day in 1999, when he was a senior in high school, he spotted an underlying reality, and in the blink of an eye, the mundane was teeming with explosive energy
“I just sat down on a bench, and suddenly I was able to see the world in a new way. Everything had just changed. It was like . . . all of creation emanating itself. It was just infinitely more itself. Like everything seemed magical and filled with energy... but it didn’t change the way anything looked. I came up with an analogy for it: it was like a grape squeezed to the popping brink.”
“So it’s still in its same form,” I clarified, “but it’s bursting. . . .”
“It’s bursting at the same time. It really is radical—everything changes. And it was accompanied by a very calm feeling, where you’re glad to be there, glad to be alive, not afraid of anything.”
A Buddhist, a Muslim, and a Catholic have similar mystical experiences—it sounds like a bad joke, but it is cosmically accurate. I asked Bill Miller at the University of New Mexico if he had found any particular themes in the accounts of his “quantum changers.”
“All the people who described the mystical type of experience described the same ‘Other,’ ” said Miller, who is a Presbyterian. “Never mind their religious upbringing—they were in the presence of the same thing.”
“What is that ‘Other’?” I asked.
“It’s profoundly loving and accepting beyond words. It doesn’t demand anything of you at the moment.You simply feel accepted as you are, and loved as you are, to the very depth of your being.” 25
Many of these people did view this “Other” through the lens of their faith. In their everyday spiritual practices, Arjun Patel, a Buddhist, saw Buddha’s eyes; Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi, communed with the Beloved; and Adam Zaremberg, a Catholic, visualized Christ. But none of them claimed his “God” as the only authentic God, nor did they begrudge anyone else a different view. They were like witnesses to the same God but from different angles.
So prevalent was this nonreligious “Other” that I wondered why these people would remain content with a particular religion. I mused about this with Sophy Burnham, who had spent years delving into Asian religions and ended up where she started, in the Episcopal Church. I told her I was surprised by that.
“So was I,” Sophy said.
She explained that she thinks of spirituality as a wheel with spokes leading to the hub. “And each of the spokes is a path to God—is a religion, if you will, or a spiritual practice. And they will all take you to the direct experience of God. But you have to choose one and go all the way down it. If you dive down one and test it for a minute and you come back out and go along the circumference again, and dive down another, you’ll never reach the hub.”
I must admit, I disliked the analogy. If truth be told, all this interfaith Kumbaya unnerved me. A decade earlier, when I had been spiritually adrift, it wasn’t a nondescript “Other” who slipped the rudder into place and breathed life into my faith. It was Christ who met me. Moreover, I liked the idea of God’s becoming a person and going to weddings. I liked the man who outargued the lawyers, who outpreached the rabbis, who declined the help of the governor of Jerusalem to stave off His own wrongful death, yet spared the life of a prostitute on the verge of legal execution.
And what was I to do with Jesus’ words,“I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me”? 26 Jesus did not fudge His words. His vision of the “Other” is no fuzzy thing, but a God with likes and dislikes, who has a personality and a plan.
And yet, I had always squirmed when my fellow believers declared there is but one way to God. I had chafed at the assertion that a philanderer or an embezzler or a rapist who asked Jesus into his life would take the express train to heaven, while Mahatma Gandhi writhed
“I just sat down on a bench, and suddenly I was able to see the world in a new way. Everything had just changed. It was like . . . all of creation emanating itself. It was just infinitely more itself. Like everything seemed magical and filled with energy... but it didn’t change the way anything looked. I came up with an analogy for it: it was like a grape squeezed to the popping brink.”
“So it’s still in its same form,” I clarified, “but it’s bursting. . . .”
“It’s bursting at the same time. It really is radical—everything changes. And it was accompanied by a very calm feeling, where you’re glad to be there, glad to be alive, not afraid of anything.”
A Buddhist, a Muslim, and a Catholic have similar mystical experiences—it sounds like a bad joke, but it is cosmically accurate. I asked Bill Miller at the University of New Mexico if he had found any particular themes in the accounts of his “quantum changers.”
“All the people who described the mystical type of experience described the same ‘Other,’ ” said Miller, who is a Presbyterian. “Never mind their religious upbringing—they were in the presence of the same thing.”
“What is that ‘Other’?” I asked.
“It’s profoundly loving and accepting beyond words. It doesn’t demand anything of you at the moment.You simply feel accepted as you are, and loved as you are, to the very depth of your being.” 25
Many of these people did view this “Other” through the lens of their faith. In their everyday spiritual practices, Arjun Patel, a Buddhist, saw Buddha’s eyes; Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi, communed with the Beloved; and Adam Zaremberg, a Catholic, visualized Christ. But none of them claimed his “God” as the only authentic God, nor did they begrudge anyone else a different view. They were like witnesses to the same God but from different angles.
So prevalent was this nonreligious “Other” that I wondered why these people would remain content with a particular religion. I mused about this with Sophy Burnham, who had spent years delving into Asian religions and ended up where she started, in the Episcopal Church. I told her I was surprised by that.
“So was I,” Sophy said.
She explained that she thinks of spirituality as a wheel with spokes leading to the hub. “And each of the spokes is a path to God—is a religion, if you will, or a spiritual practice. And they will all take you to the direct experience of God. But you have to choose one and go all the way down it. If you dive down one and test it for a minute and you come back out and go along the circumference again, and dive down another, you’ll never reach the hub.”
I must admit, I disliked the analogy. If truth be told, all this interfaith Kumbaya unnerved me. A decade earlier, when I had been spiritually adrift, it wasn’t a nondescript “Other” who slipped the rudder into place and breathed life into my faith. It was Christ who met me. Moreover, I liked the idea of God’s becoming a person and going to weddings. I liked the man who outargued the lawyers, who outpreached the rabbis, who declined the help of the governor of Jerusalem to stave off His own wrongful death, yet spared the life of a prostitute on the verge of legal execution.
And what was I to do with Jesus’ words,“I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me”? 26 Jesus did not fudge His words. His vision of the “Other” is no fuzzy thing, but a God with likes and dislikes, who has a personality and a plan.
And yet, I had always squirmed when my fellow believers declared there is but one way to God. I had chafed at the assertion that a philanderer or an embezzler or a rapist who asked Jesus into his life would take the express train to heaven, while Mahatma Gandhi writhed
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