I’ve always been skeptical of mystical experiences. This is probably because I’ve always been skeptical of the people insisting to me that they’ve had mystical experiences.
Perhaps you’ve had sober, rational-seeming individuals describe to you their brushes with the world beyond. For me, it was the girl in elementary school who smelled musty and belonged to a Pentecostal church that forbade girls to wear pants or cut their hair. She claimed to have regular visitations from Jesus, but I doubted her – I confess, partly because I felt she was silently judging my gauchos and Julie McCoy ‘do. (If you don’t get those references, congratulations! You’re young.)
Then there was the guy I met in a Borders bookstore (remember those?) in Chicago. I was browsing through the Religion Section, a book on Buddhism in hand, when he launched into a stream-of-consciousness monologue about how he had, with the help of meditation, experienced the annihilation of self and the Unity of All Things. By the looks of his dilated pupils, I figured his meditation practice was helped by a goodly dose of something.
I didn’t doubt mystical experiences occurred. It’s just that those proclaiming the reality of their experience seemed so carefully primed for it: the religious fringe, bookstore Buddhists, New Age crunchies, stoners. How can you trust someone has had a direct encounter with the Divine when they’re so thoroughly prepped for it in advance, whether through the dogma of their sect or some really high-quality shrooms? Even further, how can you trust someone has the ability to differentiate the Divine from their own ego?
Thomas Merton (more on him later) illustrated this problem in his memoir, The Seven Story Mountain. As a young man, before his conversion to Catholicism, Merton visited a Quaker meeting house one Sunday. He was taken by the silence, finding it encouraged a peaceful, receptive space to welcome God. As he put it, some “nebulous good resolutions began to take shape” in his soul.
But then one of the “middle-aged ladies” in attendance
thought the Holy Ghost was after her to get up and talk. I secretly suspected that she had come to the meeting all prepared to make a speech anyway, for she reached into her handbag, as she stood up, and cried out in a loud earnest voice: “When I was in Switzerland I took this snapshot of the famous Lion of Lucerne . . .” With that she pulled out a picture. Sure enough, it was the famous Lion of Lucerne.
So much for “if the Spirit moves you.”
To take a modern example, Michael Pollan’s documentary, How to Change Your Mind, tracked several individuals who overcame mental illness through medically regulated doses of LSD and psilocybin. The psychedelics sent them on trips steeped in both Western and Eastern religiosity; a devout Catholic woman with depression met the Virgin Mary, and a young man with severe OCD experienced his own death, followed by his regeneration as a tree.
I’m sure those Pollan profiled had drug-induced voyages that were profound and transformative. Yet I found myself questioning whether those voyages were truly mystical, truly a conduit to the Divine, due to how the medical teams administered the psychedelics. The participants were given drugs as part of clinical research conducted by universities. As such, I expected a high level of objectivity to the proceedings. As in: Here’s the sterile hospital room where you’ll take your dose, here’s the consent form to sign, here are your pills and some water – bottoms up! We’ll talk later.
Instead, the medical teams engaged in a surprising degree of preparatory New-Agey-ness for a scientific study. Participants were drugged in dim rooms lit by pillar candles and draped with vaguely Asian or Indian décor (picture the massage room at a nice day spa). Before being handed their doses, they were wished wellness on their respective “journeys”. For one participant, I believe a bell was rung to herald the beginning of the trip. A Tibetan Buddhist bell, you ask? Beats me. If I had to guess, it was a woo-woo bell from one of those Eastern religions.
My point is, the medical teams primed the participants for a “journey” that, if not strictly spiritual, was most definitely quasi-spiritual. If the person drugging you has used environment, ritual, and words to persuade you the drugs will take you to a reality otherwise inaccessible, then I say you’re already half-way along your mystic “journey” before you even gulp down that first tablet.
