The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [32]
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