Divine presence
LongingDivine presence is the direct awareness of God at the heart of the book’s account of Christian mysticism. It is not defined by spectacular visions or unusual sensations: mystics may be certain that God is present while seeing and hearing nothing extraordinary. The concept therefore joins an experience that is deeply personal to a claim that reaches beyond the senses, language, and reason. It also extends from moments of intense encounter into the practices and relationships of ordinary life.
Definition and the Limits of Description
The book offers a simple definition of a mystic as someone who has experienced God’s presence in a very direct way, with a reality and certainty that leave no doubt about what occurred. Yet the experience resists explanation. Human language cannot adequately describe God, and those who try to communicate what happened find that ordinary words do not suffice. This difficulty is not treated as evidence that the experience lacks meaning; rather, it marks the distance between an encounter understood as transcendent and the language available to report it.
Bernard McGinn’s account gives the idea several related dimensions: mysticism can be an element of religion, a process or way of life, and an attempt to express direct consciousness of God’s presence. The book identifies presence as the unifying note among these dimensions. Rufus Jones likewise defines mysticism as religion emphasizing an immediate awareness of relation with God and a direct, intimate consciousness of the Divine Presence. In his formulation, it is religion at its most acute and living, but it is not confined to Christianity; Jones recognized mystical experience in other religions as well.
The book also distinguishes presence from sensory phenomena. Rufus Jones was wary of expecting “secret messages from sociable angels.” Hildegard of Bingen had visions, whereas Bernard of Clairvaux reported no sensory experience in his encounter with God. Thomas Merton’s account of his experience in Cuba describes a conviction that God was immediately present without a corresponding sensory perception. These contrasting accounts prevent visions from becoming the measure of mysticism: what matters is the awareness of God, not a particular kind of perceptible event.
Experience, Gift, and Absence
The four marks of mystical experience attributed to William James help clarify how presence is represented. It is ineffable, because its contents cannot be adequately put into words; noetic, because it yields a kind of knowledge that is experienced rather than reached by reasoning; transient, because it may last only briefly even when the mystic loses a sense of time; and passive, because it is not produced by the person’s will. The encounter may feel as though God has taken the initiative. In the book’s account, mystics generally regard it as an unearned gift, not an achievement they can secure by effort.
That gift does not mean that spiritual life is continuously filled with a felt awareness of God. The book describes a recurring movement of rising and falling: intense nearness may give way to a desert-like sense of absence, and the absence may be painful or unsettling. The mystic may long for the return of a presence that had seemed undeniable. In its concluding guidance, the book cautions against giving up during such dry periods. Presence and absence belong to the same changing spiritual course; a remembered encounter may remain significant even when it is no longer felt.
The experience is also associated with change in the life that follows it. Jones writes of an enlarged area of life: a widening of horizons and connection with what lies beyond the individual, alongside greater personal unity and creative energy. For Howard Thurman, a true encounter with God gives life a new focal point and calls for the surrender of self-centered priorities. The experience is not validated merely by its intensity; its significance is tested by whether it changes how a person lives. Thurman describes religious knowledge of God as a disclosure, not an inference, and presents transformation as something that may emerge gradually rather than at a clearly marked moment.
Presence in Ordinary Life and Practice
A recurring emphasis in the book is that divine presence need not be sought only in exceptional states. Thomas Kelly wanted a God present at ground level: amid work in fields and stores, household responsibilities, and the small frictions and annoyances of daily life. He was interested in ordinary routines as a setting for mystical encounter, rather than limiting God to moments when thought seems elevated. Howard Thurman similarly treated daily experience as raw material for awareness of God. His course at Boston University first examined religious experience and then considered suffering, tragedy, and love as contexts through which a person may be ushered into God’s presence.
For Thurman, readiness matters even though the initiative remains God’s. He regarded prayer, and especially reading Scripture such as the Psalms and Gospels, as preparation. A person moves toward God, but God’s touch of spirit and will brings about a new character. The change may be slow: a former difficulty becomes easier, or something once regarded as acceptable no longer seems possible. His account therefore places spiritual practice and divine initiative together without suggesting that practice can compel an encounter.
The book makes the same point through repeated, modest disciplines. Prayer, meditation, study, and silence may feel dry on some days and rich on others; their importance lies in their cumulative effect over years, not in the production of one dramatic experience. The practical suggestions begin simply—with a Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer, a few minutes of silence, or a Gospel reading—and leave room to experiment with meditation or use a worship service as a time of attention. The author recalls asking a monk at Gethsemani how to deepen a prayer life and receiving the advice, “Do what we do, pray the Psalms.” That reply became a steady practice. The book’s wider account also notes silence, fasting, communal worship, and a simple lifestyle as practices among mystics.
Presence in Other People and Its Wider Meaning
The concept is not restricted to inward awareness. Dorothy Day’s primary revelation of God’s presence was poor people. Her daily prayer and attendance at Mass belonged to an interior life, but she understood service to others as a direct way of encountering Christ. She grounded that conviction in Matthew 25: care offered to a person in need is care offered to Christ. The Catholic Worker’s hospitality—providing food and shelter—thus joined spiritual perception to practical responsibility. Day acknowledged that serving people in distress could be difficult; her understanding of presence did not depend on guests appearing saintly or on the work feeling uplifting. Christ, in her account, was encountered under ordinary human appearances.
The book gathers this outward-facing understanding together with several images of an inward divine element. Mystics have described a ground, spark, seed, or watermark within the person, something not overcome by the world or sin. Quakers speak of an Inner Light in each person, attended to through silent worship and listening for the Holy Spirit. Their meeting may also include a participant moved to speak. This understanding is not confined to a finished past revelation: every person retains the potential to experience God’s presence.
Dag Hammarskjöld’s journal expresses a related conviction that God is active in human life even when events do not accord with personal wishes. He understood success as serving purposes beyond the individual and himself as an instrument rather than the ultimate source of achievement. His sense of presence was therefore connected with receptivity and vocation, not simply comfort. In a similar way, the author’s concluding account argues that circumstances once taken for chance or coincidence may later be recognized as occasions in which God was acting. Across these examples, divine presence can be inward, communal, or encountered through another person; it may alter conduct and understanding without becoming permanently or fully describable.
