Andrew Prevot’s The Mysticism of Ordinary Life is among the few recent books in the area of Christian theology that does not leave me discouraged not only about the field but the world after reading. That may sound like faint praise. It isn’t. In this book, in a characteristic and distinctive development of his earlier books on prayer and theology and race, Prevot brings Christian theology, Continental philosophy, and Black studies together into a deeply researched, sophisticated, and judicious blend. Prevot’s work opens new possibilities for diversifying and expanding the field of Christian theology in response to the best strands in the Western intellectual tradition, sophisticated engagement with the possibilities of spiritual practices for individual and communal development and social change, and in response to the intellectual, political, and ethical challenges posed by the suffering and joy found especially but not only in ordinary Black lives and bodies.

Something of the work of this book was prefaced in Prevot’s 2016 essay titled “Divine Opacity: Mystical Theology, Black Theology, and the Problem of Light-Dark Aesthetics.” Taking up significant divisions in the theology of spirituality, the genealogy of race, and ongoing debates over whether Black liberation is best served by emphasizing what are often called the Afropessimist or Afrofuturist possibilities of the histories and flourishings of African-descended peoples, Andrew offers a way forward that synthesizes both contributions and critique. In “Divine Opacity,” he uses the concept of opacity as developed by Judith Butler and Édouard Glissant to think through the aesthetics of light and dark within both Christian mysticism and the history of racialization, especially racialized practices of enslavement and capture. Without sacrificing either the specificity of the racialization of Blackness or the general need for approaches to personhood that illuminate opacity’s function in lived experience, Andrew lays out a vision for overcoming and transforming the fundamental aesthetics and symbolism that undergird the ongoing and death-dealing life of white supremacy.

As a (pro)feminist theologian concerned with questions of sex and gender who avoids the simplistic binaries of approaches to histories of Christianity and gendered life that look only for good and bad approaches to such lived experiences along sexed lines, Prevot offers a gender-sensitive analysis of the potentiality of mysticism for ordinary, everyday, political (and especially blackened) life. I want to tarry for a moment with the language of (pro)feminist, as it is indicative of the sensitivity with which Prevot places himself in solidarity and engagement with, rather than as an appropriator of, feminist thought (from white as well as brown and Black authors). We academic theologians in the Anglo-American sphere work in a time where the professional inducements to a superficial engagement with liberatory discourses like those of race, gender, and sexuality have, perhaps for the first time ever, become powerful enough to generate something that can only be called appropriation, at least I would say that for the queer case, which is my own primary site of engagement. Theologians whose engagement with queer life, sources, and resources barely go beyond a reading of Judith Butler and a brief tarry with Marcella Althaus-Reid (placed, most likely, adjacent to Karl Barth) name their projects as queer. Sections in Christian systematic theology and philosophy of religion at AAR generate rescue projects for their disciplines through engagements with queering that barely pass citational tests, without allowing the predominance of their characteristic sources to receive thoroughgoing refiguration.

While I have deep concerns about the way the language of appropriation gets used in many of our classrooms to discourage engagement with the different from sincerely interested students who have been taught far too much about how politically engaged scholarship can go wrong, and far too little about the importance of risk-taking, participation, and responsibility in how it can go better, appropriation is still, I think, a fitting word for rescue projects that are not in some way transfigured by the specificity, complexity, and contradictoriness of the lives and works out of which they hope to generate recognition and futurity for themselves. Prevot’s work is the opposite of this. The pages of The Mysticism of Ordinary Life are alive with care, attentiveness, deep reading and reflection and, though intentionally discussed only in a very brief moment at the beginning and a slightly longer paragraph at the end, the spaciousness granted by Prevot’s own engagement with and commitment to the spiritual practices of the Christian mysticism that he seeks, in these pages, to commend.

It is, in my experience, almost impossible to say anything about Prevot’s work without invoking the term irenic, even to a fault, for the usual connotations of irenic might seem to undercut the capacity to offer clear and distinctive judgments that assess the detailed particularities of projects. But that is not the case with Prevot’s work. Prevot’s irenicism, so to speak, enables an unusually disciplined clarity. As he moves through the terrain of this book, he, over and over again, offers critical assessments of the work he discusses. I want to highlight three types of such assessments. In the first, he reads a theologian or philosopher in relation to the interpretive moves they have occasioned in scholarship, and then corrects those interpretive moves. Of those corrections, the two it might make most sense to highlight are, first, his reassessment of the centrality of the specifically Christian and Christo-centric to Karl Rahner’s “transpositions of Ignatian mysticism” (42) and his case for the centrality of a “prophecy-affirming perspective” (43) and the significance of prayer to understanding Rahner’s approach to “grace in the ordinary.” Second, Prevot offers a significant corrective to some of the most influential feminist theological and theoretical engagements with Luce Irigaray. In a careful sequence, he demonstrates that regnant assumptions about Irigaray’s simple and straightforward Feuerbachianism neglect significant aspects of her work, especially through, to my delight, a reading of the only work of Irigaray’s that I personally truly love, the still relatively underappreciated Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, which Prevot finds “rich with mystical theological significance” (151). Tracing Irigaray’s “absorbing, fluid, epigrammatic address to Nietzsche,” written in a tone that is “both indicting and loving, like that of a merciful divine judge,” Prevot points out that Irigaray’s rhetorical inhabitation of something like a divine position does not happen “in a simplistically ‘projectionist’ way, as if she sought only to magnify her own attributes.” Instead, he says, “This section of the text displays both her creative efforts as a thinker and her rapturous reception of some deep, ancient source of life before and beyond her, which enables her to speak with great insight and compassion. Nature and grace are not in a competitive relationship here” (151). Prevot’s corrections of the scholarly receptions of significant thinkers never give a sense of an agenda of correction for the sake of self-aggrandizement. The patience and depth of reading with which Prevot approaches the sources with which he engages—his irenic tendencies—ground an exceptional clarity. In a Twitter-pilled academic world, I experience so viscerally the necessity, and too often absence, of voices like this at a time like this, within and beyond theology. Clear and patient judgments that issue from deep attention allow for corrections that enable rather than dismiss the projects about and to which they are uttered.

