Holding What Is Real: Mystical Encouragement for a Faith That Is Still Becoming

There are seasons in life when faith cannot survive on borrowed language.

What once felt familiar may begin to feel thin. Easy answers no longer satisfy. Religious habits that once gave comfort may begin to feel too small for the ache, beauty, grief, and wonder of actual life. And in that place, many people fear they are losing faith, when in truth they may be standing at the threshold of a deeper one.

Not a smaller faith. Not a looser faith. Not a faith emptied of substance.

A deeper faith.

The Christian mystics are often misunderstood here. People sometimes imagine them as vague, detached, or unconcerned with the solid realities of belief. But the great mystics of the Church were not trying to escape reality. They were trying to penetrate it. They believed that the world is charged with the presence of God, that Christ is not an idea but the living center of all things, and that the spiritual life is not about religious performance but about union, communion, and transformation.

For those trying to rebuild a life with God, that is very good news.

Because one of the great temptations in seasons of reconstruction is to think faith must become either rigid or unreal. Either you grip it with anxious certainty, or you let it dissolve into mood, symbolism, and vague spirituality. The mystics offer another way. They remind us that the Christian faith is both real and mysterious. Concrete and inexhaustible. Grounded and spacious. Intimate and immense.

They teach us that mystery is not the absence of truth. It is the depth of truth.

This matters because modern people are often suspicious of mystery. We think mystery means confusion, evasion, or lack of clarity. But in the Christian tradition, mystery is something else altogether. Mystery is what happens when finite creatures stand before the infinite God and discover that what is most real cannot be reduced to what is most manageable.

The burning bush is a mystery. The Incarnation is a mystery. The Eucharist is a mystery. Grace is a mystery. The kingdom of God is a mystery. Even the human person, made in the image of God and yet fractured by sin, is a mystery.

Mystery does not weaken faith. Mystery humbles faith, steadies it, and keeps it alive to wonder.

That is why the mystics remain such trustworthy companions. They never confuse familiarity with depth. They know that God is near, but never small. Known, but never mastered. Present, but never possessed.

Julian of Norwich saw this with astonishing clarity. Her confidence in divine love did not come from living an easy life or from ignoring suffering. It came from seeing that underneath the instability of the world there remains the unshaken goodness of God. Her famous line, “All shall be well,” is not denial. It is defiant hope rooted in the character of divine love. She does not say all is well. She says all shall be well. That is the language of trust. It is faith that has looked at pain and still believes love will have the final word.

That kind of faith is not sentimental. It is strong. And it may be exactly what many people need right now.

What if faith is not meant to be a closed system that answers every anxiety on demand? What if faith is meant to be a living participation in the life of God? What if the deepest Christian confidence is not found in controlling mystery, but in consenting to be held within it by Christ?

This is where the mystics can help us recover something essential. They remind us that Christianity is not merely a set of propositions to affirm, though it certainly includes truth that must be confessed. It is also a reality to inhabit. It is life in Christ. It is learning to abide. To pray. To receive. To see. To become.

Teresa of Ávila understood the soul as a kind of interior castle, full of rooms and depth, with God dwelling at the center. Her vision was not abstract. It was profoundly incarnational. The spiritual life was not about escaping the self, but about being healed, ordered, and drawn inward until one could live truthfully before God. And that inward journey did not produce self-absorption. It produced love, humility, courage, and joy.

In other words, genuine depth with God makes a person more real.

That may be one of the clearest signs of healthy faith. Not that it makes us dramatic or impressive, but that it makes us honest. More able to tell the truth. More able to love without controlling. More able to suffer without despair. More able to rejoice without pretending. More able to see Christ not only in sacred moments but in ordinary life.

The mystics are so valuable because they refuse the shallow split between the spiritual and the real. For them, to encounter God is not to move away from reality but deeper into it. Bread, wine, silence, tears, friendship, repentance, beauty, Scripture, worship, the body, the poor, the Church, all of it becomes charged with significance because all of it is held before God.

This is why mystical Christianity is not a departure from historic faith. At its best, it is historic faith burning with life.

John of the Cross speaks to this with his vision of the dark night. He is often quoted by people who want language for spiritual dryness, and rightly so, but his deeper point is often missed. The dark night is not simply about losing consolation. It is about being purified for love. It is about God drawing the soul beyond superficial attachments so that faith may rest more fully in God alone.

That is not less real faith. It is more real faith.

It is faith no longer dependent on constant reassurance. Faith that can remain in the dark because it has begun to trust the One who is there. Faith that knows God is not absent simply because God is not immediately felt. Faith that no longer mistakes emotional clarity for divine proximity.

For those reconstructing their life with God, this is a crucial encouragement. Not every season of uncertainty is a sign of collapse. Sometimes it is a sign of growth. Sometimes the shallower forms of faith must give way so that something sturdier, quieter, and more luminous can emerge.

That emergence is often less dramatic than people expect.

It may look like reading the Gospels slowly until Jesus becomes more compelling than all the noise around him. It may look like praying the Psalms when your own words fail. It may look like lighting a candle, keeping silence, walking outside, receiving Communion with open hands, confessing what is true, or learning again to say the Lord’s Prayer without rushing.

These are not small things.

They are ways of returning to reality.

