By Andrew McCarron

In late summer 1918, the American artist, engraver, and architect Rockwell Kent set off with his nine-year-old son to Alaska for a period of nine months, living on Fox Island in hopes of reinvigorating his spiritual and artistic life. He was depressed, his marriage was in jeopardy, and his career as an illustrator had hit a standstill. The drawings, woodcuts, and journal entries that he produced while away were published in a book two years later called Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska. The illustrations feature a man (presumably Kent himself or his version of an everyman) experiencing a range of moods and states of consciousness against the rugged, snowy backdrop of Alaska. Many of the illustrations capture the subject engaged in the menial chores and routines of everyday life with titles such as “Home Building,” “Fire Wood,” “The Day’s Work,” “Meal Time,” and “The Whittler.” In other illustrations, though, the subject is depicted gazing into the firmament with eyes full of wonder.

Even though Kent saw himself as an atheist, his work exudes a radical awe reminiscent of the states of consciousness described by Walt Whitman in Song of Myself. Enraptured by the bewildering mystery of the cosmos, Whitman famously poeticized that “The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual—namely to You.”¹ Rockwell Kent seems to have experienced a similar transmission while in Alaska. Anticipating his return to New England at the end of his adventure, he wrote, “In living and recording these experiences I have sensed a fresh unfolding of the mystery of life. I have found wisdom, and this new wisdom must in some degree have won its way into my work.” Years later, he’d characterize what took place in spiritual terms this way: “We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite.”²

The term unio mystica, from Latin, means “mystical union” and traditionally refers to the union of a mystic’s soul with God. The soul of the mystic gets absorbed into the transcendent in rare, transient moments of spiritual ecstasy. These moments are often described as earth-shattering and life-changing. Although known by different names, the experience is recognized in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabalistic Judaism, as well as in the works of many romantic poets and artists who choose nature as their primary subject. It also inspired a lengthy chapter in the American psychologist William James’ 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience. At the center of the experience is a profound encounter with the infinite that can’t be easily explained or replicated.

People who experience such a moment or moments seem to intuitively understand that the spiritual dimensions of our being are just as real as the physical and psychological parts of us. The Catholic contemplative Thomas Keating (1923-2018) spoke about a mystical experience he had in 1970 while walking outdoors at Saint Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. He was nearing forty at the time and had lived two decades as a Trappist monk. It was evening and the stars were bright. All of a sudden he was overtaken by a feeling of divine love and felt an acute sense of the connection between all things:

As I walked down a little ways this tree suddenly illuminated and my whole life went by in the branches of that tree in about five seconds and everything seemed to be okay in the sense that nothing matters except this. And so I walked into the field behind the guesthouse and the hay that was coming up and the trees that were coming up and the air and heat – everything was emerging out of God – including me – so I was in such jubilee that I started jumping up and down.³

Keating’s consciousness, for about an hour, joined with the infinite, like a cup of water released into the ocean. The experience was so profound that he spent the remainder of his long life developing a contemplative practice of centering prayer to help people become more deeply united with the divine presence by slowing down and entering the deep silence of the mind. It’s in this silence that God can sometimes be felt.

Rockwell Kent’s drawings and Thomas Keating’s experience resonate with me deeply. The dreamy second child of a spiritual mother, I sensed the mystery of the universe long before I had words for it. As a teenager, I was drawn to Jack Kerouac’s restless hunger for the ultimate and read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. These and other authors were early guides on a path that would lead to studying at Harvard Divinity School, where I’d learn about mystical theology and begin seeing myself as a spiritual person. One of my few truly mystical experiences occurred in the summer of 2000, at the age of twenty-four. I’d later learn from the British mystic and theologian Evelyn Underhill that the initial experiences of illumination in the lives of mystics are often the most profound.

That summer was a highwater mark in my early adulthood because I had a girlfriend, I had just concluded two successful years teaching English at a local private school, and I’d been accepted for graduate studies at Harvard Divinity School. My decision to apply was a bit of a lark, having been turned down for a graduate degree in Shakespeare at Oxford University and encouraged to consider HDS by a family acquaintance who had recently completed an MDiv there. The part that appealed to me most at the time was her explanation that I could take literature classes in the College of the Arts and Sciences in addition to my theology coursework. In my mind, this would pave the way to acceptance into a competitive doctoral program in English down the line. I left my teaching job that June and dove into three luxurious months of summer before moving to Cambridge. I had spending money, future prospects, a social life, and time to explore nature.

