A Contemporary Mystical Experience?
The highlight of the weekend was the Saturday night communion service. With all one hundred or so of the participants present, we’d have a long, comfortable, folk-style service, with plenty of singing as we stood arm in arm, swaying to the music. Although I had participated in such acoustic-guitar-driven worship services before, this one seemed different, from the start. As we sang, and eventually shared the bread and wine of Holy Communion, it seemed to me as if the entire room began to glow. Not a physical glowing, as if someone had turned on additional lights, but a radiance, a presence—words fail to describe. Slowly, but suddenly and obviously, things were different. Only words associated with light seem to capture the experience. Luminous, resplendent, glowing. It’s as if everything—the walls of the room, the various people within it, the bread and the wine being passed from hand to hand—shimmered with a light that I could still perceive even when I closed my eyes. Call it energy, perhaps. It wasn’t just as if there were a nonphysical light, it felt as if a new kind of love or joy had become manifest for the first time ever. I felt loved like I never had before.It seemed to me as if every person in the room became radiant with a visibly miraculous glow. Once I noticed it, I felt simply carried along by this serenity and joy that I had never felt before. It wasn’t ecstasy, for I didn’t feel like I left my body; nor was it a vision, for physically things appeared just as they always had. It had nothing to do with drugs; indeed when at a later date I experimented with LSD or cocaine or magic mushrooms, those substances always seemed pale and physically jarring in comparison to the loveliness I had known that night in Massanetta. Nor was it any kind of psychological breakdown—it had no ill effect on me physically or emotionally, other than to leave me with a sense of serenity and a feeling of connection to the God whom we were worshipping that evening.
This supernatural energy was so gut-level real to me, and so far beyond anything I might have imagined or tried to concoct, that I thought something objectively miraculous had happened in the room, some sort of profound moment in which God chose to reveal himself. By “objective,” I mean I thought everyone must have experienced what I did. Honestly. It never occurred to me that this might have been just a subjective experience! But I soon discovered to my surprise—and somewhat dismay—that others hadn’t felt or seen anything at all unusual that evening. After the service ended, I said to two or three people, “Wasn’t that amazing?” to which they replied with a totally noncommittal “Uh-huh.” Soon I realized that, for some reason, I had been given a unique gift.
It happened at church camp, but this wasn’t about church. I’ve been to plenty of church-sponsored events both before and since, and never did the windows of eternity open like they did that evening. No, it was something far deeper, far more profound, than mere religion.
— from The Aspiring Mystic: Practical Steps
for Spiritual Seekers by Carl McColman.
Enjoyed your Myspace page and came here to look at what your all about. It’s all so very good and cool and I must admit I am envious of your spiritual journey as you seem to “have it all-together” whatever that means. I am very proud of you for writing as I have often aspired to do so but it seems that I must be in the right (for lack of better word) spirit to do so, and then of course when I look at what I have written later I feel so disconnected from it, and then the wolf barks at me and reminds me of how egocentric I am. Anyway enough of that, just wanted to say to keep on I will enjoy reading your work both on and off the net. Thanx
Tom.
August 23, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Carl,
What a beautiful experience and beautifully written as well. Like you, I, too, have had amazing experiences of God’s immense love, both for myself and others. I consider myself a mystic because of how many I have had and the fact that they are on-going. I was glas to see that you said on the Amazon. com site that “aspiring” was referring to the desire to be transformed by that love and joy. For we can’t “make” any mystical experience happen for it is simply a gift given by God. No amount of contemplative prayer guarantees such experiences. Do mystical experiences transform”? Yes and no. Yes, because we glimpse God’s reality permeating our universe and lives and so want to align ouselves with God. No, because we have free will and every moment we have to choose love over self-interest. Mystical moments give us an overwhelming desire to choose love and in that sense, we have an advantage over those who have never had that kind of mystical experience. Personally, I like to think of it as the sacrament of the present moment, an idea I once read about. Every moment is a chance to be united with God by consciously uniting our actions with those of Jesus and the saints and using their merits for an intention. That is the mystical body of Christ concept in action. You can “offer-up” joyful or sad moments, loving moments or frustrating ones, etc… That is one of the ways I conconcretely express my union with God. The other part of the idea of the sacramental moment is that you must leave enough time in your schedule for the unexpected. I might have a schedule in my mind for my day, but God sometimes places someone in my path and I need a little extra time to be with that person. If I am too tightly scheduled then I miss an opportunity to serve God by joyfully, patiently, and lovingly serving this person.
