by James Martin
Fear is a natural reaction to the divine, to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, as the theologian Rudolf Otto says, the mystery that both fascinates and leaves us trembling.
Religious experiences are often dismissed—not out of doubt that they aren’t real, but out of fear that they are real after all.
Uncommon Longings
Also in the broad category of longing are more intense experiences. Sometimes we feel an almost mystical sense of longing for God, or having a connection to God, which can be triggered by unexpected circumstances.
Mysticism is often dismissed as a privileged experience for only the superholy. But mysticism is not confined to the lives of the saints. Nor does each mystical experience have to replicate exactly what the saints describe in their writings.
In her book Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, Ruth Burrows, a Carmelite nun, says bluntly that mysticism is not simply the province of the saints. “For what is the mystical life but God coming to do what we cannot do; God touching the depths of our being where man is reduced to his basic element?” Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit theologian, spoke of “everyday mysticism.”
What does it mean to have a mystical experience?
One definition is that a mystical experience is one where you feel filled with God’s presence in an intense and unmistakable way. Or you feel lifted up from the normal way of seeing things. Or you are overwhelmed with the sense of God in a way that seems to transcend your own understanding.
Needless to say, these experiences are hard to put into words. It’s the same as trying to describe the first time you fell in love, or held your newborn child in your arms, or saw the ocean for the first time.
During his time meditating in Manresa, Ignatius described experiencing the Trinity (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of Christian faith) as three keys that play one musical chord, distinct but unified. Sometimes people describe finding themselves close to tears, unable to contain the love or gratitude they feel. Recently, one young man described to me an experience of feeling almost as if he were a crystal vase with God’s love like water about to overflow the top of the vase. It was an experience of being “filled up,” he said.
While they may not be daily occurrences, mystical experiences are not as rare as some would believe. Ruth Burrows writes that they are “not the privileged way of the few.”
Such moments pop up with surprising frequency not only in the lives of everyday believers but also in modern literature. In his book Surprised by Joy, the British writer C. S. Lewis describes an experience he had when he was a boy.
As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to “enormous”) comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? . . . Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased.
That’s a good description of the desire for more. I don’t know what a currant bush looks like but I know what that desire feels like. It may be difficult to identify exactly what you want, but at heart, you long for the fulfillment of all your desires, which is God.
This is closely aligned with the feeling of awe, which Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel identified as a key way to meet God. “Awe . . . is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding. Awe is itself an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. . . . Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple.”
In my own life I have encountered these feelings a few times. Let me tell you about one.
When I was young, I used to ride my bike to school in the mornings and back home every afternoon. Sometimes I would ride to school with a boisterous group of friends from the neighborhood. We would start off early in the morning, carefully lining up all our bikes in front of a neighbor’s house, each jockeying for the lead position.
But some mornings I would ride to school by myself. There were few things I enjoyed more than sailing downhill through our neighborhood, down the clean sidewalks, past the newish early-1960s houses, beneath the leafy trees, under the orange morning sun, the wind whistling past my ears.
Closer to our school was a small concrete path that ran between two houses in our neighborhood; the school lay at the far end of the path, behind what seemed a vast tract of land. At the end of the path was a set of six steps, which meant that I had to dismount and push my big blue Schwinn up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs lay one of my favorite places in the world, the memory of which, though I am writing this over forty years later, uplifts me. It was a broad meadow, bordered on the left by tall oak trees and on the right by baseball fields. And in each season of the year it was beautiful.
On cold autumn mornings, clad in my corduroy jacket, I would pedal my bike over the bumpy dirt path through a meadow of crunchy brown leaves, desiccated grasses, and dried milkweed powdered in frost. In the winter, when I would not ride but walk to school, the field was often an open landscape of silent snow that rose wetly over my galoshes as my breath formed in cottony clouds before me.
But in the springtime the little meadow exploded with life. On those days, I felt as if I were biking through one of the science experiments we did in school. Fat grasshoppers jumped among the daisies and black-eyed Susans. Crickets hid in the grasses and among old leaves. Bees hummed above the Queen Anne’s lace and the tall purple and pink snapdragons. Cardinals and robins darted from branch to branch. The air was fresh, and the field was alive with creation.