One afternoon in August, my friend Steffen and I drove an hour or so from where we lived in the Hudson Valley to Bash-Bish Falls on the New York/Massachusetts border, in the Berkshires, outside Egremont. The weather was perfect—sunny and warm but with an occasional breeze that augured the cool greens of September. We hiked down along the mossy falls, forded through one of the lower pools, and scaled up Alander Mountain to the ridge with a lookout over the valley. From there we bushwhacked down the opposite slope through thick trees and fern until we stepped into a meadow of lavender stalks. The dry, purple stalks were moving together in the wind, back and forth, making a gentle whooshing sound. The word “halcyon” came to mind.

Everything felt elevated and radiant and beautiful. My heart was speeding up and I began feeling happy to the brink of fear—as if my body wouldn’t be able to contain the nearly orgasmic sensations that were teeming through my veins and expanding my capillaries. Some nearby maples and oaks were as much me as I was them—and the same was true of the sky and the enormous white clouds that passed like ethereal glaciers overhead. It was as if the atoms that made up my body were in complete sync with the atoms in the trees so that when I moved they moved and when they moved I did.

Like most experiences of a mystical nature, it’s notoriously hard to explain, and my past and present attempts have all fallen short of conveying what it was like. What I can say is that it felt like the parameters of selfhood opened and my energy distributed across space and time. Everything in me and on the outside formed a sacred, indivisible whole. For a few minutes my soul had jumped from my body to join the beating heart of the cosmos. Up to that point in my life, I had always been an “I,” someone named “Andrew,” someone born on a specific day in a specific month in a specific year with parents, a brother, and a linear story unfolding in a universe at the center of which was me. In an instant that changed. Although I felt a tinge of panic, the oceanic oneness I experienced was simultaneously liberating. It was as if my spirit had returned to the pre-ego conditions of the womb, though the maternal body in this case was the universe itself.

My friend Steffen had fallen into silence and was squatting some distance in front of me, taking in the spectacle. Neither of us felt the need to confirm or process what was taking place. I felt, deep in my cells, how unlikely it was to have been born into this and how all of it—the lavender, our bodies, the wind, the mountain, the clouds and sun—connected in ways and on levels that no scientific theory could penetrate and no words could adequately describe. This is all just a way of describing it after the fact, of course. The experience at the time wasn’t framed by concepts or cluttered with language. It was seismic, and it became all that really mattered.

By the time I arrived at Harvard Divinity School a few weeks later, I had more or less shelved my original plan to take as many courses on Shakespeare as I could. Instead I signed up for every course offering that had the words “mystical” or “mysticism” in their titles or descriptions.

Propelled by the spiritual pride typical of recent converts to any new worldview, I assumed that higher consciousness was a spigot that I could turn on and off when it suited me. I was utterly unprepared for the feelings of separation and emptiness that settled over me like a spiritual winter sometime during my first autumn in Cambridge. I recall one November weekend in particular when a bunch of us drove to New Hampshire to stay in the vacant house of a classmate’s friend situated on a large lake. Whereas I had anticipated a pleasant weekend surrounded by new friends against the picturesque backdrop of New England foliage, the actual experience was haunting. The scent of dying leaves and cold air filled me with inexplicable dread. The very world that had opened so magically a few months prior felt inhospitable and definitely separate from me.

Shortly after the unsettling weekend in New Hampshire, my girlfriend broke up with me. Unmoored from any sense of direction or centeredness, my heart fractured beneath the weight of anger, sadness, and fear. It wasn’t only heartbreak I was nursing, but a pervasive sense of having lost something I’d naively assumed was only beginning to reveal itself. The holy sort of happiness I’d experienced had turned out to be more of a transient gift than an eternal promise.

Yearning for the meadow that Steffen and I had stumbled into the previous August, I borrowed a fellow divinity student’s beat up Corolla and drove the three hours to Bash-Bish Falls, hoping to catch a contagion of the awe I’d felt. But somehow I couldn’t retrace the steps we’d taken and ended up with muddy shoes and feelings of frustration and futility. Even if I had located the meadow, I doubt anything mystical would have happened, nor would it have likely brought consolation. It would be years before I’d feel a quiver of the divine presence again, and future experiences would never match the intensity of what happened that August day.