September 11, 2007 at 3:56 am
Pingback: The Spirituality of Not « The Website of Unknowing
carl, i understand. nancy brought up a point concerning time being in the present moment when one is caught up in god, not the future nor the past, we have to slow down, way down. granted, god gives us consolations, he also rewards our efforts. if a person is truly seeking god or truth and god knows pseudo,believe me, god will manifest himself.god loves to be found. don’t ever give up your search, wail at heaven if you must and eventually in his time he will come. god does not have favorites but he does run the show. if you are really looking for him, just pray and don’t give up. jesus will lead you to the father and his holy spirt will begin the renewing. this can be glorious and difficult. then comes the understanding of eternal life. your salvation must be worked out, your co-operation is necessary. judy
February 14, 2008 at 2:05 am
Pingback: (The Man Who Inspired) Timothy Leary is Dead « Anamchara • The Website of Unknowing
Hmmm..interesting site. I will explore it more.
Not quite sure how I ended up here today..maybe to see your book? The image on the cover caught my eye..some connections there. Now the subject of the book caught my interest.
On my “about” page I call myself a ~seeker~ and it has always been so..as long as I can remember. Sometimes I consider the seeking a curse, because it tends to consume my thoughts. :O
Thank you for sharing your experiences.
May 12, 2008 at 10:22 am
Having I’m sure met a few like me you’ll know that I am underwhelmed by such things. I’ve experienced such feelings religious types might call ‘divine grace’ or some such buzzword phrase, in my case I get them usually while alone and in natural surroundings, a feeling of serenity beyond the norm, a sense of place within all things and a peculiar ‘spiritual’ aspect to the light.
I’ve felt like this more times than I can recount. Yet I am an atheist. Right there goes the theory of the divine unless you are to believe God is more often following atheists around going ‘Hey, hey, hey! Come on, be spiritual!’ I don’t take drugs, I drink in moderation, I don’t embrace anything that would change the chemical make-up of my brain because I rely on it to be stable and filter true from false. I can hardly do that if I throw my constants out of whack.
I would say the experience of grace is an unfamiliar one simply because on the whole we don’t often find ourselves satisfying our hierarchy of needs (according to Maslow) beyond the first rung. this is either because we think too much or in our problem solving minds we conjure a whole plethora of perceived issues where there are none.
Away from the city and in a forest, content with sustenance, feeling unconscious of myself within a greater system I become free of my needs and existential dreads that plague modern man. The cliché of being at one with nature prevails and my perspective swings to one of almost Taoist simplicity. An animal at peace seeing the world as form and light, separate from the constrictive urgency of our human need to label and quantify.
This sense of being ‘one’ with something is akin to relinquishing all anxieties and fears to a greater force. Dangerously close to a Freudian analysis of a child being at peace in the arms of a parent, beyond all question of trust…With adults seeking in their lives all situations that can return them to this state of sublime equilibrium, no longer counting the seconds, tallying the costs or being caught in the hectic flux of day to day life.
It’s no wonder this can be experienced in varied ways, the situation required to create such a phenomenon would likely be highly subjective and related to mental state and connotations of environmental factors. It occurs for people of every religion and is called many things.
June 1, 2008 at 8:59 am
Laurie Anderson sang, “This is the time, and this is the record of the time.” We experience what we experience, and then we talk about it, which of necessity involves interpretation. Any experience can be interpreted in a reductionist or expansionist way. The choice is always ours. Hopefully, though, we can find ways to simply describe who we are, what we see and feel, what we experience, and what it means to us, and let the chips fall where they may.
Certainly, a Freudian or Skinnerian interpretation of my experience will be reductionist. No wonder anyone who holds such an interpretation would find it “underwhelming.”
As a longstanding student of mysticism, I’m always curious about how a mystical experience changes a person’s life, outlook, and ability to find joy and delight through love and service. I am inclined to believe that any so-called mystical or unitive experience that does not lead to a radical restructuring of one’s values and behavior probably is in itself a pretty underwhelming experience, as mystical experiences go.
Lordvore, your comment makes me think you have fallen prey to the pre/trans fallacy. If you’re not familiar with Ken Wilber’s work, it might be interesting for you to explore.
June 1, 2008 at 10:29 am
Interesting description.
I have sometimes noticed a beautiful, misty, dream-like quality to reality, especially after a longer period of meditation (i’ve only done up to about 35 minutes at a time) A feeling of some kind of great power, beauty, or holiness. Maybe it is tinged with a soft feeling, it is difficult to put words to it.