One spring morning, when I was ten or eleven, I stopped to catch my breath in the middle of the field. The bike’s metal basket, packed with my schoolbooks, swung violently to one side, and I almost lost my homework to the grasshoppers. Standing astride my bike, I could see so much going on around me—so much color, so much activity, so much life.
Looking toward the school on the brow of the hill, I felt an overwhelming happiness. I felt so happy to be alive. And I felt a fantastic longing: to both possess and be a part of what was around me. I can still see myself standing in this meadow, surrounded by creation, more clearly than almost any other memory from childhood.
In such uncommon longings, hidden in plain sight in our lives, does God call us.
Exaltation
Similar to these longings are times that might be best described not as ineffable desires or strong connections, but times when one is lifted up or feels a sense of exaltation or happiness. Different from longing to know what it’s all about, here you are feeling that you are very close to, or about to meet, the object of your desire.
Here you feel the warm satisfaction of being near God. You are in the middle of a prayer, or are in the middle of a worship service, or are listening to a piece of music, and suddenly you feel overwhelmed by feelings of beauty or clarity. You are lifted up and desire more.
Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was an English Jesuit priest and poet renowned in the literary world for his creative use of language. In the religious world he is also renowned for his desire to find God in all things. In his poem Pied Beauty, Hopkins evinces a love of God, nature, and wordplay. It is a prayer of exaltation.
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles in all stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
One evening, the English poet W. H. Auden gathered together with his fellow teachers at the Downs School, when something unexpected happened to him. He describes it in the introduction to a book edited by Anne Fremantle called The Protestant Mystics:
One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had we any one of us a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly—because thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself. . . . My personal feelings toward them were unchanged—they were still colleagues, not intimate friends—but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it.
Auden seems almost to have met the desire of his heart, almost to have found exactly what he was looking for, but when he arrived at the place, he was just as quickly taken away from it. Such powerful experiences increase our appetite for a relationship with God in the future, even if we never again experience God’s presence in quite so clear a way.
Beauty as a passage to God is a similar experience, and it crops up in fiction almost as often as it does in real life. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, about a Catholic family in England in the 1920s and 1930s, one of the characters, Sebastian Flyte, a young aristocrat, confesses that he is drawn to the beautiful stories in the Gospels. His friend Charles Ryder, an agnostic, protests. One can’t, Charles says, believe in something simply because it’s lovely.
“But I do,” Sebastian says. “That’s how I believe.”
Clarity
There is a New Yorker cartoon that features a wizened, monkish-looking man hunched over a large book. He looks up and says to himself, “By God, for a minute there it suddenly all made sense!”
Sometimes we feel that we are tantalizingly close to understanding exactly what this world is about. On the day of my ordination, at a church in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I entered the back of the church a few hours before the Mass was to begin. The choir was rehearsing, and as I stood in the empty church, which would soon be filled with friends and family, I thought, This is right where I should be.
Feelings of clarity may be similar to feelings of exaltation. Indeed, many of the feelings we’re looking at may overlap. In some of the cases described in this chapter, we might also experience what Ignatius calls in the Spiritual Exercises “consolation without prior cause,” a sense of God’s communicating with us directly and giving us encouragement. “When the consolation is without a preceding cause there is no deception in it,” he writes, “since it is coming only from God our Lord.”
Isak Dinesen spoke of such clarity in her book Out of Africa. She writes about the “transporting pleasure” of being taken up in an airplane by her friend Denys Finch-Hatton. “You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel toward them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names.” Moviegoers will remember this scene from the 1985 film of the same name, in which Meryl Streep speaks lines from the following passage. Dinesen writes:
Every time that I have gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realised that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. “I see:” I have thought, “This was the idea. And now I understand everything.”
Desires to Follow
Desires to follow God are more explicit. It is not a desire for “I know not what” but for “I know exactly what.” And you may be able to identify it as the desire for God.
In the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises, spiritual directors often invite you to meditate on the gifts that God has given you, and then, as Ignatius suggests, on your own sinfulness. This is not as formulaic as it sounds. After spending time thinking about blessings in their lives, people often feel, in a sense, unworthy of what they have received. Not that they’re bad people. Rather, they ask, What have I done to deserve all this?
