We’re all mystics, whether we know it or not.
Mirabai Starr, a gifted author, scholar and translator, entered more deeply into the spiritual life after several experiences of tragedy and deep grief. Her older brother, Matty, died of a brain tumor when he was 10 and Mirabai was 7. “Death has always been my doorway to the sacred and continues to be for better or worse,” she said in an open and honest conversation on “The Spiritual Life” podcast. “Matty’s death felt—the only way I could describe it is holy. It felt holy to me, even though it was incredibly sad.”
In all my years as a Jesuit, I’ve heard only a few people describe a particular death as “holy.” Certainly, I have heard people speak of death with reverence and speak about God’s presence during grief, but rarely like what Mirabai shared about her brother’s death.
Another searing moment came at the terrible death of her daughter, Jenny, from a car accident, at the age of 14. Through some strange providence, Jenny died on the very day Mirabai’s translation of Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross, was published. “Something in me recognized that because I love my child,” Mirabai said, “I didn’t want to turn away from her even in death, that I would be present for the experience of losing her as an act of loving her, as an act of devotion to her.”
Not everyone who has painful experiences like these finds their way to God. Some people shut God out, naturally angry at a seemingly cruel and inhuman God. Others are simply unaware of God’s presence. Moreover, my conversation with Mirabai Starr covers aspects of life beyond pain and grief. We talk, in essence, about her whole rich spiritual life, which has inspired thousands of readers and students over the years.
Both Mirabai and I agree that mystical experiences are not the exclusive province of saints and mystics. You don’t have to be St. John of the Cross or St. Teresa of Ávila, to take two of Mirabai’s favorite saints, to enjoy a mystical union with the divine. One of my favorite books on the topic, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, by the Carmelite Sister Ruth Burrows, simply assumes that from time to time all of us will have such experiences.
So what is a mystical experience? Well, that is quite the question!
Over the years, I think I’ve read as many answers on that topic as there are “answerers.” Each person has his or her own take. Mirabai, in our interview, describes it like this:
It transcends language and concepts. And yet the mystics can’t seem to help themselves. It’s all they can talk about through poetry, through music, often through these kinds of nondiscursive means. But my definition of a mystical experience is a pretty classic academic definition: It’s a direct experience of the divine.
I would agree with that and perhaps add that the experience is a feeling of being overwhelmed with God’s presence in an unmistakable way. Some might quibble (I wouldn’t) with Mirabai’s description and say, well, we have a direct experience with the divine during the Eucharist, for example. But her larger point is that it is a kind of intense experience of God’s presence. One of my spiritual directees once compared it to feeling like a “vase overflowing with water.”
One of my caveats to my spiritual directees is that a true mystical experience is rare. It is to be distinguished from the kinds of spiritual experiences that we have every day (and which we might recall in the examination of conscience at the end of the day). Those can include, for example, feeling a sense of joy when you look into a newborn baby’s eyes, or feeling delight when a friend you haven’t heard from reaches out to you or feeling a sense of gratitude for a beautiful book, poem, song or homily. Each of these experiences is a way that God communicates with us. But not each of them is, ipso facto, a mystical experience.
In my own life, I think I’ve had maybe one or two. One (which I talk about at length in my upcoming book Work in Progress) happened when I was pedaling my bicycle to elementary school, around age 9 or 10. Stopping momentarily in a meadow filled with wildflowers, I felt a tremendous sense of peace and joy. Suddenly, I wanted to be a part of, to know, even to possess the source of all this. To enter into it. It wasn’t a “vision.” I still had my feet planted firmly on the ground, and I knew where I was, but it was definitely…different. For a while, I thought, “What was that?” That begins to get at what a mystical experience feels like.
One of the dangers of talking about mysticism is that people can feel sad or left out if they feel that they have not been gifted with such an experience of the divine. I sense that people do have them, but, in the words of a Jesuit friend who died very young, Bob Gilroy, people are not “encouraged to talk about them.” Perhaps the best advice would be simply to be aware. And when they happen, be grateful for them.
“Mystical experience is our birthright,” Mirabai Starr says. “That we are made for moments of union and communion with the sacred, with the divine, with God.”
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