Mystical Premonitions
Peter hadn’t overindulged himself, at least as far as I was concerned. He had spoken so movingly about his parents.
‘Do you know,’ said Peter as he placed a cup of coffee in front of me, ‘I believe the greatest gift I’ve ever been given is the love my parents had for one another. The love they worked for over the years overflowed onto me and my brothers. Without that love, I’d be nothing.’ He drew up a chair and sat opposite me at the kitchen table.
‘Thank you for sharing such a personal story with me,’ I said. ‘I feel privileged.’
‘Not at all. To be honest, I think I needed to speak to someone.’
‘It’s helped me, too,’ I told him, ‘to appreciate something that I’ve never realized before.’
‘You know,’ said Peter, ‘my mother and father knew all about the mystic way. They’d been through their “dark nights” all right, though I’m sure they’d never heard of St John of the Cross, and they’d have laughed if you’d told them they were mystics. And yet, I’ve told you about their journey to help you upon yours.’
‘It has helped me already, Peter, I can assure you. I can only thank you again for describing their journey in such detail.’
‘Oh, I didn’t tell you all the details,’ said Peter. ‘That would have taken far too long and I think it would have been too harrowing.’
He stared at the table in front of him. I looked out of the window at nothing in particular. I knew Peter was near to tears. He told me that his father had had a very vivid dream the night before, in which he saw Peter’s mother as a little girl again, handing him a love-letter under the school desk.
‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘Even at that age there was something between them that was very special.’
‘That’s what you called “juvenile” love,’ I remarked, hastily interrupting Peter, trying to raise the emotional tone of the conversation for my own sake if not for his!
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Peter, sitting up and pulling himself together. ‘The point that I was trying to make was that when we first pray, the words we use have been learnt from others, from our parents, teachers or perhaps from a prayer book. The language may be full of meaning, taken from the Scriptures or composed by the saints, but it rarely corresponds to the feelings of the beginner.
‘That’s what I meant by Juvenile Prayer. Perhaps it’s pushing things a bit too far, but it just seemed to me that the similarity merited paralleling the two.’
‘In no way,’ I said. ‘I think it’s a good analogy and it’s worth making, but the prayer of a beginner is also characterized by a lot of asking too. Isn’t it? I know it was in my case! I used to think God was a sort of spiritual Father Christmas who would give me whatever I needed, or whatever I thought I needed.’
‘You’re right,’ agreed Peter, ‘but once again there’s no real feeling for God; he is just used for what we can get out of him. Adolescent Prayer starts when the beginners are in some way touched by the Presence of God, which makes them want to be touched again and again.’
‘What do you mean by being “touched” by God? That’s never happened to me!’
‘Oh yes it has,’ said Peter. ‘Why did you come to me in the first place?’
‘I’d almost forgotten about that,’ I replied. ‘But it wasn’t because of some strange touch of God; it was because of a young mother I met at a retreat center in London, who gave me your address.’
‘That’s right,’ said Peter, ‘but why did you go to that retreat center in the first place? Remember, you went because you came to realize that your prayer life was in a mess! And what made you realize that? It was a touch of God, wasn’t it?
‘Let me explain how these touches come about in the first place, so that a beginner is inspired to take the next step in their spiritual journey. Let me give you a few examples to show you what I mean. You may be at a party, having a good time with your friends. There’s plenty of fun and games, plenty of food and drink. There’s music and dancing and everything is in full swing when suddenly it happens.’
‘What happens?’ I asked.
‘A touch of God,’ replied Peter. ‘It’s not a physical touch; it’s a spiritual touch, which amidst all the merriment makes you suddenly feel alone. It makes you feel that you don’t belong, makes you want something further, something higher, something nobler, though you’d be hard put to give a name to what you really do want if someone pressed you. But if you were pressed, you’d probably say “God”, not “Jesus Christ” but just “God”.