While the two examples of correction I’ve given are taken from Prevot’s engagement with what we typically, though of course somewhat inaccurately in theological and philosophical cases, call secondary scholarship, a second aspect of the significance of Prevot’s capacity to utter such judgments—grounded, as I have said, in patience and clarity—is found in a thread that runs throughout the book. In this second type of correction, Prevot, without dismissing or negating the projects that he assesses in these ways, at intervals notes what, in authors who do not share his commitment to a broad and inclusive vision of Catholicism with a capital R, may or may not be useful to the Christian or Catholic theologian. The cumulative effect of these moments is that Prevot’s distinctive theological voice emerges at multiple levels, not only in what he says and how he says it, but in his gentle pressure on allowing Catholic theological reflection to find a kind of “orthodox” space that would recognize grace in places it might typically have been less likely to look. In addition to the lives of the blackened and poor people, especially women, who are the ultimate subjects of the book, this means also in the lives of queer people and in religious traditions and practices, often practiced by Black and brown people, that are too often in “orthodox” Christian theology dismissed as syncretic. Because of the combination of unimpeachable orthodoxy (except by those whose main interest is impeachment of the other as such) with a sureness that comes only from a life’s work of seeking obedience to God (an obedience that can, as in Prevot’s case, only be convincingly displayed indirectly), the kind of pressure Prevot is putting is more rather than less powerful.

This then brings us to the third kind of correction that Prevot offers, one found mainly but not exclusively in the first two parts of the book. The first part of the book winds a path through the oeuvres of influential Roman Catholic theologians Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Rahner, who have come to symbolize alternative Christian responses to the challenges of modernity, while the second part engages with representatives of other schools of thought, in particular the “mystical styles” of Michel Henry and Michel de Certeau and the tradition of misnamed French feminism associated with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. The third kind of correction can be approached through two primary lenses, one more and one somewhat less recognizable. The third kind of correction reproves the thinkers considered for their inattentiveness to matters of gender and race, primarily, or for their taking up and perpetuation of stereotypical, antiblack, antifeminist, antiqueer, or otherwise inadequate approaches to these matters even in the moments that they do engage with them. His gentle correction of how mestiza might be taken up in ways that cover up the violence by which it has come to be historically, as well as the ongoing imbrication of racialization and colorism, joins with reproofs of Rahner’s spurious gender-neutrality, Balthasar and Speyr’s sexism [but note the defense we consider at the end], Irigaray and Julia Kristeva’s inadequate attention to race (here I do wish he had mentioned Kristeva’s Islamophobia), and so on. Now, I hope my emphasis on Prevot’s corrective practices is not mistakenly heard as a description of this book as scolding. It is so very, very much the opposite, and it is for that reason that I’ve chosen to center, in the bulk of my remarks, these practices of correction.

We are in a time when—to some extent within the theological academy but certainly within the politically interested humanities and left-leaning political engagement in the United States—the issuing of reproofs has become something of a blood sport. As we pronounce and denounce, we make sure to emphasize that anything other than humble acceptance of correction and immediate change is indicative of a failed ethics. When we, for example, name practices as racist or in any way phobic, we expect that the targets of our reproofs will immediately and humbly accept our corrections and amend their ways. If they do not do so, that refusal circles around to validate the judgment as we originally uttered it. We get to be right, they get to be wrong, and the circle remains locked, not to be carefully untangled or otherwise opened up and unfurled in the direction of new possibilities. If we are asked whether our modalities of denunciation might perhaps land more effectively if we engaged more patiently, with more attentiveness to the form of our expression, we have our defense ready to hand: such a request is tone-policing. And, quite often, that is correct. To name a minor but hilarious example, my own work was once described by a white, cis, heterosexual male theologian as “undermining the struggle for gender justice in the church” because I refused to limit queer theological significance merely to anemic arguments for reluctant inclusion of married queers. But not every concern about how a reproof is delivered might affect the capacity of its object to respond is reducible to or even necessarily an example of tone-policing. It takes work and judgment (and there will always be disagreement in the details) to determine when a reproof serves more the self-satisfied justice of the utterer than any potential movement toward the better in the world in which the utterer seeks to intervene.

Prevot’s voice offers a model of another way, a way that clarifies for us what the gift of irenicism grounded in deep political, theological, and mystical convictions and practices might allow for: the delivery of reproofs that can be heard without the recipient feeling shamed in a way that leads to defensive aversion and resistance. I have sometimes recently thought of such reproofs imagistically as the quick but clean cut: the correction that hurts because its decisive clarity cannot be resisted, but that also heals because the cut is so sharp (I mean here clarity as in the sharpness and precision of the surgical knife) that it leaves no additional, jagged wound behind. I have learned what such reproofs enable because they have, on occasion, been given to me—once, for example, by Amoryah Shaye Armstrong regarding the one element of my first book that I regret, which is the way I read the relationship between the children of Hagar and Sarah with too heavy a focus on the God-world relation and far too little attention to the way the contrast between enslavement, adoption, and freedom has perpetuated not only anti-Semitic but anti-Black interpretive practices. It hurt to receive that correction, but it hurt cleanly and healthily, because the reproof was utterly direct, entirely irrefutable, and in the directness of its utterance, it gave evidence of care and an openness to ongoing dialogue and relationship and even possibly friendship.

I use so specific an example because it might illuminate how much it might matter that folks are sometimes corrected in the way Prevot does throughout the book. Prevot’s patient modality of appreciative but critical engagement illuminates that no matter how one might abstractly believe that folks ought to react to having their limitations and flaws pointed out, they—and here I mean we, and I—might not always react that way in practice! And perhaps we go home afterwards and think about it and resolve to do better in the long term and eventually a seed has been planted and so on and so forth, but very often we might react in ways where our defensiveness and anger (generated, perhaps, by a deep recognition that a real vulnerability or mistake has been made apparent, or perhaps not) end up locking us into the place from which a gentle, clear, mercilessly merciful correction might have more quickly or more deeply freed us. This is, in other words, a question of how people are given the opportunity to learn (also from our mistakes), to become better collectively, that we are, as any theology or politics worthy of the name must learn to believe and to insist, more together than we are apart. Or, as Prevot emphasizes, that mystical pursuits, the significance of the mysticism of ordinary life, must issue its fruits in the company of others.

