Fingerprints of God

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

  Undergirding the light was love, Llewellyn said, a physical love, the kind that Saint Teresa of Ávila experienced in what can only be called spiritual orgasms.

  “You long for God,” Llewellyn explained, “and if the spiritual love is awakened, that draws your attention closer and closer and closer to God, until finally you have these mystical experiences of union, in which the ego falls away and you are drawn into the ocean of love. There is no ‘you’ anymore, there is just divine love, which is what the mystic longs for.”

  So it was for Adam Zaremberg, a young Catholic man who had recently converted from Judaism. His first encounter with God was a visceral event. It was like downshifting from third gear to first: the world bucked with pent-up energy. One spring day in 1999, when he was a senior in high school, he spotted an underlying reality, and in the blink of an eye, the mundane was teeming with explosive energy

  “I just sat down on a bench, and suddenly I was able to see the world in a new way. Everything had just changed. It was like . . . all of creation emanating itself. It was just infinitely more itself. Like everything seemed magical and filled with energy... but it didn’t change the way anything looked. I came up with an analogy for it: it was like a grape squeezed to the popping brink.”

  “So it’s still in its same form,” I clarified, “but it’s bursting. . . .”

  “It’s bursting at the same time. It really is radical—everything changes. And it was accompanied by a very calm feeling, where you’re glad to be there, glad to be alive, not afraid of anything.”

  A Buddhist, a Muslim, and a Catholic have similar mystical experiences—it sounds like a bad joke, but it is cosmically accurate. I asked Bill Miller at the University of New Mexico if he had found any particular themes in the accounts of his “quantum changers.”

  “All the people who described the mystical type of experience described the same ‘Other,’ ” said Miller, who is a Presbyterian. “Never mind their religious upbringing—they were in the presence of the same thing.”

  “What is that ‘Other’?” I asked.

  “It’s profoundly loving and accepting beyond words. It doesn’t demand anything of you at the moment.You simply feel accepted as you are, and loved as you are, to the very depth of your being.”25

  Many of these people did view this “Other” through the lens of their faith. In their everyday spiritual practices, Arjun Patel, a Buddhist, saw Buddha’s eyes; Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi, communed with the Beloved; and Adam Zaremberg, a Catholic, visualized Christ. But none of them claimed his “God” as the only authentic God, nor did they begrudge anyone else a different view. They were like witnesses to the same God but from different angles.

  So prevalent was this nonreligious “Other” that I wondered why these people would remain content with a particular religion. I mused about this with Sophy Burnham, who had spent years delving into Asian religions and ended up where she started, in the Episcopal Church. I told her I was surprised by that.

  “So was I,” Sophy said.

  She explained that she thinks of spirituality as a wheel with spokes leading to the hub. “And each of the spokes is a path to God—is a religion, if you will, or a spiritual practice. And they will all take you to the direct experience of God. But you have to choose one and go all the way down it. If you dive down one and test it for a minute and you come back out and go along the circumference again, and dive down another, you’ll never reach the hub.”

  I must admit, I disliked the analogy. If truth be told, all this interfaith Kumbaya unnerved me. A decade earlier, when I had been spiritually adrift, it wasn’t a nondescript “Other” who slipped the rudder into place and breathed life into my faith. It was Christ who met me. Moreover, I liked the idea of God’s becoming a person and going to weddings. I liked the man who outargued the lawyers, who outpreached the rabbis, who declined the help of the governor of Jerusalem to stave off His own wrongful death, yet spared the life of a prostitute on the verge of legal execution.

  And what was I to do with Jesus’ words,“I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me”?26 Jesus did not fudge His words. His vision of the “Other” is no fuzzy thing, but a God with likes and dislikes, who has a personality and a plan.

  And yet, I had always squirmed when my fellow believers declared there is but one way to God. I had chafed at the assertion that a philanderer or an embezzler or a rapist who asked Jesus into his life would take the express train to heaven, while Mahatma Gandhi writhed in hell because he didn’t. For that matter, I have never been comfortable with heaven and hell, much less certain about their residents. The stories of my modern-day mystics were like a crowbar prying open my faith. I had opened a Pandora’s box.

  The Cost of Transformation

  These spiritual experiences, it seems to me, have the air of high-priced interior decorators on reality television shows: they arrive (unbidden), and immediately begin punching through walls and removing countertops. They haul away most of the furniture, including your favorite red leather chair, and what they deign to leave, they put in the basement. These experiences don’t ask, they simply move in, insisting you’ll love it when they’re done, and then with a brisk clap of the hands, they’re gone, leaving you stunned, panting, and utterly transformed.

  I could hear all of that in Susan Garren’s voice.

  In the summer of 2004, Susan was thirty-seven years old and living in Asheville, North Carolina. She had started her own real estate appraisal business, which was flourishing, and she had begun dating a handsome young doctor named Vince Gilmer. On July 5, the police arrested her beau for the murder of his father. (He was later convicted of first-degree murder.)

  Susan considered herself self-reliant: she managed her business and owned a house. She ran in a sophisticated circle of friends. A nervous breakdown was not in her makeup. But after Gilmer’s arrest, she retreated to her bed, traumatized.

