Mystical Encounters for Christians

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Once I've entered "the thin place" with its profound stillness, I "wait patiently for the Lord" (Psalm 40:1) to invade me. In quietude, I surrender to an invasion of the Holy Spirit.

I wish I could say that I feel this spirit of Christ saturate my being every morning. The truth is, most mornings nothing happens. Sometimes weeks go by and nothing comes from my centering prayers. But other times, often when I have come close to despairing, it happens.

Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician, gave testimony of such an inflowing of God's Spirit as he described going into a room early one evening, shutting the door, sitting alone in darkness, and prayerfully waiting. The next day he wrote in his diary:

10:30 p.m. FIRE! God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not the god of the philosophers and the scholars-absolute certainty-beyond reason. Joy! PEACE! Forgetfulness of the world and everything but God! The world has not known Thee, but I have known Thee. JOY! JOY! JOY! Tears of joy!

When I am asked how I know that such mystical infillings of the Holy Spirit aren't the result of simple "feel good" techniques that sometimes mark the ecstasies of New Age practitioners, I have an answer. I explain that these experiences generate within me an intensive passion for telling others about Jesus. Along with that powerful evangelistic drive, His Spirit also creates within me a compassion for the poor and oppressed, and I am driven to respond to their pleas for help and justice.

The Bible says that if any person says that he or she loves God and fails to live out love toward those in need, that person "is a liar" (1 John 4:20). When centering prayer results in one's heart being broken by the things that break the heart of Jesus, it is a validation that the ecstasy experienced in stillness is an infilling of Christ's spirit. When one experiences compassionate love for others, it is evidence that "the spirits are of God" (I John 4:1).

There's an old African-American spiritual that begins, "Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus." I am gaining some idea as to what they were singing about. I think they had something in common with Ignatius--and with an age-old Christian contemplative tradition that finds perfect expression in centering prayer.

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