Which brings us to the final, and the most important, part of the book. The last chapters of the book turn to the Americas, and specifically to the mysticisms of ordinary life found not only in theologians and theorists like Ada María Isasi-Díaz¹ and Gloria Anzaldúa, or in womanist authors like Alice Walker, or even in womanist theologians like Delores Williams and Shawn Copeland, but in what chapter 6 calls “the graced lives of black women” in a section on mysticism in the spiritual lives and practices of Black women preachers in the ante- and postbellum periods in the United States. The concluding chapters of the book suggest the global scope of his work while offering a concretely-located point of arrival for feminist-informed approaches to ordinary-life mysticism. Mysticism is typically charged with elitism and unspecificity. The former point represents an approach to mysticism that itself generates the elitism it pretends to critique through its focus on the heroic, almost gigantic aspects of mysticism, or on its most easily accessible (because canonized) proponents, while violently overwriting the complexity and reality of the ordinary lives within which mysticism might be pursued and is, as Prevot so convincingly shows, found. The latter threatens to collapse not only intellectual but historical specificity by assuming that traditions of bodily and meditative practice generated in a wide range of contexts (temporally and spatially) are effectively interchangeable and unified in their meaning, a temptation that Prevot’s gentle opening up of Catholic theological specificity avoids throughout.

Prevot argues for an approach to mysticism that offers the same complexity, but ultimately also a specific and utterly necessary priority, to the forms of mysticism found “in the testimonies of the dead” and primarily “for those compelled to live in the present and the future, those who must struggle with the hardheartedness of the world and seek God in its midst. To some extent it is for monks and vowed contemplatives who dedicate their lives to mystical pursuits, but it is also for the vast majority of human beings who do not have such formal vocations but may nevertheless experience the grace of divine union in their quotidian lives. It is for everyday people who, in their strangeness and singularities, are more or less resistant to socially constructed norms. . . . [I]t is an effort to remember the mysterious and all-important norm of incarnate love” (267). Prevot’s work is funded throughout—and it is impossible not to speculate that his generous clarity is also—by his belief in the immoderate love of a unitive God who seeks and offers the immoderate passion of a spousal relationship to a creation which lives in fragility and in dependence on that God.

To end with an invitation to collective reflection, Prevot’s deep reading and engagement with the various sources he considers models an example of a set of tactics, inviting further consideration of tactical strategies (which are never merely tactical). For those of us seeking to do transformative theological work within a theological academy and within universities that consistently and constantly leech the energy of transformative critiques for the purposes of their own self-legitimation, how do we think about how we engage with our various sources? What do we need to be doing, in conversations like this, to create (to the extent we can), the conditions of possibility in which our engagement with certain kinds of sources might not be taken as reassuring to the dominant schools in the academy that they do not need more than just a little bit of reading outside their typical canons, since we are giving them bridges to discourses (of race, gender, and/or sexuality) that they ought most fundamentally to find themselves put to the question by, as we find and have found ourselves put into question as well?

The only proper way to begin an engagement with Prevot’s achievement in The Mysticism of Ordinary Life is with praise. In particular, I want to praise Prevot’s talent for illuminating the sacred in a world that, for many, seems more self-assuredly disillusioned. And who could blame folks for the arrival of this disillusionment? After all, it’s easy to feel alone and adrift in a world like ours, marked as it is by brutality, corruption, and loneliness, buoyed only by the slim hope that our weapons, nonviolent or otherwise, will triumph over those of the other. Moreover, when viewed from the perspective of those on the underside of history—persons of color, queer people, the disenfranchised, the migrant, the poor—in other words, the crucified—it is more likely the case that such a hope drifts instead into a hopelessness. Gaza. Ukraine. Nouns substitute for arguments.

Those of us working in or around theological circles know that liberation theology has tried to provide a response to this bleak reality. We know, following thinkers like Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Cone, and others, that God is on the side of the oppressed. Among its many virtues, perhaps most significant is liberation theology’s ability to embed God’s own activity within otherwise purely secular political movements. God does not merely await the deaths of freedom fighters, runaway slaves, or the like, in the celestial beyond. Instead, God fights, and even dies, with them here.

Liberation theology’s convictions resonate strongly within The Mysticism of Ordinary Life. One can hear them most clearly in the final two chapters of the book, where Prevot’s Latina and Black interlocutors are self-consciously protagonists for liberation. But Prevot’s achievement goes further. For if God is on the side of the oppressed, as liberation theology maintains, then what does that accompaniment actually look like, not at the generalized level of political movements with which so many of us are familiar, but rather at the individual level, to this or to that individual person embedded in a world of oppressive forces? Prevot’s book, outlining the contours of the mystical life, is the answer to that question.

What seems practically unattainable for most of us—after all, many of us believe that mysticism, marked by the recounting of gender-bending ecstatic experiences of seven-step journeys to spiritual enlightenment, is safely guarded by the Middle Ages and the modern period—becomes democratized in Prevot’s hands. Mysticism, like grace, is available to everyone. What makes this particular form of grace mystical is its affective registration: “Grace, the loving activity of God ad extra,” Prevot writes, “would be distinctively mystical insofar as it draws the human being into some sort of experiential union, or at least profound intimacy, with God, and with other human and nonhuman creatures too, in this very life” (5).

Prevot engages many theological and philosophical giants on the road to connecting liberation theology to the mystical life, but I think that three figures in particular tower above the rest. The first is Michel de Certeau. Prevot engages Certeau’s work as part of a larger effort to highlight the work of postmodern philosophers who engage figures within Christian mystical tradition as source material. Each figure Prevot studies—and besides Certeau there are considerations of Michel Henry, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—offers something of value for Christian theologians, even as these philosophers may not possess any confessional affiliation with Christianity. Certeau’s engagement with Christian mysticism, for his part, is marked by mourning and distance from the God who is the mystics’ object. And there appears to be no going back. As Prevot writes, Certeau’s work is animated by the conviction that “he and the culture in which he lives are exiled from mystical theology . . . a dirge from a deprived outside” (131).

But a trace of this God, the wholly non-Other, remains in Certeau’s work. For Certeau finds in the Christian mystical tradition an affirmation of the ethical significance of alterity that he believes remains vital for our present moment. Accordingly, Prevot walks us through a number of the figures Certeau engages, including Jean-Joseph Surin and Meister Eckhart, remarking that, for Certeau, what remains of paramount importance is the way that each of them experiences otherness and how this otherness impacts the trajectory of their lives. The lesson for those of us on the other side of secular modernity is that we can engage the various norms and institutions within our world, especially the unjust ones, in a “mystical” way insofar as we respond to these norms and institutions, even while being embedded in them, in a way that reflects a longing for (an)other. As Prevot remarks, at the societal level, this longing for another world has been transferred from the Church to leftist, utopian politics (131).

