It was 33 years ago today that my dear friend Frederica Mathewes-Green returned to Christianity after a sojourn as a hippie Hindu. As she tells it in "Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey Into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy", the story begins with Frederica and her husband on their honeymoon:
On June 20, 1974, we took the ferry from Wales to Ireland, then hitchhiked to Dublin. After dropping our bags at a hoel, we walked sightseeing through the city in the waning light and stopped at an old gray church squeezed into the facade of a city block.I strolled in the dim interior, past the massive main altar, past the statues. At last I came to a small altar surmounted with a statue of Jesus. The sculptor had depicted Jesus' heart visible in the center of his chest, twined with thorns and springing with flames. I remembered from girlhood the story: he had appeared like this to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque three hundred years ago. He had told her, "Beholdl the heart which has so loved mankind."
When I came to myself again I realized I was on my knees. I could hear a voice speaking inside. It was saying, 'I am your life.
"I am your life. You think that your life is your name, your personality, your history. But that is not your life. I am your life.
"Beyond that, you think that your life is the fact that you are alive, that your breath goes in and out, that energy courses in your veins. But even that is not your life. I am your life.
"I am the foundation of everything else in your life."
When I got up I felt pretty shaky. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. In a strange way, it seemed like the most real thing that had ever happened, a brutal confrontation with reality. In comparison, all previous life seemed pale.
...The experience in the Dublin church had blown away my neat ideas of the orderly world; I had been forced to admit I was dealing with things I didn't understand. I needed to be taught by someone who did.
My own pilgrimage into Christianity was occasioned by several mystical occurrences. I'd like to hear from readers who have been led toward religion in a similar way.
By the way, did you know that Frederica is now podcasting?
UPDATE: TMatt appeals once again to a Virginia newspaper to correct its outrageous error in a recent profile of FMG.
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PHILARET75:
I grew up Southern Baptist in Texas and I am now Eastern Orthodox.
My only response to your stunning post is this: Thank you Jesus.
Rod,
Good questions! I told you you make me think...
The point is, not all mystical experiences are benign or positive; sometimes they're dark, and involve deception. As a pagan, do you agree?
I absolutely agree; there are many spiritual forces in the world, and not all of them have our best interests at heart. Most have no reason to have anything to do with us at all, and some choose to have positive relationships with us, but certainly there are malicious, amoral and evil beings as well, both in the human and spirit worlds. Ár nDraíocht Féin (ADF), a neo-Druidic order, actually incorporates this realization into their basic order of worship; as part of establishing sacred space (a necessity when you don't have a dedicated, consecrated worship site), a token offering is left *outside* it for the "Outdwellers", with the wish expressed that they will leave the participants alone and not seek to disrupt the service.
How do pagans discern these matters?
I can only answer for one pagan, but my basic criterion is the content of the experience - how does it taste? Is the presence benign or hostile? Do they seem to want me to do something, and if so how does that stack up against what I believe to be morally correct?
Let's take an example that is common to both my religion (Hellenic Revivalism) and yours. If a being purporting to be a god, or to speak for a god, told me that I would be required to sacrifice my child in order to appease them, I would be forced to conclude that this being was not "of the light".
I have no way of knowing, of course, whether Artemis actually required Agamemnon to sacrifice Iphigenia - the oracle may have been in error, or been misinterpreted, or the entire story may be the result of poetry rather than prophecy - but assuming that the incident did occur basically as depicted by Euripides, I believe that Agamemnon's actions were morally indefensible and a violation of the most sacred obligations, those of hearth and family.
Philaret, thank you so much for letting me know about your experience! How humbling. What an honor for me. Ironically, I remember that speech as one that didn't seem to go well; I remember feeling like I wasn't really synching with the audience, or that maybe they didn't care for the content--something was a little off. Just goes to show that the Holy Spirit is not bound by what I do!
I concur with the opinion that the ability to sense spiritual things may well be natural rather than "supernatural." If you grow up in a culture with a duallistic understanding, it's very hard to shed later on; if someone teaches you, "this thing divides into two parts," it's hard to perceive the earlier unity. But the sense I get in Eastern Christianity is that God pervades, permeates, fills all Creation. He is inside everything, seen and unseen. "Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord." Jeremiah 23:24. This seemed so natural to the early Christians that they gathered and preserved the remains of the martyrs, and they believed Christ is really present in the Eucharist. Matter & energy don't exhaust what God is, or capture him--he exceeds it all, and eternally exceeds our comprehension--but in everything he is truly present.
