand here, conscientiously convinced that the institutional Catholic Church’s teaching on gender and sexuality needs to be radically reformed. But the courage of that conviction does not give me the liberty to hold people who disagree with me in contempt. My job is to love them all, and let God be their judge. Remember, what is at stake here for today is the cultivation of our joy.

To cultivate our joy, we also need to take good care of ourselves and work for the healing of our emotional or psychological shame or trauma. Many of us need to be in therapy. Or in recovery. Or both! And many of us would benefit from the compassionate presence of a spiritual director or companion in our lives. Spiritual direction is not the same thing as therapy but it can be profoundly helpful when it comes to healing a toxic or broken image of God. If our faith is compromised by the wounds of trauma or the sting of shame, it’s worth it to find caring support to help us recalibrate our faith, away from fear and toward joy.

We need to learn to be present in our own bodies. Shame and trauma often can lead to dissociation: feeling numb or disconnected from our own creaturely embodiment. And for those of us who are struggling with trauma and shame related to gender and sexuality, this can be especially pointed: If we have been told that it is a sin to be gay, or a sin to be genderqueer, we might learn to ignore the truth of who we are, in our own bodies. That is a survival mechanism, and I applaud the resilience and courage of anyone who has done what they have needed to do to survive. But there comes a time when we can begin the healing work of re-embodiment. The love of God and the Holy Spirit are given to us in our embodied hearts. Joy happens in the human body, so we need to be present to the very down-to-earth bodies that God has given us.

Another way for us to find the joy that God wants to see blossom in our lives is by learning to invest time and energy into whatever it is that nurtures our souls. It’s an important, sacred question: what nurtures your soul? We will all answer that question in unique ways. And this is not just “churchy” stuff. Yes, I’m all for prayer, and lectio divina, contemplative silence, making retreats, and so forth. But we also nourish our souls by being creative. By being physically active. By enjoying long walks in nature. By falling in love. By serving those in need. By working on our mental health and well-being. By learning to replace negative/shame-based thoughts with positive/joy-filled thoughts. When we nurture our bodies and souls, we make ourselves available for the presence of God, a presence that is often marked by joy.

Related to this is a wonderful line from the African American mystic, Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” What nurtures your soul is probably what makes you come alive. Look at me, for example. I am a nerd for the mystics. I could care less about football — I was vaguely aware that Taylor Swift’s boyfriend was playing in the Superbowl, that’s about as far as it goes — but I just love Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Julian of Norwich, and so forth and so on. Reading and studying the mystics, and following their advice for prayer and meditation, and sharing their wisdom with others — that makes me come alive. And therefore, it fills me with joy.

Alongside Howard Thurman’s wisdom, let’s not lose sight of Jesus’s own teaching: that in order to enter heaven, we need to become like little children. And this reminds me of my favorite memory involving Monsignor Henry Gracz, who for many years was the pastor of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Atlanta, and a heroic advocate for LGBTQ Catholics. The Shrine is not my parish so I have only worshiped there on occasion over the years, but a number of times I’ve been blessed to have been invited there to facilitate an adult education hour. I think it was my second or third time there when someone must have told Fr. Henry a bit about me. He came up to me and said “I understand that you have a connection to the monastery in Conyers.” I said, yes, I was a lay associate of the monastery, and Henry lit up like a child on Christmas morning, and spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes sharing with me his enthusiasm for the monks and their deeply contemplative spirituality. And every time I saw Henry after that, he always brought up the monks. Now, I know he had a lot of things to worry about besides the Trappist monastery! But clearly, the spirituality of the monks helped Henry to come alive, and when he shared that with me, his face glowed and his voice sang. The monastery brought out the little kid in Henry, and truly his eyes danced with joy.

Finally, for anyone who is seeking more joy in your life, we need to remember to keep in our minds and hearts joy’s best friend — which is love. In the words of John Bradshaw: “Giving and receiving unconditional love is the most effective and powerful way to personal wholeness and happiness.” God is Love, so when the Bible promises us that love is poured in our hearts, the Bible is saying that God’s own self — the Love of God, the Love who is God — is available to us all. If we want to cultivate joy, heal shame, and transform our trauma, there is no better step to take than the step to love.

And often, our journey of love must begin in our own hearts. Learning to love our own selves — this can be as challenging, but also as rewarding, as recalibrating our image of God. But when we allow ourselves to hope in God’s unconditional love, and to let that love into our hearts, we are given the grace to slowly but surely transform our lives out of fear and trauma, and into compassion and care.

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a concept called the “seeds of virtue.” Part of living a conscious, ethical life is to be the kind of person who plants these seeds. In the words of the Buddhist writer Judith Ragir,

Our practice is to bring forth a seed of virtue… These seeds can be as small as a mustard seed. They can be just a thought in the mind or a very small action. No matter how large or small, we plant a seed of virtue, right in the middle of our likes and dislikes. These seeds of virtue are any spiritual concept that may help the situation, such as: kindness, patience, clarity, changing our habits, bringing forth a soft heart, reconnecting with universal energy, and opening up to something larger than our concept of a ‘self.’

The wisdom here is universal: we are all called to plant sees of virtue. A seed is very small, and we plant it with trust that mother earth and the providence of God will help it to grow to its fullness. The same thing with our virtues. We don’t have to have it all figured out today. It’s okay if we haven’t fully healed from our trauma or if we are still struggling with our shame. What’s important is that every time we plant one of those gracious seeds, we are voting for a future filled with love and joy. And that, I believe, makes God smile.

I still struggle with shame. I still carry the wounds of my own trauma. I have no real idea how to “be” nonbinary in a binary world, other than to simply trust the wisdom of my own heart. But while I don’t have all the answers of who or what God is calling me to be, I know that I am not called to live in shame or fear. In the New Testament, the Apostle John proclaimed that love casts out fear. I believe that, as surely as I also believe that joy casts out shame.

Everyone in this room is a survivor. We don’t need to compare our traumas or our wounds, because every path is unique. But whether our traumas were big or small, we were resilient and we are survivors. And because of this, God rejoices in us, for God loves us. Listen carefully: God rejoices in us. Yes: God finds joy in us.

When we begin to deconstruct the shame that binds us, God is overjoyed, because God loves us. And when you allow the silent spaces in your heart to be filled by the joy that surges forth from the very heart of God, then you are experiencing God’s wholeness and healing (salvation) at this very hour. Truly, a cause for rejoicing!

I’ll conclude by sharing a few words from my own book on joy, Eternal Heart. I hope these words will be a blessing for you and an inspiration on your own journey of courage and growth in response to love.

Beyond just a light and exuberant feeling, joy is a foundational orientation of our hearts and minds—toward God, toward love, toward grace, toward hope, toward life. The happy feelings that we commonly think of as joyful are ordinary side effects of this deep interior transformation, but the transformation can be given, and remain an essential part of us, even when our mercurial feelings come and go...

