Christian mysticism has diverse takes on the relationship between God and the soul with purification and reunion
the goal and the soul synonymous with the Christ Self or one''s true God-given nature. In Catholicism, saints and other beatific individuals are sometimes said to have received the Holy Spirit—an expansiveness of love in their souls that grants them miraculous, prophetic, or other transcendent abilities—and this belief is taken up in certain charismatic and evangelical faiths that seek out testaments to divine revelation through spontaneous speaking in tongues, faith healing, the casting out of demons, etc. However, the practice is generally unrelated to a disciplined mystical approach.
Mysticism, in a general sense, means “the aspiration of the soul to achieve unity with the Divine” (Cleve Gunnel, 1986: 16). Gunnel also states that there are “at least four different elements of mysticism that can be included in a novel” (ibidem: 31). He, first of all, refers to the fact that an author can include the mysticism as a character or a character that has mystical experience can be included. Secondly, there might occur revelations of the Divine; the mystical development might be rendered and, most essentially, the language used is very close related to the mystic elements. According to Gunnel “any writer who wants to include religion or mysticism in a novel must simultaneously fulfill a condition that all novel writers have to fulfill” (ibidem: 35): “the only thing which matters in fiction is the illusion of real experience…” (Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael Short, 1981: 152).