At this point in the Exercises your faults may come to the fore. As Bill Creed, a Jesuit spiritual director, once told me, “In the bright sunshine of God’s love, your shadows begin to emerge.”
This can lead to the realization that you are, as Jesuits say, a “loved sinner,” imperfect but loved by God. Typically this prompts gratitude, which leads to a desire to respond. You may feel so overwhelmed by God’s love for you, even in your “imperfect” state, that you want to say “Thank you! What can I do in return?”
For Christians this often takes the form of a desire to follow Christ. The response to the urge comes in the Second Week in the Exercises: a series of meditations on the life of Christ. In the Second Week, the desire is more explicit than one for “I know not what.” It is for a particular way of life, that is, following Christ.
You don’t have to be in the middle of the Spiritual Exercises for this kind of desire to manifest itself. You may be reading something about religion or spirituality and think, This is what I’ve always wanted, to follow this path. You may be sitting in a church service, hear about Jesus, and think, Why don’t I follow him? You may remember the way you felt about God as a child and think, What would happen if I returned to that path? Your desires are more formed in this case. You are able to identify clearly your desire to follow a specific path, or to follow God. This is another way that God calls us.
Desires for Holiness
An attraction to examples of holiness is another sign of the desire for God. This can be triggered in at least two ways: first, learning about holy people in the past; and second, meeting holy people today.
In the first case, one famous example of this experience is that of Ignatius. There he was lying on his sick bed, reading about the lives of the saints, when he started to think, in essence, Hey, I could do something like that. His vanity was attracted to their great deeds, but a more authentic part of himself was attracted to their holiness.
This is one way that God can call you to holiness—through a heartfelt attraction to holy men and women and a real desire to emulate their lives.
But holiness resides not only in canonized saints like Ignatius but also in the holy ones who walk among us—that includes the holy father who takes care of his young children, the holy daughter who attends to her aging parents, and the holy mother who works hard for her family. Nor does holiness mean perfection: the saints were always flawed, limited, human. Holiness always makes its home in humanity.
So we can be attracted to models of holiness both past and present. Learning about past examples of holiness and meeting holy people today often makes us want to be like them. Holiness in other people is naturally attractive, since it is one way that God attracts us to himself. Experiencing the attractiveness of sanctity today also enables us to understand why Jesus of Nazareth attracted great crowds of people everywhere he went. Holiness in others calls out to the holy parts of ourselves. “Deep calls to deep,” as Psalm 42:7 says.
This is something of what Marilynne Robinson, author of the novel Gilead, had in mind when she wrote in an article, “What I might call personal holiness is in fact openness to the perception of the holy, in existence itself and above all in one another.”
Vulnerability
Here’s an often misunderstood and misinterpreted statement: many people feel drawn to God in times of suffering.
During a serious illness, a family crisis, the loss of a job, or the death of a loved one, many people will say they
turn to God in new ways. More skeptical minds may chalk this up to desperation. The person, they say, has nowhere else to turn and so turns to God. God is seen in this light as a crutch for the foolish, a refuge for the superstitious.
But in general, we do not turn to God in suffering because we suddenly become irrational. Rather, God is able to reach us because our defenses are lowered. The barriers that we erected to keep out God—whether from pride or fear or lack of interest—are set aside, whether intentionally or unintentionally. We are not less rational. We are more open.
Remember my story of being on that operating table and realizing—with blinding clarity—my desire to be a priest? That is one reflection of this same phenomenon. The desire was always there, as was God’s call within that desire. But with my defenses lowered, it was much easier to see it.
When he was in his late fifties, my father lost a good job. After a long while, he found a new position but one that he found unsatisfying. As many people know, it is difficult to find work and start a new career later in life, at an age when many people are looking forward to retirement. It was hard for him and for my mother.
His job required an hour-long commute from our home in suburban Philadelphia. One dark night, in the parking lot of his office, far from home, my father had a dizzy spell, lost his balance, and fell. He ended up in the hospital. Tests showed what everyone feared: cancer. Cancer of the lungs had spread to his brain, which had caused the fall. (My father had been a heavy smoker for much of his life.)