Books of heightened interest tend to go unnoticed in Cuba. This is the case of Chapters of a love story. Mystics of love , by the Reverend Adolfo Ham Reyes (1931), priest of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Cuba, Ham is also a man linked to revolutionary ecumenism, for years he has linked faith in Christ with the Cuban Revolution, for which he has had a work of social praxis beyond the scope of his religious congregation. A man with a broad spirit and such an intense thirst for wisdom that under the wing of an already established teaching profession, even facing his 90th anniversary, he continues to search for information, assimilate and discuss as if he were a young eager researcher.

In about one hundred and seventy pages of net texts, Ham applies two expository methods for his purpose: the reference and quotations of other authors, his own reflection and the direct source of the mystics he deals with, namely: Saint Rabbi of Basra ("the servant of love ”), Jalal-al-DinRumi (“ the astrolabe of divine love ”), SantKabir (“ the weaver of sublime love ”), Saint Teresa of Jesus (“ the love that gives value to all things ”), Saint Juan de la Cruz ("the flame of love"), Jacob Boehme ("the apostle of love"), Rabindranath Tagore ("the joy and beauty of love"), Simone Well ("love as full solidarity"), and Ernesto Cardenal (radical and revolutionary love). How much erudition treated as to walk at home, as to immerse ourselves in the matrix ideas, motives of these various mystics, almost all poets in varying degrees,

In the presentation of the book, the Reverend Raimundo García Franco thanks Ham for this book, which, according to the back cover note, is: "aimed at evangelical readers who are unaware of the subject." It is edited by the Christian Center for Reflection and Dialogue, in Cárdenas, Matanzas, but the book goes far beyond the use of faith, ecclesial or for seminarians. Ham explains what he supposes "Reason for being of a book" as reading for friends, "preferably of evangelical formation", but for the uninitiated and poetry readers he also offers a singular work. To the neophytes he explains "What is mysticism?", But then the content of the book is a walk through the world of faith and revelation, of mystical imagination and the adoration that this implies, and for every reader it clarifies which is "Love in mysticism." From the first question he summarizes, the mystique is: «a) an intensification of consciousness beyond the normal threshold; b) a sense of certainty; c) clarity; d) ineffability; and sometimes e) a change in personality ”(p. 15). With the second question, he weaves a brief treatise that covers the history of mysticism in its fundamental texts, its relationship with theopoetics and leads to a section on "Mysticism and action", not only seeing it from the contemplative profile that it carries.

She calls Rabiá al-Adawiyya al-Quasiyya, the Servant of Love, a virtuous woman par excellence in the world of Sufism and who had already left the trail of her work in 13th century Europe. The fame of his miracles reaches our days. Their divine marriage was conscious, and it was about love for love itself, with no other search than a beautiful disinterest that anticipated the saint of Avila when she affirmed: «Oh God, if I adore you for fear of hell, burn me in hell, and If I adore you for the hope of your paradise, exclude me from paradise, but if I adore you for yourself, do not deprive me of your eternal beauty ».

Another great Islamist, from the world of Sufism, was Jalal.al-Din Rumi, whom Ham calls "Astrolabe of Divine Love." He had a powerful influence on Sufi poetry, but Rumi was a universal poet who exceeded the thirteenth century in which he lived. In his famous "Religious Controversy" he says in a beautiful parable: "The long windings of the path, the mountain passes, the precipice, the bandits that infect it, herald the greatness of the traveler's goal." The goal, the divine encounter, is glorious, but the path to get there is arduous during life, difficult, full of obstacles and dangerous steps. Rumi also supported the idea of ​​"love for love", with no other interest than love itself, because God is love even though He is beyond love itself. Within Ham's book, it is the longest chapter and the one that includes the largest number of original texts,

Kabir is another of the Asian mystics who had a notable influence among Christians but especially Hinduism. SantKabir was, according to Ham, "the weaver of Sublime Love." It seems that he was an oral poet, but much of his creations were transcribed because many were created to be memorized. Regarding love, he said: "love is what makes us see beyond / and beyond beyond." For him all creation is music. Ham cites numerous ideas and verses from this great mystic who came to influence Gandhi and Rabindranth Tagore.

The brief and in-depth studies of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross are a real introduction, a wake-up call from the much-studied Spanish saints and mystics. Ham works here in the face of an overwhelming bibliography and achieves a synthesis typical of a professor in his duties. The Teresian "only God is enough" and the passionate "dark night" of the holy thinker, show the vital rhythm of the love of both, embraced in the book of Ham like two fires of the approach to their God, for Whom their soul is open. The spiritual Canticle is one of the most beautiful encounters with the divine in universal literature.

Perhaps less well known in the vicissitudes of mysticism Jacob Boehme, housed between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was an enlightened man of his time, linked to the knowledge of his time and to Christian philosophy. It sustained the material renunciation, the step towards God by overcoming the self, the redemptive death for the encounter with the living God.

After "leaving" in the book of the Near East, crossing Spain and passing through Germany, Ham returns us to Asia with Rabindranath Tagore, extraordinary poet, about whom he describes his theory of love and its closeness of thought to the Divine. His work in prose and verse has been widely disseminated in the West, which is why he is perhaps the best known of the mystics that Adolfo Ham presents in his book. In an increasingly polluted world, Tagore is an ecological poet, an author who sees in love for the Earth a way of worshiping God. It seeks beauty through the work of art, which exalts the human being to the rank of creator and supports a capital idea: evil is imperfection.

A strange but enlightened woman, Simone Well, a kind of prophet of justice within social life who loves the dispossessed, who wrote that: «The revolution implies not simply an economic and political transformation, but also a technical and cultural transformation. ». He did not believe that any people were particularly "chosen" by God, but that all of humanity were twinned in His radiance. A God-not-present leaves human beings free to act, but “His compassion is the visible presence of God here below.

Adolfo Ham closes his book with a mystic who may seem unsuspected for much: Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan Trappist monk who became a great poet and a sincere revolutionary, which is why he found suspicion from the Vatican. Cardenal thought that a true mystic faces social praxis, and not only meditation, he joined the fight for the construction of a more just society, and is perhaps the only one of the mystics who joined power in a square ministerial (culture) within a revolutionary government. For him nature is like a shadow of God. Cardenal, who died almost a centennial, did not reach the great prizes that we human beings invent to exalt our own species ego.

And Adolfo Ham is pleased in his book to exalt the least explored path of mysticism: that of its influence on social transformation. For this, the author resorts to the constant appointments of experts in mysticism and of the mystics themselves that he underlines. So he obtained a scholarly book that reads as a lesson in faith, as a popular science text, or as a work that wants communication with all possible readers, and not just with the world of evangelized men and women. Rich book, which puts scholarship to the reading of our eyes, Chapters of a love story. Mystics of love offered me a pleasant reading, and made me listen to the voice of a wise man behind its pages.