Fingerprints of God (4 page)

Sophy laughed self-consciously, embarrassed to place herself in the company of Moses watching the back of God from the cleft of the rock.

“And seeing the aftereffects! It was all love and joy and sparkling particles, swarming up and circling—it was just exquisite. And knowing that everything is going to be all right. It’s that idea of Saint Julian of Norwich, although I didn’t know it at the time:
‘All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things will be well.’
³

“And then, slowly, slowly, slowly, coming like a turtle up to the surface of the water again, I opened my eyes. And I was blinded by the light. It was piercingly painful so I shut my eyes again. And I went back to the spiritual light for a while, and then came out again, and when I opened my eyes this time, I could see. And I realized the whole thing had taken forty-five minutes, a
huge
amount of time. And I realized I had to hurry for the bus. And I came galloping and springing like a gazelle down the terraces, my heart filled with joy! And watching this light radiate off my hands and light off my arms and light off the grasses and the trees burning with light, everything flaring!

“I suppose that’s what God sees when he sees us,” Sophy reflected, turning to look into my eyes. “Just light. Nothing else. And then I got on the bus and I noticed that a blood vessel had burst in the back of my hand about the size of a quarter. It startled me, but also pleased me because it meant that yes, something had happened. And other people knew it. I remember this university professor coming up to me and sitting next to me and saying something like, ‘Something happened to you, didn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and that was all.”

I sat immobilized by her story. I felt like a body surfer who had been slammed down by a wave. Then I asked Sophy a question that many a neurologist has pondered as well.

“Did you think,
Gosh, I just had a temporal lobe seizure
?”

“Oh yes! Absolutely that occurred to me!” Sophy admitted happily. “Was that an epileptic fit? Did I have some kind of electrical burnout of the brain? But everything seemed to be functioning,” she said, adding that nothing like this had recurred in the past twenty years.

She leaned forward, speaking urgently.

“The
experience
is not important,” Sophy said, and then she laughed. “I’ve just spent fifteen minutes telling you about an experience and now I tell you—and I cannot reiterate it enough—
the experience is not what was important.
It’s changing you on a cellular level that is important. It’s providing the hope and joy that’s important.”

If a spiritual experience is real, she said, it will transform you, fling your worldview and priorities, your relationships and your personality, up in the air like a two-year-old hurling a deck of cards. It can make you a stranger to your friends, to your family, and to your own psyche. It was a disorientation I knew all too well. I remembered my own return to Washington after researching the
Los Angeles Times
story, when I, too, felt my world upended by a brief brush with something mystical. I remembered how my friends and even my family felt foreign, how I declined invitations to dinner so that I could stroll for hours at night, reveling in the unseen company of a God I had just discovered.

“What was it like coming home from Peru?” I asked.

“It was dreadful,” she said quietly.

“But your life in Washington was so rich,” I protested.

“Oh yeah, I’m a successful writer, I’m married to a successful journalist for
The NewYork Times
,” she conceded.“But that was ashes in my mouth. I could not bear it. It was physically painful to sit at a dinner party and listen to the shallowness of the conversation. I was so sensitized. I could hear what was going on underneath people’s conversations. This woman is telling a story at a dinner party in a brittle, gay, happy way, and underneath it, I can hear her heart breaking! I just wanted to shake people and say,
Stop it. I can’t bear it!
”

I persisted, prompted less by journalistic curiosity than by a need for guidance, affirmation perhaps. “A lot of people would say, ‘Yeah, that was a remarkable experience, but now I’m back in my real life in Washington, D.C., with my friends and we talk politics, we talk economics, we talk journalism.’ Don’t you think it’s easier to fit back in that way?”

“That’s true. Except that you’re forgetting one thing,” she said. “You’ve fallen in love.”

This is the paradox of the person who is tethered to earth but has touched the sky. The memory robs
and
enriches you, reveals your life to be drabber
and
more magical than you had imagined.

“Anyone knows, when you’re passionately in love everything is heightened,” Sophy explained.“And you can find yourself in this wonderful state, the state of being in love that so many saints talk about when they speak of being the ‘bride of God.’ We always think it’s metaphorical, but what it really means is that they’re in a perpetual state of being in love. And just the way you can’t scientifically measure being in love, although you know it’s a madness, and that surely it will end—it’s the same with a spiritual experience. It’s a madness and it will die down and be replaced by something else.”

Eventually, perhaps, but not without exacting its price. It is an imperious love. It usurps all rivals. It did for Sophy.

“I can remember my husband saying at some point, ‘How can I compete with God?’ ” she recalled. “And I said, ‘You can’t.’ ”

Sophy Burnham tried to make her marriage work. She had teenaged children, after all. But she had been transformed, as she put it, at a “cellular level”—to the core of her being, where she could think of little else but to pursue this God she had encountered on Machu Picchu. There was no turning back. It was as if the door back to a normal life had been locked from the other side, and she could only move forward. And like other modern-day mystics I interviewed, Sophy set about transforming her external life to match her new inner world.

The Burnhams divorced three years after Sophy’s trip to Machu Picchu. Her daughters were furious for several years, but Sophy says she has repaired those relationships. Her choices—her single-minded pursuit of God and her resulting singleness—is yet another reason her story terrifies me.

Had Sophy Burnham been lying in a brain-imaging machine at the time of her mystical experience, a neurologist might explain the incident like this: The part of Sophy’s brain that orients her in time and space became quiescent. Her spatial boundaries fell, creating the sense of oneness with the universe. Meanwhile, the part of the brain that handles hearing, vision, and emotions spiked, creating the roaring sounds and the particles of light that composed, for her,“the hem of the garment of God.”