Joy naturally emerges when despair is healed, and the “medicine” for such healing is the grace of God. Imagine that grace—the divine medicine—functions as an intravenous drip. And indeed, if the medicine were given to us all at once, it might be more than we can bear. The Holy Spirit, in her gracious wisdom, gives us a leisurely drip of grace, slowly and almost imperceptibly, so that little by little, we might root out the infection of fear and rage and woundedness and sin.

We have to be gentle with the process, for sometimes it takes time—a lot of time. But when we say yes to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we have embraced the process. Once the healing begins, moments of delight and beatitude will arrive unexpectedly. Glimmers of the luminous wonder that awaits us, as our hearts become more fully immersed in the heart of God, will be revealed to us, glimpse by hopeful glimpse.

We can trust love. We can trust mercy. We can trust the spirit of life, a spirit that will heal us and make us whole and then inspire us to bring love and care to others so that one by one, we can slowly transform the entire world… Accept the gift, exult in it, and then share it with the world. The more you give it away, the more it flows within you. Joy, like love, multiplies as we share it with others. May we all orient our lives to such an economy of grace.

Amen.

Hi friends, our latest Radical Mystics podcast is what we hope will be the first in a long series of interviews — friendly conversations with fellow seekers, mystics, contemplatives, perennialists, punks, ferals, radicals, and whoever else happens to happen along.

Our inaugural RadMystConvo took place on September 28, 2026, as Debonee and Skye sat down with Lisa Colon Delay of the legendary Spark My Muse podcast. We divided our conversation into two parts: the first part, hosted by Spark My Muse, features Lisa interviewing us on our vision for this Radical Mystics newsletter and podcast; we took over the host responsibilities for the second part, where we invite Lisa to share insights into her new book, The Way of the Desert Elders: How the Wisdom of Ancient Christians Sustains Us Today.

Click here to listen to part one of this podcast! (and Subscribe to Spark My Muse).

As the title suggests, it is a dive into the spirituality and literature of the desert mothers and fathers — radical mystics of the ancient world. Lisa’s perspective on these ancient hermits and spiritual directors is insightful and helpful whether you’re new to the desert elders or have been hanging out with their words for many years.

So check out Lisa’s book as well as her podcast…

• Spark My Muse on Apple Podcasts

• Spark My Muse Interviews Radical Mystics

• Spark My Muse Interviews Carl McColman:

  • Episode 129: Calibrating Your Heart

  • Episode 143: An Invitation to Celtic Wisdom

  • Episode 176: Unteachable Lessons

  • Episode 200: Eternal Heart

  • Episode 224: The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism

On September 23, 1999, three bisexual activists — Wendy Curry, Michael Page, and Gigi Raven Wilbur — celebrated the first Bisexual Visibility Day. While it may not be quite as famous as Pride Month (June, commemorating the Stonewall Riots), National Coming Out Day (October 11) or even International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19, which of course began strictly as a joke), Bisexual Visibility Day has remained a day that is meaningful to the bi community and is probably more important to the overall queer community than many realize.

In honor of Bisexual Visibility Day, here’s my take on the history of bisexuality over the last fifty years. I’ll conclude with a few thoughts about why I think a day like today matters: because visibility matters, and not just for bi folks.

Our story begins in October 1976 — almost exactly half a century ago — when Elton John came out as bisexual.1 It was in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine, so it made quite the splash. For those who weren’t teenagers at the time: Elton John was basically as big in the mid-1970s as Taylor Swift is today. So for him to come out as bi, at a time when more than 30 states still had anti-sodomy laws on the books, was nothing short of huge.

He wasn’t the only one. David Bowie, Dusty Springfield, Joan Baez, and Lou Reed were all forthcoming to a greater or lesser extent in the ‘70s about either being in non-straight relationships or identifying as bisexual. Of course, many other musicians and actors kept their sexuality strictly in the closet. Freddie Mercury, Barry Manilow, Liberace, Rock Hudson, and Jim Nabors were just a few of the celebrities of that era who worked to keep their sexuality private (Liberace went so far as to sue people who called him gay — ah, the irony).

And while Mercury and Liberace were iconic for their flamboyance, they nevertheless would deflect or deny any speculations about their sexuality. When Barry Manilow finally came out at the age of 73, he said he never wanted to discuss his sexuality because he was afraid of disappointing his largely female fanbase. That may sound silly to us today, but it also strikes me as deeply sad.

Elton John went on, in 1992, to clarify that he really wasn’t bisexual — he was just plain gay. But for more than 15 years, he was “on the record” as bi.

Bisexuality as Myth and Menace

That fact — that Elton was not “really” bisexual — points to one of the enduring myths about bisexuality: that it doesn’t really exist. This myth maintains there are only two kinds of people, straights and gays/lesbians. Therefore, if someone says they’re bi, they are really either a straight person who’s just going through a phase, or they’re actually gay or lesbian but just not willing to fully admit it (like Elton John in 1976). But that kind of binary thinking rests on the idea that sexuality is monolithic and never changes. Even back in the 1950s, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey developed a scale for understanding sexual orientation as a spectrum: some people are entirely straight, some entirely gay/lesbian, but then others are located at various points along the spectrum, maybe feeling more attracted to one sex than the other, but still honestly capable of attraction across the spectrum.

If in the 1970s bisexuality was seen as a myth, by the 1980s it had a new reputation: it was dangerous. This was especially aimed at bisexual men, for they were seen as the “bridge” by which the HIV virus got transmitted into the heterosexual population. Public perception of the AIDS pandemic, at least in America, was always clouded by homophobia, since during the height of the pandemic more than half of those who died from HIV infections were men who had sex with men. During the moral panic of the Reagan years, AIDS was dismissed as “the gay disease” and bisexual men were seen as villains for getting infected by their male lovers and then passing the virus on to their “innocent” female partners. The anti-bi backlash got so strong that David Bowie scurried back into the closet, announcing in 1983 that coming out as bisexual was the biggest mistake he ever made.2

Medical advances by the mid 1990s turned the tide on HIV infection as an automatic death sentence, but “bisexual chic” took time to recover. Nevertheless, celebrities as diverse as Ani DiFranco, Miley Cyrus, Janelle Monáe, Lady Gaga, Frank Ocean, and even Kurt Cobain self-identified as bisexual or bi-curious over the years.

By the turn of the century and beyond, yet another new phenomenon emerged: the tendency among younger generations to identify as queer rather than gay, bi, or lesbian.

