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All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

One evening, the English poet W. H. Auden gathered together with his fellow teachers at the Downs School, when something unexpected happened to him. He describes it in the introduction to a book edited by Anne Fremantle called The Protestant Mystics:

One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had we any one of us a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly—because thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself. . . . My personal feelings toward them were unchanged—they were still colleagues, not intimate friends—but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it.

Auden seems almost to have met the desire of his heart, almost to have found exactly what he was looking for, but when he arrived at the place, he was just as quickly taken away from it. Such powerful experiences increase our appetite for a relationship with God in the future, even if we never again experience God’s presence in quite so clear a way.

Beauty as a passage to God is a similar experience, and it crops up in fiction almost as often as it does in real life. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, about a Catholic family in England in the 1920s and 1930s, one of the characters, Sebastian Flyte, a young aristocrat, confesses that he is drawn to the beautiful stories in the Gospels. His friend Charles Ryder, an agnostic, protests. One can’t, Charles says, believe in something simply because it’s lovely.

“But I do,” Sebastian says. “That’s how I believe.”

Clarity

There is a New Yorker cartoon that features a wizened, monkish-looking man hunched over a large book. He looks up and says to himself, “By God, for a minute there it suddenly all made sense!”

Sometimes we feel that we are tantalizingly close to understanding exactly what this world is about. On the day of my ordination, at a church in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I entered the back of the church a few hours before the Mass was to begin. The choir was rehearsing, and as I stood in the empty church, which would soon be filled with friends and family, I thought, This is right where I should be.

Feelings of clarity may be similar to feelings of exaltation. Indeed, many of the feelings we’re looking at may overlap. In some of the cases described in this chapter, we might also experience what Ignatius calls in the Spiritual Exercises “consolation without prior cause,” a sense of God’s communicating with us directly and giving us encouragement. “When the consolation is without a preceding cause there is no deception in it,” he writes, “since it is coming only from God our Lord.”

Isak Dinesen spoke of such clarity in her book Out of Africa. She writes about the “transporting pleasure” of being taken up in an airplane by her friend Denys Finch-Hatton. “You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel toward them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names.” Moviegoers will remember this scene from the 1985 film of the same name, in which Meryl Streep speaks lines from the following passage. Dinesen writes:

Every time that I have gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realised that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. “I see:” I have thought, “This was the idea. And now I understand everything.”

Desires to Follow

Desires to follow God are more explicit.