I. Thirty minutes

In June 2025, lying in bed watching a video, I cried for about half an hour. Since then one desire has stayed with me: to kneel all the way down and surrender completely to the Lord.

The desire is real, but my life does not match it. In Guangzhou I was part of a church community for a while; I have not gone back in a long time. I want to be baptized, and I have never taken the step. I have been to the Oratoire Saint-Joseph in Montréal, and that is all.

Someone once asked me: the baptism you want, is it the kind with a community and a godfather as witness, or something that belongs only to you and God? Mostly the second, I said. Deep down, I added, I lean toward mysticism; I trust what I feel inside.

This essay tries to work out where that answer comes from, and whether it holds.

II. A conviction older than faith

My politics have changed four times: Maoist, utopian believer in a digital planned economy, liberal, and now something close to a libertarian. It looks like a wide arc. Underneath, one line has never moved: not to be dominated.

That line predates every position. The refusal of central control and the pursuit of individual freedom came first; the economics followed. Looking back, much of what drew me to Maoism was its anti-authority side. The positions kept changing; what they served did not.

When I turned toward religion, the line came with me. I am not wary of God. I am wary of whoever stands between God and me.

III. Mysticism: religion’s refusal to be ruled

Mysticism holds the place in religion that the refusal of domination holds in politics. Its claim fits in one sentence: a person can know God directly, without an intermediary. Sacraments, hierarchy and doctrine are not denied, but they move to second place. The final evidence is the soul’s direct encounter.

The institutional Church has always understood what that implies, which is why it has treated its mystics with equal parts reverence and suspicion. Eckhart said that God’s ground is my ground. In 1329, more than a year after his death, Pope John XXII’s bull In agro dominico condemned more than twenty propositions drawn from his works. Madame Guyon wrote a small book on inner prayer. Arrested at the end of 1695, she was held at Vincennes, in a convent at Vaugirard and in the Bastille, and was not released until 1703.

None of these people denied God or the Church. Their offense was going around it. If a person can receive God directly in prayer, a priest’s direction stops being a required passage, and the Church’s authority shrinks from a monopoly to a reference. For any center, that is dangerous.

There is a more radical version. With the help of AI, I translated A. E. Waite’s The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal (1909). Waite argued that behind the Grail romances lies a “hidden church,” deeper than the visible one, whose mystery is not handed down through the official succession. The visible Church keeps the outside; the real sanctuary is elsewhere.

That is nearly the theoretical version of my own position. I trust those thirty minutes more than any parish register. I do not need a godfather to vouch for me or a parish to stamp me. What happens between God and me is no one else’s to certify.

IV. The objection: in politics, I defend the middlemen

The strongest objection to this position comes from me.

In politics, what I defend is precisely the middlemen. I admire the Middle Ages before absolutism, when church, towns, guilds and families checked one another and together checked the center. Montesquieu wrote that “intermediate, subordinate and dependent powers” are what make a monarchy a monarchy rather than a despotism. On a common reading, Tocqueville saw what followed: once those bodies are destroyed, the individual stands alone before the state, which is exactly the condition despotism needs.

So my political conviction is that something must stand between a person and the highest power. In religion, I want the opposite: to tear down every mediation and set the soul alone before the Most High.

One could say there is no contradiction, since the state can be a tyrant and God cannot. But the problem is not God; it is the interpreter. Without a witness, there is only one interpreter of what God wants from me, and that is me. My wants, my fears and my mood that day can all dress up as God. In religion, the middleman does not protect me from God; he protects God from me.

History has run the experiment. The Reformation removed the Roman middleman in the name of direct access to God, and in much of Europe the result was not freedom but state churches in princes’ hands: cuius regio, eius religio. In England the king became supreme head of the Church. Newman, after leaving it, could see in it nothing but “a mere national institution.” Once the church that crossed borders was gone, religion fell to the prince.

The second objection comes from the mystics themselves: almost none of them walked alone. In December 1577, John of the Cross was locked in a cell in the Carmelite priory of Toledo by brothers of his own order, and held there for more than eight months. In that cell, with almost no light, he composed the first thirty-one stanzas of the Spiritual Canticle. After he escaped, he stayed in the order. Teresa of Ávila wrote down her experience because her confessors told her to.

John also described the dark night: a time comes when every feeling of having been touched disappears, and only a faith without sensation remains. If my spirituality rests on feeling alone, nothing will be left when that night comes. That is why the tradition insists on spiritual directors and community: feelings leave; witnesses stay.

The third case is Evelyn Underhill, two of whose books I translated with the help of AI. In 1907 she had a conversion experience and wanted to become a Catholic, then lingered on the threshold for more than a decade. She went back to the Church of England, and in 1921 asked Baron Friedrich von Hügel to be her director. The author of Mysticism ended by accepting guidance. Von Hügel admired her books but thought she leaned too heavily on mysticism. To him her faith looked like a broad and rather intellectual theism, and he steered her toward one with Christ at its center.

On my side there seems to be only Simone Weil. She loved Catholicism deeply, was never baptized, and stayed at the threshold all her life. But in her letters to Father Perrin she explains that she does not enter the Church because she does not believe God wants her to, for now. Even her refusal was made in the name of obedience, not autonomy.

One detail I cannot get around. Later I found the video again, watched it, and cried again. What moved me was seeing and hearing “them,” real people, living out their faith together. I chose a road for one; what made me weep was the sight of many.

V. Only the truly free dare to walk in

I used to think that not being dominated meant staying out: joining nothing, being registered nowhere, giving no one standing to judge me. The mystics offer another reading.

An institution dominates a person only through what that person needs from it: recognition, identity, security. Eckhart, on trial, declared that he would submit to the Church’s judgment; his ground was never in the courtroom. John of the Cross stayed in the order that had imprisoned him, because the order never owned him. Because their freedom came from elsewhere, they could enter an institution without belonging to it.

So standing outside is not proof of freedom. More likely it shows a freedom not yet finished: I am still afraid of being shaped by others, so I will only submit in an inner space where I alone govern. But a surrender whose terms I set is no surrender. I have written elsewhere that heart means giving yourself entirely to something that needs no justification. A gift that keeps a last share of sovereignty is not yet a gift.

Ignatius of Loyola has a prayer that begins: “Take, Lord, receive all my liberty.” I have always valued freedom above everything else. That is exactly why it is the most precious thing I have to offer. Mysticism should not be my way of keeping it, but the place where I learn to give it away.

I have not walked in yet; practical things still come first. But I no longer take standing outside as proof that I am free.

Sources

Further reading: Meister Eckhart, German Sermon 5b (“God’s ground is my ground”); Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life, prologue (written at her confessors’ command); Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises §234 (the Suscipe); the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the English Act of Supremacy (1534).