I have felt compassion sometimes after performing various cultivations on compassion, or practicing heart breathing, which is a breathing technique that alters the heartrate variability to increase its “coherence” (using biofeedback software to measure this coherence). I can’t tell if the love comes from God or from myself, though. I have felt this occasionally through prayer, too, although it is more subtle.
Interestingly enough, just visualizing compassion seems to increase heartrate variability, regardless of the breathing technique. By visualizing compassion, I mean imagining someone being compassionate to someone else, and sometimes also imagining compassion as a flame or energy inside you that is radiating outwards and gradually touching more and more people.
October 8, 2008 at 7:35 pm
`Hi. Yes, I have that experience all the time. I think of it as things being suffused with the Holy Spirit. God’s very presence, perhaps. There’s an extra, added quality like fizz and very bright light. I’m seeing it now across the field through my window. It’s been dreary all day but as I write this the field is flooded with fizzy sunlight.
Linda
April 13, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Hi Carl,
I just discovered your wonderful blog today, one day after I realized how much I needed to connect online with others who shared my passion for mysticism. As a “mystic in training” I’m largely self-taught and sincerely needing friends, information and guidance on how to steer my little boat towards a PhD that would focus on mystical experience and its possible application in the field of mental health.
Fourteen years ago I had a mystical experience with a colleague when I was completing my Master’s degree in Counselling Psychology here in Vancouver. Somehow I was able to convince my thesis supervisor, a number crunching academic, to let me write about the experience as a single case qualitative feminist study.
With no background in mystical studies and the most tenuous connection to Christianity, a faith I’d happily abandoned as a young teenager after being confirmed in the Anglican Church, I had little to draw on and no one in my faculty to guide my reading or thinking. I found Evelyn Underhill, William Stace, William James and the work of Ralph Hood who designed the Mysticism Scale.
I subsequently published my story as an article in Women and Therapy: A Feminist Quarterly that was also published as an edited collection of essays under the title More than a Mirror: How Clients Influence Therapist’s Lives. That was twelve years ago and I’ve hungered to deepen my studies ever since but life is complicated and instead I have dipped and dived into Buddhism, worked as a clinical counsellor and lived my life. In 2007 I ran back to church, literally, after listening to a one hour presentation by Duke University psychiatrist Dr. Harold Koenig who reported unbelievable benefits found in research exploring the impact of religion and spirituality on health. His output on this field is massive and, in my view, of particular relevance to people interested in mysticism because research on the experience itself is missing in this literature.
I have just returned from a one week intensive training at Duke University through the Duke Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, that Dr. Koenig taught along with a number of faculty members. It was a fantastic experience. There we were from all over the world, forty-one of us; psychiatrists, doctors, chaplains, priests, social workers, counsellors, and nurses, to talk about the issue of religion, spirituality and health, and to learn how to think about and do this research. Though mysticism was not on the menu, half a dozen people sidled up to me to indicate their keen interest in talking with me about it.
Earlier this summer I took a one week course at the Vancouver School of Theology called Monastics and Mystics: Through the Eyes of Thomas Merton. It was amazing to find part of the literature I read for this course turning up weeks later in my reading for the training at Duke. But there is so much, so much, so much, so much to read and figure out, and I do feel overwhelmed and quite alone in my journey.
In the meantime I have left the church again, just this spring. I cannot swallow it. I have indeed felt the joy, the brimming mystery, the wonder of communion, and my deep gratitude in the celebration. But I cannot find my way through the liturgy, the creed, the gender stuff, the smallness of the political issues raised at meetings and all rest of the mess. As for spiritual direction, I am having little success. Two people I approached in the past two years were highly recommended, educated scholars and teachers but they were discouragingly unaware of sensitive clinical practice and I felt patronized, not befriended. I do understand that I may be operating at a disadvantage as I am a seasoned counsellor myself who wants more of a reciprocal connection with a spiritual mentor
The fact that I would spend this time writing my story to a stranger out there in blog land when I should be writing a paper on Merton and how he was influenced by Julian of Norwich, is testament to my hunger for spiritual connection, and a spiritual home I can name. If you have made it this far Carl, I thank you very much for your kindness.
So, given what I have told you here today, please feel free to share any or none of it with your audience. I would be most grateful if you could make any general or specific suggestions on:
1. how best to direct my search on PhD programs that would allow me to focus my study on mystical experience and its practical applications in health care. By the way, you may not be aware that the University of Kent in the UK is currently offering an MA in mystical and spiritual experience.
