After sitting with the Tarkovsky film Stalker on my mind for the past week I finally feel that I have formulated my ideas into a response. One thing that struck me was the Stalker’s despair at the end of the film. He deems that all he is useful for is bringing people to the room, he sees himself as a tool of God. At this moment, the Stalker has demonstrated that he has lost himself, his ego. Murtaza so eloquently defined Mysticism as less of a transcendence but more about losing yourself(your ego) to the divine will and that is exactly what the Stalker has done here. He does not believe in himself yet he believes in the greatness that comes from the room, despite losing all belief in himself he still manages to speak about the holiness and greatness that is the room. This reminds me of Paul, especially in 1 Corinthians 15:9-10 in which he states “For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.” This mental suffering expressed by Stalker also reminds me of Paul’s own suffering he describes as losses in Philippians 3:8-9, he has lost everything for the Lord therefore he was a subject of divine will just as Stalker was. These forms of suffering also remind me of the Stigmata of Saint Francis of Assisi. Which I found very profound as it describes him receiving the stigmata as him being gifted the wounds of Christ. What I am trying to get at is the significance of suffering in the journey of a mystic as a test of their faith in God and that is one of my key takeaways from the course so far and the Tarkovsky film Stalker.
In the past few weeks, I have had the writings of Augustine on my mind, specifically his writing presented on page 401 of The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism. There was one quote that stuck out to me on my initial read and it was, “[y]ou are called by the one who for your sake made you man not to be a man.” (Augustine). This quote speaks to me as it is about the beginning of the journey of a mystic. It is about the journey of not being a man, the journey of trying to get back to the way we were before the fall of man. God gave us the free will to make our own decisions and Adam had chosen to eat the fruit which is where we became man. The journey of a mystic is not one everyone can walk, it is not a feat many can “achieve” if any at all it is all up to the will of God. Rather the journey of a mystic is a journey of losing yourself to the divine will. Augustine refers to this divine will as a sort of adoption, “God wants to make you god-not by nature, as in the case of the One he gave birth to, but by his gift of adoption.” (Augustine). This reminds me of Romans 8:15 where Paul writes “[t]he Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’” What is really profound to me about these two pieces are the significance of the word adoption. From my understanding, the Ancient Roman process of adoption is one that was used to ensure the patriarchal lineage of a family, like how Augustus was the adopted son of Caesar. This makes Paul’s usage of the term interesting.
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