Us boomers came of age in a time when “queer” was used pretty much only as a slur, a derogatory term used to describe non-straight people by people who were not allies. But thanks to activists who embraced the word in an effort to reclaim it, and then television shows like Queer as Folk or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, by the early years of the new century the connotation of the word queer had changed dramatically. But it also changed the dynamics within the queer (or LGBTQ) community: those who prefer to self-identify as queer seem to be far more comfortable with the idea of sexual fluidity, where the lines that separate gay and bi or lesbian and bi become blurry if not disappearing entirely. Meanwhile, new ways for talking about sexual orientation emerged, including pansexual (sexual attraction not only to men and women, but also to nonbinary or third-gender persons) and asexual (individuals who experience little or no sexual attraction to anyone). Queer identity seems to celebrate sexual (and gender) diversity without needing to fixate on labels that seem to imply categories that never change.

Whew! A lot happened in the bisexual world over the last fifty years.

Why Visibility Matters

But back to today: why is there a need for a Bisexual Visibility Day?

Because bisexuality is often subject to what has been called erasure. Bisexual erasure means something deeper than David Bowie backtracking his public queerness. It refers to the fact that when a bisexual person enters into a monogamous relationship and chooses to be faithful to their one partner, their bisexuality essentially goes into storage. By itself this is not a bad thing: marriage, when happy, is a beautiful experience, and giving up other sex partners is for most people a reasonable price to pay for the stability and emotional depth that a healthy marriage provides. But it also means that, on a social level, bisexuality becomes the lost sexual orientation. Once a couple gets married, the world begins to see them as either a straight couple or a gay or lesbian couple, depending on how they present themselves to the world. And as this happens on a large scale, the extent of just how many people are bisexual becomes, well, erased.

I have been married for over 33 years. I’m happy in my marriage and my spouse says the same (and I have no reason to doubt her). We are by choice and intention monogamous. Anyone who meets us, even if they are aware that I am nonbinary, will still think of us as a “straight” couple, given our respective male and female bodies. But that’s a perception built on erasure — for I have known since I was a teenager that I am attracted to men as well as women, which did not vanish when I got married. This simply got integrated into my commitment to be faithful to one person.

The old myths die hard. There’s a horrible moment in Sex and the City when Carrie Bradshaw is freaking out because she’s just met a guy who casually came out to her as bi. “I’m not even sure bisexuality exists,” she declares. “I think it’s just a layover on the way to ‘Gaytown.’” Ouch — and that aired in 2000.3

Why should we care about bisexual visibility? Why not just accept that anyone who opts for monogamy will end up categorized as either straight or gay/lesbian? I think the answer operates on two levels, one personal and the other social.

On the personal level, I think bisexual visibility matters because it is a matter of authenticity. It’s one thing to put one’s bisexuality in the basement, but it’s a short hop from there to pretending to be what we aren’t. This is perhaps especially true for anyone who is a member of a conservative religious group, where queerness (of any stripe) is rejected and condemned. “Passing” as a straight person when one is really bisexual might seem convenient in such settings, but it is like a slow leak of one’s self-esteem. Sooner or later, it can only take a toll. So being honest about who we are, even when we have chosen not to act on our attraction, is a matter of psychological health (this is why some Catholic priests insist on being out of the closet as gay men, even though they are celibate; they are not intending to act on their queerness, but they know that authenticity means they can’t hide who God has created them to be).

But an even more important reason is the social implication of bisexual visibility. It is mind-blowing, but unfortunately true, that in 2026 queer people continue to be stigmatized by a large segment of our society. Even worse, our current federal government and far too many state legislatures appear to be overtly hostile to the specific needs and concerns of the LGBTQ community. Being out and proud as a bisexual person is an act of solidarity. It’s a reminder that bisexual people do exist, which means in a larger sense that queer people exist. To a young person who is at the beginning of their coming out journey, knowing that bi people exist can be a lifesaver. Politicians and influencers need to be reminded that bi people are not a myth, and not villains, but an important segment of the LGBTQ community — and of society at large. It has been said that the personal is political — so the personal visibility of bisexual people, even when they have opted to be in monogamous relationships, helps the political work of those who want our world to be a safe place for all people regardless of their sexuality.

So, whether you are bi or not: happy Bisexual Visibility Day!

The 2027 Wild Goose Festival will take place in Harmony, NC on September 2-5, 2027. Mark your calendars — and we hope to see you there!

At the 2025 Wild Goose Festival, we wore our own custom-printed “Radical Mysticism” T-shirts — and several people asked us to buy one. So this year we printed a limited number of T-shirts; now that the festival is over, we only have a few left, so we’re offering them to our Substack subscribers. When they’re gone, they’re gone — so if you see one you like, order it now!

We also have Radical Mystics stickers, suitable for your water bottle, laptop, or car. So grab one (or three) of those while you’re at it. And we have some other merchandise goodies for sale as well, including Julian of Norwich bumperstickers, and mugs featuring quotes by our very own feral contemplative, Skye (Carl) McColman.

Click here to get your Radical Mystics merchandise.

The following list of resources represents a selection of books, music, movies and quotations that Debonee and/or Skye find spiritually interesting and worth sharing. Remember everyone’s taste is unique, so you may or may not love everything (or anything) on this list. But we hope you’ll give some of these works a try — we think you’ll find inspiration for your own radical mystical journey.

We are intentionally not linking this list to any online retailer; we encourage you to support your local independent bookstore and music store whenever possible.

Also, please note that we will be continually updating this list, so check back from time to time to see what’s new!

Books We Love

• Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing

• Lerita Coleman Brown, What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman

• Cynthia Bourgeault, Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Mystic

• Ruth Burrows, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer

• Joan Chittister, Radical Spirit: 12 Ways to Live a Free and Authentic Life

• Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

• Cassidy Hall, Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality

• The Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

• Ram Dass, Be Here Now

• Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

• Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk

• Julian of Norwich, The Showings

• Kenneth Leech, The Eye of the Storm: Living Spiritually in the Real World

• Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

• Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Shamanic Bones of Zen: Revealing the Ancestral Spirit and Mystical Heart of a Sacred Tradition

• Carl McColman, The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism

• Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

• Mary Oliver, Devotions

• Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger

• Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

• Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See

• Mirabai Starr, Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground

• Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart

• Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness

• Pamela Ayo Yetunde, Casting Indra’s Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community

Movies We Love

• The Anchoress, directed by Chris Newby

• C’Mon C’Mon, directed by Mike Mills

• The Darjeeling Limited, directed by Wes Anderson

• A Hidden Life, directed by Terence Malick

• In Pursuit of Silence, directed by Patrick Shen

• Into Great Silence, directed by Philip Gröning

• The Life of Chuck, directed by Mike Flanagan

• Music for Mushrooms, directed by East Forest

• Northfork, directed by the Polish Brothers

• Of Gods and Men, directed by Xavier Beauvois

• Perfect Days, directed by Wim Wenders

• The Secret of Kells, directed by Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey

• The Secret of Roan Inish, directed by John Sayles

• Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay

• Spirited Away, directed by Hayao Miyazaki

• Wings of Desire, directed by Wim Wenders

Music We Love

Albums

• Above & Beyond Presents Oceanlab, Sirens of the Sea

• Anonymous 4, An English Ladymass

• Vashti Bunyan, Just Another Diamond Day

• Kate Bush, Aerial

• The Clash, Sandinista!

