Pauline's Bookshelf: Stepping Heavenward

I'd use book covers for these posts, but copyright law is kind of convoluted and I don't want a DCMA notice.

Stepping Heavenward was a lovely read! It’s a fictional diary by Elizabeth Prentiss, following the life of a girl named Katherine Mortimer. One of my mentors gave it to me during a phase I went through where I was rather caught up in trivial worries of this world. In my journal I wrote of it, “This book is such an encouragement! A delightful breath of air, relieving such a sense of suffocation – and I have only reached chapter seven.” Part of this “sense of suffocation” came from being mired in the filth of some exceedingly worldly books I was attempting to analyze. When a Christian is entrenched in a field of godless thinking, they can only feel suffocated and depressed – which is what happened to me.

Now that you know where I was when I started reading Stepping Heavenward, let me tell you some of my favorite parts of the book!

My first realization that I would enjoy this read came when I saw the frivolity and impulsivity of the protagonist, sixteen-year-old Katherine Mortimer, or Katy. (“How dreadfully old I am getting! Sixteen!”) Though Katy is a fictional character, she is more genuine than some girls I know, including myself. This book is set in the 1830s-1850s, but young Katy has much in common with teenage girls of today: a tendency to oversleep, a fierce devotion to her BFF, and even a messy bun as her go-to lazy hairdo. I didn’t know messy buns were a thing back then!

But aside from her lighthearted thoughts (or “levity,” as she would call it – this book was published in the 1800s, after all), young Katy also struggles with how to live the Christian life. She promises herself she’ll pray more, control her temper, and exercise the discipline of self-denial, but this doesn’t work and she constantly berates herself for her failings. After an honest conversation with her pastor, Dr. Cabot, in which Katy admits she doesn’t know if she loves God or not, she still doesn’t have all the answers. And that is okay. Many people who grew up in Christian homes could relate to this conversation – when one has been raised by judicious Christian parents, says Dr. Cabot, one cannot identify a turning point in their lives in which they turned to God. “The question is not whether you ever gave yourself to God, but whether you are His now.”

I know what this is like. When I was eleven, I thought I wasn’t saved because I never recited that prayer that’s always printed on tracts. So I snagged a friend at church and asked her to lead me through it. Looking back, I don’t think I understood anything at all! I didn’t truly fall in love with Jesus until I was fourteen and had read Authentic Beauty by Leslie Ludy, which presented our Lord in an intensely personal way.

As Katy comes to the same understanding I found, her joy fills the pages. But she has to learn contentment by the only means possible: sorrow. The loss of family and friends, a broken engagement, and poor health give Katy plenty of reason to mourn – and to seek out her Savior. The journal spans twenty-seven years and ends on an overwhelmingly enraptured tone in the midst of chronic illness: “Yes, I love everybody! That crowning joy has come to me at last. Christ is in my soul; He is mine; I am as conscious of it as that my husband and children are mine; and His Spirit flows forth from mine in the calm peace of a river whose banks are green with grass and glad with flowers. If I die, it will be to leave a wearied and worn body and a sinful soul to go joyfully to be with Christ, to weary and to sin no more. If I live, I shall find much blessed work to do for Him. So living or dying, I shall be the Lord’s.”

True to the style of the era, the writing is verbose and decidedly untweetable, but I’ll try to pick the more succinct of my favorite lines:

“[Mother says] I am growing careless about my hair and my dress. But that is because my mind is so full of graver, more important things. I thought I ought to be wholly occupied with my duty to God. But Mother says duty to God includes duty to one’s neighbor and that untidy hair, put up in all sorts of rough bunches, rumpled cuffs and collars, and all that sort of thing make one offensive to all one meets.” (Chapter IV)

 “Moral – Mothers occasionally know more than their daughters do.” (Chapter V)

“Duty looks more repelling at a distance than when fairly faced and met.” (Chapter VI)

“It is not optional with God’s children whether they will pay Him a part of the price they owe Him and keep back the rest. He asks, and He has a right to ask, for all you have and all you are.” (Chapter VI)

“One need not be fanatical in order to be religious.” (Chapter VII)

“The only true way to live in this world, constituted just as we are, is to make all our employments subserve the one great end and aim of existence, namely, to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” (Chapter VII)

Many of my favorite quotes are from the earlier chapters of the book, when Katy is around my age and I relate most to her then. Later chapters tell of her dealings with the disappointments in married life, difficult in-laws, and lessons learned in the crucible of motherhood – all things I have yet to experience, but I hope that the truths presented here will help me prepare myself for my future.

