I hadn’t intended to listen to the new James Martin podcast with Stephen Colbert. I like both of them a great deal, but I’ve been a bit burned out on podcasts lately, and I’d already heard Colbert talk a number of times about his faith (more than once with Fr. James), so I figured there wouldn’t be anything in it I hadn’t heard before. But after Colbert got fired from CBS I was mad on his behalf, and thus more inclined to give it a listen; and then when I saw Fr. James post on social media about “the mystical experience that brought Stephen Colbert (back) to the Catholic faith,” and I knew I should make time for it.
I am an easy mark for conversion (or re-conversion) stories, particularly ones that touch on the mystical/fantastical/supernatural. I find the question of the miraculous to be endlessly fascinating, and I love to hear people who seem otherwise pretty straightlaced talk about these experiences that sit outside the norms of daily existence.
For instance, here is the great George Saunders talking about the ecstatic experience he had at age 12 or 13:
I was in Friday-night Mass and had this feeling of what I’d describe as loving lineage — I felt part of a long line of Catholic practitioners (“Hi, Peter! Hi, Paul!”) and felt a kind of ecstatic uplift at that brotherhood. And I felt it would be so beautiful if this feeling could be sustained. But alas.
I think those ecstatic experiences are favors God does you, in order to say, “You’re not ready for this yet. You can’t do it, but I’m not kidding — this state is real and valid.” I still remember the clarity and power of those feelings. I felt this great and overwhelming affection for everything and everybody.
Here, Saunders reminds me of Thomas Merton, who, in “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” described his own mystical experience this way:
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness.
Colbert’s mystical experience was, well, somewhat less mystical sounding, though clearly no less significant for him. He talks about becoming an atheist in college and then after graduation experiencing a time of desolation and loneliness. He tells Fr. James that at a particularly low moment someone gave him a pocket Gideon New Testament; when he cracked it open (literally, since the thin paper pages were frozen together) to the suggested reading for dealing with anxiety, The Sermon on the Mount, he said, “It was speaking off the page to me. … There was no reader. There was no book. I was being spoken to directly by Christ.”
It often takes vulnerability and defenselessness … to allow us to accept the inbreaking of God into our lives.
He and Fr. James talk about how it often takes vulnerability and defenselessness — us letting down our guard, perhaps because we are so tired of how we currently feel that we are willing to accept anything that will change us — to allow us to accept the inbreaking of God into our lives. As Fr. James says, “God is kind of always knocking on the door, but we have these walls up. But when you’re vulnerable … you’re more able to feel it.”
Colbert takes pains to explain that this wasn’t a Saul on the road to Damascus moment — a complete, startling reorientation of his life — it was being called back home, to how he was raised, but coming back to it in a way that felt newly real and significant and lasting to him. As he so eloquently puts it, “I am often in the valley. But I know what it looks like from the mountaintop, and I believe that’s a real experience. And I keep that real experience with me, and my faith … is to get me to the next real experience.”
There is a long, rich mystical tradition in Catholicism, and if we give it no credence, or downplay its significance, we are missing out on something beautiful and possibly transformative in our own lives and worldviews.
I love the way he repeats “real experience” here, since there might be a tendency to dismiss moments like this — ones that touch on the divine presence moving in our lives — as less than real. I know in my own life I also went through a period of youthful atheism and had my own mystical experiences that helped lead me back out of it. While rationality could not convince me of the reality and presence of God, personal, intimate experience of this presence did. This, I suppose, is grace. But it is also deeply personal and idiosyncratic; my experiences were real and significant in my own life, but they aren’t really translatable to anyone else.
I am now many decades removed from those direct, ecstatic experiences. I do not doubt that they happened, but at this point my faith does not rely on mystical experiences to be sustained. At the same time, I must admit, I would love to feel that sense of enchantment again — to fully feel the world “charged with the grandeur of God.” Not just to know that it is, but to experience it directly.
The mystical nature of reality has been particularly on my mind lately because I recently finished “They Flew: A History of the Impossible,” in which the award-winning historian Carlos Eire dives into the (superabundant) historical record of levitations and bilocations attributed to saints and witches in the early modern era (and on into our own time). It is easy, from our modern perspective, to dismiss accounts of witchcraft as benighted misogyny and classism, but it all gets a bit more complicated for Catholics, whose tradition testifies to the ability of saints to fly and bilocate and do all sorts of, well, magical-seeming things.
Here on Ignatius Day it is worth noting that St. Ignatius, in addition to writing some of the most nuanced and psychologically astute accounts of the spiritual life, was alleged to have levitated during prayer numerous times and to have bilocated as well. There are multiple accounts of these impossible phenomena. Do we believe it actually happened, or do we want only the more rational aspects of his spiritual wisdom?
Personally, I have no problem believing in personal, internal, mystical experiences — the sorts of moments Saunders, Merton and Colbert relate above. I know that all sorts of people experience these things with pretty regular frequency. But I find it a little more challenging when we get to claims about more public sorts of miraculous moments.
I remember being a reasonably devout Catholic school student, in 7th or 8th grade, and my older brother, freshly home from college and armed with a semester’s worth of biblical deconstruction, asking me if I really believed that Jesus walked on water. I had never really questioned it before. My initial inclination was to say that of course I believed it, but as I looked at my brother’s incredulous, somewhat scornful face, I hemmed and hawed. It did seem pretty unlikely, really. Wasn’t it more likely that his followers came up with the story, years after he died, as a way to show his power?
Reading “They Flew” foregrounded this tension between belief in the miraculous and the embrace of rational empiricism. We, obviously, live in a world fully shaped by the latter. And (generally speaking) I find myself at odds with people who reject science, facts, evidence and rational thinking in favor of “biblical truth”; our current governmental nightmare shows the sort of damage these sorts of people can inflict on the world. But I don’t want to surrender irrationality to the fundamentalists. There is a long, rich mystical tradition in Catholicism, and if we give it no credence, or downplay its significance, we are missing out on something beautiful and possibly transformative in our own lives and worldviews.
So it is worth reaffirming that belief in the fantastical and the mystical is not the same as a fundamentalist rejection of reality. Stephen Colbert is, famously, a Tolkien obsessive, as am I, and Tolkien, as a Catholic and as a fantasy writer, knew how central the imagination is to perceiving the true nature of absolute reality. In “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien wrote, “Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it.” Fantasy “does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity.” Tolkien’s vision of the fantastical does not reject facts or reality, but he also knows that empiricism is not the sum total of what is real. Rather, he writes, “The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.”
Perhaps the miraculous levitations and bilocations of St. Ignatius (and St. Teresa of Avila and St. Joseph of Cupertino, among so many others) are another way we can go about glimpsing this underlying truth. Even if we personally have not had any mystical or ecstatic experiences, we can still pay attention to these baffling, impossible moments of the miraculous in the lives of the saints and accept that they point toward a deeper reality — that there is more to existence than what we can immediately see and measure. We perceive reality in one, limited way, but as Merton says, the true nature of reality “cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift. … I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”
Fr. James mentioned the walls we all have up around us most of the time, which can keep God, and others, out; Merton reminds us that the gate of heaven, which can lead us through these walls, is everywhere. May we become aware enough, vulnerable enough, to recognize this.
To that end, on this feast of St. Ignatius, it might help to recite his Suscipe prayer, and pay particular attention to his call to surrender our understanding to God:
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.
You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.
Amen.
Top art: “The Vision of La Storta” by Albert Chevallier-Tayler (Jesuit Curia)