Beyond Magic and Miracles

The more we live deeply into life, the more we turn to God.
And the more we turn to God, the more we live deeply into life.
When we turn towards mystery, mystery parades through our lives.

Richard Moss, M.D. Words That Shine Both Ways

I was terribly sobered at the revelation a Catholic nun I know once shared with me.

I had been struggling through a particularly dry period in my spiritual life. For several months no amazing dreams filled me with insight about my journey, no synchronous surprises delighted me with their serendipity. I was hanging in there with my ministry and my spiritual practices but I felt like throwing in the towel. I wasn't having fun and it seemed something had obviously gone wrong. I thought perhaps a conversation with a veteran might help.

C. was in her 70's at the time, working as a counselor in a shelter for runaway teenagers in New York City, living in a tenement in Hell's Kitchen with three other nuns. In a conversation with her about my spiritual dry spell, I learned that C. became a nun when she way in her 30's, at approximately the same age as I was when I was ordained as a minister. There were some parallels in our lives, and I felt a kind of kinship with her, but how had she been able to put up with the unappealing living situation, the difficult work? What had allowed her to stay so devoted to her calling? How had she been able to live without so many of the comforts most Americans require, without a husband or children of her own? What kinds of spiritual experiences had sustained her all those years, brought her acceptance that was never resignation and humor that wasn't cynical?

Her response to my inquiry was to describe a mystical event that had taken place very early in her religious life. Because such things are precious and intimate, and the content doesn't really matter to anyone but her, I won't describe what occurred. But what is important for me to tell you is that this was something that happened once, and once only, in C's life. She never again had something happen to her that fell into the Signs & Wonders category into which I filed my own spiritual experiences.

I was appalled, amazed and in awe of her endurance in the face of what I considered true spiritual poverty. There's no way, I thought to myself, that I would pursue a spiritual path if there wasn't something to reinforce that I was on the right track, or at least the right continent. However, for C., her experience of that event had been so powerful that it imbued her with all that she needed to sustain her in her vocation. She would certainly have been pleased to have other such profound contacts, she told me, but it wasn't really necessary -- the real spiritual life is lived in the trenches of everyday life. And her work in the inner city attested to her willingness to live that life.

Filled with respect for the way C. was able to live her life in faith derived from a single moment of divine revelation, I looked in dismay at my own demands for what I thought a spiritual life should look like. Spiritual rewards, what St.Teresa called consolations - I wanted something to show for my efforts. And, after all, why shouldn't it be as it had always been for me before? I had come to rely on the steady stream of the magic and miracles that had characterized my path to spiritual awareness from the start. I believed they were my spiritual life!

One of the first inklings I had as an adult that there was more to life than met the eye came one day in Missoula, Montana on a hot summer day in July. A friend had told me it was possible to get a psychic reading for $7 from a spiritual awareness class that was held in a room above one of the brick storefronts downtown. Coming in from the brilliant sunshine, I climbed the dark staircase uncertain as to what awaited me. But for seven bucks, what could the harm be? I assured myself.

There were five people I'd never seen before already seated in the room when I entered. Three would "read" me, one would record whatever words were spoken and draw pictures, while another would act as the "ground" and "hold the space," the tall blond man seated in the center of the room explained to me. Sure, I thought, whatever! I was a staff nurse at the local hospital at the time and this sounded like a lot of nonsense to me, but because I was suffering in the aftermath of my father's suicide and a recent divorce, something in me was open to something different and I wasn't in a position to be too choosy. So I sat and did what was asked of me, which was that I simply speak my full name aloud. Then I just listened. One after another the three readers, with their eyes closed, began to describe images that were coming into their mind.

At first these were general statements about me that could have been true for any woman in her mid-20's, but then they became more specific. Things only I could have known about myself were suddenly being revealed by perfect strangers. I became increasingly uncomfortable, anxious both about the content and the method of the revelation. And then came the clincher. One of the women readers began to falter a bit, obviously a bit uncomfortable herself. "Has there been a death of someone close to you recently?" "Yes," I answered. A few more uncomfortable moments passed. "Your father?" she queried. Yes again. "And the way he died? It was sudden and unexpected?" Yes, yet again. "I don't want to upset you," she said, "and I'm very new at this -- but what I am seeing is that he committed suicide." The room was silent. I was stunned. There is no way any of these strangers could have known that fact! I had just moved to Missoula and hardly knew anyone in town. And I certainly hadn't hung out with any "spiritual" types like these people. I was at a loss to explain what happened, but it seemed extraordinary, really way beyond anything my mind could conceive of at the time.

