Editor’s note: “The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.,” is a new podcast from America Media that focuses on how people experience God in their prayer and their daily lives. To accompany each episode, Father Martin will reflect on the experience and offer practical advice on a few spiritual themes. You can listen to all episodes of “The Spiritual Life” here.
In 2007, shortly after the publication of a series of Mother Teresa’s letters, I received a call from “The Colbert Report,” the Comedy Central show starring Stephen Colbert (in which he played a satirical blowhard newscaster also named, conveniently, Stephen Colbert). I had written an op-ed in The New York Times explaining why the somewhat surprising revelation in the new book, Come, Be My Light, which described St. Teresa’s “dark night of the soul,” did not mean that she didn’t believe in God, as some commentators had suggested. I was delighted to be invited onto “The Colbert Report,” not only because I knew it would reach more people in 10 minutes than I could in a lifetime of homilies but because I knew that the host was Catholic. And an interesting one.
You’ll discover just that in our open, honest and wide-ranging conversation on “The Spiritual Life.” Truth be told, Stephen Colbert was one of the people I most wanted to invite to join us on our new podcast. Over the years, both on his show and in other America Media venues, we had discussed his faith, but I wanted to go a bit deeper.
And we did. For one thing, we talked about the searing experience of losing his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash when Stephen was still a young boy. It was his mother, as he describes that experience, who invited him to see things “in the light of eternity.” The cross, not surprisingly, also became a central part of his Catholic life. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ “glory” is the cross because it is the sign of his radical obedience to the Father. But Stephen doesn’t see it so much as a “victory” as something else.
“I’m not looking to the crucifix for the victory,” he says. “I’m looking at it for the suffering. Because that’s when I need the suffering. And then the victory comes all the time.… I really just don’t want to be alone in my suffering.”
As powerful as those reflections are, it was his experience of being a “fallen away” Catholic and returning to the faith that I found the most compelling part of our conversation. In college, he embraced atheism. In my own college years, after a close friend died in an accident, I, too, found atheism to be the more rational approach to life’s problems. What brought me back was a friend inviting me to be grateful to God for my late friend’s life, rather than being angry about his death.
For Stephen, the turnabout, or rather return-about, came in an even more unusual way. Someone handed him a Gideon Bible, and, on one freezing cold day, he took out the Bible and cracked it open. It had been frozen shut. He opened to the Gospel story of the Sermon on the Mount and was transfixed by what he read. “It spoke off the page to me,” he told me. “There was no effort. I wasn’t doing anything. I was being spoken to directly by Christ.”
He describes this moment as one of profound recognition, rather than novelty. That is, it felt like coming home, hearing an echo of the faith given to him by his parents. Even today, he carries the Bible that was given to him by a stranger: It’s underlined, dog-eared and well-worn.
As a spiritual director (or just as a believer), I find these kinds of quasi-mystical experiences fascinating. In her conversation with us on “The Spiritual Life” last week, Mary Karr, for example, spoke of going into a church and “conceiving a hatred” for all the people she saw, and then, after leaving Mass, loving them. The ways that God reaches out to us, sometimes in an unmistakable way, are fascinating to me.
These stories also raise the questions of what constitutes a mystical experience, how rare (or not rare) they are and what one should “do” if or when one receives one. That is a topic that whole books have been written on. (You might start with Ruth Burrow’s Guidelines for Mystical Prayer.)
But we can say that a mystical experience is one where you feel overwhelmed or even bowled over by God’s presence. Sometimes this comes during prayer, but as Stephen Colbert shows, sometimes it comes in a kind of dramatic, seemingly once-in-a-lifetime encounter where you are sure that this is God. In other words, you cannot doubt it. If you’ve never had an experience like this, don’t worry: It doesn’t mean you’re a bad Catholic or a bad Christian. Just because your prayer is not like that of St. Teresa of Ávila does not mean you are doing something wrong. Or, perhaps you have had these experiences, but you’ve not been encouraged to see them as such. In general, they are rare, but in my experience, many people have had at least one or two of them.
What should you “do” about them? Well, in my experience as a director, it seems that the most common reason for them, if we could call it that, is to simply remind the person of God’s abiding presence. But as in Stephen’s case, there also may be some sort of message implicit. (I’m aware that some people might not categorize his experience as mystical at all; there are many definitions of this somewhat elusive term.) Often it takes a while before one can understand the meaning. This is where spiritual direction can be helpful. In any case, I’m grateful to Stephen for sharing this part of his faith journey.
Last summer, I helped to facilitate a papal audience for comics and comedians with Pope Francis in the Sala Clementina at the Apostolic Palace. Stephen Colbert helped me select around a dozen U.S. comedians who would be invited (including former guest Whoopi Goldberg), and his “bookers” helped me contact them. For Stephen, meeting Pope Francis was a profound moment of being seen and one of gratitude as he listened to the successor of St. Peter tell him and his fellow comics why joy, humor and laughter mattered.
“Whatever I did got me to this room…and that guy in the white up there saying that what I do is of value in a spiritual life…. I’m going to hold onto that one.”
Stephen Colbert really is one of my favorite Catholics: smart, faithful, questioning, well-read and, of course, funny. You’ll enjoy our conversation—that I’ll wager. And you’ll laugh, too—that I know.
