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If a spiritual experience is real, she said, it will transform you, fling your worldview and priorities, your relationships and your personality, up in the air like a two-year-old hurling a deck of cards. It can make you a stranger to your friends, to your family, and to your own psyche. It was a disorientation I knew all too well. I remembered my own return to Washington after researching the Los Angeles Times story, when I, too, felt my world upended by a brief brush with something mystical. I remembered how my friends and even my family felt foreign, how I declined invitations to dinner so that I could stroll for hours at night, reveling in the unseen company of a God I had just discovered.

“What was it like coming home from Peru?” I asked.

“It was dreadful,” she said quietly.

“But your life in Washington was so rich,” I protested.

“Oh yeah, I’m a successful writer, I’m married to a successful journalist for The NewYork Times,” she conceded.“But that was ashes in my mouth. I could not bear it. It was physically painful to sit at a dinner party and listen to the shallowness of the conversation. I was so sensitized. I could hear what was going on underneath people’s conversations. This woman is telling a story at a dinner party in a brittle, gay, happy way, and underneath it, I can hear her heart breaking! I just wanted to shake people and say, Stop it. I can’t bear it!”

I persisted, prompted less by journalistic curiosity than by a need for guidance, affirmation perhaps. “A lot of people would say, ‘Yeah, that was a remarkable experience, but now I’m back in my real life in Washington, D.C., with my friends and we talk politics, we talk economics, we talk journalism.’ Don’t you think it’s easier to fit back in that way?”

“That’s true. Except that you’re forgetting one thing,” she said. “You’ve fallen in love.”

This is the paradox of the person who is tethered to earth but has touched the sky. The memory robs and enriches you, reveals your life to be drabber and more magical than you had imagined.

“Anyone knows, when you’re passionately in love everything is heightened,” Sophy explained.“And you can find yourself in this wonderful state, the state of being in love that so many saints talk about when they speak of being the ‘bride of God.’ We always think it’s metaphorical, but what it really means is that they’re in a perpetual state of being in love. And just the way you can’t scientifically measure being in love, although you know it’s a madness, and that surely it will end—it’s the same with a spiritual experience. It’s a madness and it will die down and be replaced by something else.”

Eventually, perhaps, but not without exacting its price. It is an imperious love. It usurps all rivals. It did for Sophy.

“I can remember my husband saying at some point, ‘How can I compete with God?’ ” she recalled. “And I said, ‘You can’t.’ ”

Sophy Burnham tried to make her marriage work. She had teenaged children, after all. But she had been transformed, as she put it, at a “cellular level”—to the core of her being, where she could think of little else but to pursue this God she had encountered on Machu Picchu. There was no turning back. It was as if the door back to a normal life had been locked from the other side, and she could only move forward. And like other modern-day mystics I interviewed, Sophy set about transforming her external life to match her new inner world.

The Burnhams divorced three years after Sophy’s trip to Machu Picchu. Her daughters were furious for several years, but Sophy says she has repaired those relationships. Her choices—her single-minded pursuit of God and her resulting singleness—is yet another reason her story terrifies me.

Had Sophy Burnham been lying in a brain-imaging machine at the time of her mystical experience, a neurologist might explain the incident like this: The part of Sophy’s brain that orients her in time and space became quiescent. Her spatial boundaries fell, creating