A few moments later the reading concluded, and I, shivering with goose bumps, stumbled back out onto the street again. What had happened? Not knowing what to do next I walked into a bookstore across the street and went directly to a bookshelf and to a hardback yellow book with a gray paper cover. I plucked it off the shelf without looking at it and bought it straight away. When I got home I read the introduction by Dr. C.G. Jung in which he describes the phenomenon of synchronicity, an acausal meaningful relationship between events; it was the basis for the ancient text I now held in my hands - the I Ching.

From that day of the psychic reading and that moment when I first encountered the I Ching, I began to perceive life as a series of events that had an unseen but discernible significance. Before this, my life seemed to be a succession of one absurdity followed by another, now it was more like strands of a necklace composed of pearls and precious gemstones. Even when my life circumstances were difficult, I reveled in a newfound capacity to find meaning in everything. It was magical- given enough meaning I could find a way to pull the rabbit out of the hat every time and find my life worth living.

The magic of making meaning served me for many years. I came to rely on it to take me beyond the superficial appearances of things, to take me deeper into life and to myself. When one day I read Maurice Nicoll's words, "God is meaning. If you dislike the word the word God, then say Meaning instead." The word God, he explains, shuts some people's minds, but the word Meaning cannot. It opens the mind. I came to see that the true magic in life comes of having an open mind, one that can make links with the unseen and irrational, a mind not bound up in its own misery-making conditions and rationalizations. When my mind opened to Meaning as God, it opened to that realm of infinite possibilities wherein Miracles lie.

Miracles succeeded Meaning as the raison d'être for my spiritual life. The first miracle I recall had to do with the manifestation of money I needed to get away from Missoula after the painful breakup of yet another relationship. To me it was on the order of the multiplication of loaves of fishes that I, who had floated a check for my rent only two days before, could put my hands on $600 for a plane ticket to Florida, get a month off from my hospital job and just leave. Looking back I'm not so sure this was so much a miracle of manifestation as it was a miracle of manipulation, but at the time I was quite pleased that it came about that I could abandon the dark Montana winter for the sunny shores of St. Pete Beach.

But real miracles ensued, at least ones that couldn't be explained by me or others. I began having mystical experiences left and right - times when ordinary reality seemed to dissolve into something I could only describe as psychedelic, only without the assistance of hallucinogens. At one point, I received a calling, seemingly from out of the blue, to be a minister. Then there was the strongest earthquake in the area in 50 years at the exact moment I affirmed my willingness to follow that calling. Another moment, when I was watching the movie The Natural my consciousness spontaneously altered and I had a direct perception of the metaphysical implications of Good and Evil. Or, when I saw A Passage to India for the second time (the first time it bored me to sleep and I was giving it another chance!) , I was flooded with understanding, forgiveness and release in relation to someone I'd been holding onto for much too long. There were many more miracles, too numerous to count if you include the everyday ones I considered at the time too insignificant to pay much attention to. I felt blessed by these miraculous events, was humbled by them; I always appreciated them when they happened, but I also felt some pride that they seem to happen so often, when others I knew led such ordinary lives.

Even though my life seemed rather charmed, I'd always lived pretty much on the edge without a lot of thought for the risks I might be taking. I was usually prepared to deal with the worst and did so with equal measure of courage and foolhardiness. But then really bad things started to happen, and rather than just enjoying miracles that would come and go as they pleased, I began to actively need them and to pray for them. I was not failed. Cancer came to live my mouth but did not stay for long, and the healing of this was a miracle, not only of physical healing, but of something much deeper - my will to live. Three years later, a strange man broke into my apartment in the Bahamas and put a knife to my throat, but he did not linger either. It was a miracle that I could speak the truth that his soul could hear, and that the rape he intended, like the cancer, did not have to happen.

Since then, for the past eight or nine years, miracles have lost their luster. I mean, after your life gets saved a couple of times by a power greater than yourself, you finally come to realize that maybe it's enough just to live life without spiritual fireworks going off every five minutes. Everything in its own way is a miracle, and perhaps nothing is miraculous, in the sense of being the benign intervention of something supernatural. I am happy I had a whole slew of extraordinary things happen to me - I might not have made it this far if they hadn't. But, now, like the nun I felt kin to (well, after all she is my aunt!) I know that neither magic nor miracles are necessary to my spiritual well-being and that something else is far more important.