A challenging book which offers a fascinating clue to why Eastern and Western Christianity developed differently on this point is David Bradshaw's "Aristotle East and West." He points out that the New Testament Greek word "energeia" (energy) had not Latin equivalent, so Jerome used "opus." Instead of seeing God's energy inside everything, animating it, God related to Creation like a sculptor relates to a statue. He's outside it, above it, maybe has walked away entirely...you can see how taht would create a wholly different way of understanding God.
I recently read in Bill Bryson's fascinating "A Short History of Everything" that scientists now believe that 90-95% of the matter in the universe is "missing," that is, invisible. The universe needs a certain amount of matter in order to hold together, and most of it can't be seen. That's called "dark matter" (there's also "dark energy").
Perhaps some of us are just born with a better ability to sense this real, created, but invisible thing, just as the sense of taste perceives lemon. Here's a test question for whether you have it: say you're on the subway reading, absorbed in a book. Unseen by you, the person across from you begins to stare at you. Would you sense it?
A major complicating factor is that we use the same word "feel" to cover two significantly different meanings: "I went outside and I could feel that it was raining" and "I noticed it was raining and I felt sad."
I can "feel" the presence of God. As a result, I "feel" joy or yearning. When we're talking about rain, we acknowledge that the person is experiencing somethting objective. But when it comes to spiritual things, even Christians succumb to the notion that when they "feel" the presence of God, they're doing no more than wallowing in their own emotions & emotional projection. It would help a lot if we could separate these two events, the initial experience of God's presence, and how we react to it, emotionally or intellectually.
The New Testament Greek word for the part of us that perceives things, in particular spiritual things, is "nous," but in the English bible it gets translated "mind," which leads astray into concepts of intellectual processing. But "nous" really means the innate faculty to perceive things. If I get one question more often than any other, it's "can you explain what the nous is" -- it's a concept we don't have in English, and is deeply unfamiliar. Though, once you grasp it, it makes *so much* of the Bible and spiritual experience clear.
Frederica,
Do you think that the "nous" may be explained as "applied wisdom", a.k.a. discernment of spiritual influence? (If so, it requires lots of experience and a heart that's open to teaching, I've found.)
BTW, the next time someone says to you, "God must really love you", you should reply, "Yes. He's quite fond of me, actually!" :)
(Borrowed from a story about God's love, featuring an Irish prist, who, while laying prostrate in the street beseeching God, had a passerby say exactly the same thing.)
I heard Frederica speaking at Point Loma Nazarene University--could it be last year or even two years ago!? There was a wonderful sense of joy and awe in the room when she shared her conversion experience.
There are two standout experiences for me. The first was after college study and experiences contributed to me walking away for about 6 years from the Christian faith I had as a child and teen. I just couldn't know whether or not God existed and I couldn't believe as I had when I was a kid. One afternoon, I invited some members of a religion I'd always been told was not Christian, though they claim to be, to visit our home simply out of curiosity. They were going door to door through our apartment complex, offering to study the Bible with people for a few weeks. I wanted to know what the difference was between what I'd been taught as a child and what they were teaching so I picked up C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" and dusted off my Bible.
After a few weeks of reading and meeting with these people, I found myself more and more reconciled to the Christian faith but I couldn't overcome the doubts I had. One day, when I was alone, I sank down to the floor with a desperate need to know if God was real. I didn't expect an answer but I said, out loud, "Lord, I need to know if you are real!" There was a wonderful sense of presence--Someone was with me (I know what Frederica means about it seeming like the most real thing that had ever happened to you) and I heard (not audibly) the Lord say, "I am real and I love you."
The second was when I had become ill with severe clinical depression and didn't know I was ill. My youngest son had been diagnosed as severely autistic about 8 months prior to this second experience and I realized that the landscape of my thoughts and emotions had become dark and incredibly lonely. No amount or fervency of prayer, devotions, or encouragement made any difference. Two friends had tried to help me realize I could have depression but I didn't recognize it when I read the list of symptoms for depression one friend gave me. They just weren't awful enough.
One afternoon, I was sitting on my bed trying to decide with my poor, foggy mind whether it could be true that the Lord had abandoned me, despite biblical promises to the contrary. I had been thinking in the past few days that death might be a welcome relief; wondering if I could end my own life. Suddenly, that same sense of presence and a loud "voice" in my thoughts said, "Call your doctor NOW." (Why not just heal me, I sometimes wonder!)
During the three weeks that it took for me to get into counseling with a Christian counselor and for the anti-depressant medication from the doctor to work, I felt a wonderful sense of presence and guidance from Him. It was exactly what I needed for as long as I needed it; no more and no less.
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