Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [32]
Prelude to a Shift
Social scientists have studied AA at the safest and most superficial level—the communal part of it—and concluded that having a supportive group to which one is accountable aids in your recovery. The same goes for church and book clubs. Astonishingly, no one had studied the spiritual element of AA—that is, until a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Mexico began posting fliers at AA meetings around Albuquerque. In this way, Alyssa Forcehimes conducted one of the most illuminating studies into spiritual experience, finding consistent themes before, during, and after the spiritual moment occurred.
Forcehimes is a beautiful, petite twenty-something whose groundbreaking research led her to spend untold hours interviewing recovering alcoholics about their spiritual transformations. She has an earnest way about her, and a knack for drawing out personal stories, which no doubt came in handy. I asked Forcehimes whether she noticed common themes before the transformation.
“They knew they were falling apart, and that they could not sustain this way of life anymore,” she said. “There was a brokenness. And then there was some sort of resolution, like, I have to do something. I have to do something different.”
The spiritual experiences themselves varied, she said.
“They ranged from a ‘struck by lightning’ experience to dreams that spoke so profoundly to the person that they woke up and changed. Some had an inner dialogue with God, others felt like the weight had been lifted—and they meant that physically, not figuratively.”
Seven out of ten people responded to that moment at a physiological level: they felt something change in their bodies. One out of five heard voices or music; and one out of seven had visions or saw a light. In these visceral transformations, I heard echoes of my modern-day mystics like Sophy Burnham and Susan Garren, and Bill Miller’s subjects in his book on “quantum change.” And like those people, Forcehimes’s addicts identified their encounter with the supernatural as the pivot point of their lives.
“They saw the world in a new way,” Forcehimes recalled. “Colors appeared different. The world appeared brighter. People appeared friend lier. Many of these people were on the brink of suicide. Prior to the experience, they really did not think that they would be around much longer. They were looking for a way out, and death seemed a possible solution. But after the experience, they were saying, ‘Gosh, this is what I’m here for, this is what I can do.’ So the experience was really powerful in that way.”
And they never used drugs or alcohol again.
Most Americans do not find themselves in Alicia’s position—an alcoholic mother with a cocaine-addicted husband and no money to feed her two small children. Most people are not bankrupt or suicidal or disabled from a terrible disease or accident. And yet, many people claim they have been bowled over by something they consider supernatural. For these people, the trauma that leads them to an encounter with God is softer—an aimlessness, or unexplainable hopelessness—the kind of despair that Sophy Burnham felt when she looked at her perfect life and said, Is this all there is?
A confession here: I have more than a clinical interest in understanding the prelude to dramatic spiritual experience. I want to know what happened to me.
And My Heart Was Strangely Warmed
I told you that I was assigned to write an article for the Los Angeles Times Magazine in June 1995. I did not tell you that at the time, my inner life was a sickening storm of misery. First, my career—always a bedrock of security and self-worth—tottered uncertainly. A year earlier, I had taken a leave from my eleven-year reporting career at The Christian Science Monitor for a fellowship at Yale Law School, and finally decided to leave the news business for good. I had received a book contract