‘On the other hand, you might be sitting by the sea, listening to the waves lap against the shingle on the shore; the sun bloods the sea red as it settles down to rest behind the distant hills. There’s a gentle caressing breeze, the sound of the curlew piping over the marshes – then it happens again! A touch.
‘When this happens you can close your eyes. You have no need to gaze at the scene any longer to savor the One who has reached out and touched you through what you have seen. You are enveloped by a deep melancholic sadness that is worth all the joys of the world ten times over.
‘When I was in Paris I was taken to see the opera Aida. It simply bowled me over. The music wasn’t entirely new to me but the overall effect of the production was beyond all my expectations. When the curtains fell at the end of the Grand March I was literally entranced. I didn’t want to go to the bar with the others for a discussion on the merits or demerits of the current production. I just wanted to be transported back into the solitude of my own room to savor what I had received. Somehow, through the medium of the composer’s music, I had been able to experience something of the beauty, something of the glory and majesty of God, and I didn’t want the experience to be dissipated by a lot of meaningless claptrap. A moving film, a beautiful piece of music or an artistic masterpiece can have the same sort of effect. Intense study can lead to a similar experience.’
‘Yes, I’m with you,’ I said. ‘I know exactly what you mean. But why should God suddenly decide to reach out and touch us in this way?’
‘Well, it’s not quite like that,’ said Peter. ‘Remember, St John said that God is love. I think it would be more accurate to say that God is loving, and he is loving all the time. The reason why we don’t experience his loving is because we are so lost in ourselves. Then, all of a sudden, by the combination of some powerful external stimulus and an inner receptivity of mind and heart, we are able to experience for a short time the love of God that is there all the time.
‘I used to call these experiences “mystical premonitions” because that’s really what they are. They are an experience in advance of the mystical awareness of God that eventually becomes far more commonplace for the true contemplative who has been sensitized to God’s presence through a long purification. These touches actuate a sort of spiritual restlessness that enables a person to know by experience what St Augustine meant when he said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Now they want to search for the One who has touched them, to experience in ever-fuller measure the love without measure that has briefly reached out to them.
‘Long before my father met my mother again when he was in his late teens, he knew all about the experiences that we’ve been talking about. The geography master at school had interested him in astronomy and he used to stay up to all hours on the school roof, gazing at the stars. To start with, his knowledge was purely academic; to end with, it was purely mystical. He didn’t bother with the telescope when the grandeur and majesty of the heavens spoke to him and touched him with the sort of knowledge that you don’t find in books.
‘The same thing happened with mountaineering. He started to climb the highest peaks he could find, just because, as Mallory said, they were there, but he ended up climbing them because he experienced that Someone else was there. His mother told him he’d fallen in love with love when she saw him daydreaming and she was right – he had. That Presence reached out to him in a new and unexpected way the day he re-met my mother. She was to be for him an even greater and more perfect embodiment of the One he was searching for.
‘You see, it is not man but mankind that is created in the image and likeness of God, man and woman together, who in their mutual loving manifest the most perfect embodiment of God’s loving. The masculine and the feminine, which are perfectly balanced as one in God, are manifested as two on earth, so that man and woman, in entering into the other through love, experience God in a unique embodiment.
‘When my father met my mother, he came to experience through her something of the beauty, the goodness and the truth of God clothed in a feminine form that excited his heart, his mind and his body, and led him on into an experience in which God’s presence made itself felt more fully than ever before. It was an experience that became more and more perfect as, with the passing years, the selfishness that still kept them apart was gradually purified through the suffering and self-sacrifice involved in bringing up a family together.’
‘I’d never looked at things like that before,’ I said. ‘I’d certainly never seen marriage as a call to the mystical life.’
‘I know you hadn’t,’ said Peter, laughing to himself. ‘Few do. Please do be clear about this – everyone is called to the mystical life, because “the mystical life” is the expression used by Christian tradition to describe the experience of being plunged ever more fully into the love of God. This is for all, whether they are married, unmarried or celibate.