  As she lay there, she said, one by one, her senses ceased to operate.

  “All of a sudden I realized I wasn’t able to see anymore.Then I couldn’t hear anything. But I could sense. And I heard a voice—well, I didn’t technically hear it. It was some sort of communication that I could understand. And it was just reassuring me that everything was okay. I felt very calm, very safe. The more I relaxed into it, the safer I felt.”

  “How would you define this voice or this experience?” I interrupted. “Is it God? Is it the universe? Is there a personality to it? Is it infinite mind?”

  “I call it the Source,” she said.“It’s the Source of all that is, and everything that encompasses it. It wasn’t the old man with a beard; it was some very powerful force able to communicate in extrasensory ways. But it was very loving, very comforting. Every time I think about it I begin to tear up. It’s absolutely the most powerful feeling I’ve ever experienced.”

  “How did it end?”

  “I came out the same way that I went into it. The first thing I could remember is I could hear the birds chirping in my yard. And then I was back in this consciousness, and I lay there for however long, thinking, Holy shit, what just happened?”

  She laughed, and then her tone grew serious. “I’ve changed on a cellular level,” she said. “I literally feel that I’m being rewired. I used to be quite the party girl. I was out all the time. I used to date for sport. And since that happened, I suddenly had no desire to live a superficial lifestyle. It was night and day—this sudden, absolute, quick change. Now a great day for me is playing in the yard, or having a great conversation with my friends at my house, or reading a great book. It completely changed my lifestyle.”

  Susan had always thought of herself as a spiritual seeker, interested in alternate beliefs.But she never pursued them much past flipping through a New Age magazine. Since that moment, however, she has been obsessed with quantum physics. “Where I thought about it before, now I’m pretty much consumed with it.”

  “Why does quantum physics interest y
ou?” I asked.

  “Quantum physics tells me that we’re much more connected than we realize.” I thought of Arjun’s connection with the grass.

  “What did your friends think of these changes?”

  “Well,” she drawled,“the friends I’ve known for fifteen, twenty years enjoy this deeper aspect. People who knew me only four or five years I don’t have as friends anymore. I have very few friends, and that is intentional. I just weed them out. I can sense people who have no depth. I don’t mean to sound rude, but after I changed, I wanted to be around others who had deeper philosophies, who were interested in exploring spirituality, who were interested in bettering their lives and empowering themselves. And if people weren’t interested in that, I didn’t want to be around it.”

  Just like Sophy Burnham. And just like me.

  The First Became Last and the Last Became First

  When I told Bill Miller at the University of New Mexico about my conversations with modern-day mystics, he merely nodded.

  “It’s a one-way door,” he said. “It’s not like you decide not to go back” to your previous lifestyle and priorities. “The experience people describe is: I just am different.”

  “How did your subjects’ values change?” I asked, referring to the people he interviewed for his book Quantum Change.

  “They were turned upside down,” he said.

  Miller explained that he had asked the fifty-five people in his study to look at a list of fifty values, and rank them according to what was most important before and after the mystical experience.

  “Essentially the things that were at the top of the hierarchy [before the experience] went to the bottom,” he said.“Often what was literally number one was number fifty, and vice versa: the first became last and the last became first.”

  Before the experience, men ranked their top personal values as: wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, and being respected (in that order). After the experience, their top values were: spirituality, personal peace, family, God’s will, and honesty.

  The women seemed to have fewer self-centered values than the men to start with, but even these shifted: from family, independence, career, fitting in, and attractiveness (before the mystical experience), to growth, self-esteem, spirituality, happiness, and generosity (afterward).

  Often these subterranean changes flowered into a new career or life course. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee became a Sufi mystic and author, for example, and Arjun Patel chose to counsel the dying because of the “light.”

  Sometimes these changes dislocated their lives. Usually, the transformed people felt a twinge of regret at losing their former life but found invariably that the spiritual adventure more than compensated. I felt sorrier for their family and friends, who became the “collateral damage” of the spiritual experience, scratching their heads helplessly as the person they thought they knew disappeared forever. Virtually every woman I interviewed, and several of the men, reported that their values and goals had veered so drastically away from their spouses’ that they eventually divorced. Asked why she and her husband (whom she still loves) parted ways, Sophy Burnham replied,“I wasn’t the person that he had married.”

  “Have you paid a price?” I asked Llewellyn, the Sufi mystic.

  He chuckled wryly. “Ah, dear, yes. There’s always a price. The price is yourself.”

  “Is it painful?”

  “There’s nothing more painful.You become incredibly vulnerable, you become incredibly naked. Nobody in their right mind would want to do it.”

  “Except you can’t help it.”

  “There you go,” Llewellyn said. “You don’t have a choice.”

  What I did not realize when I said good-bye to Llewellyn was that the stories of my mystics would give me a peek into the rest of my research. Their stories would contain elements that would prove central to an array of different spiritual experiences: the sense of union with all things and the universe; the loss of fear of death; the new definition of reality and of “God”; and profound personal transformation. I heard some or all of these descriptions from people who experienced emotional breakdown or mental dysfunction, who experimented with psychedelic drugs or meditation, who had near-death experiences. I didn’t know it then, but I was on my way to redefining for myself the nature of God and reality.

