What the ancient mystics taught me about questioning as an act of love.
In 105 days I’ll begin walking the Camino de Santiago (The Frances Way) from Logrono, Spain — an ancient pilgrimage route across northern Spain following a path that Christians, Celtic nomads, and Roman travelers have walked for over a thousand years. I’ve been preparing physically and logistically. But the preparation that has enriched me most is my spiritual preparation and reading.
As part of getting ready, I set an intention at the beginning of the year to go deep into mysticism — particularly the early Christian mystics; it’s been a joy to spend time with the likes of Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, and Meister Eckhart to name a few. The theme that keeps coming up for me is this: they write about God with such tenderness and intimacy that frankly can seem almost taboo in the spiritual & metaphysical tradition I’ve called home for 26 years. They aren’t just working with the Divine. They are in love with it. And reading their devotion stirs something ancient in me.
I want to share something from a book I love called For Lovers of God Everywhere — a collection of poetry and writing from mystics across traditions by Roger Housden. This particular piece is from Saint Paul. I know — I don’t read the Bible much either. But I want to invite you to hear Paul as a mystic musing rather than a cleric posturing. What Paul is writing about is not religion. It’s his experience of loving God.
If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
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When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
— Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:1–3, 11–13
Paul is saying that all the gifts we cultivate —the knowledge, the intuition, the faith that moves mountains — without love as its essence, is just noise. A clanging cymbal. The passage that stands out for me is: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”
He’s not concerned with mastering a principle. He wants to be known — the way you know a person, not a concept. He’s reaching for a relationship with the Divine that is mutual, intimate, second-person. Not God as a power to be worked with, but a presence that turns toward him.
Reading the mystics while simultaneously training prayer practitioners in my community has put me in an interesting place.
In the spiritual tradition I practice and teach, New Thought, rooted in the Science of Mind — we are trained to relate to the Divine from two places. The first person: God expresses as me, I am one with the Source; and the third person: there is only God, the Source of all creation. These are powerful practices. They have healed me in more ways than I can count. I am beyond grateful for all the healing I’ve experienced.
And yet. Reading these mystics, sitting with their longing and their love, I’ve felt a shift and a longing stirring within me.
What I’m longing for is what the philosopher Martin Buber called the I-Thou relationship — the moment the Divine stops being a principle we work with and becomes a presence that looks back. Not an It but a You. Not the Universe or the Infinite but just a loving presence, that loves me in a real way and that I can love back.
It has felt, at times, like a betrayal of my training to want this.
And then I came across this exchange between philosopher Martin Buber and Joseph Campbell at a lecture series Buber was giving at Columbia University that gave me insight.
Campbell challenged Buber over their differing perspectives. Their differences seemed irreconcilable, Buber relating to God as an intimate other (I-Thou) versus the Eastern and New Thought understanding that the Divine is already within you, that you and God are not separate at all (what Campbell calls the I-I). When Campbell asked Buber what Buber meant by God having a hidden face, Buber insisting “we must come out of our exile to find God”, with Campbell countering that “we were never in exile to begin with”.
The idea that came to me was maybe they’re both right — they’re just describing aspects of a larger relationship with self and God. Why can’t the longing for I-Thou just be the lived experience of someone whose I-I practice has gone so deep and become so real that it has opened a hunger that the practice itself created.
In other words — the craving for intimacy with God isn’t a step backward. It may be what happens when you’ve gone far enough forward.
This is where Teresa of Ávila comes in.
I was first drawn to Teresa because she was not only devoted to God — she was, by any modern measure, a bad-ass businesswoman. She founded seventeen convents across 16th century Spain, negotiated with bishops, challenging them through lawyers when needed. But her most enduring work is a book called The Interior Castle, in which she imagines the soul as a crystal castle with many rooms. The spiritual life is the journey inward — from the outer rooms toward the center, where the most intimate encounter with the Divine takes place.
What struck me is this: you never finally arrive. Every room opens onto another. Every threshold leads deeper. And Teresa suggests that it’s not frustrating — it’s actually the point. The Beloved keeps receding not to tease you, but to keep you in love with the journey. To keep you moving. To keep you reaching.
This is what doubt as devotion looks like. You think you’ve arrived — and then something in you asks, is this all there is? That’s not a loss of faith. That is the soul falling so hard for the Divine that it must keep moving toward it, not moving “out there”, but moving inward.
To quote Howard Thurman: “Love loves; this is its nature.”
In other words, God is Love and Love just loves itself. That’s the core of all beingness.
We started this exploration in doubt earlier in the series asking whether doubt was something to be ashamed of. We end here:
Doubt is simply one of the names Love gives itself when it isn’t finished yet.
Emma Curtis Hopkins followed her doubt and opened a new spiritual lineage. Rosa Parks courted her doubt and changed the laws that upheld segregation. Teresa of Ávila let her doubt pull her deeper into the interior castle. And Paul, two thousand years ago, sat with the mystery of not knowing but being fully known and called it the greatest thing.
As I continue to long for a deeper intimacy with the Divine — and count down the days to the Camino — I want to leave you with this: let your questions bubble up. Don’t run from doubt. Court it like a lover. See where it takes you. This is one of the ways Love lures us deeper into the reality that is everything within us and everything around us.
What if the very thing you’ve been doubting is not an obstacle to your faith — but simply the next room in the interior castle?
Thank you, Alice for clarifying your message about the I-Thou dynamic.