• Alice Coltrane, Universal Consciousness

• John Coltrane, A Love Supreme

• D’Angelo, Voodoo

• Krishna Das, Pilgrim Heart

• East Forest, Music To Be Born To / Music To Die To

• East Forest and Ram Dass, Ram Dass

• Ludovico Einaudi, Divenire

• Ludovico Einaudi, The Summer Portraits

• Brian Eno, Ambient I: Music for Airports

• Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On

• Gothic Voices with Emma Kirkby, A Feather on the Breath of God: Sequences and Hymns by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen

• George Harrison, All Things Must Pass

• Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

• Howard Jones, Dream Into Action

• Liquid Mind, Liquid Mind X: Meditation

• Loreena McKennitt, The Visit

• Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon

• Moor Mother, Untold to Untold

• Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening

• Phoria, Caught a Black Rabbit

• Deva Premal, The Essence

• Layne Redmond, Being in Rhythm

• Renaissance, Ashes Are Burning

• Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Durch Die Wüste

• Ryuichi Sakamoto, async

• Pharoah Sanders, Karma

• Tony Scott, Music for Zen Meditation

• Nina Simone, Emergency Ward

• The Waterboys, Fisherman’s Blues

Songs

• “All Along the Watchtower,” Jimi Hendrix

• “Astral Weeks,” Van Morrison

• “The Christians and the Pagans,” Dar Williams

• “Everyday People,” Sly and the Family Stone

• “Grantchester Meadows,” Pink Floyd

• “Imagine,” John Lennon

• “The Inner Light,” The Beatles

• “Q.U.E.E.N.,” Janelle Monáe with Erykah Badu

• “Ripple,” Grateful Dead1

• “Tonight and the Rest of My Life,” Nina Gordon

Quotations We Love

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
— Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays, “Epilogue”

The world is the cloister of the contemplative. There is no escape. Always the quest for justice draws one deeply into the heart of God. In this sacred interiority, contemplation becomes the language of prayer and the impetus for prophetic proclamation and action… Activism and contemplation are not functional opposites. Rather, contemplation is, at its heart, a reflective activity that is always seeking the spiritual balance between individual piety and communal justice seeking…Even in its most passive aspects, contemplation plugs the supplicants into the catalytic center of God’s Spirit, into the divine power that permeates every aspect of life. In this space, there are no false dichotomies, no divisions between the sacred and the secular… Through acts of contemplation, individuals and congregations enter the liminal space where the impossible becomes possible.
— Barbara Holmes, Joy Unspeakable, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Contemplation, Activism and Praxis”

When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.
— bell hooks, Sister Outsider, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”

There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island and on that island there is an altar and standing guard before that altar is “the angel with the flaming sword.” Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of your inner authority. Nothing passes “the angel with the flaming sword” to be placed upon your altar unless it be a part of “the fluid area of your consent.” This is your crucial link with the Eternal… We are all of us deeply involved in the throes of our own weaknesses and strengths, expressed often in the profoundest conflicts within our own souls. The only hope for surcease, the only possibility of stability for the person, is to establish an Island of Peace within one’s own soul… Well within the island is the Temple where God dwells—not the God of the creed, the church, the family, but the God of one’s heart.
— Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, “Part I: The Inward Sea”

Contemplation has a context: it does not occur in a vacuum. Today’s context is that of the multinational corporations, the arms race, the strong state, the economic crisis, urban decay, the growing racism, and human loneliness. It is within this highly deranged culture that contemplatives explore the waste of their own being. It is in the midst of chaos and crisis that they pursue the vision of God and experience the conflict which is at the core of the contemplative search. They become part of that conflict and begin to see into the heart of things. The contemplative shares in the passion of Christ which is both an identification with the pain of the world and also the despoiling of the principalities and powers of the fallen world-order.
— Kenneth Leech, The Social God, “Contemplation as a Subversive Activity”

Contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.
— Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Address to the Synod of Bishops in Rome, October 10, 2012

Let us serve our body out of love for God, remembering all the times the body has served the soul. A genuinely holy conversation can function as an authentic spiritual practice. Our guides might also recommend that we spend some time in nature. Experience is a great teacher because it helps us to see what is best for us and to realize that God can be served by everything we do.
— Teresa of Ávila, The Book of My Life, Mirabai Starr translation, Chapter 11

Tim Curry has died. He was eighty years old.

By all accounts, he was a quiet and humble man, polite and professional in his work as a singer and actor. A heavy smoker who suffered a debilitating stroke when he was only 66, in recent years he had been confined to a wheelchair and worked mainly as a voice actor. Now he is gone, and we are left to reflect on his legacy as a performer.

For many of us, that legacy centers on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That makes it a troubled legacy, and I’ll get to that. But first, I’ll share my own story in relation to that film and the impact it had on me, especially as a young (and very closeted) adult.

I only saw it in the theater a couple of times, so it was not nearly as impactful in my life as it was among some of my friends — some of whom went to see it, back in the day, just about every weekend. I first heard of it when I was in high school, when the organist at my church (how deliciously ironic that is) mentioned seeing it (and loving it).1 Sometime after that, I looked at the soundtrack album when I visited the record store, but I thought it looked weird, so I didn’t buy it. Clearly, I wasn’t ready for Rocky Horror!

Then I went off to college, and briefly dated a woman who was one of those who liked to see it every weekend. But that was when she was back home in D.C.; it wasn’t playing anywhere near our rural college, so I never got to see it while we were dating. But she told me all about it.

Like me, she was a refugee from charismatic Christianity — but she was much further along in her liberation from that world, meaning she was much more, shall we say, experienced than I was. We were a bit mismatched and clearly wanted different things out of our relationship (I don’t think she would have used that word), so of course it didn’t last. But we were together long enough for her to tell me all about Rocky Horror.

I learned about what happened at the screenings (my buddy the organist talked cryptically about people throwing toast, but my not-quite-girlfriend helped me to connect the dots). She patiently explained the cosplaying culture at The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I had never heard of cosplaying of any stripe, so this was a fascinating world she was giving me a glimpse of. “I always go as Magenta,” she announced. Wanting to be included, I asked her what part I should play. She thought I was cute, so she said “You could be Rocky” — but that made other friends laugh, for they all insisted I could only be Brad.

When I finally did see the movie, about six months after breaking up with that woman, I was both amused and mortified to learn that Rocky was a physically gorgeous man who strutted around wearing nothing but a gold bikini bottom, while Brad was… well, to call him a nerd would be a bit of an insult to nerds. We’ll leave it at that.

But here’s a secret. When I saw the movie, there was only one character I wanted to be. And that, of course, was Frankie.