This is just the opening to the possibility of God’s action in the world that Prevot finds theologically generative. Though not directly theorized by Certeau (though also not ruled out either), Prevot finds in Certeau’s foregrounding of otherness the possibility of encountering the incomprehensible God in a negative theological way in and through the voices of those who have been rendered other by the world in which they live. “Such desires and memories of the truly divine God,” Prevot remarks, “could conceivably be recognized as providing access to the grace of divine union even in largely secular milieus” (133).

This is not only a creative theological reading of Certeau’s psychoanalytically inflected philosophy. It is also a way to begin to connect liberation theology’s central thesis—that action for authentic liberation in the world is also a reflection of God’s action in the world—to the mystical tradition. When juxtaposed to Certeau’s thoroughly secular rendering of la mystique, Prevot’s theological hermeneutic provides the balance that liberation theologians typically celebrate. God’s non-competitive relationship to humanity allows for liberation of the oppressed to be seen through a completely secular lens while those same liberative acts also point toward the nearness of the Christian God in that struggle. God is the wholly non-Other providing illumination for the other world that belongs to the utopian imaginary of leftist politics.

But God does more than simply provide illumination for (an)other world imagined by liberative politics. This is where Prevot’s second towering figure emerges, Karl Rahner. Whereas Certeau relates mysticism to contemporary politics, Rahner relates mysticism to metaphysics. It therefore emerges as no accident that Prevot can divine in Certeau’s philosophy the presence of the hidden God, since Prevot knows that from Rahner’s notion of the supernatural existential—Rahner’s way of saying that God’s grace is embedded within human existence as such, not only within those who may have received graces associated with justification and regeneration—God’s presence to human beings is natural, quite literally. Designating Rahner’s theology a “cardiocentric mysticism” (59), Prevot argues successfully—and thrillingly successfully for those who might find Rahner’s theological prose impenetrable—that the place of encounter between God and human beings is the heart, this element of human existence that is “no mere part of the human, a place of passion and feelings. It is rather . . . a way of approaching [human] existence that gathers it together and reveals its potential openness to the divine” (59). From here, the drama of human existence before God commences, where our cooperation with God may lead us into ever-deeper forms of obedience to the movement of the Spirit following on the example of Jesus. “When we live our everyday lives in these Christic ways,” Prevot remarks of Rahner, “. . . then God is present with his liberating grace. Then we experience . . . the Holy Spirit of God” (50, quoting Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” 205–6).

What connects liberation theology to mystical theology is, as is widely attested, God’s abiding presence. But Prevot’s important clarification is to explain in greater detail the nature of that presence. It is that, following Rahner, this presence is a form of uncreated grace that sits at the very root—at the heart—of the human being. Every human being. And furthermore, because of this accessibility to the presence of God, this encounter with uncreated grace—what the mystics of old illustrated in such dynamic and striking ways—is not the achievement only of hermits and ascetics; it is potentially yours and mine. And when we bear the central conviction of liberation theology in mind, it is especially the potential achievement of those that are discarded by the oppressors of the world.

This places us at the threshold of the third and final figure, or more precisely, at the threshold of a final set of figures: the womanists of Prevot’s final chapter. As a whole, womanist thought meaningfully deepens the trajectory of Black liberation theology, precisely by adding important corrections to the hetero(sexist) depredations that continued to disempower Black people within Black liberationist thought. Prevot’s chapter unfolds as a symphony of praise to these womanists, so much so that Prevot is unafraid to declare that womanism “is a mysticism of ordinary life” (223, emphasis mine), thereby making the womanists the veritable heroes of Prevot’s book. Their lives exemplify walking with God, often without any formal theological training, but nevertheless with the tremendous weight of theological insight that comes from their manifestations of God’s nearness in their own actions. Among the figures he treats, Prevot recounts how three Black women—Zilpha Elaw, Jarena Lee, and Sojourner Truth—each demonstrate that nearness by accepting the divine calling from God to preach. Sister Henriette Delille, a Catholic counterpart, receives her call from God to establish a religious order, the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans. And Alice Walker, whose work enacts a critical distance from Christianity, populates her novels with characters who experience the transformative power of God, whom they are unafraid to name outside of, and sometimes in opposition to, established theological frameworks.

These womanists are not heroes simply because their lives are meaningfully mystical in the ordinary, democratized sense that Prevot argues throughout the work. They are heroes because their mystical lives are also the living embodiment of liberation theology. Sojourner Truth’s relationship with God, for example, prevents her from returning to slavery (236). Delille’s religious order provided resistance to the sexually exploitative practice of plaçage (239) in nineteenth-century New Orleans. And Walker’s fiction consistently features characters, for example Celie in The Color Purple, for whom the erotic provides important mystical-theological insight into the goodness of same-sex sexual relationships. Indeed, when Celie makes love to her lover, Shug, Celie remarks, “It feel like heaven” (258, quoting Walker, The Color Purple, 48).

The womanists bring Prevot’s mystical liberation theology into focus. As liberation theology maintains, God is with the oppressed in their struggle for freedom—so close as to be united to the core of their very being. Crucially, this closeness is such that God can meaningfully animate their struggle for freedom, even athematically. But even more than this, by arguing for this divine intimacy at the base of our existence, Prevot highlights that (political) liberation is only one result of this divine nearness. As such, this nearness goes beyond liberative political projects, suffusing the entirety of the creature’s being, ecstatically drawing the creature beyond themselves to a place of strength, even in circumstances where, following the theology of Howard Thurman, people find themselves with their “backs against the wall.” Now surely, many of these walls may be narrowly political, but they may take other forms as well, as demonstrated by the womanists’ continuing calls to overcome every obstacle, including those based in racism, classism, and (hetero)sexism.

But there is even more to Prevot’s mystical liberation theology. Not only may these walls be structural, they can also be deeply spiritual, as in the obstacles that manifest as sinful personal barriers to a deeper relationship with God. This is the significance of Prevot’s incorporation of Rahner’s mysticism, which, while always insistent on the supernatural existential, also maintains that the mystical life is also one of continual conversion and deeper insight into one’s own spiritual journey. “To the extent that ordinary life is characterized by disordered attachments,” Prevot writes, “Rahner is hardly approving of it. On the contrary, he argues that the gift of divine union both demands and enacts a decisive break with such attachments” (44). In this way, Prevot’s mystical liberation theology constitutes a dual achievement. His account renders mystical theology more liberative—that is, by providing the grounds for regarding intimacy not only as a spiritual reality but also as a political reality oriented toward destroying all systems of oppression. And his mystical liberation theology renders liberation theology more mystical, by providing a deeper metaphysical foundation for liberative work within the deep space of one’s heart, where one encounters God alone. “Mysticism,” Prevot writes, “is political but not only political. It is the abundance of eternity in time and place. It is an ever-greater love, which one can touch and embody but never capture” (270).

