User:Alan347/Mystic prayer

Prayer is the process where a person seeks to communicate with God.

Mystic (from the Greek μυστικην) is an adjective that means 'partly shrouded', where the full meaning can never be grasped.

Mystic prayer therefore can never be made fully comprehensible, but is shrouded in mystery. On the other hand, since man is a being of transcendence, "Mystery in incomprehensibility is what is self-evident to man"

"Mystery, therefore, in its strict theological sense is not synonymous with the incomprehensible, since all that we know is incomprehensible, i.e., not adequately comprehensible as to its inner being; nor with the unknowable, since many things merely natural are accidentally unknowable, on account of their inaccessibility, e.g., things that are future, remote, or hidden. In its strict sense a mystery is a supernatural truth, one that of its very nature lies above the finite intelligence."

In the mystic prayer, the transcendental-anthropological man is realized. .

Experience
The direct experience of the mystic prayer involves intuition, instinct or insight. In his book The Law of Christ Vol.II/life in fellowship with God and fellow man, Bernhard Häring wrote:

"The dialogical character of prayer is most fully realized in the so-called passive or mystical prayer, in which the divine motion is in the foreground of consciousness and divine love stirs the heart, and the loving majesty of God manifests itself in infused contemplation. Though the prayer is called passive, man is not purely passive in it. On the contrary, one is never so completely and utterly active as when God moves him by the graces of mystical prayer. But in this mystical experience the "divine partner in the dialogue" is in the foreground rather than the human response. In mystical prayer, the soul experiences the life in grace and from grace as a gift of divine love. It is the experience of faith in its most exalted realization."

Mysticism usually centers on a practice or practices intended to nurture those experiences or awareness. In Christianity, this is understood as happening because of the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is a law "in Christ Jesus". For the Holy Spirit is for us the gift of Christ exalted in glory and signifies vital incorporation into Christ. "No one, therefore, can enter into communion with God except through Christ, by the working of the Holy Spirit”.