Thankfully, the coursework I was taking at the time helped me contextualize what was happening to me. What I was learning helped me to better understand the spiritual parts of myself and others. I read about the “dark night” experienced by Saint John of the Cross, and Evelyn Underhill’s reflections on the loneliness and abandonment suffered by mystics who traverse dark valleys of separation between rare moments of illumination. In her 1911 work, Mysticism, Underhill writes:

The “Dark Night of the Soul,” once fully established, is seldom lit by visions or made homey by voices. It is of the essence of its miseries that the once-possessed power of orison or contemplation now seems wholly lost. The self is tossed back from its hard-won point of vantage. Impotence, blankness, solitude, are the epithets by which those immersed in this dark fire of purification describe their pains.⁴

Years, decades, or a lifetime can pass without another divine showing. Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila taught me how this absence can be downright excruciating. Depression, doubt, and despondency aren’t uncommon. The private correspondence of Mother Teresa, made public years after her death, contained expressions of this emptiness over long stretches when she ceased to feel the presence of the divine. Over the decades following a series of potent mystical experiences in 1946, she felt abandoned by God. “I am told that God lives in me,” she wrote in a letter to her confessor, “and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”⁵

In the spring of my first year at divinity school I took a seminar on mystical poetry taught by the kind and incredibly gifted Louis Girón-Negrón. Feeling lost and fragmented, I sat in the back of the classroom and kept quiet the entire semester, though I read everything that was assigned to us and listened attentively, filling up a red Harvard Coop notebook with notes, questions, and doodles. During that seminar, I was introduced to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, one of the great Christian mystical poems of modern times. A profound expression of what it’s like to drop from the “infinite” into the “finite” can be found in the opening stanzas of “Burnt Norton,” the first of the quartets. The poet-speaker finds himself remembering a walk taken with a friend through a garden to a drained concrete pool where something mystical took place (symbolized by a lotus), but the elevated moment is brief and dissipates:

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.⁶

Through the quartets, Eliot depicts the divine presence not as something most of us will always feel. Most of the time we will contend with its absence:

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; . . .⁷

This is to say that most of the time the divine presence only manifests itself in “hints” and “guesses.” Unio mystica may be approximated in occasional spacy moments of a daydream, or in our transcendent encounters with art and nature. Rockwell Kent’s experiences unfolded across several months in Alaska, while mine took place in one afternoon in the Berkshires. In both cases, the feeling of mystical intensity and connection didn’t last forever but gradually alchemized into a subtler form of experience with less dramatic peaks and valleys.

Evelyn Underhill wrote in her work Practical Mysticism (1914) that “illumination shall be gradual. The attainment of it depends not so much upon a philosophy accepted, or a new gift of vision suddenly received, as upon an uninterrupted changing and widening of character; a progressive growth towards the Real . . .”⁸

I vividly recall reading these words in my Rockefeller Hall dorm room and copying them into my notebook before going out for a walk. An early spring nor’easter had passed through the city the previous day and night, dumping over a foot of snow on the streets. I trudged through the snowdrifts in sneakers, my toes freezing. The cloud cover blew off over the Atlantic as I made my way through the empty streets of Somerville. Suddenly the sun was beating down over the snow with a glaring intensity that made me feel vaguely nauseous.

And then something magical happened. As I turned the corner of Park and Beacon Street, I walked under a giant stalactite-sized icicle jutting down from an eave on a corner building. My eyes moved upward and my heart began racing. Although the air was frigid, the sun was strong enough to begin melting the outer layer of ice, which created a liquid sheen that refracted the light into a scintillating display of color that my consciousness momentarily joined. For a few seconds, I forgot my troubles and allowed the visual spectacle to move through me. It was, quoting again from Eliot’s Quartets, “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything).”⁹

In that moment, I made a commitment to myself that regardless of how blessed or frustrating my life might seem to me at different times, and no matter how infrequently or fragmentarily I’d feel the divine presence quiver through me, I’d follow such moments like a trail of breadcrumbs on my journey home. Even though moments like this might be transient, occasional, or faint, I understood that accepting their fleeting nature was one of the most lasting and profound lessons in navigating a spiritual life.