For this, as I said at the beginning, I can only respond in praise. As Prevot demonstrates powerfully, in all of our struggles God is with us, more than we may ever come to know.

Andrew Prevot’s The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism is a remarkable accomplishment in the study of Christian mystical theology. The author assembles a “chorus of voices” (Prevot 4) which creates a rich account of the possibilities for the experience of divine union not only in the interior lives of those who experience it but also for political struggles against multifaceted forms of oppression. Prevot reads each of his theological and philosophical sources carefully, critically, and with undeniable charity toward elaborating a picture of mysticism that reclaims it from strict association with what Rahner calls “parapsychological” experience. This careful yet courageous engagement of his sources allows Prevot to offer a fresh account of everyday mysticism’s politically liberative significance.

Mysticism, as Prevot specifies it in his work, is the grace of divine union. While there are experiences of divine union that manifest in extraordinary situations, mystical experiences more often take place in the context of ordinary life, including amid the everyday struggles against dehumanization that frame the lives of the Black and Brown women. It is mysticism’s very ordinariness, however, that raises important challenges for our collective understanding of its politically liberative implications. What is the relationship between ordinary mysticism and democratic norms? More specifically, can the often norm-defying experience of ordinary mysticism that Prevot describes collaborate with the norm-dependent demands of democratic life in a pluralistic society?

I argue that public art, especially community murals, provides a crucial site of mediation between ordinary mysticism and the cultivation of a democratic culture that can serve as a context for emancipatory politics. After engaging Prevot’s astute exploration of the tensions between normative and quotidian forms of “ordinary” experience, I will discuss the 2020 mural of Breonna Taylor painted by Denver-based muralists Thomas “Detour” Evans and Hiero Veiga as part of their #SprayTheirNames mural campaign in which they painted a series of murals celebrating the beautiful and ordinary lives of Black and Brown people killed by law enforcement agents. I contend that this mural simultaneously embodies the normative and quotidian dimensions of the ordinary teased out by Prevot toward comprehending the intervention of ordinary mysticism into the struggle against unjust policing practices that daily undermine the lives and dignity of Black and Brown people in the United States.

Ordinary Mysticism and Democratic Norms

What makes something ordinary?, asks Prevot. On one hand, ordinariness connotes “normal,” or conforming to a particular set of norms. On the other hand, ordinariness refers to the “quotidian,” which includes, as Prevot explains, “the at once narratable and non-narratable lives of embodied subjects as they unfold each day. Including both their individualized participation in norms and their more or less pronounced deviations from them” (Prevot 11). Prevot’s work reflects a clear preference for the language of the quotidian sense of the ordinary, which he describes as pointing “to an experience of freedom and joy in one’s living body, the power to resist oppressive social norms, the flexibility to live and think otherwise, and the creativity and self-expressivity of a life that ultimately cannot be controlled” (Prevot 11). At the same time, Prevot emphasizes the potency of “normativity,” which can function in both violent and liberative manners. He explains: “At its worst . . . [normativity] establishes standards to which some do not or cannot conform . . . yet existence without any norms whatsoever would be an impossible dream or nightmare. Even if it were achievable, such a condition of radical indeterminacy would offer little relief to the suffering masses whose quotidian lives are beset not only by normative constraints but also by chaotic forces within the self, within the social context, and within the natural world. Integral liberation cannot be achieved simply by means of a generalized anti-normative politics” (Prevot 12). Prevot’s articulation of these distinctive senses of the “ordinary” surfaces a practical question for mysticism in the life of democracy: Is it possible to engage with the graced experiences of everyday lives—including divine union in the midst of struggle—with the norm-dependent structures of democracy toward fostering a more just, equitable, and participatory society?

The ligaments between the mysticism described by Prevot and modern democracy might not seem immediately apparent. Whereas Prevot describes a mysticism that is ordinary but not necessarily normative, modern democracy is predicated on the establishment and practice of norms: civic participation, representative governance, diffusion of power, independent judiciaries, free speech, political opposition, independent journalism, acceptance of election outcomes. Derived from Enlightenment and liberal political philosophical reflections, political and ethical norms such as these seek to establish a structure for the exercise of human agency oriented toward building and sustaining laws and institutions responsible for maintaining democratic order.

The past decade of democratic crisis around the globe has revived interests in articulating and defending democratic norms among those who seek to preserve this political way of life. Societies around the globe have witnessed the devastating consequences of the erosion of democratic norms, including the resurgence of authoritarian politics and regimes that pose grave threats in the ordinary lives of those most vulnerable to exploitation. These anti-democratic movements seek to usurp norms not for the sake of fostering liberation but with the aim of implementing norms and structures that favor ruling parties who wish to establish dominance and maintain hierarchical orders.

Given the primary orientation of democratic norms in establishing and preserving political order, it is advisable to not conflate them with an adequate and comprehensive vision of justice that pursues the fullness of liberation of the Black and Brown women who serve as central players in Prevot’s theology of mysticism. Whereas norms in general are interested in “ordered, standardized, regulated, and well-governed,” Prevot argues that mysticism “supports only those norms that encourage holistic love, joy, and freedom.” Of mysticism, he writes, “It is not a receptor of any other norms and, in fact, emboldens its recipients to resist them whenever they become harmful or overly entrenched” (Prevot 268). If it is correct that democracy requires norms and mysticism defies them, then what is the basis for the relationship between the kinds of political resistances anchored in ordinary mystical experience and the common life of a democracy that implicates the ordinary lives of its participants? I turn now to the public artistic practices of community muralism to illustrate the potential for artwork to mediate between these distinctive senses of the ordinary.

