Suffering Born From Beauty

“We’re all mystics!”  That sentence contains in itself the right of every human being to beauty and vision….Mysticism is the experience of the oneness and wholeness of life.  Therefore, mysticism’s perception of life, its vision, is also the unrelenting perception of how fragmented life is.  Suffering on account of that fragmentation and finding it unbearable is part of mysticism.  Finding God fragmented into rich and poor, top and bottom, sick and well, weak and mighty: that’s the mystic’s suffering.  The resistance of Saint Francis or Elisabeth of Thuringia or of Martin Luther King grew out of the perception of beauty.  And the long lasting and most dangerous resistance is the one that was born from beauty.    P. 302.

– Dorothee Soelle, in The Silent Cry: Mysticism And Resistance (translated by Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt)