Book Review: If Only We Could See: Mystical Vision and Social Transformation

Abstract

If Only We Could See: Mystical Vision and Social Transformation. By Gary Commins. Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2015. xiv + 502 pp. $59.00 (paper).Gary Commins has written a truly remarkable book. Like his earlier published writing, it is an exploration of the passions and assumptions that have shaped his career as a parish priest in challenging urban settings.Ten years ago, Commins published Becoming Bridges: The Spirit and Practice of Diversity (2007), reflecting on his own experience of ministry in congregations far more diverse than the average Episcopal parish. A decade earlier, he had written Spiritual People, Radical Lives (1995), a study of four Christians often identified as social activists-Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, and A. J. Muste-to demonstrate that while all four had highly visible encounters with the social ills of their day, in each case their activity was undergirded by a profound faith more commonly identified with the tradition. But his intention in this work goes beyond the symbiotic relationship between the two. He insists that there is an intrinsic connection between prayer and social action because Christian spirituality is incamational, and that social transformation is always undergirded, encompassed, and made more urgent by transcendence (pp. 11-12). Furthermore, mystics and activists are deemed threatening because they are to every empire, every religious, political, and economic system, and every status quo of any kind, because no status quo is ever the realm of God. Their experiences of God and their faith in God make them all dangerous (p. 12). This is the premise that he has undertaken to describe and document in If Only We Could See.Unlike his earlier books, the present volume is a dense and scrupulously documented study of the relationship between what Commins calls mystical vision and social transformation-a belief that has obviously undergirded his own decades-long ministry. His investigations have taken him far and wide, and include fiction and poetry as well as twenty centuries of Christian experience and insights from Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi Muslim voices. The Glossary of Names, which offers one-line biographical information for each of the persons cited, includes, by my count, 227 individuals plus four of Francis of Assisi's brothers and sixteen Desert Fathers and Mothers. Each chapter except the first (an introduction) and the last (which ends with a prayer) begins and ends with a brief meditation by Commins, drawing on his own experience as pastor and parent, and sometimes the connection between the two.The book is divided into ten chapters, each of which is loosely organized around a central theme: the importance of vision for both religious experience and activism, both of which he considers as rooted in the experience of God; the inevitable sorrow of really seeing the world as it is; the light of God; the hiddenness of the divine; the pain that customarily accompanies both the and the activist way; the challenge to see and share God's love for all human beings, and indeed the whole creation ; the holiness of the body and of human relationship (borrowing a phrase from the nineteenthcentury Anglican priest and Christian Socialist Charles Kingsley, Commins entitles this chapter Holy Communists); God's often hidden glory; and the peace of God, an inner peace that forever rests in restlessness (p. …