The Church Taught Me Morals. The Mystic Taught Me to Melt.
On Trading Behavior Management for Inner Alchemy
I was raised in a religion that taught me how to behave. Be nice. Don’t lie. Don’t sleep around. Don’t get angry. Don’t ask too many questions.
It gave me rules—beautiful, broken, useful in places, but hollow in others. Like scaffolding around a building that was never meant to remain unfinished.
It took me decades to realize that much of what I was given wasn’t formation. It was containment.
And then I met the mystics.
Not in person. In books. In breath. In breakdowns.
Not one of them said, “Just try harder.”
Every one of them said, “Go deeper.”
Behavior Control is Cheap Grace
The church I grew up in loved Jesus as a moral teacher. He was held up like a cosmic kindergarten cop, handing out gold stars to the compliant and warnings to the wild ones.
Morality was the goal. Obedience was the map. Sin management became our spirituality.
But something didn’t add up. People were behaving better—but not becoming whole. We learned to act nice, not to be free.
As Cynthia Bourgeault says, we traded the flaming center of the gospel for a baroque cathedral of behavior. We lost the presence and picked up performance. Instead of transformation, we were given templates.
The mystic calls bullshit.
Melting Isn’t a Metaphor
The mystic doesn’t ask you to improve. The mystic hands you a match.
They don't teach you to act like Christ. They dare you to become the kind of being that is Christ.
To melt is not to collapse—it’s to be liquified in love, until all the hardened parts of you begin to flow, reform, and radiate. This is not sentiment. This is the hard science of soul-work.
Jesus wasn’t running a moral improvement plan. He was starting a fire. His presence didn’t coax people into better habits. It cracked them open.
Bourgeault writes:
“What Jesus was really teaching was a complete transformation of consciousness. A meltdown, if you want to call it that, of our ordinary kind of castle of human personhood…”
That castle—the one built out of control, trauma, people-pleasing, and perfectionism? It wasn’t made to last. And thank God. Because under the rubble is something far more real: the mind of Christ already glowing in your depths.
Sacred Smackdown
The mystic doesn't care if you’re a good person. Not if it means you're asleep.
They’ll kick your ladder if it’s leaning against the wrong wall. They’ll expose your virtue if it’s just a defense mechanism. They’ll whisper questions that make your ego squirm.
Because here’s the secret:
The “self” you’ve worked so hard to polish is the exact thing that has to melt.
Bourgeault again:
“You must lose your life to find it… That radical laying down, which is at the heart of Christ’s message.”
And in case you think this means passivity or collapse, the mystics would like a word. What arises in that melted space isn’t some milquetoast pushover. It’s will. It’s presence. It’s the divine template reactivating from the inside out.
Presence Is the Point
You don’t melt once and call it done. This isn’t a Disney montage. It’s a practice. A re-centering. A thousand tiny deaths and one enormous yes.
Presence is not self-awareness on steroids. It’s your whole being tuned to something higher. It is the place where the world of the senses meets the world of the spirit. The moment when you remember: I am not my reactions. I am not my roles. I am.
As Bourgeault puts it:
“Presence is the point of intersection between the world of the senses and the world of the spirit.”
In that presence, you begin to sense the divine not as a doctrine, but as a deep current moving in you.
When the Inner Christ Awakens
Eventually, something shifts. It doesn’t come with trumpets. It often comes through tears, silence, or laughter you can’t explain.
But one day, you stop trying to behave.
And you start becoming.
You’re no longer interested in being “good.”
You want to be real.
The church taught me morals.
The mystic taught me to melt.
And in that molten center, I met the Christ within—
not the one in stained glass, but the one whose gaze cracked my ego open and whispered, “You’re already mine.”
So What Now?
If this fire is real, it will keep burning. But it doesn’t demand frenzy. It asks for attention.
The next time you feel your energy leaking—when the scrolls are endless, the small talk numbing, the old ego script taking over—don’t moralize. Don’t shame yourself.
Just pause.
Drop in.
Be here.
Practice the presence.
As Helminski writes, “Presence is our connection to that greater being to which we belong.” It’s not something you earn. It’s something you notice—beneath the noise, beneath the moral scorecard, beneath even your longing.
The mystic path doesn’t bypass the world. It just lets you see it with eyes that melt.
If this post unhinged your halo, poured some Presence in your posture, or made your inner heretic weep with joy—share it, toss a coin to your scribal renegade, or subscribe for more molten reflections from the margins.
One thing that struck me as I read is how we who were raised in religion and in the west, have a tendency to perform and aim for a destination or accomplishment. But the spiritual teachings of Jesus and the Magdalene are all about being. Hard to tick off on a checklist or earn a gold star for that.
I have looked at it as having nothing separate from God. Trying to release things large and small that I see as "mine ". But all that you leave (if it is good) is still there when shared.