Fr. Martin on mystical experience

Today I read an article by Fr. James Martin SJ on mysticism. After reading it, I walked to the window and stared out at the clouds. I was thinking in my head .... "It's been a long time since I've had any of what I'd call mystical experiences and I don't know if those were real - maybe I just made them up. It's getting harder and harder to believe in God. If God's really there, why doesn't he ...." And then I had a sudden feeling, so strange it made me stop in mid-thought. By the time I realized it had happened it was already over, like the way something can hurt so much, be so shocking, that it takes your breath away (I stub my toes a lot :) but is over before you can even really react. The feeling was gone so fast it's hard to re-feel it, but I remember it was for a moment like being a different person, one without all my worries and a completely different, sort of exalted perspective. Hard to explain. And as soon as it was over, I was thinking .... "That doesn't count." But still, I thought I'd write it down anyway :) Here's part of Fr. Martin's article ......

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Want to Experience God? You Already Have: Uncommon Longings

Ever said to yourself, "I would believe in God if only I had some distinct experience of God?" .....

"Mysticism" is often dismissed as a privileged experience for only the super-holy. 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 superb 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 20th-century 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 in which 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 simply 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. But just because they are difficult to explain doesn't mean that they're not real, or authentic.

St. Ignatius Loyola, the 16th-century founder of the Jesuit Order, once 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 that they feel. Recently, one young man described to me an experience of feeling almost as if he was a crystal vase and God's love was like water about to overflow the top of the glass.

While they are not commonplace, mystical experiences are not as rare as most 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? ... [B]efore 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 this 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 .........

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