Excerpted from Dorothee Soelle: Essential Writings, Selected with an Introduction by Dianne L. Oliver (noted as EW); published by Orbis Books in 2006. 1. A Different Experience Power and Mysticism In this first section, the writings included largely focus on Soelle’s mystical vision of the nature of religious experience and her view of God as one who is vulnerable because the power of God is powerless love. “Different experience” encompasses Soelle’s understanding that religious experience does not look to obedience to dogmas or church teachings as its core, nor does it search for moments that separate us from the everyday world. She rejects the focus on a supernatural God who is separate from the world and seeks to pull us out of the world and instead turns to a mystical vision of a God who encompasses the whole world and into whom we sink as the very ground of our existence in the world. For Soelle, such a vision of God pushes us to recognize God in the world, embracing all that is and present in everything. This also means that we no longer speak of God “out there,” but as that which is integral and connected to every single aspect of our life in the world. Nothing is secular for Soelle, for the God who is radically incarnated in our midst sacralizes everything. Mysticism is not something for the chosen few, but that which needs to be democratized so that all can see that of God which surrounds them and all can have the opportunity to express such experiences. God is involved in our lives, our loves, our work, and our politics. This involvement is not in the form of commands from on high that provide rules for us to obey, nor in the control of every event so that everything is willed by God, nor in the insistence on using the word “God” in public places, but in the form of the very interdependent web of life through which all of creation is connected. Power is revisioned as empowerment, so that good power is always shared between God and creation rather than used by an omnipotent God as a mechanism of control. Thus religious experience is about our connectedness to the very ground of our existence, our relationship with God who is bound into the web of life.
EXPERIENCE, NOT AUTHORITY The best definition of mysticism, the classical definition, is a cognitio Dei experimentalis, a perception of God through experience. This means an awareness of God gained not through books, not through the authority of religious teachings, not through the so-called priestly office but through the life experiences of human beings, experiences that are articulated and reflected upon in religious language but that first come to people in what they encounter in life, independent of the church’s institutions. Mysticism can occur, then, in all religions; and it almost always clashes head-on with the hierarchy dominant in its time. It is an experience of God, an experience of being one with God, an experience that God bestows on people. It is a call that people hear or perceive, an experience that breaks through the existing limitations of human comprehension, feeling, and reflection. This element of shattering old limitations is crucial to the mystical experience, and it is responsible for the difficulty of communicating mystical experience: It is impossible to speak