Over at the Frankenstein Place

Frankie is the affectionate nickname for the character Tim Curry played: Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the mad scientist who is the central figure in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. As his name suggests, he’s a spoof of Frankenstein; Rocky Horror was the “monster” he created (“come up to the lab / and see what’s on the slab”). But this is not Peter Cushing’s or even Gene Wilder’s Frankenstein. Only 28 years old at the time of filming, Curry was young, gorgeous, and completely at ease playing a “sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania.” Dolled up in makeup and wearing only a corset, fishnet stockings, pearls, sparkly elbow-length gloves, and tiny black undies for much of the film, he was provocatively transgressive in his appearance — let alone his actions. As the story progressed, he proceeded to seduce both Brad and Janet, the naive young fiancées who stumbled into his mansion one dark and stormy night.

When I was a freshman in college, Frankie was basically an embodiment of my shadow, in the Jungian sense. Swaggeringly confident, aggressively bisexual, joyfully genderqueer (before that word even existed), he was basically everything I secretly, secretly wanted to be, but could not bear to admit — not even to myself.

The spiritual heart of The Rocky Horror Picture Show consisted of a lovely ballad called “Don’t Dream It, Be It”2 — where Frankie shares his hedonistic philosophy with Brad, Janet, Rocky and his servant Columbia. The scene, which culminates with the characters swimming (and caressing) in a pool, is as dreamy as the song. Its message — that it’s possible to live your authentic self, and not just spend your days fantasizing about what might be — is, frankly, something I am still learning to manifest in my own life.

Spoiler alert: The story actually goes south pretty dramatically after that idyllic moment. It is revealed that Frankie is actually an alien from another planet; his henchman Riff Raff (played by Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien), also an alien, has been tasked with taking over their “mission” and in the process kills Frankie, Rocky and Columbia. The aliens depart, taking the mansion (actually a disguised spaceship), and leaving the surviving earthlings behind to ponder the insignificance of human life.

It’s a bleak and rather existentialist end to a colorful and transgressive film, and frankly I consider it to be one of the most unsatisfactory movie denouements of all time. But that’s not the only problem with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. While it is a campy and goofy sendup of B-movie horror flicks, its treatment of sexual hedonism and gender diversity has not aged well at all. Today, it is easy to see the movie as relying far too heavily on stereotypes that are simply harmful. Frankie, as a character, is violent and predatory, his behavior clearly manipulative, especially with Brad and Janet, meaning that the film seems to suggest that there is something, well, unsavory and disturbing about genderqueerness.

It’s not surprising that it is not at all universally loved by queer people today, especially those who were not yet born when it was first released.

Back to Tim Curry. In recent years, he was well aware of how complicated Rocky Horror’s legacy turned out to be. Here’s a screenshot from a social media post of his from a couple of years back.

His cheek notwithstanding, I completely agree with his sense of history and context. In its day, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a triumph for queer visibility and for just plainly celebrating both bisexuality and gender beyond the binary. And it was far, far too enmeshed in the prejudices of its time, and therefore it has aged very poorly. Both of these things can be true, simultaneously.

The first time I saw the movie was in 1980, and it was fun and playful and felt liberating. It would be almost a decade before I saw it again, not because I was avoiding it — but simply because I never felt the need or found the opportunity to go back. I finally did see it again in the theater after I moved to Atlanta. It was 1988 and I had a steady girlfriend, so we thought it would be a fun date. I was bitterly disappointed. The crowd seemed loud, aggressive rather than transgressive, and the sense of fun was simply not there. More shouting, less flirting. I don’t know if white middle class America had changed a lot in those eight years (the years of the Reagan administration, interestingly), or if it was just that I had changed. Either way, whatever magic I found in Rocky Horror as an undergraduate seemed to have disappeared. One cannot step in the same river twice.

Let’s Do the Time Warp… Again

I never truly came to grips with my own genderqueerness until I was well into my midlife years. But when I think back on how Frankie made me feel, I can see so clearly now that it was in me, just waiting to break through my anxiety and my inhibition so I could do more than just “dream it” — I really could “be it.” But at the time, the closet was just too tightly locked.

And now Tim Curry is gone. As I have read various encomia for him in the days since his passing, I have come to realize that for many people in the LGBTQ+ community, his portrayal of Dr. Frank-N-Furter was truly iconic: a watershed representation of authenticity, of freedom, of the promise of living one’s true self.

And it’s that concept — of the true self — that makes it appropriate for me to write my own appreciation of Curry on this particular Substack. For what is “Radical Mysticism” if it isn’t an invitation to be one’s radically true self?

I know that when I think about mysticism, even now, I am much more likely to think about Julian of Norwich or Howard Thurman than about Dr. Frank-N-Furter. But maybe as we mourn Tim Curry, it would be worth taking a moment to rethink that a little.

The character of Frankie is deeply flawed and highly problematic, and arguably may have done as much stereotypical harm as liberating good. But mysticism always acknowledges that we human beings are a broken, messy lot. Why should Frankie be any different?

For me, he will always represent the promise of my own erotic and nonbinary authenticity, just as Evelyn Underhill or Ram Dass represent the promise of my spiritual, contemplative authenticity. I’m still trying to live into the fullness of both of those authenticities — which means, I owe just as much of a debt of gratitude to Tim Curry as I do to all the contemplative authors I love.

Dear ones, whether you are being called into the deep authenticity of the mystical life, or of political activism, or simply of being your most fabulously queer (or straight, or cisgender) self: don’t dream it, be it. As they say: be yourself, everyone else is taken.

And as for Tim Curry: may he rest in peace.

The other day when Debonee and I recorded the second episode of our Radical Mystics podcast, I introduced us by saying “We are the radical mystics.” Simple enough — that is the name of our podcast, right?

But it did make a twitch a wee bit. Let me explain why.

As I have written elsewhere, many years ago I made a promise to the British theologian and contemplative writer Kenneth Leech not to call myself a mystic. I got to know Ken through a mutual friend (actually my spiritual director at the time; Ken had been his spiritual director) and while I don’t think I can claim he was my mentor, he was always very kind and encouraging when we would meet and I would ask to pick his brain on whatever project I happened to be working on.

It was while I was working on the first draft of the book that, years later, would be published as The Big Book of Christian Mysticism when Ken cautioned me against calling myself a mystic. In his mind, to be called a mystic was an honor — like being regarded as a saint or a shaman. One does not just decide “I am a mystic” just like no one would dare to say “I am a physician” or “I am a therapist” just because they liked to think of themselves that way. Honorifics are earned, not self-bestowed.

Ken wasn’t trying to rain on my parade, though. He said, “Don’t call yourself a mystic, just be a mystic. Leave it to other people to decide if you are a mystic or not.”

All these years later, I think it’s cracking good advice.

To this day I often tell people that everyone is a mystic — but I still shy away from applying the word to myself. Performative humility, perhaps? Or just honoring a promise made to someone I admire many years ago.