Of course, a decent rejoinder to this is, So what? If burning some incense, playing some sitar music, and dropping acid allows you leave this broken world for the true one, what’s the problem? And C.S. Lewis might even agree. In Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, he wrote:
I shouldn't be at all disturbed if it could be shown that a diabolical mysticism, or drugs, produced experiences indistinguishable (by introspection) from those of the great Christian mystics. Departures are all alike; it is the landfall that crowns the voyage. The saint, by being a saint, proves that his mysticism (if he was a mystic; not all saints are) led him aright; the fact that he has practised mysticism could never prove his sanctity.
When it comes to mysticism, at least, Lewis inverts the advice I’ve been given ever since I was a teen: it’s not the “journey,” it’s the destination. You were absorbed into the Absolute, made one with God? Congratulations. With that new consciousness, it’s time to stop acting like an idiot, then. Unfortunately, as this tweet acknowledges, that seems to be hard to do:
I’ve been mulling over that tweet a lot, lately, for the simple reason that I had the very thing I’m so skeptical of: a mystical experience. And that experience, albeit brief, was so overwhelming and transcendent that I feel a responsibility to live up to it.
The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways. Including Huge, Over-glossed Lips.
My “journey” – to use an overused, cringe word – occurred last March, after my father’s passing. At that point, I had made a half-dozen trips within the prior year from my home in New Jersey to my parents’ place in California. Most of these trips were to monitor the progress of their dementia (yep – both of ‘em!) and to urge them to accept a home aide, without success.
My parents’ dementia was complicated by Dad’s congestive heart failure and cirrhosis, and their mutual drinking binges. As I recounted here, at times it was a shitshow, involving visits from the cops and Adult Protective Services. I tried to manage their care remotely, but one hurdle followed another at a sadistic clip. Finding a physician to give them a dementia exam (a grim resource scarcity I wrote about here). Getting my parents’ driver’s licenses rescinded. Persuading Dad to agree to let an aide set foot in the house. Finding a female aide to attend to a hulking, 230-lb male with an aggressive vibe. Talking Dad down from his agitation over the phone during his multiple ER admissions. Being told by hospital staff that my efforts were futile, since he nearly punched a nurse and had to be sedated and strapped to his bed, anyway. Scrambling to arrange Dad’s discharge from the hospital into a memory care facility that would take a paranoid, violent resident.
And now, another hurdle: arranging his affairs after his death.
When I boarded my now-familiar red-eye from Newark to Sacramento, I was basically a wrung-out mop in leisurewear and slip-on sneakers. I slunk into my window seat, closed my eyes and, as soon as the cabin lights went out, tried to drift off to sleep. But I couldn’t. I was experiencing that most vicious of combos: tired, yet emotionally fitful. Beneath the weight of my exhaustion, something restless was tossing and turning and refusing to quiet.
Throughout the flight, my thoughts kept returning to my conversations with Dad just before he died. Out of all family and friends, I was the only one to see him during his month in memory care. There were plenty of reasons not to. First and foremost, until his anti-psychotics kicked in, he was deluded and desperate to get out of the facility. Understandably, no one wanted to swing by for a visit only to be pressed into being a prison break accomplice.
As for Mom, she was too debilitated by her own Alzheimer’s to manage it. Once Dad was in memory care and she was living alone in the house, she frequently assumed he had “taken off” without warning, or even already died. In lucid moments, she admitted she’d “fall apart” if she had to see him in a facility, begging to come home. Her dread, I found, was shared by most. “I heard it’s better to give them at least a couple months to adjust before you visit,” said one person. Which I think may be sound advice or may just be stalling.
Then there was the morally rational reason not to visit Dad: he was an abusive narcissist, a public saint but a private nightmare. If you’re the child of such a parent, if you made it to adulthood relatively intact, I understand and respect your decision to keep contact at a minimum, or to cut it off altogether – even at the end. My sibling made the same choice. Given the kind of father Dad was, my sibling reasoned he didn’t deserve his time and attention now that he was dying. I can’t really argue with that.
And yet, I went to visit Dad in memory care. Why? Maybe daughters shoulder an outsized-share of guilt as parental caretakers. Maybe it was the recent conversations I had with my uncle about the abuse he and Dad had suffered at the hands of my grandmother, the extent and nature of which I never realized. Maybe that knowledge loosened my heartstrings, such that I could accept Dad for who he was, even if I couldn’t forgive him. How could I forgive a man incapable of acknowledging or comprehending the harm of his own actions? Then again, Christ asked for God’s forgiveness of his persecutors because “they know not what they do.” Maybe I visited because I was haunted by those words.
