Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground

Reviewed by Bob Dixon-Kolar

June 1, 2025

By Mirabai Starr. HarperOne, 2024. 240 pages. $26.99/hardcover; $13.99/eBook.

Books about integrating the Divine into our mundane lives are always welcome. A wonderful addition to this genre is Mirabai Starr’s insightful, heartening book Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground.

Starr, an acclaimed translator of sacred literature, public speaker, and teacher, excels at braiding together stories with spiritual purpose. One strand of her storytelling makes vivid the lives of renowned mystics of the East (the Buddha; Hazrat Inayat Khan; and the Hindu poet Mirabai, Starr’s namesake) and West (John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and Julian of Norwich). Another strand profiles what she calls the “ordinary extraordinary” mystics she has come to know. Yet another strand recounts her own unconventional, countercultural life: a life spent exploring the spiritual and the sensuous and, tragically, a life pierced by the death of her 14-year-old daughter in a car accident.

Her moving stories twine together to express her overall message: We all are mystics; we each have experienced the sacred “zillions” of times over the course of our everyday, ordinary lives. She asks, “Don’t you realize that you are one? That your fleeting tastes of unitive awareness qualify as mystical? That when unconditional mercy washes over you, the divine is remaking your heart?” Unfortunately, many of us make light of and soon lose sight of these transient mystical experiences. Her book teaches how to gaze into them and to nurture and extend them into acts of caring and service.

To help foster direct participation with the sacred, she closes each themed chapter with an experiential activity or a guided meditation. Her chapter titled “Connection: Building and Tending Beloved Community” introduces her version of metta, a widely practiced Buddhist expression of universal lovingkindness. The meditator engages in an expanding circle of heartfelt blessing, reciting first: “May I be well. May I be happy. May I be safe. May I be at peace.” This blessing then reaches out to a loved one: “May you be well . . . be happy . . . be safe . . . be at peace.” Next it reaches further to “someone you have trouble loving, a personal adversary or toxic public figure.” The blessing finally embraces all beings of the world. Starr asks readers to accept whatever feelings arise during this meditation and notes, “There is no right or wrong way to offer yourself to the broken world, starting with the one who is often the most difficult to love: yourself.” Each chapter concludes with a stimulating writing prompt, wherein we’re encouraged to approach writing as a spiritual practice; these range from open-ended (“What I really want is . . .”) to more specific (“Take a walk, find a point of focus, describe what you perceive in vivid detail”).

Starr’s Deity is multiform, indwelling, and all-pervasive: “My God is sometimes Goddess . . . embodying all the most life-giving qualities of both the feminine and the masculine . . . . My God both transcends anything I could conceive of and lives inside of everything I know and do and am. Even religion.”

Her writing style throughout Ordinary Mysticism is lush; lucid; funny; and conversational, even salty. Consider one example:

Like you, maybe, I set myself up with an array of preconceived notions about the kind of family I would like to make, and then beat the shit out of myself when things don’t work out the way I envisioned—when my children don’t treat me like the March girls treated Marmee in Little Women, when I don’t behave anything like I thought I would or should as a parent.

I highly recommend Starr’s book. It’s loving and uplifting. It’s also “irreverently reverent,” a phrase the author uses to describe herself. I kept placing her teachings in dialogue with writings on mysticism by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Quakers, including Quaker Strongholds (Caroline Emelia Stephen, 1891), Studies in Mystical Religion (Rufus Jones, 1909), and A Testament of Devotion (Thomas R. Kelly, 1941). Kelly, often called a Quaker mystic, encouraged Friends to be kind to themselves when they falter in their spiritual progress. When this inevitably happens, he advised, we “lose no time in self-recriminations, but breathe a silent prayer for forgiveness and begin again, just where you are.”

Starr offers similar encouragement: “All you have to do to walk the path of the ordinary mystic is to cultivate a gaze of wonder and step onto the road. Keep walking. Rest up, and walk again. Fall down, get up, walk on.” I believe everyday, ordinary Friends will find much spiritual wisdom here to enrich their own mystical lives.

Bob Dixon-Kolar is an emeritus professor of English. He and his family are members of Evanston (Ill.) Meeting.