Community Murals and the Politics of the Ordinary

In 2020, Denver-based muralists Detour and Hiero initiated the #SprayTheirNames campaign in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in the spring of that year. These murals depict what the artists call “oppressed, neglected, and silenced individuals”1 who have been killed by police violence and other forms of gun violence (such as white supremacist vigilante violence in the case of Arbery). These portrait murals depict their subjects in brilliant color and surrounded by glistening flowers, birds, or other images from nature. The murals also include theologically resonant images, colors, and themes. For example, Detour and Hiero’s mural of Breonna Taylor, located in a plaza at 29th and Walnut streets in Denver, Colorado, depicts her young, dewy face surrounded by red and pink roses, evoking Marian imagery and its associations with innocence, youth, and closeness to Jesus Christ. Likewise, their mural of George Floyd depicted rose stems encircling his head as though they were a crown of thorns.

In her book, If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice, theological ethicist Maureen O’Connell argues that community muralism is a “distinctively democratic expression of public art.”2 Her argument resonates with Detour’s reflections, posted on his social media, who emphasizes the crucial public dimension of his art form: “I notice how important street art is because it’s something that is in your face all the time. When you’re getting up and going to work or you’re coming home or you’re getting lunch or you’re on your jog or you’re walking to the local park, you’re seeing street art . . . this is a way for me to always showcase what’s important in the community and what the community actually looks like as well.”3 Publicly visible walls can be decorated with advertisements or painted with authoritarian propaganda, but community muralism is distinguished from other types of murals by the collaborative process, content, and context of the artwork. In this way, community muralism reflects the everyday, ordinary, quotidian emphasis of Prevot’s theology of mysticism.

Attending to the process, content, and context of community murals such as the ones painted by Detour and Hiero in the #SprayTheirNames project both reflect upon and embody the ordinary mysticism that Prevot unpacks in his work. The murals are aesthetically captivating, featuring saturated colors that are not easily missed as one moves through their daily routines in the streets of Denver. But the colors draw viewers’ attention to the portraits of those whose lives have been lost. Neither valorizing nor romanticizing the subjects, the murals remember each in their ordinariness. The mural of Breonna Taylor, for example, is based upon a selfie that was featured in media coverage of her murder. She looks into the camera, her face positioned at a flattering angle. For women of Ms. Taylor’s generation, selfies are indeed ordinary, quotidian. And yet, Detour’s mural helps us to see beneath the surface of this seemingly mundane form. It shows us a beautiful young Black woman with all the vibrancy of her young life and career. She is ordinary. And she is dazzlingly beautiful. Her life, violently and unjustly taken much too soon, was a site of beauty. Indeed, it was a site of graced union with God.

The Breonna Taylor mural illustrates the possibility for the ordinary in the quotidian sense to simultaneously critique unjust democratic practices—a conception of the “rule of law” that views Black bodies as collateral damage and as disposable by institutional structures that allege to protect them. At the same time, Detour and Hiero’s mural serves as a prophetic call for a new normal: one where a precious Black woman asleep in her own home can continue her beautiful, graced life. And it calls to account a society where democratic “normal” undermines democratic “norms,” a situation where, at a bare minimum, Black and Brown people can expect to live our lives without being murdered in our own beds in defense of a norm of injustice. Read in conversation with Prevot’s work, the #SprayTheirNames project invites us to articulate those norms that foster life, joy, and freedom in the context of our democracy.

Andrew Prevot’s recent monograph, The Mysticism of Ordinary Life, is no ordinary universe of ideas. It consists of three interconnected parts, each of which could be the theme of a whole monograph (in reality: each chapter could occasion a monograph). I am wholly impressed, and overwhelmed, by the range of authors and topics covered in the book. There are separate chapters on French phenomenologists, on Karl Rahner, on Balthasar, on French feminists, on mestizo thinkers, womanists, and theologians, on Black literary and theological voices and womanists. My single review here could not do justice to the vastly complicated nexus of academic literature debated in this volume.

Given my own interest in French phenomenology, I wish to focus on Part II, the so-called “postmodern” section of the book. While I am thoroughly provoked by Part II as a whole, and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in continental philosophy of religion, I do have a few queries and assessments that may rouse some discussion concerning basic definitions of the term “ordinary” in light of Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and other mystically-inclined Catholic phenomenologists. Here Prevot’s Catholic model of interdisciplinarity (25) remains, in my view, heavy on theology and light on philosophy.

Up front and from the outset Prevot is careful to define what sets of experiences correspond to “ordinary life.” The two terms’ inner tension is not lost on Prevot: mysticism of ordinary life is conventionally contrasted one with the other, so that we may arrange their relationship as binary, as if we could say mysticism versus ordinary life. It may have been the case that the holy man or the monk or the saint seconded himself (usually a masculine experience) to a post stationed away from or on the edge of the city lights, the civilized exchange and commerce of ordinary individuals. Dwelling in an attitude of deprivation and retreat, the monk discharges his holy acts somewhere in the desert or the forest—in a word, a spirituality of an otherworldly existence.

Prevot challenges this contrast or tension between the two types of subsistence. The ordinary type of subsisting in the world proves just as fertile to be a site of mystical experience as does the extraordinary life of the secluded monk. Prevot defines the ordinary as we might expect, which is pellucid: “In its broadest sense, this term points to universal conditions of finite existence such as temporality, corporeality, and relationality, which classical philosophical theology uses to distinguish creatures from their Creator” (10). Sometimes Prevot uses the word “quotidian” to invoke a series of images that express the inner logic of ordinary, usually bound up with the ordinary lives of oppressed peoples.

I have no problem whatsoever with the method and definition of “ordinary.” I suppose I would wonder why Prevot would decide to incorporate Michel Henry and other French phenomenologists (Lacoste as well) into this project? I would not call them postmodern (for fear of not knowing what the tired term really signals), unless we make “postmodern” refer to alterity and otherness (and hospitality to those features), then Levinas and Derrida and de Certeau (whom Prevot discusses at length) would be properly postmodern, not Henry—given his emphasis on a consistent thematization and positive evaluation of interiority, universality, transcendental immanence, and self-presence or auto-affection.

I think what question I should like to ask Prevot to explore is that of auto-affection, and how this might resemble something like the ordinary. I would not interpret this all-important term in the work of Michel Henry as a domain of ordinary or quotidian existence. For Prevot suggests that auto-affection, or pure immanence, opens up a site of living flesh. This is true, so far as the technical vocabulary proceeds to unfold in Henry’s oeuvre. However, just what Henry means by interior living flesh (synonymous with pure immanence or auto-affection) gets to the heart of my query.

