James ODea - The Conscious Activist: Where Activism Meets Mysticism

O Marvel, a garden within the flames.
Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi

Torchbearers for justice, for healing and for unconditional love, it is time to pass through the flames together: the garden of the future we have longed for now draws near.

Activists and mystics are pioneers and adventurers. They leave the safer territory of comforting spirituality and charitable service and venture to the edges of personal and social transformation. They have a degree of longing and passion that makes some people uncomfortable. They have an unsettling degree of intensity. They ache for breakthroughs. They destabilize normality. They rock the boat of acceptability. They go off the radar screen of lifes prescribed trajectories only to return bursting with ecstatic insight, fiery conscience and new codes to rouse us from a sleepy moral conformity.

Both mystics and activists let their imagination catch fire. Rather than experiencing vision as an abstraction, they join with it as active participants. Vision enters into them and courses their veins until it is fully embodied. They are called relentlessly to step into the cauldron of real-life verification in order to bring airy concepts into flesh-and-blood reality. The path of enactment can be clumsy, painful and dangerous, but there is no other way for those who want to live the reality others conceptualize but hesitate to incarnate.

Have you been fed enough concepts lately? It is exciting to hear so many leading-edge concepts on everyones lips but, for my part, I get indigestion if I swallow too many great ideas at once. I need to savour them. I need to experience them in action.

One way important concepts move from a heady parade of ideas to full integration with my heart, my gut and the grip I have on reality is when I see them played out in lived experience. I like to see alluring concepts actualized in richly revealing personal narrative and tested out in the context of societal complexity. I am a little wary when intellectual brilliance feels disembodied.

It helps me to know how people live the scintillating ideas they present to others. I want to know how they got there; how they grew up and what were the pivotal intersections in their personal growth. This is why I decided to share with you those key pivot points in my own journey. There is more than a full spread of ideas about activism and mysticism in this book, but it is my hope that you will also enjoy the adventure of how they were explored and tested and finally integrated.

There is more biographical material in the early chapters on my childhood and adolescence sharing our origins is an essential part of revealing our growth and development. In contrast, there is more conceptual material in the later chapters laying out the collective growth, integration and quickening of this era of unprecedented transition to a more conscious planetary civilization.

What is intended is that you experience the contrasting requirements of authentic growth for both activist and mystic before you can come to a full understanding of how they integrate in a visionary embodiment for a new humanity. The Conscious Activist describes the many rigorous initiations needed before the power of the activist can become one with the power of the mystic.

The very great idea of a unifying field of engaged spirituality and transformative action, emerging as an earthly reality of universal peace and justice, is not sold at the front door of this book. It is a vision that cannot be accessed without participation. The Conscious Activist will reveal the sacred conjunction of mystic and activist as you enter into its stories, as you meet its many wisdom-keepers and reflect on the threading of ideas whose time has come to ignite the integration of ecstatic spirituality and inspired action.

The author describes his formative mystical experiences as a child and a dramatic fall from grace which leads to a reflection on the nature of spiritual guidance, mystical communion and purification as one begins the mystic quest for direct experience of divine reality.

It was three in the morning. I was thirteen. My suitcase was scuffed from being hauled through woods and across rocks and bracken. I had made my escape partly across some wild Cheshire countryside to avoid being seen by even a stray car out for its own mysterious reasons on those remote roads in the dead of night.

I could never have explained myself. As inventive as I was, a young boy dragging a suitcase in a very lonely place at that time of the night would have a hard time explaining himself, when in reality he had committed a robbery and was on the run.

But now I dropped down onto the country road. I had no other option. I had an early train to catch from the nearest town of Macclesfield to the big city of Manchester. From there I would take a plane out of the country. It was a big plan; one that called for unflinching resolve. It would be sheer ignominy to be caught.

About half a mile down the road a red telephone booth presented itself whimsically out of nowhere. These famed English telephone kiosks can be found in the most unlikely of places. As I held the telephone in my hand, about to call the operator to check on the time, a wave of anxiety finally made its way into my otherwise focused and well-paced adventure. I stalled.

It had been only hours since I had stolen the money. Could somebody have woken up at the seminary and found that my bed was empty or the safe had been robbed? Or would I simply arouse suspicion as a young person calling from a remote rural telephone booth in the middle of the night to ask the time? With phone in hand I felt the shocks and jolts of adrenaline as I contemplated the powers of the world parents, priests, policemen who would soon be at my heels. But for the moment I was free. I dialled the number, got the time, and then picked up my pace as I headed for the railway station.

In my heart I knew that God was not entirely displeased with me. Somewhere in the cosmos I had a co-conspirator who was smiling down on this more than brash escapade and having fun with shuffling the deck of possible life trajectories to guarantee mine would be anything but a linear destiny path. It was of little concern to such a high cosmic being that I could suffer bitter consequences for my action, since bitterness can be a stern but effective teacher.

One thing was very clear: my priestly vocation had come to an abrupt end. Instead of living at a seminary, there was a distinct possibility I might find myself in an institution for young criminals.

What brought me to this moment cannot be reached by simple addition: who we are and why we act the way we do is a vast equation and one best not accounted for by a flippant psychology or without an understanding of the metaphysics of a universe finely calibrated to the laws of action and karmic consequence.

My bold raid on the Bursars office and dramatic departure from the Salesian seminary at Shrigley Hall have a natural connection to my seventh birthday. Age seven is the time of ones first spiritual coming of age in the Catholic Church. It marks the year when one can receive Holy Communion. My brief, intense and formative experience with Catholicism begins there, as does my first mystical experience.