Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [38]
The spiritual wanderlust, it seemed, was passed down from one generation to another. For Don, the search culminated one afternoon in 1980, after lunch, when he was driving along the freeway near Board-man, Oregon, in his 1976 Datsun. It was ugly landscape, rocks and dirt. Don was an itinerant musician and activist. He had recently completed a three-week tour of Oregon high schools, a thankless job where he had been playing his guitar and lecturing about peace and justice to groups of cynical teenagers. He was thirty-three years old, married, underpaid, and on a perpetual search for spiritual answers. At that sweaty, fretful moment, his future seemed as bleak as the landscape.
“I was hot and tired and bored. And I was going,‘Oh, man, I’ve got another four-hour drive to get home.’ I was just thinking, maybe I should get a job with benefits and a regular paycheck. I was feeling really discouraged. And suddenly this thing just happened.”
Don poured these musings into a handheld tape recorder.When he traveled, he made audio letters for his friends, which back in 1980 was cheaper than a long-distance phone call. Gradually, the brown ocean of earth before him began to glow, as if someone had turned up the “brightness” knob on his television set. Then, in an instant, the world exploded into pixels of light. His hands began to shake, his breath became shallow. Don clicked the recorder off and veered to the side of the road. A few moments later, he reached for the tape recorder again. This is his account, and as far as I know, this is the only mystical experience narrated live.
“I guess I’ve just had the kind of experience that Saul must have had on the road to Damascus. All of a sudden, just out of nowhere, I just got a sweeping experience of the Holy Spirit, I guess. That sounds kind of strange coming from me, because I don’t talk like this very often, but I was just moving along and Whammo!
“I went all goose bumps and all the hairs on my arms and legs just started standing on end and I was just kind of full of electricity. Not exactly a voice or anything like that, but kind of a bright, shining message came through to me that said . . .‘Yes, you do understand me, and here is some more understanding,’ which is just . . . I’m starting to cry again . . . which is just an amazingly joyful experience for me.”1
After the vision faded, Don leapt from the car and, crazily, a man possessed, started hurling rocks at the ground, one on top of another, splitting them open.
“They looked like gold to me,” Don told me twenty-five years after the experience that still makes his skin tingle. “Everything, everything, was beautiful. There was nothing that wasn’t full of light—it was that kind of ecstasy. And later, I was reading the Gospel of Thomas, and I came to the phrase,‘Kneel down, break open the rock, you will find me there.’2 That’s exactly what happened to me. I literally broke open rocks, and they were full of light and beauty and everything was infused with God. I just burst into tears.”
Don paused, gathering his composure. Then this guitar player in Oregon echoed the words of mystics through the ages.
“It was the actual experience of unity with everything else. It was the classic drop of water in the ocean. But the thing that occurred to me that was miraculous was, I felt the ocean in the drop, not just the drop in the ocean. I felt I was God-stuff—that I was made up of the same stuff that God was made up of, and the only difference is God knew that, and I didn’t.”
I heard familiar themes in Don’s experience: in the moments before the event, a soft brokenness, or sometimes a dark night of the soul; during the experience, the light and the voice, the joy and the unity with all things around him; and after the light ebbed,