Prevot writes that Henry “sings a hymn to immanence” (106). This is, of course, true on any reading of Henry’s works, from his Essence of Manifestation released in 1963 down to his final publication Words of Christ in 2002. Prevot, in my estimation, gives a more than adequate reading of Henry’s theme of auto-affection as immanence in light of its theological implications (again just in my estimation). Prevot writes lucidly that immanence in Henry is “the flesh feeling itself, and it is God. It is the union of the two. In some sense, it is their identity, their essential sameness” (108). Prevot continues with insightful commentary on Henry: “To claim that auto-affective life is the essence not only of the human being, and not only of the human being united with God, but also of God’s own internal reality is another sort of statement, which obscures the content of Christian mysticism and forces it into the procrustean bed of an ontologically interpreted phenomenal immanence” (110). And finally, another important quote from Prevot that shows a not uncritical grasp of Henry: “For Henry, this essence remains a dark mystery. It cannot be seen or understood (certainly not according to Kantian forms of sensibility or categories of understanding). But it can be intuited as that which feels. It is not equivalent to any particular sensation or emotion, or even to a set of internal faculties that would sense or be moved. It is the pure affectivity that makes any such affective capacities or experiences possible” (114).

Following from these excerpts from Prevot, a question ensues: what about pure interiority (which is non-temporal and pure presence in Henry, and one with the eternal self-presence of the Trinitarian God of Christianity) should evoke anything like ordinary or quotidian existence? My instinct is to claim that Henry’s work resembles the conventional category of “mystical” if we understand that term as the withdrawal from the world into an inner space of timeless union with God. Recall, a strict reading (perhaps a less strict reading is permissible?) of Henry wishes to be faithful to the style of givenness that auto-affection recommends: pure and uncompromising self-presence with no difference, no alterity, no temporal streaming, no world horizon, and ultimately, no finitude. Perhaps that is what I see to be at stake: the ordinary must attend consistently to the philosophical question of the world, and its ceaseless hetero-affection.

Lacoste, who makes an appearance in Prevot’s monograph, also talks of bracketing the world (a theological reduction in Note sur le temps or liturgical reduction in Expérience et absolu), in which the vigil symbolism at mysticism outside of ordinary commerce, where there is “neither a time of salaried work nor a time appropriate for leisure” (Experience and the Absolute, 80). Solitude, the night, extreme passivity, inaction, and the dismantling of the logic of the world constitute the chief elements of experience in Catholic phenomenology (am I being too narrow here in my hermeneutic of this trajectory?). For example, both Henry and Lacoste utilize the praxis of indifference as a counter to political, ethical, economic, and ordinary discourse. This recalls Prevot’s own use of the Ignatian vocabulary of Ignatian indiferencia (46, 214, 240, 262).

I wonder if this term (indiferencia) shares any overlap with conventional deployments of the contemplative practice of ascetical indifference to the world in its ordinary temporal streaming and spatial configuration. I imagine there is strong overlap. But I could be wrong. I wonder how Prevot matches the extreme passivity on display in Henry, Lacoste, and even in Marion (his saturated phenomenon completely de-centers the ego, reformulating experience into a muted passivity, or receptivity) to a politically conscious, gender-focused, and ethically conscious mysticism of the ordinary that he champions so beautifully in Part III of his excellent book. If, as Prevot notes, mysticism is not a flight from the world but a source of empowerment within it (232), then how do we square passive states of existence formed in a site independent of the world cultivated by the Catholic phenomenologists Prevot wishes to enlist and traffic in?

The Mysticism of Ordinary Life offers a postmodern Christian theology of mysticism that comes by way of assembly, appraisal, and advancement of diverse philosophical, theological, and cultural traditions. In many ways, Prevot writes in a way where the reader can witness and take part in his gathering of major figures within and outside the Catholic and ecumenical traditions like patches of a quilt in making or puzzle pieces. Imagine each of these puzzle pieces corresponding to its own expression of divine subjectivity—Catholic, the formerly Protestant, the European feminists, Latina mujeristas and Chicana feminists, Black feminists, womanist theologians, and nineteenth-century Black women evangelists are brought together in conversation to provide readers with a glimpse of what full communion might look like in postmodern thought.

These figures and their associated conceptual productions, though initially jigsawed in the realm of Christian theological and philosophical discourses due to their perceived incompatibilities, find a home together—a home built out of the brilliance of Prevot’s intellectual and devotional instincts, inclinations, and an interdisciplinary methodology.

Prevot’s instincts and inclinations work together to disclose and unfold a postmodern Christian theology of mysticism that is not beholden to escaping modernity, unapologetic in its Christian center yet both fearless and gracious in its openness to non-Christian witness and embodiment of divine mystery. I will then consider how these instincts are applied in his reflection on the relationship between mysticism, Blackness, and divine darkness that interlocks with the concept of mystical femininity which Prevot establishes as a critical theme in previous chapters. More specifically, how is this reflection on mysticism, Blackness, divine darkness, and mystical femininity accomplished through Prevot’s engagement of Alice Walker, M. Shawn Copeland, and nineteenth-century Black women evangelists? What are the strengths and subsequent queries that arise in Prevot’s engagement of these conversation partners and their source material, and what is exactly accomplished by placing emphasis on “the grace of divine union that is experienced by suffering, joyous, and free bodies”—an “experience of God’s incarnate love” despite and in spite of their context of social suffering?

By way of his own construal of Rahner’s “mysticism of ordinary life,” the seemingly unremarkable or “conditions of quotidian existence” are for Prevot yet subject to Being itself. If the patristic prioritization is correct whereby uncreated grace is revealed and locates itself in “this earthly life,” then the presence of God, being itself, is already immanent in a substantive way that makes the very experience of spiritual ascension possible. And whereas ontological oneness between uncreated and created grace is a presumption, therein is the promise of communion. The common connector shapes of the puzzle pieces themselves inclusive of the tabs, slots, knobs, and holes that these various perspectives on divine mystery reflect in their distinctive shape and texture can be apprehended as vital to the overall grid structure as reflective of a larger interlocking mechanism. This is how the jigsaw puzzle once completed becomes a work of iconography. The nature of the resemblance between Rahner, Balthasar, Speyr, Henry, Certeau, Irigaray, Kristeva, Isasi-Díaz, Anzaldúa, and Alice Walker, M. Shawn Copeland, Maria Stewart, and Zilpha Elaw is their individual and collective desire to imagine possibilities and new realities where these new possibilities and new realities are about being, thinking about being, modalities of being, transformation of being and beings, or in relation to Being itself.