So even announcing the podcast: “We’re the radical mystics” felt like a wee bit of a transgression against that promise. But on reflection, I think it is appropriate for me or Debonee to say “we’re the radical mystics” — for these reasons:

1. It’s the name of the podcast, for heaven’s sake. For Debonee and I to say we’re the Radical Mystics is rather like Michael Gungor and Hillary McBride calling themselves the Liturgists. It’s not a comment on their ability to lead worship (although I suppose they’d make fine liturgists), it’s simply the name they give to themselves for creating their audio content.

2. As much as I continue to admire Ken Leech, I have to admit that I probably use the word “mystic” differently than he did. Ken came of age in the 1950s, before the huge renaissance of contemplative spirituality that took place in the sixties and beyond. And even though he was very much at the forefront of that renaissance, I think we can still assume that his formation in spirituality came at an earlier age, when “mystic” implied almost being a kind of spiritual superhero. I suspect that for Ken, saying “I’m a mystic” is rather like saying “I’m Superman.” That would be silly at best, at worst delusional.
   But I frankly understand mystics and mysticism in a different way, one that stresses how ordinary mystics are rather than how exceptional they might be. I heartily subscribe to the notion, popularized by Br. David Steindl-Rast, that “the mystic is not a special kind of human being, but every human being is a special kind of mystic.” If that’s true, then it should be a good thing for people to claim themselves as mystics: they are embracing the fullest authenticity of their spiritual selves.

3. And finally, there’s the specific kind of mystic that we are talking about: not just a mystic, but a radical mystic. A mystic who is rooted. Grounded. Embodied and earthy. A mystic who embraces their contemplative path fully and completely, and who wants to give their all to the transforming beauty and power of the interior life. This has real world, meaningful implications not just on the inside, but in our shared common lives as well. Once again, I think part of what makes radical mystics so, well, radical, is just how humble and down-to-each such an approach to spirituality can be. To be a radical mystic is not about levitating like Teresa of Ávila or manifesting the stigmata like Padre Pio (even though I’m all for a good miracle or two). To radical mystics, the greatest miracles of all are paradoxically the most ordinary: the miracle of love, of compassion, of forgiveness, of reconcilation, of peace, of justice, of building community, of appreciating the many small wonders and quiet beauties of life.

For those reasons, I have to amend that old promise to Ken Leech. I’m not going to put on airs about being special or “chosen by God” by suggesting I’m a mystic (in the old understanding of the word); but I am all for saying “we are radical mystics” — with the implicit understanding that the we means potentially everyone.

And let me end by noting that Ken Leech, priest of the Church of England, internationally known leader in combating racism and religious bigotry, tireless champion for the poor and the unhoused, and one with a deep and abiding love the Spirit encountered in deep silence: he was a radical mystic if ever there were one!

Take a whirlwind tour with us from Japan to India to Germany to Austria; from the deep panentheism of Shinto to the nonduality of Vedanta and the sacrifice-it-all devotion of Catholic mysticism; from the longing of an angel to the power of family and finally to the surprising link between death and dance.

What movies do you think belonged on this list, but we left out? Which of our selections excites you? Infuriates you, opens up the curiosity of your heart? Let us know — the comments section isn’t going to fill up by itself, you know.

Scroll on to see the trailers for each of the movies we discuss.

P.S. There are plenty of books that can be linked to these movies, but we’ll offer you just one for now: Star Child by Claire A. Nivola (see C’mon C’mon).

One of the fun (or infuriating, depending on your point of view) qualities of the word “radical” is how it carries radically (sorry, couldn’t resist) different meanings when used by different people in different contexts.

Three easy examples:

— In surfer culture, especially in my generation (maybe it’s different now), to say something is radical or simply rad would basically be to say it’s awesome, very good, impressive. In other words, it’s a word of unadulterated praise.

— In politics, radical might refer to something you really like (“our country is overdue for a radical change”) or something you really don’t like (“those radicals bombed the ROTC building”). Either way, it implies being on the extreme edge — and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends largely on the eyes of the beholder. To conservatives, socialism is radical; to liberals, MAGA is radical. In neither case is the word meant as a compliment.

— Mathematicians, chemists, or physicians use radical in a variety of specific ways. A doctor performs a radical prostatectomy to remove an entire prostate and often adjacent tissues (usually in order to remove cancer). Meanwhile, a “free radical” is not a political extremist at large, but rather is an “especially reactive atom or group of atoms that has one or more unpaired electrons” that can be dangerous to living tissue.1 Since these terms are quite technical and have specific meanings, they don’t have the same positive or negative value that the word carries in other contexts.

Whew. I’m thinking of Glinda asking Dorothy, “Are you a good witch or bad witch?” So… are you a good radical, or a bad radical, or just some sort of scientific radical?”

Then again, can’t we say much the same thing about the words “mystic,” “mystical” or “mysticism”?

— For contemplative Christians, a mystic is a particular kind of Christian whose faith is marked by a profound experience of either union with God, or of the felt presence of God — but paradoxically can also be used to describe those whose experience of God is shaped by an experience of God’s seeming absence.

— Meanwhile, in our culture at large, the word mystic is practically an umbrella term for new agers, psychics, shamans, UFO-seekers, Wiccans and other neopagans, and anyone else who seems to espouse a spirituality meaningful for them, but others find rather easy to dismiss as “woo-woo” or flaky.

— Other religions may not typically use this word internally, since it comes from Greek Christian culture. But it gets applied to a variety of religious or spiritual communities or traditions — such as Kabbalists, Sufis, Advaita Vedantists, Taoists, and others — in a generic way to imply any kind of spiritual practice or lineage that is marked by an embodied experience or a serious commitment to the tradition’s beliefs or practices.

— Historically speaking, the concept of mysticism has been used by empiricists, agnostics and atheists as a blanket term for criticizing religious or spiritual beliefs and practices. In this sense “mysticism” essentially means “woolly thinking” or what Sigmund Freud called “magical thinking” — in other words, mysticism in this sense is a synonym for irrationality.

What were Debonee and I thinking when we decided to call our Wisdom Camp experience Radical Mysticism? We chose not one, but two, words that can say remarkably different things depending on context.

Simply put, radical mysticism can carry a variety of possible meanings. Some are positive, others negative, still others neutral or ambiguous.

It might be easiest if she and I sat down, drew up a statement clarifying what we mean when we use a term like “radical mysticism,” and then leave things like that. Part of me is tempted to do just that.

But then it occurs to me that she and I might not come to an easy agreement.

And so this is where I’ve landed: that part of the appeal in a term like radical mysticism is its very ambiguity. This is not a concept that can be easily nailed down: thank heaven for that.

When we leave radicality and mysticism in their ambiguous state, we invite you to do your own work: of deciding what these words represent, either singly or together, for you. We take a risk with this, of course. You could always conclude that you understand radical mysticism to mean extremist irrationality. Clearly, we hope you don’t go there. But it’s easy to see how someone could reach that conclusion.

