Dinner party conversation

Recently I went to a dinner party, attended by some seemingly good folks who I am just getting to know on a superficial basis. It's always difficult deciding how I am going to describe myself to people I meet for the first time. You'd think by the time I arrived at middle age, that there would be more of a fixed quality about me, rather than an ambiguous shifting between artist, writer and environmental advocate with dubious means of support.

The long and the short of it is that if you have half an intention of being a practicing mystic, there's very little way to speak the truth about it at a dinner party, unless you want to grind the conversation to an immediate halt.

So instead, the conversation is predicated on a fiction--that I am an artist (presumably trying to make, sell and show art of a certain defined type); or a writer, writing for clients--for who would write from themselves? So I told a questioner that I had recently written a piece on communicating about global warming, which is true--what I didn't mention is that the publication commissioning my work is "The Carp", a free newspaper out of rural Red Wing, Minnesota.

Perhaps mystic and theologian Meister Eckhart was able to avoid the problem I've been facing by completely avoiding dinner parties. His challenges were greater. As a theologian and monk within the Dominican order, he was condemned by Pope John XXII of heresy in the 1320's, a charge that could have resulted in his execution by burning. Eckhart's heresy was to believe that we each could "give birth to Christ in our souls." A people centered theology like this certainly contradicted the orthodox views.

I've written before on Eckhart's statement that we should "work without a why." Another verse of Eckhart's, translated by Matthew Fox (another theologian who was censured by the Vatican) takes this concept even father:

All works are dead
If anything from the outside
compels you to work.
Even if it were God himself compelling you to work
from the outside,
your works would be dead.
If your works are to live,
then God must move you from the inside
from the innermost region of the soul--
then they will really live.
There is your life
and there alone you live
and your works live.

So let's imagine a dinner party of all mystics, a delightful thing to imagine. Perhaps the subjects of conversation would proceed along the lines of Bohmian dialogue, a form of communication devised by physicist (and mystic) David Bohm. The mystical dinner party would begin with a silence that was broken when someone had a revelation. In this dinner party, the non-mystic who blundered in with a typical dinner party question like "what do you do for a living?" would be met with profound acceptance and quite possibly more silence.

Anyway, it could be that I am a professional mystic, or a mystical blunderer, because I seem to teeter-totter between purposeful, intentional action and directionless wondering about how to "work without a why."