Is my experience such a wonderful realization of God's power and might that I can never despair of anyone I see? The degree of panic is the degree of the lack of personal spiritual experience (Oswald Chambers: My Utmost for His Highest)
Guard well your heart, for out of it flow all the issues of life (Proverbs 4:23)
Recently, I saw an interview on BBC with the scientist who discovered the so-called "God Particle," the closest thing science has discovered to the origin of life. The interviewer asked whether the scientist thought there was a conflict between science and religion. For him, there was a conflict because, as he said, he could believe only in what he could see and test by experience. For other scientists, though, he said there seemed to be no conflict between science and religion.
When I studied philosophy, I learned that belief in and reliance on only what we know by experience is called "Empiricism." Empiricists believe that all human knowledge is through observation only. When it comes to the area of spiritual truth, or the knowledge of spiritual things, however, there seems to be two paths to transcendence, or "mysticism," if you will.
One of the paths does indeed begin with empirical observation, or experience of the world outside of us -- an experience that often somehow suddenly takes on new meaning, as if there were an infused Presence and significance to the moment. In Man is Not Alone, Abraham Heschel describes a sense of "awe and wonder" that is the beginning of all religious experience.
In her excellent treatise on mysticism, Evelyn Underhill says that there is for most people "a decisive moment," which she calls the awakening of the transcendental consciousness. She studies the lives of a number of mystics who have described their "awakening" moments, moments that changed dramatically the entire course of their lives. I have written previously of C.S. Lewis's "moment" when suddenly a door in the universe seemed to open before him while he was riding the upper deck of a public bus in London, and without understanding, he made a choice to walk through the door into the spiritual life.
For me, I would have to say that "moment" came definitively in my first year of college, although there of course were "small moments" all along the way leading up to that moment. I was alone one Friday afternoon in the biology lab of St. Mary's Dominican College. The lab was located on the second floor of the venerable old building which faced St. Charles Avenue, with its classic streetcars rumbling along the center tracks. The floor-to-ceiling windows of the laboratory were open to the campus below, with its green spaces centered around a flowing and bubbling fountain. It was a beautiful day in March, and I yearned to be a part of the outside beauty instead of dissecting a frog in the chemical environment of the lab. But my project notebook was due on Monday morning, and this was my last chance to complete the anatomical drawings I needed.
As I traced the process and workings of the execretory system, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the beauty of the body and its operations -- all carried out without our conscious attention. I "saw" majesty and intelligent design in the system by which toxins were filtered out of our bodies without our knowledge, and then excreted safely outside of our bodies. And surprisingly, one of the wonders I beheld in that almost mystic moment of awareness was the that whole process happened without any awareness on our part, until the final moment -- which was then within our control, so that we could "wait" until an appropriate moment to excrete the toxins within us.
My awareness of God as Loving Creator and Designer of the Universe at that moment was so strong that I had to resist the impulse to kneel on the old oaken floor and worship Him in a way I had never done before. Only the fear of being discovered kneeling in adoration while alone in the lab kept me from falling to my knees. I was shaken to the core of my being, much as the experience described in "The Groundhog," a poem by Richard Eberhardt we had studied in my senior year of high school.
For me, that was the moment of "awe and wonder" referenced by Heschel and the "awakening of transcendental consciousness" described by Evelyn Underhill. I often look back now and laugh at God's sense of humor in using the execretory system of a frog to bring me to a mystical experience.
I do believe that looking closely at the external world, as the book of Romans says, brings us to a knowledge of God, for "the heavens declare the glory of God, and firmament proclaims His handiwork." But if the common experience of mystics that we can study is true -- as in the case of C.S. Lewis and others, for example --empirical observation is not the only path to knowledge of spiritual truth.
A second path to truth is by looking within ourselves, as Proverbs 4:23 indicates --by looking, observing, and holding fast to the truth within our hearts, "for out of it flow all the issues of life."
While I was traveling, I had much time to read and think about mysticism, guided by Underhill's book and Richard Rohr's Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality. I was so impressed by both books, which unfold to me mysteries common to human experience, but which we often do not have the words to describe or analyze. I would like in the coming days to try to capture in this space some insights for myself and for others, in order that I might not lose forever what I have learned from both writers.
I once told a friend who suggested that I 'spice up' my blog with more concrete detail that I was just allowing others to read my journal -- maybe a mistake. After all, if one goes public with writing, the reader does have a right to expect that the writer is aware of her audience and of what the reader needs. So I am always caught between the needs of my (few) readers and my need to capture my insights before they are lost. Maybe that is why I rely so much on other writers to put into words what I have experienced in the spiritual life.
I want to 'pour out' into other's lives the richness of the things God has given to me -- but as Richard Rohr says, it is impossible to speak of the "best things," so we are left with the mission of trying to describe the "next best things" (more on that later).
I believe that we are all made in such a way that it is possible to experience the "best things," even if we don't have the words to describe what we experience. And so we are all left with what Oswald Chambers calls "a degree of panic," based on our lack of personal spiritual experience. We know what we have experienced, but we have not solidified our experience by words or by attention to our experience, so it floats away from us, dismissed as "unreal" by Empiricists.
Our lack of attention to the knowledge stored up in our "hearts" affects everything else in our lives. Personal prayer, openess to the universe around us, spiritual reading, religion are all ways of attending to the "best things," the knowledge of God as He attempts to break through our pride of empiricism -- our "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil."
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