It is in Prevot’s choice of thinkers who share differentiation yet resemblance and his fondness for the conjunction “Although” that he demonstrates his sharing in this imagination of possibilities and new realities through certain instincts as a Catholic philosophical theologian. Prevot uses this conjunction “Although” over 300 times in a text of 266 pages not to express his desire to connect mere words, phrases, and clauses but his methodological commitment to acknowledge complexity as is the function of dialectical thought. Prevot’s inclination toward not necessarily balancing but surely integrating opposing perspectives and reluctance to adopt dogmatic stances are examples of this recognition of complexity and nuance but not arbitrarily. By grounding his mystical theology in a doctrine of grace via ordinariness that privileges the “although,” he exploits the promise of the dialectical thought yet rejects the violence of its imposed structure of dichotomization. This is most poignantly expressed when Prevot states: “the quotidian sense of ordinariness points to an experience of freedom and joy in one’s living body, the power to resist oppressive social norms, the flexibility to live and think otherwise, and the creativity and self-expressivity of a life that ultimately cannot be controlled” (11).

Prevot’s mysticism of ordinary life centers “the grace of divine union” and affords him the opportunity to centralize, but for a moment, the differentiated experiences of Black women to emphasize that mystical experiences are not earned or only achieved through human effort but are, instead, gifts from an incarnate and loving God (13). This instinct of inclusivity places the mystical in the hands of God to argue that mysticism is unmerited divine encounter. The tensions between immanence and transcendence, the effable and the ineffable, the individual and the social-communal aspects of mystical experiences find some measure of resolution or co-abidance in the disavowal of the symbols of “whiteness, maleness, straightness, able-bodiedness, propertiedness” that co-opt the divine essence and sovereignty of the divine is also at the same time a denial of the omnipresence of the divine.

How do Prevot’s instincts address these issues? Prevot is faithful to the early thinkers and framers of our understanding of what Christian mysticism is via a return to the foreground in a doctrine of grace, and commitment to inclusivity to honor the sacred worth and dignity of abjected humanity causes Prevot to heed the wisdom of feminist and womanist troubling of the hermeneutics of sacrifice that tends to legitimate involuntary suffering as redemptive. At the same time, Prevot’s mysticism is also able to acknowledge the variation within mystical experiences to reflect more ethically in his appraisal of the more traditional elements taken to be particular to mystical experience such as transformation, sanctification, and experience of the supernatural.

Prevot’s mystical theology does not legitimate social suffering, but it is an “in spite of and despite” circumstance mystical theology whereby the relational emphasis of communion and love between humanity and God can be found among the disinherited Celie and the devout Teresa of Ávila. When Prevot argues that “Christian mystical theology . . . should . . . hold fast to the best characteristics of its own ancient traditions and . . . adapt to the changing conditions of quotidian existence,” he is calling for a hermeneutic within Christian mysticism that has the capacity to not only imagine but acknowledge that divine encounters are available to all if we could only pray Eckhart’s prayer of “God rid me of God” or the symbols that foreclose our recognition of the sacred mysteries of God’s immanence and transcendence.

In Prevot’s reflection on mysticism, Blackness, and the divine subjectivity of Black women’s embodiment to revisit Dionysius’s notion of divine darkness via Walker, Copeland, and Lorde provides an opportunity to consider the question: what does it mean to be divine in one’s creation and party to “all” yet socially constructed as “nothing”? The strength of placing emphasis on “the grace of divine union that is experienced by suffering, joyous, and free bodies”—this is an “experience of God’s incarnate love” despite and in spite of their context of social suffering—is that Prevot contributes to the consideration of womanism as its own kind of existentialism (9). In this respect, if existence as a human being means to have capacities as individuals and as communities that have come before what Heidegger talks about as essence, but one might refer to as “imposed essence.”

Prevot does not allow Alice Walker’s non-Christian orientation as a self-avowed earth worshiper to deter him in his commitment to reflect on womanism as an existentialism in which the ontics and the ontology of Black women’s existence can be valuable sources of theological reflection. Whether it is historical fictions of Alice Walker’s Meridian or The Color Purple, Morrison’s Beloved, or the flesh and blood historical protests of Maria Stewart and Zilpha Elaw’s experiences of divine darkness, Black feminists, cultural theorists, and womanists can appreciate Prevot’s perspective on mysticism as it furthers the work of evaluating and constructing theology that queries the realized and unrealized capacities within the lives of Black women. What are the ontics of Black women’s existence? What can Black women do and what do Black women do, individually and communally, in light of / in spite of the nexus of oppressions they face to survive and thrive?

And last, I share this final observation and a few questions. In consideration of this four-dimensional focus of marginalized human experience, the immanent and transcendence of Being itself within the world, one could argue that Prevot’s engagement of Black and womanist cultural and theological sources helps us consider Balthasar’s fourth aspect of his fourfold distinction between God, beings, being, and the world emergent of Aquinas’s distinction between the real and the rational. I wish to note this observation: womanism as a way of exploring the fourfold distinction that comprises theological anthropology provides a consummate glimpse of what full communion might look like in postmodern thought on mysticism.

While readers are equipped with a way to appreciate a take on mysticism that does not essentialize suffering, how can we appreciate Dionysius’s invocation of divine darkness without essentializing blackness which can be in a way by virtue of its dialectical correlation and formulation by whiteness can essentialize suffering? Prevot engages Copeland’s notion of the mystical body of Christ and her reflection on the consubstantial solidarity of Jesus’s body and the suffering bodies of Black women. Could Copeland’s notion of mystical-political discipleship help us conceptually mitigate the risk of essentializing blackness or essentializing suffering? Is the way out of this risk of essentializing blackness intimated in Prevot’s use and reference to blackness with a capital “B” as opposed to lowercase “b” which takes on a particular political signification? And if so, how might this political connotation direct us toward Copeland’s mystical-political discipleship which provides a pedagogical function for the Church on how to live more faithfully to the purpose of its creation?

The Church as the mystical body of Christ takes up the earthly ministry of Christ as the spiritual and mysterious presence of the one who was crucified yet defeated death. Copeland details that among the features of “mystical-political discipleship” is its distinctive commitment to the “in-breaking of the reign of God” despite the threat of state reprimands inclusive of the “cross as a condition” that Christ faced as a result of political “praxis of compassionate solidarity that he [Christ] inaugurated on behalf of the reign of God [that] disrupted social customs, religious practices, and conventions of authority and power” (181–83).