What Mystics See: “God is Light, and In Him is No Darkness”

An Interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez about A Year with the Mystics

(photo: Register Files)

I recently had the opportunity to speak with prominent Catholic media personality and speaker Kathryn Jean Lopez. We discussed the Catholic faith, education, the public square, and other pertinent matters within the modern era. Kathryn has written a new book, A Year with the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living (Saint Benedict Press/TAN Books, 2019). I recommend that you get this book, whether for yourself, a loved one, or both, particularly for the new year of 2020! The following is the transcript of the interview, and I thank Kathryn for her time and service to the Church.

 

1) Please tell us a little about your faith life.

Thanks be to God for the gift of faith. Along with life, it’s the greatest gift my Catholic school teacher parents gave me! They also sacrificed to make sure we went to Catholic schools, and I remember being dropped off early in the morning at Guardian Angel School on Tenth Avenue in New York City and always wanting to spend time in front of the Blessed Sacrament and in the little Lourdes grotto they have there, to this day. So, he has been drawing me close to his Heart for a long while now, and the idea that some decades later I’d be talking with you about mystic saints isn’t the most absurd thing in the world.

One of the things I am a little sheepish about with A Year with the Mystics existing now and with the reality that I get to write a lot about religion, is that people think you’re better than you are. I’m a sinner as much as anyone. I sometimes think I would simply die without the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

I get to write about faith and culture more than I used to, and that is a tremendous blessing. When I was editor of National Review Online for many years, I was obsessed with the news. It was a job, and it became my life. Maybe I’m trying to make up for lost time now.

 

2) How did you come to write A Year with the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living?

If you’re asking quite literally, it’s actually a funny story. I love the “A Year with” series from Saint Benedict’s Press. And over the years, I’ve interviewed some of the authors of the volumes. I think it was talking to Paul Thigpen over email after interviewing him about A Year with the Saints, and I announced that they really should have A Year with the Mystics. That was a well-received suggestion, but they wanted me to do it, which wasn’t my plan! I just very much wanted it to exist so I could give it to people — one volume tapping into some of the great treasury of the prayers of saints and other holy people who had (and have, there’s a person or two who is living in there!) deep prayer lives. It took me longer than I’d care to admit (I’m not even sure, to be honest!) to finish it. But I am very grateful and I hope it is nourishing for people. So many of the meditations are so rich and on any given day I benefit from them. That’s why I wanted to share them with you! I absolutely love the people at Saint Benedict’s Press for how beautiful they made it — it’s physically old-school and exactly what I wanted to be able to give people as a gift to help with their prayer lives.

I’m also very grateful for its existence because I have a terrible habit of carrying too many books. I haven’t fully adapted to the Kindle world. I used to carry with me big volumes from the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality series and multiple months of issues of the Magnificat monthly for meditations from holy people, masters of spirituality. My back thanks the good people of Saint Benedict’s Press for trying to reform my ways, for putting so many things I wanted to linger on and share in this neat one-stop shop.

 

3) Every saint — including the mystics whom you included in A Year with the Mystics — had a rich interior life. What do you think is the most prominent threat to the interior life in the modern era?

ALL THE NOISE! It’s everywhere. It’s so hard to get silence. Sometimes I simply have to walk away from my phone. Sometimes we do. There’s noise in restaurants, in Ubers, in the supermarket. Do you see how people on the streets seem to have headphones permanently installed on their heads? (We’re not far away from that, are we?) I don’t mean to be a caricature of an aging “get off my lawn” kind of neighbor here, but SILENCE, PLEASE! My favorite hymn is “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.” We can’t hear God if we can’t get quiet and listen for him. Mercifully, sometimes he makes his will quite clear and obvious, but we still need to spend some time with him — and consistently — to grow in receptivity to and trust in his will.

 

4) I typically ask this of every interviewee — what is your favorite scriptural passage, and why?

In the book, I open and close with Saint John. “God is light, and in him is no darkness” (1 John 1:5-10) seemed to be the right way to begin! And the final meditation is Jesus talking to his Father about us! I pray that A Year with the Mystics can help people enter more deeply into the Trinitarian life, and the Gospel is such a great gift for doing so. I think one of the experiences that made me determined to finish this project was hearing a priest say, upon the reading of John 17:20-26, that he wasn’t going to preach on the Gospel because it was too hard to understand, that no one can really understand it, because we’re not mystics. I wanted to rush the altar and encourage him not to give up – and on God’s faithful people! We, too, can be mystics! We are being drawn this very minute to the heart of Jesus, to live life with the Trinity in an eternal dance of love that began the day you were conceived and took on new meaning when you were baptized. If we receive our Lord in the Eucharist and are healed by him in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and oh my goodness, if we are confirmed, we should be on fire with his merciful love, seeing with his heart throughout our days.

I love the Psalms, they are like the heartbeat of our living faith. I love Song of Songs. The parables constantly challenge me. I could go on and on. There is so much God will say to us through Scripture. Every day of our lives. That’s one of the beautiful things about daily Mass, if you can get there — you are always reading from the Bible! I think this is an underappreciated fact about Catholics, even underappreciated by Catholics. We can take it for granted, but life is different when we don’t. When we drink in the Word of the Lord, it changes us.

 

5) What hope do you have for the Church in the 21st century?

Jesus Christ is our hope! I pray that the scandals emphasize to us the urgency that we need to be saints. I loved how when Pope Francis came to the United States the theme of the visit was “Love Is Our Mission.” If we believed that, and lived that, our lives and our politics and our culture would look different than they do now. The older I get, the simpler it seems to be. Of course, this can be tremendously difficult. Sort of like a writer can write longer rather than shorter (although Twitter I think has made it the reverse!). I remember being in Chicago last year and visiting one of those churches in the Loop and looking up and thinking: “This might not always be here.” As we’ve seen, some of the churches and schools are going to have to close. I did a walk of grieving through one now-closed school in upper Manhattan close to my heart during the summer. But that’s okay. The Church isn’t buildings. It’s the sacraments. It’s us living lives of virtue, loving one another better, giving our lives back to God, not claiming them for ourselves, not being of the world, but aching for Heaven.

 

6) Do you have any closing remarks for our readers?

I’m praying for you. Anyone who picks up the book, or gifts it to someone. I’m praying for you if you happen to be considering buying the book (there’s the beautiful, old-school bound volume or the Kindle version), if you happen to be reading this, or even see an image of the book cover on social media. And: would you mind saying a prayer for me, too? Writers should always pray for our readers, and we should pray for the people we read. We’re all in this together here, trying to build God’s kingdom here and get one another stored-up treasures in Heaven! And we never know what another person is struggling with. People are in so much misery, so often. Let’s be determined to be leaven. With God’s help!