Mystery experience

Mystical experience, in the book’s account, is a direct and compelling awareness of God’s presence, not a spectacle or a special form of sensory perception. Its central paradox is that it may be certain to the person who undergoes it and still nearly impossible to convey to anyone else. Visions and unusual sensations can accompany religious experience, but they do not define it: many mystics seek God rather than extraordinary phenomena, and some report no sensory experience at all.

Definition and the question of presence

The book distinguishes mystical experience from accounts centered on visions, voices, or being transported to another realm. Rufus Jones was wary of expecting supernatural messages, while Hildegard of Bingen did have visions. Bernard of Clairvaux, by contrast, described an encounter with God in which his senses registered nothing. Thomas Merton’s account of his experience in Cuba likewise conveyed a conviction that God was directly present without a sensory event. The contrast matters: a vision may be one way experience is narrated, but mystical experience cannot be identified simply with seeing or hearing something extraordinary.

Bernard McGinn’s account helps clarify the range of the term. Mysticism can be considered an element within religion, a process or way of life, and an attempt to express direct consciousness of God’s presence. Across these meanings, presence is the unifying concern. The basic definition offered in the book is an experience of God that feels direct and so certain that the person has no doubt about what occurred. Yet that certainty does not produce an adequate description. Mystics try to communicate what happened, but human language and familiar categories do not seem sufficient to express what they understand as beyond language and definition.

Four characteristics of the experience

William James’s four marks provide a framework for describing mystical experience without reducing it to a single kind of event. The first is ineffability: the experience cannot be adequately reported in words. The failure is not merely a lack of eloquence. Mystics regard ordinary language as incapable of describing God fully, and may value the encounter precisely as an overpowering mystery rather than as something that can be mastered through explanation.

The second mark is noetic. An experience may convey knowledge, but not knowledge reached by reasoning through evidence or argument. It is understood as a way of knowing that must be experienced rather than learned from description. This does not mean that the experience supplies a detailed doctrine; its force lies in the directness of the perceived truth.

The third mark is transience. Such experiences are temporary and often brief, even when the person undergoing one loses a sense of time during it. Their passing can leave a frustrating awareness of God’s absence. At the same time, the brief encounter may remain certain in memory and sustain gratitude that divine presence was once so unmistakable. The fourth mark is passivity: the person does not will the experience into being and may feel that the self’s ordinary agency has receded. Mystics commonly interpret it as an unearned gift initiated by God, not as an achievement produced by technique or effort.

Different forms, a common concern

The experiences recounted in the book show how these features can appear in distinct circumstances. In late 1937, Thomas Kelly described an experience of Presence that he had not sought. It came after the crisis of failing his Harvard dissertation examination, an event that had deeply shaken him. When he addressed a Young Friend’s group in January 1938, his manner had changed: rather than speaking as a professor describing experiences he had encountered in books or other people, he spoke from the intimacy of his own experience. The episode illustrates both passivity and consequence. The encounter was not something Kelly had arranged, but it changed how he communicated about religious life.

Howard Thurman’s experience in India took place through a conversation with an Indian scholar about the spiritual life in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Their morning discussion had involved defending their respective religious positions. After they recognized this, they agreed to return to the conversation in a different spirit. Thurman later described the afternoon as a profound sharing of religious experience: they met beyond their social, political, and cultural divisions, while each remained an individual. He regarded the encounter as a watershed in his life. Here, mystical experience does not depend on a solitary vision; it emerges through a meeting in which religious difference gives way to a shared awareness of spiritual reality.

For Simone Weil, the experience at Solesmes developed through prayer and poetry amid affliction. A young English Catholic introduced her to George Herbert’s poem “Love,” which she learned by heart and recited when her suffering was most difficult. During one recitation she experienced Jesus Christ as taking possession of her. She understood the encounter not as something produced by her senses or imagination, but as the presence of love within suffering. Her later practice of reciting the Our Father in Greek with absolute attention further developed this connection between prayer and experience. If her concentration wandered, she began again. At times, the prayer carried her into an experience of profound silence; she also described Jesus Christ as present with her in a way more real and moving than before. For Weil, attention became central to prayer, not because attention could compel an encounter, but because it oriented the soul toward God.

Preparation, change, and the limits of description

Howard Thurman described religious experience as a dynamic encounter between humanity and God, and as the individual’s conscious and direct exposure to God. He believed that worship could become a setting for such an encounter, but he did not claim that people could command it. Prayer prepares the person; Scripture, especially the Book of Psalms and the Gospels, can form part of that preparation. The initiative remains with God. In Thurman’s account, the movement involves both seeking God and being found by God, and the encounter discloses that God is rather than establishing that conclusion by inference.

For Thurman, the test of an experience is not its strangeness but its effect on a life. A genuine encounter gives the person a new center of purpose and requires a gradual surrender of self-directed priorities. That change connects private religious experience to moral life: the encounter should make a difference in how a person lives, not merely provide an intense memory. Dag Hammarskjöld similarly linked attention to God with freedom from the self. He believed that a person becomes strong when focused on God, who is within the person and in whom the person lives; he also connected self-forgetfulness in God with the moral life of society. In Markings, he described mystical encounter as a desired crossing into unfamiliar territory and understood prayer as descent into oneself to meet the Other. His account presents the encounter not as escape from responsibility but as a ground from which to act.

The book also stresses the limits of both language and control. Paul’s account of ascending to the third heaven, Bernard of Clairvaux’s difficulty identifying when his encounter began or ended, and Douglas Steere’s emphasis on the experience as given all reinforce the sense that it cannot be fully explained or manufactured. Mystics are characterized less by the pursuit of ecstasy than by a deep longing for God and hope for union with God. Prayer, study, meditation, and silence can cultivate receptivity, but no practice guarantees divine presence. Experiences may come and go, and spiritual life may alternate between certainty and absence. In this account, their lasting significance lies not in spectacle but in the conviction of presence, the desire for God, and the changed orientation that an encounter may leave behind.