  But I am getting ahead of myself.

  Fortified by the insight that spiritual experience is not only everywhere but open to research, I was ready to tackle the questions that were driving my own quest. I began by reexamining the faith of my childhood in the light of science.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Biology of Belief

  MARY ANN BRADLEY SAT PERCHED on the living room sofa in her Nantucket home. Her eighty-five years had been kind to her. She always had been short, but these days barely topped five feet, with a perfect mane of silver hair and not a single wrinkle on her forehead. It was August 18, 2006, about ten in the morning. She had prepared for this moment, as evidenced by several pages of handwritten notes spread out on the coffee table before her. She was, and is, one of the dearest people in my life. And at this moment, Mom was serving as my guide to a religion that is, perhaps, a hundred years ahead of modern science—a religion that relies wholly on the power of thought to alter the body.

  “I have never known anything but Christian Science,” she began. “It’s been the guidance system of my life and has never let me down.”

  Mom comes from a family of Christian Scientists, and raised my brother and me in the faith. Her mother was a “practitioner,” the metaphysical equivalent of an emergency-room doctor. People called her with their problems. Granny prayed for them, and more often than not, a healing ensued.What most people know about Christian Scientists is that they do not take medicine—even vitamins—and that they rarely go to doctors.What most people do not know is that there is a method to this asceticism.

  Christian Science holds as a central premise that healing is a function of spiritual understanding; that matter and its conditions, including sin and disease, are “false beliefs”; and that prayer changes a person’s thought, which results in healing. An example drilled into me by my Sunday-school teachers: When a person looks at a dirty bathroom mirror, his reflection may be marred by smudge marks and toothpaste splatters; but the problem is with the mirror (the distorted image of reality) and not the person. In Christian Science, the way you clean the mirror—and restore the reflection—is to clean up your thinking.

  “Everything is thought in Christian Science,” Mom explained. “Everything is going on in your thinking. If you remove the ‘false beliefs’ which we can call error, evil, sickness, and replace those thoughts with the spiritual truth—the truth that man is made in the image and likeness of God—then the body responds. Since there is nothing broken in God, then there can be nothing broken in the image and likeness of God, man.”

  Okay, let me translate for those unfamiliar with theVictorian language of Christian Science, which was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the mid-nineteenth century. Christian Science prayer shares little with the popular conception of prayer. Rather than beseech an authoritative and exceedingly busy Judge to stop what He’s doing, listen to the plea, weigh the arguments, and then miraculously intervene, Christian Science appeals to spiritual principles, akin to working out a math problem. In this sense, Christian Science prayer is nearer to meditation than to petition: it is a mental discipline, one that claims that when you apply spiritual “laws,” you take control of your environment—your body, your employment status, your love life, your mood. Which does not mean that life proceeds perfectly or endlessly—not even Mary Baker Eddy cheated death—but that what you think directs how you experience the world. Or as my mom always says,“Your thinking is your experience.”

  I asked Mom for a concrete example.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you about my broken hand,” she offered. “I was engaged to be married and it was a Sunday afternoon. I was with my fiancé—your dad—and he was teas
ing me, and I hit his knee in response. I knew immediately something was wrong with my hand. So I asked him to take me home.

  “I started working in Christian Science,” she continued.“And this is the thought I worked with: Nothing can come into my human experience that I do not allow in my consciousness as a reality. And it was up to me to see that this broken bone—or whatever it was, at that point I didn’t know—was unreal. Just as the statement ‘Two plus two is five’ is erroneous, unreal. You take it out of your consciousness as a reality. You erase it, and then you substitute the truth.”

  “In this case, what was the truth?” I asked.

  “The truth was, that I could not have anything broken,” she said. “I was a spiritual idea of God, so there was nothing to be broken.”

  Then Mom grew quiet, overwhelmed by the memory of what came next. I had seen this cascade of emotion before, when I talked with Sophy Burnham, and Arjun Patel, and virtually all of the mystics I had interviewed.

  “I was sitting on my bed, about to go to work,” she recalled. She was reading the Christian Science textbook Science and Health when the tectonic plates of her reality shifted.

  “I had this great sense of light—of one thing flowing out of another, out of another, out of another, out of another, into eternity,” she said. “There was nothing but light. It’s all one. It’s all God. The all-ness of God, which is the oneness of God, and I was within that oneness. And I just sat there, and it didn’t last very long, but I’m quite convinced that that was when my hand was healed.”

  At the request of my father, who had not yet converted to Christian Science, my mother visited a doctor who X-rayed her hand two days later.

  “And the doctor came back and said, ‘Well, yes, the large bone in your right hand is broken,’ ” Mom recalled. “And he said, ‘What we usually do in cases like this when someone hasn’t gone to the doctor immediately is we rebreak it and reset it. But if you want that done, you’re going to have to go to another doctor. Because it’s perfectly set and it’s almost healed.’ ”