Ladybugs, Lions, & Landscapes

Note: This was originally published in our bi-weekly e-newsletter, Liminal Spaces. To get future issues delivered to your inbox, sign up here.

—In your spiritual journey, when have you most deeply encountered or felt the divine? How did you know or understand what you were experiencing?

For me (Melanie), the times I have most profoundly experienced the divine were when I “heard” an inaudible voice speaking to me, as well as when I was in Utah simultaneously being challenged by and taking in the breathtaking, otherworldly landscape of the desert. Somehow I knew in the depths of my soul that I was communing with God. 

For me (Gary Alan), it was the night I spent at Nambiti Game Reserve in South Africa. I sat up most of the evening on a small deck outside my tent taking in the symphony of sights and sounds that can only be described as sacramental. About a hundred yards away was a pack of jackals on their nightly hunt. In the trees just in front of my tent were a family of Vervet monkeys speaking to one another in a language older than words. A giant Kudo gently sauntered across the grass in front of me. Looking up, the stars sang their ancient songs for those with ears to hear. It was as if I’d unzipped my tent and stepped out into a different dimension.

—If your experiences with the divine are similar, did you tell others about them? How did they react?

Except for a few spiritual traditions, most modern religious and non-religious communities struggle to make sense of—let alone accept—these types of spiritual experiences, thanks to the influence of the Enlightenment and its elevation of logic and reason at the expense of revelation. “We should only believe what can be proved,” the rationale goes, “and we can’t prove subjective experiences.” This logic leads one to believe any inner experience of faith should be approached with a high dose of skepticism and even be considered dangerous. Therefore, our beliefs (or intellectual thoughts) are elevated above our experiences of faith. 

Yet as our spiritual ancestors can and do attest, our experience of the divine need not be limited to the thoughts in our heads. In fact, though we do not often recognize it, even our beliefs themselves are filtered and indeed influenced by our experiences. “The irony in all of these attempts to over-rely on externals is that people end up relying upon their own experience anyway! Most of us—by necessity—see everything, mystical and otherwise, through the lens of our own temperament, early conditioning, brain function, role and place in society, education, our personal needs, and cultural biases and assumptions,” writes Father Richard Rohr.

So rather than seeing faith or spirituality through a logical lens or a spiritual one, our task is to see them through both. Maria S. Guarino put it eloquently in her book, Listen with the Ear of the Heart: Music and Monastery Life at Weston Priory: “Head and heart, rational and spiritual, need not stifle or silence one another. Both are necessary as the brothers position themselves toward an experience of God that is immediate yet distant, familiar yet ineffable, immanent yet transcendent, and as rational as it is unknowable.”

Practice

The simplest way to attune yourself to God’s presence is to just sit outside somewhere for 20 minutes a day. Find a quiet spot near a lake or stream, or even under a shade tree. Pay attention. What do you see? What do you smell? What can you feel between your toes or in your hand? With any luck, you will soon hear God’s still, small voice in the breeze, or you might even glimpse the divine hovering over the water. Maybe you notice the tiny ladybug who decided your arm was a nice place to rest, or all the bees buzzing as they pollinate the flowers. Be still and know that you are in the presence of God, and simply say, “Thank You.”

Humbly,

Gary Alan and Melanie

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