To a conservative fundamentalist Christian, both “radical” and “mysticism” might sound or seem dangerous. Again, we cannot prevent someone from feeling that way. Naturally, we hope that no one will jump to any conclusions here.

But then there are the happier ways of interpreting these words: experiencing God awesomely. Feeling the divine presence to the nth degree. Finding that place where political activism and contemplative silence come together to dance (for what it’s worth, that last example is pretty close to what I think radical mysticism is).

We won’t define this for you, because we don’t believe we have any business telling other people what to think — or even how to define nuanced words like these. We are not looking for followers who will obey us — we would much rather have dialogue partners who are willing to meet us, eye-to-eye, as we seek to understand just what it might, or could, mean — to be a “mystic on the edge” in our time of crisis.

Ready to help us discern this one? Reach out to us, with your questions, your comments, your ideas, your hopes, dreams, and desires. Let’s create our shared understanding of radical mysticism together.

Evelyn Underhill, the renowned 20th century authority on the inner life, famously titled one of her most enduring books as Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People. Now, I do tend to stumble over the word “normal” in that title — truth be told, I am much more comfortable with thinking of myself as “weird.” But it’s helpful to remember that Underhill was not writing for artists and Bohemians. She saw doctors, lawyers, business leaders, and other mainstream folks as her audience: these are the “normal” folks whom she believed were just as called to the interior life as are the most austere saints, nuns, and monks.

A century later, another term to help us think about experiential spirituality has emerged: the concept of ordinary mysticism. Mirabai Starr, Mark Longhurst, Dennis Tamburello, and Albert Haase are some of the authors of our time whose work explores ways to understand the mystical life as ordinary. It seems that ordinary mysticism is even more down-to-earth than its practical predecessor. If a practical mystic is the kind of person whose spirituality pairs well with the most mundane qualities of modern-day life, then an ordinary mystic is anyone who intuitively recognizes that you don’t need to run off to a monastery, or engage in extreme fasting, or do any other kind of on-the-edge activities, in order to be accepted as a “true” mystic. Experiential spirituality is for everyone — and especially, it would seem, for people who are truly humble, completely down-to-earth, and at home with the most quotidian circumstances of our lives.

When Debonee Morgan and I were coming up with a theme for our program at the Wild Goose Festival’s Wisdom Camp in 2025, we could easily have opted to call our approach to mystical spirituality either “practical” or “ordinary,” following the concepts that these writers have explored in their various books. But we opted instead for the concept of radical mysticism. Let’s look at a few ideas that help us to understand what puts the “rad” into radical mysticism.

The first thing that needs to be said: I’m not sure that any of these terms are mutually exclusive. Hopefully, a practical mysticism is also an ordinary mysticism — and vice versa. And hopefully, a radical mysticism, at its best, is also thoroughly practical and ordinary. When we try to understand the distinctions between these words, we’re not trying to create any sort of firewall between them; rather, we are hoping to let these different words with their different meanings illuminate and inform each other, so that our overall sense of mystical spirituality is deepened, not fragmented, by these three different approaches.

In a nutshell, then, let’s consider what these different ways of understanding mysticism are saying to us about spirituality — in a way that sheds light on how we can go deeper.

Here’s one way to approach these three concepts:

• Practical mysticism emphasizes how mystical spirituality is embedded in something we do, something we perform. It’s “practical” to engage in Centering Prayer, to pray and meditate daily, to go on retreats and work with spiritual directors. Practical mysticism is mysticism in practice.

• Ordinary mysticism reminds us that mysticism is down to earth, and that ordinary people get to be mystics as much as great saints or theologians do. This is mysticism for the rest of us, mysticism that doesn’t put on airs, mysticism that finds beauty and truth and purpose in the humblest corners of everyday life.

• Radical mysticism is spirituality that is deeply rooted: it gets to the bottom of things. It’s mysticism on the edge, but also mysticism at the foundation of wonder and in the center of joy. This is not extremist except maybe in the sense of extreme joy, extreme purpose, and extreme meaning. This is not mysticism that tells us what to believe: rather, it is a type of mysticism that invites us into greater wisdom and freedom which makes it possible to decide for ourselves what we hold as true, and good, and beautiful.

If a radical is someone who refuses to accept the brokenness of the status quo, then a radical mystic is someone who wants to rethink religion and spirituality from the ground up.

If a radical is someone brave enough to fight for meaningful change, to bring real solutions to real problems, then a radical mystic is someone with the courage to identify the spiritual problems that people experience, and try to find meaningful new solutions that can help us all to make the world a better place.

If a radical is someone who wants to get to the real root of a problem rather than just addressing the symptoms, then a radical mystic is someone who sees spirituality as an invitation to go truly deep in our own hearts, minds, bodies, and souls, so that we might get to the root of what can help us all to find true joy, purpose and meaning in our spiritual lives.

As I write these words, I feel that I must be clear: I’m not there yet. Maybe none of us are. But I’m willing to do the work to steer my life into this radical new direction: where spirituality matters, where change is real, and where new possibilities can revolutionize the ways we live our lives.

Now, let’s be practical and look for ways to live the promise of radical mysticism in the most ordinary ways we can!

A Reminder: Radical Mysticism is the theme of Wisdom Camp at the Wild Goose Festival!

Like last year, Debonee Morgan and I are leading a day-long workshop on Thursday, September 3 on the theme of “Radical Mysticism.” We’d love to see you there.

The Wild Goose Festival is a camping event, although hotels and AirBnB rentals can be found in the vicinity. Admission to the festival covers all programming from Thursday evening through Sunday morning; if you want to attend the Thursday “Wisdom Camp” program, there is a separate admission fee just for that event.

Visit www.wildgoosefestival.org to learn more about the Wild Goose Festival.

To purchase your tickets for both Wisdom Camp and the main festival, click on this link: www.wildgoosefestival.org/tickets/and select “Buy Tickets Now.” Remember to use the code A-CM to get $50 off of your adult regular admission. Register now, and we’ll see you then!

Please… share with all your friends!

Trust the Silence. It’s already inside you: after every heartbeat, between and beneath each thought. Learn to listen to it. Learn to gently let go of your inner commentator; give that voice the day off. Breathe quietly. Allow the silence to guide you.

Be Your Rooted Self. You are really you, only and completely you all the way down, deep into the soil. And if you are like everyone else, you’ve taken in lots of messages to be someone you’re not. Get rid of that nonsense. Give the world the gift of you.

Live Beyond Belief. Change up your worldview, your creed, your belief system. Not for the sake of chaos but for the sake of staying present and mindful. Discover the treasures that your dogmas tend to filter out. Let those treasures change you.

Embrace Playful Wonder. Giggle and be goofy. Run around screaming with the unanswerable questions. Jump in and out of fountains. Get dirt under your fingernails. Notice just how magnificent it all is. Marvel at just how wonderful you are.