What I've discovered is that beyond the "rewards" of magic and miracles, of unusual and extraordinary phenomena, there is something far more essential in life which invites me to offer myself in devotion. It is unnamable and unknowable - in fact, we could say it is the Unknown, the Mystery of life itself. Mystery is what we encounter every time our efforts to create a predictable world fail, every time we deny the unfolding of our consciousness that requires our internal and external environment to shift and change. Mystery is what the mind does everything to avoid, because it is unfamiliar in its limited capacity to experience.

"What is dark to the mind is bright to the heart," my Zen friend Bruce teaches, and this has certainly been true for me in my most recent and current encounter with Mystery. The heart he refers to, of course, is not the anatomical heart that can be dissected and analyzed by the mind to understand its workings. Rather, it is the energetic heart, the spiritual or sacred heart, that our human heart has come to symbolize. The heart that perceives and animates what is beyond the senses, penetrating beyond appearances, to the original nature or essence of things. Just look at the picture of anatomical heart on the cover of this publication and you see how while there is a diagram of how the blood flows through the valves and chambers of the heart, there is no explanation for how the life that sets the heart to beating does so, or why it stops when it does. We can only intuit the life force, the Mystery, that intiates that first electrical spark in the heart tissue and sustains it for as long as it does. We can only turn toward that Mystery in awe.

As I lean into Mystery now, my internal experience is one of upheaval. A year ago I thought I'd be doing what I was doing then for a very long time; I was relatively content with my life and work and could see continuing indefinitely. But something began to move in me and around me. I tried to deal with it in a rational way but I ended up being quite irrational. I realized that the only thing I was certain of was that in one moment I couldn't be counted for much longer than that. Entering into the Mystery is sometimes like a roller coaster ride - exhilarating in one instant, terrifying in the next. And yet, through it all and right in the midst, Mystery invites a different kind of knowing than what my mind offers me: nothing is wrong.

Well, yes, I know this intellectually, and besides, a Jungian therapist has already assured me of this. On one level the changes currently taking place in my life, leaving the form of ministry I've engaged for the last twelve years, make perfect sense. He asserts that they are part of a pattern of growth for any spiritual teacher.

Yet the knowing Mystery offers me is different from this. It's more like what happened recently when I wrote an email to my friend Jane who recently left work she loved as a nurse-director of a women's health clinic. Since our circumstances were so similar, I asked her if she had any counsel for me in this time of transition. A few days later an email arrived back from her. In my list of unread mail I saw her email address and "Re: have faith and trust…" I clicked on a button to open it, but instead of "Read" I inadvertently punched "Delete." Her message disappeared immediately. No little menu flashed on the screen as it normally does to ask me if I really want to delete this message. It was gone instantly. After consulting my resident computer whiz and determining this message was irretrievable, it was clear that whatever Jane had to say to me was in the tag that announced it. "Have faith and trust." Mystery invites us into itself with these words, and there's really nothing else that needs to be said.

Magic and miracle do indeed happen. But they are really added things, not the essence. Mystery offers us no tangible rewards for entering into it.. There's no promise of an afterlife in heaven, no guarantee that your prayers will be answered in a way that pleases you. As with a virtue like faith, immersion in the Mystery is its own reward.

The experience of entering into Mystery cannot be fathomed by the mind, but only lived into and appreciated by the heart, which through its innate capacity to love life deeply with faith and in trust, awakens more fully to it. If we rely on the occurrence of magic and miracles, or any event in the world, to define our spirituality we miss out on the best part. My aunt, the nun, understood that and at 86 still lives (with a pacemaker jumpstarting her heart and a replacement mitral valve keeping the blood flowing in the right direction) by exercising her faith muscle.

This is a life based not in what happens but in what is deeply and most essentially true. It's what's there for you and me, for all of us, as we live into it. How do we do this? Next time you find yourself faced with an unfamiliar situation, notice what your mind does to avoid the discomfort of this new condition or circumstance. Doesn't it tend to generalize and make this one, whatever it is, just like the last one? And having done that, doesn't your mind start to work some strategy that will allow it to maintain control over the new situation? (Your mind knows all the tricks when it comes to avoiding the Unknown!) Now that you know you can think yourself into the Known, let yourself feel how this sense of control takes some of your aliveness away, because it takes Life itself away. Is this what you really want? If not, then begin to let yourself drop down into your heart, that space in yourself that is not so interested in controlling and avoiding this new situation as it is willing to meet it.

Why do this? Not because you'll get something you might want, but because in the act of meeting Mystery, you are - not a strategizing mind - a part of life unfolding itself. Just meet it, whatever is there, because it is there, because you can. I think you'll find that this , whatever you might have been avoiding, is it - the thing you've always wanted most.

Copyrighted, NCM Press, 2002