2. who you might recommend I read or talk to as a starting point in my search for PhD programs that would be mysticism friendly in Canada, America or the UK.
3. whatever else you feel I should bear in mind.
4. how best to connect with others on the same path other than hitting the blogs
If you feel these questions would best be answered though a paid consultation with you, please let me know. I am very grateful to have found your excellent blog and will read it carefully start to finish as I am sure there is much I have to learn here.
Best to you and many thanks,
Catherine
September 6, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Thanks, Catherine. I’m sorry you’ve had such bad luck with spiritual direction. Probably your best bet would be trying to find a director who has a background and training similar to yourself, who is willing to explore the possibility of a “soul friendship” peer relationship. I’m sure they’re out there, but they may not be in your neighborhood. Check out http://www.sdiworld.org.
I would LOVE to read your paper on Merton and Julian, once it’s finished. Hint hint.
I’m sorry but I’m not really dialed in to what kind of PhD programs are out there. If you could get in touch with either Andrew Louth in the UK or Bernard McGinn in the USA, they might be able to help you. Check out http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/mcginn.shtml and http://www.dur.ac.uk/theology.religion/staff/?id=670
As for how best to connect with others: I know that church can be onerous at times, but for me it has remained the best networking tool. Also monasteries. Becoming a Benedictine Oblate, or a Lay Cistercian, or a member of the Fellowship of St. John, all could put you in touch with other contemplatives. And of course there’s Contemplative Outreach (www.contemplativeoutreach.org), the centering prayer organization. Unfortunately, 99% of the people you meet in religious settings will have a mythic/membership approach to religion. But it’s the other 1% who keep things interesting!
Best of luck to you, and thank you so much for reaching out. Please stay in touch.
Carl
September 8, 2009 at 5:42 am
Pingback: Charism « The Website of Unknowing
Pingback: Thirty-Three Years « The Website of Unknowing
I would just like to say to Catherine if she can look up the Taize site with its Podcasts, beautiful contemplative chants and a site for daily prayer. A Psalm, a Scriptue reading the Lord’s Prayer and Lovely Intercessory prayers she may find this a beautiful form of contemplative prayer. They even have the peal of the Bells for the call to Prayer. I am a Solitary Religious Sister living at home. I am catholic in an Ecumenical Order and have been to a few beautiful Taize retreats which has opened up a good way for me to pray. The Repetitive Chants are very reflective. You can buy a Song Book and DVD tapes and have some candles and Icons and have your own Contemplative Prayer Session at home and you may get a few friends to join you. I am very ill with sever chronic pain and find the Full Catholic Office too long for me to pray at times whereas, even if sick in bed i can play a CD, read one psalm and try to read a short piece of Gospel and Old Testament and it fills my soul to the fullest. I feel it may be a suitable form of Spiritual Practice for you if the Liturgical Church Services are just too heavy for you and send you running. Sometimes I can’t get to church, but have my 2 services a home just using the internet site with a candle and an Icon as a little Alter and once the Bells are pealing I know have a few minutes to recollect myself for the short prayer service. Often, one of the chants will stay with me for one or a few days as a Reflective way of praying even while doing some ironing or such. Taize is an Ecumenical Order and I am a Catholic member of an Ecumenical Order and the two fit together very well for me. Praying this may be a little help for you. I also have a Brilliant Spiritual Director, Ignation trained, a layperson in the church but what a treasure she is. The Blessings will come if you keep searching.
March 11, 2010 at 9:52 am
A short comment cannot do justice to all I wish I could say in response to ‘stumbling across’ your website, Carl, but I’ll try to succinctly convey what I feel is most important.
God is both ‘immanent’ within Creation and ‘transcendent’ beyond Creation. Because of His immanent presence in this beautiful material Universe He loves, almost anyone who is open to the beauty of nature can have a mystical experience of Divine Presence as ‘lordvore’ the atheist did, and yes ‘lordvore,’ God most definitely hopes mystical experience of His reality in this way will lead atheists to seek Him further! (Or, that’s what I think!) (smile)
I am impressed with lordvore’s comment in its entirety, and agree that one of the most destructive things you can ever do to yourself — body, mind or spirit — is to experiment with mind-altering drugs (LSD, etc.) Changing one’s body chemistry in this fashion makes one vulnerable to mental as well as spiritual deception, and the most deceptive experiences are those which mimic (and mock) genuine mystical experience.
