Mysticism for Protestants

I have just finished book two of Watchman Nee's trilogy, "The Spiritual Man". It is certainly the most exciting, inspiring, challenging, thought-provoking and sometimes downright terrifying writing I have come across since I was introduced to "Meditations on the Tarot" nearly fifteen years ago.

Nee's milieu was the evangelical Protestantism that Western missionaries planted in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He stresses the absolutely necessity of conversion, of regeneration, of believing in the saving death and resurrection of Christ, in a way that I think any conventional evangelical believer today would completely agree with. But he then builds on those basics in a way that is (from what I've seen) not often expressed, but is absolutely true and authentic. And after I'd been reading for a while, much of it also seemed strangely familiar.

It seems to me that what Nee is doing, at least in the first two books, is to map out the Christian's journey in a very similar way to St John of the Cross (and, for those who know "Meditations on the Tarot", letter Twelve of that book, on the Hanged Man). More specifically, he is writing about exactly the same journey and mapping the same territory, but in very different language: twentieth century rather than medieval, and Protestant rather than Catholic. As a result, I find the whole thing far more alive, immediate and stimulating than reading St John, wonderful though he is, and much more immediately applicable than much of "Meditations". As a result, I can see myself enthusiastic recommending the book to many people who would be suspicious of any representative of the Counter Reformation and downright hostile to any book with the word "Tarot" in the title.

I said Nee's writing is sometimes terrifying, and here's why. Like the other two authors, a central theme is this: we need to give away self if we are to make any significant spiritual process. That's scary, whether we think of it in terms of "taking up our cross" (Nee, and the gospels of course), or the nights of sense and spirit (St John), or disidentifying with ego (Buddhism) or living upside down in the grip of celestial gravity (the Hanged Man). None of these metaphors refer to any kind of self-improvement or moral advance. They are much more radical than that. They are talking about a total trust, a self-giving love and a disregard for one's personal happiness and even survival that are hardly ever encountered and that I for one can barely envisage myself (if that is the right pronoun) ever attaining.