‘I’ve been stressing the idea in the married life firstly because my own parents came as close as any I have ever known to attaining it, and secondly because that ideal has a lot we can learn from. I don’t want to pretend that the ideal is attained more regularly in married life than it is, for instance, in religious life, because I don’t believe it is. I think honors would be about even.’
‘Are we talking about something that is a particularly Christian experience, or does everyone experience God’s touch?’
‘It’s for everyone,’ Peter replied emphatically. ‘God loves everyone, not just Christians, but Christians do respond in a unique way.’
‘How do you mean?’
Peter opened his prayer book.
‘Now. Let me see now,’ he said, as he opened it at the readings that had been set for the Feast of St Augustine.
‘Now just listen to this. Here is a classic example of what we’ve been talking about, what I’ve described as a mystical premonition or touch. St Augustine’s reaction to it is typical and his response is specifically Christian as we’ll see, though it’s interesting to remember he wasn’t actually a Christian at the time:
When first I knew you, you lifted me up so that I might see that there was something to see, but that I was not yet the man to see it. And you beat back the weakness of my gaze, blazing upon me too strongly, and I was shaken with love and with dread. You called and cried to me and broke open my deafness and you sent forth your beams and shone upon me and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath, and do now pant for you. I tasted you, and now hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I have burned for your peace. So I set about finding a way to gain the strength that was necessary for enjoying you. And I could not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who is over all things, who was calling unto me and saying, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
‘You see,’ said Peter, ‘the experience Augustine had was one that is in many ways common to many, though few can explain the experience as he can. Many people have what are sometimes called “natural” mystical experiences, but they find it difficult to express their experiences. Whilst the poets spend all their time trying to transpose them into words, capture them in sublime poetry, Augustine rushes on to seek the source from which they came.
‘His search leads him to Jesus Christ, for he finds in him the Masterpiece of God’s creation. The fragments of God’s beauty and goodness and truth that are scattered in the rest of creation are to be found fully in the Masterwork. He spent years getting to know Jesus by poring over his every word in the Scriptures and by responding in his own words until a sort of spiritual conversation developed in his prayer life. To begin with, the knowledge was predominantly intellectual, but it gradually became more and more emotional as he experienced the love of Christ reaching out to envelop his mind and heart and his whole being. Now he began to respond in the language of love, as his deepest feelings awoke to the love he experienced reaching out to envelop him. Finally, when everything had been said that needed to be said, he found that all he wanted to do was to be still, to savor in silence what he had received in a deep but “heartfelt” contemplative stillness. This was St Augustine’s spiritual adolescence and it followed an identical pattern to that of my own parents when they rediscovered each other as teenagers.
‘When they met again, my father had to get to know my mother all over again, but in a deeper way than before, when they were only children. Their relationship grew and developed in a way that perfectly parallels the adolescent prayer life of St Augustine. When they first began to see each other again they spent hours talking, catching up on the lost years, talking about the present and sharing their plans for the future. They found they had so much in common; they both liked the same sort of music and began to go to concerts together regularly.
‘They liked swimming, too, and went to the local pool every Friday evening. My father was delighted to hear that my mother was a keen walker, and they would go hiking in the Peak District at weekends and to the Lake District in the holidays, and of course they loved gazing at the stars together, though the poor stars were regularly neglected! He said they talked a lot to begin with, but the more they met, the less they said; the more the spark of love that was there from the beginning began to flicker into a flame, the less they needed words to communicate how they felt, though words were still important. On one occasion, he said, they spent almost a whole day on the hills above Lake Windermere and they hardly spoke a word. He could hardly hold his tears back as he quoted from one of his favorite poems by John Donne, “The Ecstasy”:
We like sepulchral statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.
‘The same sort of idea is expressed by D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love. “Words travel between the separate parts but in the perfect one there is a perfect silence of bliss.”’
Peter paused for a few moments for his words to sink in before he continued.