Prioritize Joy. Don’t delay this one: it’s the most important thing after love. Give joy the place of honor it deserves. If joy eludes you, woo it gently and kindly; be patient but persistent. Be intimate with joy’s close friends: delight, awe, gratitude, and fun.

Love Nondually. Cultivate the vision of a world where unity matters more than polarity. The poles don’t disappear — dance with them both. Love them all, and let God sort them out. Watch over your heart, and gently deconstruct your resentments and bitterness.

Break the Rules. Mystics are not sheep; they are woefully incapable of simply doing what they’re told. Test the limits, push back against the meaningless customs and barriers that exist only to serve the convenience of others. Be radically free.

Color Outside the Lines. Take up a new hobby. Join a new religion (or an old one). Love someone you’re not “supposed” to love. Wear the wrong clothes, listen to the wrong music, notice the person everyone mocks and get to know their story — which will surprise you.

Be Psychedelic. The sacred plants are optional — but the transformed consciousness is necessary. Breathe exuberantly. Dream with abandon. Pay attention to everything. Integrate emerging wisdom. Get lost in expansive music and swirling colors. Be alive.

Ignore the Institution. Be kind and responsible, of course, but don’t waste time with bureaucratic officiousness. Question authority (including your own). Be humble but not a doormat. Sneak in through the cracks where no one’s watching.

Dismantle Privilege. For this one, inquire within; recognize who you deem to be “less than.” Share your advantages with others. Listen to those who are not used to being heard. Apologize whenever necessary. Agitate for constructive change.

Cause Good Trouble. Be curious; see what it’s like to rock the boat a little. If something needs to be changed, change it yourself if you can. Otherwise, find some way to get the attention of those in power. Be irritating and annoying. Be a story worth telling.

In 2025 I was invited to become the new facilitator for a day-long program called Wisdom Camp, held each year at the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina.

The Wild Goose Festival brings together artists, musicians, writers, activists, contemplatives, spiritual directors, and many others to explore the intersections of spirituality, creativity, and justice. Having participated in the festival several times, I was honored to help lead one of its signature day-long experiences.

Wisdom Camp serves as a retreat and spiritual practice intensive, offering participants a deeper contemplative experience than the festival’s typical one-hour sessions. Over the years it has featured presenters such as Adam Bucko, Matthew Fox, Mirabai Starr, Lama Rod Owens, Cassidy Hall, and Alexander John Shaia, so I knew I had big shoes to fill.

My first step was inviting Debonee Morgan to serve as co-facilitator. Debonee is a therapist, spiritual director, and executive director of Zeitgeist Atlanta, where I serve as contemplative-in-residence. Her background in contemplative spirituality, spiritual direction, and integrative therapy, combined with her inclusive, pluralistic approach to faith, made her the ideal partner.

After exploring several ideas, we settled on a theme that immediately energized us both: Radical Mysticism.

Here’s a video we created to let people know about Wisdom Camp 2025:

Together we designed a day of spiritual practices, conversation, and reflection around that theme. The response exceeded all expectations: the festival organizers told us it was the best-attended Wisdom Camp — and the best-attended day-long camp—in the festival’s history. We received the news with gratitude, believing we were simply serving something much larger than ourselves.

That experience convinced us that Radical Mysticism deserved a life beyond a single annual retreat. As we prepare to return for Wisdom Camp 2026, we’ve also launched www.RadicalMystics.com as an ongoing space to share articles, podcasts, videos, and conversations. Our hope is to gather companions from around the world who want to explore a radical approach to mystery and what it might mean for our lives.

But this begs a question…

What is “Radical Mysticism”?

Words like “radical” and “mystic” carry a lot of connotations, ranging from the visionary to, frankly, the unsavory. So here are my thoughts on what this curious term might mean.

Let’s start with mystic. It’s related to mystery, and before that, to silence: the word mute descends from the same Greek word that gave us mystery and mysticism. Depending on where you’re coming from, mysticism could mean union with God, the experience of enlightenment, the transcendence of ordinary reality, a visionary dimension of consciousness — to name just a few possibilities. A mystic, therefore, is someone who either experiences, or calibrates their life toward, some form of mystical experience or consciousness. And even though it can mean many different things especially to different people, there seems to be a golden thread running through all the varieties of mysticism: a recognition that life carries an array of possibilities, far beyond what ordinarily meets the eye. Nothing is impossible to the mystic.

So then there’s “radical.” Forget any ideas you might have about violent extremists or inflexible ideologues — we’re using the word in a much more grounded (literally!) way. It comes from the Latin word for root — radix — think radishes. To be radical, therefore, means (or can mean) to be rooted, stable, anchored in the good earth (and the corollary to the good earth, the good human body). Radicals start at the root of the matter, and the root of mysticism is the experience of infinite possibilities. We weave mystery and silence and rootedness together to celebrate a vision of spirituality — indeed, of life in general — that is willing to go beyond the limitations of conventional religion, or garden-variety politics, or “business as usual” society. Mystics want liberation, transformation, deification (becoming one with the divine). Radical mystics, therefore, want that kind of interior transfiguration literally from the ground up.

Okay, I know this is all somewhat vague. But that’s by intention: we don’t want to box you in with our ideas about what radical mysticism is all about — or what is possible for us. We just want to co-create, with you, a forum where possibility and liberation and deep interior transformation all dance together. Where we can embody our from-the-roots-up spirituality beyond the confines of religion, of dogma, of limiting ideas of “this is how we’ve always done it.” Let’s open our hearts and minds and souls to infinite possibility: that’s where radical mystics love to dance. So come, and dance with us.

Beyond the Wild Goose

To be a radical mystic means to be engaged in something sacred and deep and eternal. And while we are eager to revisit our Wild Goose Festival friends (and to meet some new companions) as we return to the Wild Goose for Wisdom Camp 2026, we also feel like this topic is bigger than what one single retreat day once a year could fully do it justice.

So we decided to complement the annual in-person Wisdom Camp with a forum here on Substack, where not only can Debonee and I create content (whether articles, notes, podcasts or videos) to share with anyone and everyone interested in this topic, but hopefully this could also serve as a forum where a larger community could begin to form. Obviously, not everyone is going to make the trek to rural North Carolina to participate in a weekend festival; our purpose in creating www.RadicalMystics.com is to begin inviting friends and companions from around the world to join us in exploring and discerning a radical approach to mystery — and what it might mean for any of us.

We’re inviting you to be part of the circle. We hope you’ll subscribe to this newsletter, and that you’ll share your thoughts, ideas, etc. with us and with others who are drawn to this intersection of mystery and rootedness. If you haven’t already done so, subscribe here. Tell your friends, comrades, co-conspirators and fellow troublemakers about this as well. Let’s be community together.

Thanks. And stay tuned! There’s more to come.