From what I have discerned from years of study, there appears to be far more false spiritual experience than genuine mystical perception of God and His Will . . . which is very disturbing. I recently read a reference to a Christian theologian who came to believe by the end of his life that everyone who thinks he/she has a relationship with God actually has a relationship with Satan . . . and there may well be a lot truth in that observation. It reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story ‘Young Goodman Brown’ in which a devout Puritan man eventually sells his soul to the devil — but only after discovering he’s the only person in his village who hasn’t secretly done so already. The villagers continue to worship Jesus Christ in church each Sunday in the same way they always have, but spiritually it is a sham. A thought-provoking read.
Back to the issue of drug use and mysticism. It is my belief, and the belief of many like-minded others, that no one who has had a genuine mystical experience of God’s presence would decide thereafter to try drugs for any reason. God’s presence cleanses us, sets our feet on a path towards union with Him, and provides us with the strength to engage only in activities of His choosing . . . and doing drugs is not on that list. He needs us alert and observant in the world, not stoned, perpetually chilled out, or stupified by altered states of consciousness. Mystical awareness is not to be LESS present to one’s earthly surroundings, but MORE! Mysticism is an intensity of awareness and a fullness of perception, not trance states or ‘emptiness’ devoid of thought. (Which is why meditation practices which involve ‘emptying the mind’ are fraught with danger for those who have not already solidly devoted themselves to God, and are used extensively by cults and mind control gurus).
To be honest, Carl, the fact that you later tried LSD is one indicator amongst many that the supernatural experience of ‘glowing presence’ you describe in this blog post was not a genuine mystical experience, but, instead, a chimeric illusion. Deceptive supernatural presences — be they rogue elements within the collective unconscious, per Jung, or spirits acting in rebellion to God per classic Judeo-Christian belief — ABOUND in the world, and they LOVE to induce feel-good experiences of light, warmth and peace. These comforting experiences lull individuals into thinking God loves them just the way they are and there is no need for self-examination, the confession of sin, contrition, or attempts to conform to a higher standard of conduct and attitude. New Age literature is full of testimonies similar to the one you recount here, and none of them advance one’s spiritual evolution towards union with God.
Genuine prayer, then, is humble and honest self-examination of ourselves (conduct, thoughts, motives) in light of Jesus’ instruction that God expects us ‘to be perfect as He is perfect.’ Since self-examination cannot help but convict us of all the ways in which we do not measure up, it is humiliating and humbling and heartbreaking and painful . . . and people don’t want THAT, Carl! They don’t want to ‘go where the pain is’: they want to feel ‘enlightened’ and ‘at peace’ while enjoy the glow of a room of people radiating light!
Jesus’ Abba, the God who led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, is a definite Being with a personality and an agenda, and the type of mystical union which arises — over time — from personal relationship with God has nothing to do with blissful experiences of light and inner peace. It is about seeing the world through God’s eyes: the corruption of social institutions created by human beings living according to their own desires and plans; injustices which destroy the spirits of powerless human beings and cause the grossness which is destitution-level poverty; the mocking of God and His plan for the world by religions which distract us from Him through ritual and spiritual exercises (when Jesus said all we need is one-on-one dialogue/relationship with God).
There is great love and joy in mystical union, but there is also shattering pain and suffering, since God Himself suffers over the state of mankind’s depravity.
As a lover of God who grew up within Catholicism before turning to study of ‘the words in red’ in college at a Protestant bible church and then independent study of Scripture and mysticism as an adult, I’m deeply disturbed that Protestant Christianity believes all mystical experience is false when of course it is not, at all. But after years of reading account after account of ‘mystical experience’ which obviously does NOT originate with God (including the experiences William James wrote about in The Varieties of Religious Experience), I begin to understand how Protestants have come to the conclusion that mystical experience is dangerous and should be avoided.
I hope you will take what I say seriously enough to turn to God in prayer and ‘test the spirits,’ Carl. Although I am sure there are better sources, three books you might check out come to mind off the top of my head: Hank Hangegraff, Counterfeit Revival: Looking for God in All the Wrong Places; Johanna Michaelson, The Beautiful Face of Evil; and Reinhold Niebuhr, Children of Darkness, Children of Light. None of these books are about mysticism per se, but all give examples of how people who have spent a lifetime in pursuit of spiritual truth can nevertheless so easily become deceived by supernatural experiences which SEEM, at the time, beneficial and ‘true.’