‘St Augustine knew it was Christ whose love he experienced enveloping his whole being as his spiritual adolescence reached its climax, but my parents didn’t. That is, until Abbot Williams explained who they experienced in the love that they mutually generated and shared. It was a sacramental love because each was a seeable, touchable sign to the other of the different quality of God’s love that they shared with each other. This sacramental love was publicly celebrated on their wedding day, and on every other day throughout their lives whenever they tried to love each other selflessly.’
‘Thank you, Peter,’ I said, ‘for explaining everything to me so clearly. It does make sense to me, although when you were describing how St Augustine’s prayer reached its climax I thought he’d reached the heights of mystical prayer.’
‘Oh no!’ said Peter. ‘Only the heights of Adolescent Prayer.’
‘Well, what happened next?’ I asked.
Peter laughed. ‘You should know,’ he said. ‘You’ve just been finding out for yourself when your spiritual adolescence suddenly came to an end.’
‘You mean St Augustine had to go through what I’ve been going through?’ I asked.
‘Exactly!’ said Peter. ‘And so does everyone else when spiritual adolescence suddenly comes to an end as it did for you.’
‘But why does this have to happen?’ I said.
‘It has to happen,’ replied Peter, ‘so that a person can grow up spiritually and enter into what I’ve called Adult Prayer, where they are prepared for Perfect Prayer. You see, the reason these fleeting experiences of God could not continue for long was because the would-be mystic belongs to this world, not the next, and so does his heart. And his heart is full of so many human desires of one sort or another that are initially far stronger than the transitory desire for God.
‘If purely human desires are allowed to absorb the whole of a person’s attention, then these brief mystical glimpses of God will diminish the older a person gets, until they will play little or no part in their experience. You see this sort of thing happening in the lives of some of the Romantic poets. The more human needs and desires absorb their attention, the less they can be sensitive and attentive to the source of their inspiration in creation. Their poetry suffers and so do they. Time and time again they turn to sex, to drink, to drugs, to do for them what the touch of God had done before, or at least to satisfy the yearnings which that touch had uncovered within them.
‘Those Christians who, like Augustine, turn to prayer to lead them on to come to know and experience the Creator in his Masterwork, travel on a path that is unknown to most of the poets. They begin to experience the touch of God reaching out to them not just from inanimate creation but from a living Person. Through prayer, they are not only touched in the highest part of their spiritual being but in every part of their being, as their human emotions are opened up and begin to respond to the One who excites the sensual as well as the spiritual.
‘Although their love is expressed in words, words finally fail them, and all they want to do is to gaze in awe at the One who absorbs their whole attention. This “mystical gaze” is not totally different from that of the natural mystic, but it is surrounded and supported by a wealth of human feelings and emotion. Medieval spiritual writers used the words meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio to describe how an initial intellectual process develops through highly charged emotional aspirations to the still and silent gaze. During the Counter-Reformation, when spiritual writers became a little more analytical and psychological, they used the terms Meditation, Affective Prayer, Prayer of Simplicity, and Acquired Contemplation to describe what their medieval forebears had described before them. The phrase “acquired contemplation” was coined to describe the final stage of this process because it can be reached by human endeavor, to distinguish it from true mystical contemplation which, as we will see, is a pure gift of God that cannot be attained by any man-made methods or techniques.’
‘I’m with you,’ I said. ‘I know what you’re saying from my own spiritual reading, but in my arrogance I had come to believe that when I came to what you’ve called “acquired contemplation” I’d reached the heights, and so I was shattered when everything seemed to stop almost overnight. Despite everything I tried to do, I got nowhere but deeper and deeper into a spiritual desert with no oasis in sight.’