I give this book six out of five stars and recommend it to anyone struggling with how to live in a heaven-minded manner while dealing with earthly suffering.

Misunderstanding Mysticism

Buddha statue in Japan

What comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘mystic’?

For me: Eastern religions, occult, Buddhist monk in an ‘ommm’ pose

What about the word ‘mysticism’?

For me: abstract, too open to misinterpretation, lacking truth

Sadly, these associations reveal that I’ve grown up with a misunderstanding of the concept of mysticism, especially as it applies to Christianity.

“Mystic Christianity? Aren’t you getting into some weird stuff now?” you may be saying.

As far as I have gathered, a full Christian experience has three parts: theological, mystical, and practical. These three things involve the intellect, the personality, and the actions, respectively. If any of them are isolated and taken by themselves as the Christian experience, the follower is seriously missing out. A purely theological, or intellectual, experience of Christianity consists of learning the history and doctrines of Christian teaching. This is the sort of experience a non-Christian professor of world religions would have. The mystical experience consists of personal interactions with God, especially through prayer, and such an experience isolated from the other two doesn’t last long, as a personal encounter with God requires knowledge of doctrine (because as fallen creatures, we need to have some objective measure of truth to discern by, as our sin natures prevent us from accurate perceptions using our own understanding) and practice (because if one does not act on what the Holy Spirit convicts him of, he is ignoring God and therefore won’t be coming to a deeper understanding of who God is). Finally, a merely practical experience of Christianity becomes blind legalism on its own without personal conviction to guide it nor knowledge of Scriptures to measure what is truly right.

As this post is about mysticism, I will reiterate what I mentioned above as the definition of mysticism: a personal interaction with God. Paul Tillich, in A History of Christian Thought, cautions us: “Do not make the mistake of identifying this type of mysticism with the absolute or abstract mysticism in which the individual disappears in the abyss of the divine.”

What kind of mystical experiences are legitimate in Christianity? Let’s look to examples in Scripture. The simplest and most concrete of these is prayer. There are many examples as well as instructions for prayer in the Holy Bible, the most famous being the Lord’s Prayer. I could ramble on about what prayer is and isn’t, but I think most of you have some notion that it concerns direct communication with God, so I will save those ramblings for a different post.

Another mystical experience, common to pretty much every Christian (and every non-Christian who obeys their conscience – see Romans 2:14-15), is that of conviction. It’s that feeling of when you know you’ve done something wrong and need to make it right – and when you ought to do something right to serve God. Such convictions can be misdirected by our accusing Enemy, though, which is why we must check it against the light of Scripture. Philippians 4:8 is a good measuring rod.

Another type of mystical phenomenon is called speaking in tongues. There seem to be two different types shown in Scripture. The first is speaking in known earthly languages, as we see at Pentecost in Acts 2. The purpose of this sort is to expedite the spread of the Gospel to people groups who speak a different language. The other is discussed in 1 Corinthians 14 and seems to be a sort of prayer language that pours out of the human spirit, not understood by the human mind but by God. I highly encourage you to read the chapter and study it for yourself; it’s fascinating stuff.

There is an interesting phenomenon that Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 12. Speaking in the third person, he describes “a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven.” There is much vagueness as to the nature of this vision; we find that this is intentional. “Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know – God knows. And I know that this man – whether in the body or part from the body I do not know, but God knows – was caught up to paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.” From what I understand, a person who has such experiences is not to tell anyone else; such a revelation is not for the edification of the church, but for the edification of the individual believer and thus we are not to receive such knowledge secondhand.

Now then, what is one to do with all of these modern ideas found in different denominations? “I go to a Baptist church; we’d never do some of that crazy stuff.” “What are you talking about? That’s like, normal, at my Pentecostal church.” To address the validity of such viewpoints would take a whole ‘nother blog post, and frankly I’m not interested in that topic right now. My goal was to help clarify what a mystical experience in Christianity is, and if you come away thinking, “Huh, I never thought of prayer as a mystical experience,” then I have achieved my goal. If you proceed to experience a more vibrant prayer life and thus walk more closely with Christ because of your new perspective, then to God be the glory!