Dallas Willard wrote often about the kingdom of God as the range of God’s effective will, the living reality in which we now learn to live. That vision sits beautifully alongside the mystics because it keeps Christianity from becoming merely institutional or intellectual. The kingdom is not just a future destination. It is the present reality of God’s reign breaking into this world and into us. To follow Christ is to apprentice ourselves to that reality.

And this is what so many tired believers ache for, whether they can name it or not. They do not only want arguments for faith. They want a faith they can live inside. A faith that can survive beauty and sorrow. A faith with enough substance for hospital rooms, unanswered prayers, ordinary Tuesdays, moral failure, human limitation, and holy joy.

The mystics insist such a faith is possible.

Not because they had perfect emotional lives. Not because they resolved every theological question. But because they learned to anchor themselves in the reality of God rather than in the volatility of the self.

It says to the anxious heart: you do not have to force yourself into certainty.

It says to the disillusioned believer: the failures of religious people do not exhaust the reality of Christ.

It says to the weary soul: God is deeper in you than your fear, and nearer to you than your shame.

It says to the person rebuilding from fragments: what is true in Christ does not become less true because your language for it is changing.

This is not permission to drift into vagueness. The mystics are not inviting us to dissolve Christian faith into a general spirituality of comfort and light. Their lives are full of Scripture, prayer, repentance, worship, obedience, and the person of Jesus. They are rooted in the Church. Their God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, revealed in Jesus Christ, present through the Holy Spirit. Their mysticism is not a replacement for Christianity. It is Christianity tasted from within.

And that may be the distinction many people need.

Because some have known a version of faith that was heavy on explanation and thin on encounter. Heavy on performance and thin on presence. Heavy on systems and thin on love. In that kind of setting, mystery can feel threatening because it exposes how little control we actually have.

But the Christian life has never been about control.

It has always been about surrender.

Not the surrender of passivity or resignation, but the surrender of trust. The surrender that opens the hands. The surrender that says, with all its trembling, I believe Christ is real. I believe his life, death, and resurrection are the truest thing in the world. I believe grace is stronger than my confusion. I believe the Holy Spirit is still at work in the Church and in me. I believe I can live by receiving rather than grasping.

This is why the mystics often sound so free. They have stopped trying to possess God. They have learned to be possessed by love.

Brother Lawrence, in his simple and luminous way, found God in kitchens and chores, in ordinary tasks done with attention and affection. There is something deeply healing about that witness. It reminds us that the reality of God is not reserved for dramatic moments or spiritual elites. Divine presence shimmers in common life. In washing dishes. In walking to work. In caring for a child. In sitting quietly at the edge of the bed before the day begins.

The world is not empty. It is full of God.

And once that truth begins to settle in us, faith becomes less brittle. It becomes less frantic. Less obsessed with proving itself every moment. More able to rest. More able to adore. More able to endure.

This does not mean every question disappears. It means the questions no longer carry the whole weight of your soul. They are held within something larger. You begin to realize that faith is not first the elimination of all uncertainty. It is fidelity to the reality of God in the midst of creaturely limitation.

There is tremendous peace in that.

Not because everything is solved, but because not everything has to be solved in order for Christ to be real.

In fact, one of the great gifts of mystical theology is that it protects us from making an idol of our own comprehension. It reminds us that our minds are good gifts, but not final courts of appeal over the life of God. We are meant to think, study, discern, and test. But we are also meant to kneel, receive, and worship.

The mystery of faith is not opposed to reason. It simply exceeds it.

And perhaps that is where encouragement begins for many people today. Not in being told to stop asking questions, and not in being told that nothing can really be known, but in hearing this: Christianity is solid enough to bear mystery. The reality of Christ is not threatened by depth. The gospel is not weakened by wonder. The truest things are often the things that can be entered, adored, and lived long before they are fully explained.

So hold fast to what is real.

Hold fast to Jesus, who is not merely a concept but Lord.

Hold fast to the Spirit, who still comforts, convicts, and remakes.

Hold fast to the Father, whose love is older than your fear.

Hold fast to the Church, even in its imperfection, as the place where grace keeps being given through word, table, water, song, confession, and blessing.

Hold fast to the strange and beautiful truth that faith is not only something you think. It is something you inhabit. Something that inhabits you.

And when the path feels uncertain, let the mystics teach you this holy steadiness: reality is deeper than your panic, and mystery is kinder than your suspicion.

“All shall be well,” Julian says.

“Let nothing disturb you,” Teresa says.

And beneath both voices is the older voice of Christ himself: “Do not be afraid.”

That is not an invitation to superficial calm. It is an invitation to live from what is most real.

So for the one reconstructing, relearning, returning, or simply trying to believe with greater honesty, take heart. The mystery of the faith is not a fog meant to confuse you. It is the radiant depth of a reality sturdy enough to hold your whole life. And the God who calls you deeper into that mystery is not hiding from you.

He is drawing you in.

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This post was written by Joseph Dea. Joe is a writer for his own blog at https://kfmbroadcasting.wixstudio.com/buddywalkwithjesus and is one of the directors and writers for KFM Broadcasting.

This blog is a response to an episode of Discovering Christian Mysticism with Jon Adams on Deconstruction and Christian Mysticism. You can watch this episode by clicking here or check out more from DCM by visiting their show page.