‘You see, what happened was this,’ said Peter. ‘The initial fleeting experiences of God’s Presence that reached out to touch you actuated a deep desire to be touched again and again. It was this desire that led you to take up a serious prayer life, knowing that it was only there that this desire would be fulfilled. What was initially a rather vague desire for some sort of experience changed into a desire for a person – just as a teenager who falls in love with love, and moons around looking for some sort of experience to satisfy them, changes when they discover not just love, but someone’s love reaching out to embrace them. The experience of being loved deepens as you come to know the one who loves you. The same thing happens in prayer as the desire for love is changed into a desire for the Lover.
‘Given serious commitment to prayer, love grows and grows with ever-deepening knowledge of the Lover, which comes through listening to his words and discovering that they are not only charged with meaning that you had not understood before, but with loving that you had not experienced before. This is why the slow, meditative reading of the words of Jesus in the sacred Scriptures has always been the primary way that the heart and mind of the believer is raised to the Father through the Son.
‘As the desire that was there from the beginning is buoyed up by human feelings and emotions, it is able to remain focused on God and to remain so for longer periods of time than before. Prayer now becomes no more than a simple, silent, contemplative gaze upon God. Adolescent Prayer has reached a climax, which suddenly changes when the heart’s desire – which had been sustained and supported by a whole range of human emotions before – is suddenly raised above and beyond them as it reaches out into the unknown. It’s as if it has suddenly fastened onto some mysterious magnetic power that draws it relentlessly towards itself. Once this happens, Adolescent Prayer comes to an abrupt end. There can be no going back even if a person wanted to. The days of this exciting, exhilarating, emotional prayer have ended, never to return in quite the same way again.
‘Let me give you an analogy to explain a little more clearly what has happened. When a rocket or spaceship destined for the planet Mars is ready to depart, it has attached to it boosters, huge canisters of fuel whose job it is to raise it up off the ground and out of the earth’s atmosphere. When they have done this, they will be of no further value, so they must be detached from the spaceship or they would impede its progress towards its destination. As the spaceship comes closer to Mars it comes under the planet’s magnetic force and travels faster and faster. The boosters or the canisters of fuel, then, fulfill exactly the same function for the spaceship as do the emotions for the heart’s desire for God. They raise it up off the ground, as it were, where it has been earthbound. They raise it higher and higher for as long as it takes to latch onto the mysterious magnetic pull of the divine love that it has been gazing upon through its most perfect human embodiment. When they have done this, they can do no more and must be cast away or they would impede the individual’s progress towards God.’
‘I see,’ I interrupted, ‘and that’s what happened to me.’
‘Yes,’ said Peter. ‘That’s why you can’t use your emotions in prayer as you could before. That’s why all the spiritual feeling that sustained your first fervor in the prayer groups and in your private prayer can no longer support you in the journey ahead. You have to learn a new means of prayer that will sustain you on the mystic way that you have now just begun. You have now left Adolescent Prayer for good. Adult Prayer has already begun. My job is to help you on the road ahead.’
Peter was on his feet, smiling. He could see that his explanation had had the desired effect. Yes, it did make sense to me. A thousand and one questions were rising up in my mind, but I could see they would have to wait. It was almost one o’clock and I knew Peter had to go.
‘When can we meet again?’ I asked eagerly. I’d been so engrossed in what Peter had been saying that I’d forgotten all about his mother’s death and about his father and his own grief. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ I said. ‘You’ve got more than enough on your plate at present.’
‘No,’ said Peter, ‘I invited you here precisely so that we could talk. But I do have to go to Liverpool with my father tomorrow morning. He’d just put down a deposit on a flat fifty yards away from my brother’s home – he’d planned on spending the rest of his retirement there with my mother so that they could watch the boys grow up. My brothers were both keen on the idea, and if anything happened to one of them, the other would be close by so that they could be looked after – but now everything’s changed. Tony’s insisting that my father should move in with him, so we’ll have to try and get out of the contract. Anyway, I’ll be back by lunchtime, so I’ll come round about two o’clock if that’s all right by you.’
‘Fine,’ I agreed.
‘Bye!’ said Peter, and with that he was gone.