But just beneath that physical explanation lie explosive questions that scientists often prefer to ignore or to declare irrelevant. Who or what
causes
these spiritual dramas, these tiny gold threads of mystery that have woven their way down the centuries and into religions, through Christianity and Buddhism, through Islam and Kabbalah and Hinduism? Often, scientists can spot patterns in these mystical accounts and, with a sigh of relief, offer a diagnosis. Oh, that’s temporal lobe epilepsy. It’s schizophrenia. It’s LSD, or magic mushrooms, or a chemical that is released in the brain as it shuts down to die.

It is, both literally and figuratively, all in the head.

And yet, small cracks are appearing in the smooth façade of this paradigm, thanks to a small army of psychologists, geneticists, and neurologists. They are making surprising discoveries about the physiological underpinnings of the spiritual. Before delving into DNA and brain chemistry, I want to turn to the most mysterious genre of experience—the spiritual storm that passes through otherwise healthy people, often unbidden, usually unexpected, and always unexplainable by material science.

This is the God who breaks and enters.

If Sophy Burnham had crossed paths with William James, her story might have found its way into the pages of his
Varieties of Religious Experience.
Sophy missed the famous Harvard psychologist by a century: James’s series of lectures was published in book form in 1902. That
Varieties
is still regarded as the classic attempt to understand spiritual experience from a scientific perspective is, no doubt, a tribute to the originality of James’s thinking. It is also a reflection, and perhaps an indictment, of twentieth-century science, which shied away from investigating this most basic of human sentiments—the longing for “something more.”

I like to imagine William James arriving at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. I can picture him, with full beard, receding hairline, and thick eyebrows crowning his intense eyes, approaching the lectern, gazing out at the sea of European scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals, and taking a deep breath.

“It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk,” he began his first lecture, “and face this learned audience.”
⁴

James professed to be intimidated by his colleagues’ erudition. But he must have felt a twinge of exhilaration as he began to dissect, like a sure-handed surgeon, the philosophical wisdom of his age. In his twenty lectures, James rejected the reigning theory of his colleagues, who diagnosed spiritual experience as evidence of a disordered brain and believed that mystics and religious believers were better suited for the asylum than pulpit or pew.Why, he asked, could scientists not envision the world as consisting of “many interpenetrating spheres of reality,”
⁵
which can have both scientific and spiritual explanations—just as, to day, depression can be explained by both psychotherapy and altered brain chemistry?

“The first thing to bear in mind,” he warned the august crowd, “is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.”
⁶

Then James set out to do what scientists do so well. He categorized. First he analyzed the more common (and less intense) spiritual experience: religious conversion. Drawing from the rich personal stories of Saint Augustine, Leo Tolstoy, John Bunyan, and less famous converts, he concluded that people who had undergone religious conversions had achieved something that most of his intellectual colleagues had not. They had pushed through the angst of a “divided self,” with its disappointments and doubts about the world. They had utterly surrendered themselves, only to find that their divided self had somehow been sewn back together.

For psychologists, James said, those forces are subconscious; but for the converted, they are supernatural. James himself yearned for, but never found, the transforming spirituality about which he spoke. But, he told his colleagues, he had become persuaded that “twice born” people—those who had been touched and converted by spiritual experience—were the healthiest, not the sickest, among us.

James then turned his gaze to the spiritual virtuosos: the mystics, who know firsthand “the reality of the unseen.” All mystical experiences share certain common elements, he contended—and his descriptions presaged the words of Sophy Burnham. First, they are ineffable: they cannot be described adequately with words. Second, they have a noetic quality—a truth or deep insight that is truer to the person than the material world itself. The insights may differ from person to person, but there are certain shared threads: the unity of all things, the love of a conscious “other” or God, and the confidence that all is as it should be—as Julian of Norwich voiced it,“all manner of things will be well.” Third, James observed, mystical experiences quickly ebb, usually within a few minutes. Last, these experiences pounce on the mystic: some power outside of the person takes control, pushing the mystic into the passenger’s seat. As James put it,“The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”
⁷

After placing mystics under his searching and sometimes critical gaze—for example, he looked dimly at Saint Teresa’s erotic flirtation with God as so much exhibitionism—the Harvard scientist came to an extraordinary conclusion.

“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different,” he said.

He went on to write, “We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”
⁸

For many believers then and now, William James had endorsed “God.”At the very least, he had vouched for the mental health of those who claim to know God. James might have viewed it differently: he readily conceded that science could neither prove the reality of a spiritual dimension, nor rule it out. But these experiences, he argued, point to “the possibility of other orders of truth.”
⁹

James’s lectures caused a stir in academic circles around the world, drawing accolades and more than a few attacks. But if James triggered a revolution in the scientific approach to spiritual experience, that revolution was soon overcome by alternative theories that excluded the mystical.

One theory, launched by psychologist James Henry Leuba around the time of James, declared God to be illusion. In this view, electrical or chemical activity in the brain is the source of all mystical experience;
¹⁰
epilepsy and psychedelic drugs only prove the point. Sigmund Freud dismissed spiritual experience as pathology. Freud stated that religion offers protection against suffering through a “delusional remolding of reality.” The “oceanic feeling” that mystics describe is a memory of an infantile state, he argued, perhaps unity with the mother—but whatever it was, it represented an escape from reality, not a perception of it.
¹¹
Others went a step further, arguing that mystics longed for their mother or the womb, a desire sparked by the sexual frustrations of chastity. Piled on top of these psychological arguments was a sociological one: French sociologist Émile Durkheim
¹²
and others theorized that mystics are correct to feel part of something larger—but that something is society, not God.