I don’t know. All I can say is that I defied my own expectations. So many times in life, I assured myself that when my father was on his last legs, weak and enfeebled and desperate for some compassion, he’d be on his own. But the revenge that seemed so satisfying in my imagination became unthinkable in reality. I guess I just didn’t have it in me.
So I went to him. He cried each time he saw me. He was bloated and ashen and despondent. I held his swollen hands and assured him he’d be out soon, the minute he was well again. I brought old newspaper articles about his accomplishments – how better to entertain a narcissist? – and told him how impressive he’d been and what a difference he’d made. I told him I loved him, but not begrudgingly. He told me he loved me, too, so earnestly that I was both gratified and embarrassed.
I was still chewing on these memories when the plane landed and I headed out the gate. The memories weren’t comforting. I realized, belatedly, the source of the restlessness beneath my exhaustion: contempt, and it was directed inward. I had been so stupid, flying cross-country to support the one who had poisoned me with self-doubt, who had tainted my ability to relate – to men, to authority, to myself, even. My sibling was right, we owed him nothing, and yet I gave. Hell, even the best of his friends knew to steer clear, and yet I showed up. All for a man who couldn’t love anyone except himself. Whatever words he had told me were exactly that: words, rote expressions of affection any child could parrot. What an idiot I was, thinking I needed to go to him. What an idiot I was, thinking any of it mattered.
I continued wheeling my little suitcase towards the terminal exit, the world bereft of meaning. Everything that had ever passed between myself and my Dad was meaningless. The pattern on the ugly airport carpeting was meaningless. I glanced to my left; there stood a squat vending machine full of Kylie Jenner cosmetics. Each of the boxes inside featured a pair of ridiculously plump lips, dripping with gloss. That was meaningless, too.
And then –
I was suddenly flooded by the sense I was loved, dearly and beyond what I thought possible. Perhaps I shouldn’t frame it as “the sense I was loved”; what seemed to permeate me was love itself, and to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, it did so as “immediately as a taste or color.” I was integrated with that love, and felt the relief of being found and returned to my natural state. I felt warm and buoyant and absolutely certain that every little act of kindness I had ever performed was not only meaningful, but essential. The entirety of this experience was less than a minute; whatever reality passed through me was already receding by the time I descended the escalator down to taxi service. Yet each second of the experience seemed saturated, slow, and outside time.
What flooded me? God? My father’s love? I’m not really sure. I will say, though, that if you’re going to have a brush with the Divine, there cannot be any dumber place to do it than directly across from a Kylie Cosmetics vending machine in the United Airlines terminal of Sacramento International Airport. Never thought my first mystical encounter would be Kardashian-adjacent, but there it is. If anyone reading happens to pass by that vending machine – it’s a can’t miss, on your way to the women’s restroom – you should know you’re treading upon sacred ground.
It’s a solace to me, and a source of amusement, that Thomas Merton (I told you I’d get back to him) also had a mystical experience in a thoroughly non-mystical setting. As Merton described it in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, in 1958,
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…
Probably my own bias and ego talking, but Merton catching a glimpse of God smack-dab in the middle of an urban shopping hub not only rings true, but proves God has a sense of humor.
There’s an historical marker placed at Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, commemorating Merton’s epiphany and noting that it prompted him to invest himself in human rights activism.
As for myself, I’m endeavoring to use my mystical experience to less lofty ends.
There’s so, so many reasons – good reasons! – not to perform those small, tender mercies to those needing them. It’s not deserved. It won’t be reciprocated. It’s too hard or unpleasant or awkward. It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
But in the face of those reasons, I recall my transcendence at the Kylie Cosmetics vending machine in Sacramento International Airport and sometimes – if not always – try to be kind, anyways.
Wonderful, thank you.
Johanna, this reflection is quite simply perfect.