Sincerely,
Diane Stranz
March 22, 2010 at 1:28 pm
Diane, thanks for your comment. I think you and I probably are in broad agreement about the necessity of submitting all “mystical experiences” to discernment and that such experiences are only worthwhile insofar as they lead to holiness and growth in Christlike love. However, I find a statement like “no one who has had a genuine mystical experience of God’s presence would decide thereafter to try drugs for any reason” to be quite problematic, and not only because it is aimed at me! Such a sweeping generalization seems dogmatic and metaphysical more than anything else. By that logic, Peter, having seen the Transfiguration first hand, would have been incapable of denying Christ. It suggests to me that you have a pretty strong Calvinist idea that grace and/or salvation is meted out only to the elect few, and is evidenced by their unfailing sinlessness ever after — with even the slightest peccadillo implying that the experience of purported grace must have been fraudulent. I’m sorry, but I think this kind of idea — that a genuine experience of God requires certain types of unfailing behavior permanently thereafter — suggests ultimately that God is miserly, unforgiving, and controlling. That’s simply not a God I can worship. Part of our glory in being human is our spectacular capability of making mistakes — even after a transformational experience. Now, having said all this on the theoretical level, the question still remains: was my experience “genuine” (i.e., from God), or “false” (i.e., from Satan). I think others will have to be the judge of that, and probably such judgment could not be passed until after I die. In the meantime, I have to confess to being rather more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty in all things — including mystical experience. Julian of Norwich admits to having doubt even in the midst of her mystical showings. In other words, I suspect there is no such thing as a “pure” mystical experience: they are all splendid and imperfect mixtures of God’s grace and our resistance to the same. With this in mind, it might be less useful to worry about how “true” or “false” any one experience is, and may make more sense to pay attention to the overall journey of faith that each of us must undergo — a journey that, as we all know, entails far more than just peak experiences.
March 22, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Pingback: “Counterfeit” Mysticism and Oppositional Consciousness « The Website of Unknowing
Beautiful and finally, a relate able story. Thank you for sharing. I feel much less alone than I did prior to finding your website.
March 24, 2010 at 6:46 pm
It seems to me that a true mystical experience is natures way of returning our emotions and thinking to a balanced and rational concept. It is very much like re-booting a computer that has become locked up (used to be called looping). This applies not only to the mental and emotional side of our selves but also to re-establishing our connection with what we think of as the real (physical) world. I am more than seventy years old, have lived a full life, have seen many things, have experienced many things, (some good some bad) but the one experience that I had over forty years ago that matches what many describe as a mystical experience is with-out a doubt the most profound that has come about in my life. Nothing else is even close.
I think the use of drugs to try to reach the ultimate point of life is like trying to paint all of nature with one color. It just comes far short of being real.
kester
May 8, 2010 at 11:41 pm
I have had so many mystical experiences in my life that I have few to share with (not drug related). I’ve searched in the Christian churches for places to feel understood, where I can worship my love of Christ, and fellowship..but always feel alone. I am a mother and a wife, and am looking for fellowship with others who have a mystical orientation with Christianity..where do I go? Where shall I find that sense of community? Any thoughts would be most appreciated..
June 30, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Kathy, thanks for your question. It’s an important one, and I can’t do it justice in a mere comment here. So please follow this link to see my response: Where Do I Go?
July 3, 2010 at 7:35 am
Hello. I discovered your blog while trying to find a name for my new blog, http://www.spiritualchristianity.net. I’ve posted nothing yet, astonished to find my voice is silent when speaking of God.
I have had a few mystical experiences, none of which I expected nor prayed for. These experiences, dreams and visions come exactly when they are needed.
I have found, however, they seem diminished when communicated verbally, and through the years I have learned to be most discriminating to whom I tell. I feel that my “pearls” are trod by “swine” as I am met with uncomprehending (or worse, envious) eyes.
Reading of your experience I see you encountered something similar My question is: How did you feel writing about it? And I’m wondering as well if you suffered dark attacks as you began to teach the way of unknowing.
October 2, 2010 at 11:53 pm
Ahh! This basically sums up my experience with spirituality — these moments where everything seems filled with holiness. There is no real way to describe it; everything is lovely. (I’m always TRYING to describe it — and that’s why I’m a writer. I realize I’ll never capture the essence of soul — but that is what I am blessed or cursed with always trying to do). Kudos to you for sharing your journey and gifts.
November 8, 2010 at 5:21 pm