22nd Anniversary comments, part I

The search for a path through life

Aesculus (Buckeye) with swallowtails. From the author’s garden, Sparkill, NY earlier this week.

On Monday, my good friend Paul Bains asked me to speak a little more about the ecstatic religious experiences I had 22 years ago.

I hardly ever speak of this., In fact I actively avoid it. The anniversary of my most intense religious ecstasy (there were a number of them) is, however, today— Friday, July 26—and so perhaps all these many years later, it would be appropriate to speak, if somewhat guardedly, about this specifically and deeply medieval experience.

What will people think of such a thing? It worries me, quite frankly, and always has. This is why I rarely bring it up. Yet many folks are interested in the miraculous; and what I have to report falls under that definition, although after all these years of contemplation on the matter I would call it natural, myself, and thus not miraculous at all.

So instead of miraculous, let’s call the experience ”medieval”—not because I’m an aficionado of medieval life and art, but because the type of religious ecstasy I experienced is more commonly spoken of in testaments such as that of Teresa of Ávila, a Catholic Saint who I certainly was not familiar with when the religious ecstasies took place. One cannot of course call her medieval in the strictest sense, but from a cultural perspective the roots of such things lie in the middle ages, not here in our country; they lie in Chartres and the Gothic , not in Google and Facebook.

There was not one miracle. there was a steady stream of them, a stream whose influence I still live within. They followed one after another, year after year after the Virgin Mary touched me outside the Vatican in broad daylight in Rome in June 2001—another thing I don’t speak of much. That experience shattered me; the instant it took place I saw that everything I thought I knew or believed wasn't true.

She put something in me. Something I could feel.

I kept walking past the Vatican.

I finished the trip to Italy.

But I was already in a completely different world.

And there was never any going back from there.