Tales of an Urban Mystic
A Spiraling Memoir
- History & Biography
- Prayer & Spiritual Formation
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
What does it mean to live as a mystic in the kaleidoscope of everyday urban life? Acclaimed author Andrew Ramer, a modern-day prophet, opens the door to a lifetime of luminous encounters with the unseen. His stories shimmer not from a mountaintop monastery but from apartment buildings, city streets, and family kitchens in New York and Oakland. Walk beside Ramer through more than seventy years of extraordinary tales. From his first memories in the womb to intimate encounters with dead ancestors, angels, and God, his journey will awaken and transform you—while calling you deeper into your own spiritual life.
Endorsements (15)
“Eli Andrew Ramer has had many identities over the years: storyteller, angel-whisperer, channeler, prophet, sage. Here, he stands before us naked—yet surrounded by the magical beings, synchronicities, and spirits who have been his guides since before he was born. In these tales, the mundane mingles with the supernatural, the painful with the profound. I can say with certainty that you have never read a memoir like it.”
“A work of luminous honesty, self-knowledge, and wisdom. Ramer is a writer who manages to combine—in all his many books—earnestness and levity, a keen awareness of life’s joyous gifts and innumerable tragedies. Perhaps a prophet, certainly the author of luscious prose.”
“With humor and vulnerability, Andrew invites us into the terrain of his inner world—from the presence of a vanished twin to angelic visitations and moments of revelation sparked by bees, books, and subway rides. If you’ve ever longed for a story that makes space for your own truths, memories, and your shimmering path toward wholeness—this book is for you.”
“This poetic memoir is a song of invitation. To recall. To live. To dream. More than anything, it is an invitation to loosen the bounds of time and space that tether us. Andrew’s words delight the senses, evoke the imagination, and free the spirit. And the ending holds an even deeper invitation: to know ourselves as ‘Earth Healers,’ and to act from this most expansive self.”
“Lily Tomlin once pondered, ‘Why is it when we talk to God we’re said to be praying but when God talks to us we’re schizophrenic?’ Given his penchant for hearing voices, remembering places he’d never been, and having encounters with beings from other realities, Andrew Ramer wondered as a child if indeed he were crazy. Happily, he learned to channel his experiences in ways that allowed him to forge profound connections with kindred spirits. Tales of an Urban Mystic is a delicious exercise in life review, as Ramer introduces us to the people, places, realizations, and visitations that formed him and led him through his ‘amazing journey to Now.’”
“Mystical dreams, angels, reincarnations, radical faeries, ancestral visitations, spirit guides . . . all pop in and out of Andrew Ramer’s embodied, self-revelatory life story. Tales of an Urban Mystic is a captivating, heartfelt journey through the multidimensional life of a great writer and super cool human.”
“This book is an excellent example of how some of us reach a level of spirituality or understanding, yet not in the same way. Different journeys, without any reference points, other than showing up for life. I’ve known Eli Andrew Ramer for over three decades, and he’s an extraordinary example of what spirituality actually represents.”
“Professor Ramer is of what Dolores Cannon hails as ‘the First Wave,’ the vanguard, the pioneers, the bellwether. And though he is from the prosaic side of the uterus, I am deeply honored to proclaim him brother. Indeed, brother-in-arms, as we fling open the doors to that ineffable effulgence that has been quietly knocking since before time was time.”
“Eli Andrew Ramer has always been a visionary guide, weaving together deep spirituality, Jewish wisdom, and queer experience with rare grace. In Tales of an Urban Mystic, he opens his heart and his many lives to us, sharing his journey through the lands of faerie with candor, humor, and luminous insight. This memoir is a gift for anyone who has ever sought to reconcile their mystical experiences with their everyday lives, or their spiritual and sexual selves.”
““Here I am.” “I contain multitudes.” Echoing the words of Abraham and Walt Whitman, Ramer invites readers into his rich inner landscape. He’s a maggid, a teller of stories, and his tales of wonder, visitation and travel across space and time illuminate what it’s like to become those multitudes. His words are a gift and an offering. You, too, he reminds us, have this fullness, these possibilities, this holiness.”
“When you meet Eli Andrew Ramer, you won’t know what hit you. Did you fall in love or have a psychotic break? He has gotten inside your DNA and won’t take no for an answer. The adage ‘thou art that’ is truer than you wish. For despite your best efforts, you feel his heart beating in your chest. His eyes looking out your sockets. And you gasp in amazement: You have been met and seen!”
“Andrew Ramer has been seeing things that ‘aren’t there’ since he was in the womb. If you see things too, you must read this book. You probably won’t find that your visions are the same as his. But you’ll learn something powerful from his openness. Ramer’s message: Even when they are unsettling, they offer us not danger but revelation.”
“From the time baby Andy was wrapped in a yellow blanket he lived a life not quite in sync with the world. His willingness to flow with what came has allowed us all to benefit from those experiences. In Tales of an Urban Mystic he offers us the whole story, providing recognition to those who have shared a similar journey, and inspiration to those struggling with the twists and turns of fate.”
“Andrew Ramer takes us on his spectacular journey ‘over the threshold between times and worlds’ in Tales of an Urban Mystic. What permeates these multiple realities is Andrew’s boundless love and quest for meaning. He not only describes how he has tapped into his own potential, but as he implores us throughout the book, how ‘everyone . . . has a share in the transformation of human life upon this planet.”
“I love Andrew Ramer’s Tales of an Urban Mystic. Eli, as he is now called as an elder of the tribe, shares stories of his interior life—things people don’t usually share. Eli tells about the kinds of spiritual experiences I’ve always wanted to promote in my own work. We don’t see enough of this in gay culture, though so many of us have such rich interior lives. I was impressed with the storytelling—very easy reading.”
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