Seeing With Your Heart

Hiding in Plain Sight

It was a Saturday in 2012 as I sat gazing aimlessly through a large bay window at the parkland, planted with ancient oaks and other large deciduous trees in Gonzaga College, a well-to-do secondary school run by the Jesuits in Ranelagh, a cosmopolitan suburb of Dublin. I was attending a seminar as part of a two-year course on spiritual companionship for lay people. The training programme is coordinated by an organisation called 'Anamchardas', which means 'soul friend' in Irish. I wasn't to know, though, that soon I'd learn, in a most unexpected way, that we have  'soul friends'  in another dimension and that they can connect with us in more powerful and surprising ways than we can imagine.

The rest of the class of about twenty adults were chatting in the small kitchen at the back of the room or reading quietly, waiting for the class to begin. Usually, I'd be with the former group enjoying the banter. But, this morning, I was in a melancholic mood as I sat alone with my thoughts.

Feeling an acute sense of loss for my late wife, Cushla, I silently said to her, 'Where are you, Cush? Are you beside me?'. But try as I might,  I couldn't sense her spirit. I put my disappointment to one side when Fr Myles, the course founder and now a friend of mine, began to speak. He asked the class to close our eyes and lead us into a guided meditation. As I went deeper into myself, I heard an almost inaudible voice:

'I'm in your heart,' the voice said. It was Cushla! I had been looking everywhere for her, and she couldn't have been closer.

 'There's no time or space in the spirit world', Cushla used to say to me regularly. Now she was proving her point! She was not only in a dimension right beside me, she was actually in me! Also, as she had done throughout our life together, she was reminding me to look not just with my physical eyes, which are constrained by time and space but with my heart and soul, which are eternal.

Other Realities

When we approach the world with the attitude that 'there's more to this than meets the eye' and look behind the obvious, we discover that reality has multiple levels of meaning. 'Ordinary' things will not seem so ordinary after all. We understand more than ever that things exist for a reason. This insight alone can open our eyes and heart wide enough to notice how events are colliding and interweaving in our life, how they might serve us, and what we could learn from them.

With spiritual discipline and an openness to a divine purpose, we might eventually possess an Apocalypse spirit. Apocalypse has come to be used popularly as a synonym for catastrophe, but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation. In the Bible, an apocalypse happens when someone is exposed to the transcendent reality of God's perspective. An apocalypse is a confrontation with the divine so intense that it transforms a person's view of everything. From then on, they possess a spirit which unmasks illusions and uncovers a deeper meaning to appearances.

However, we don’t have to have encountered anything as dramatic as an apocalypse to experience the transcendental. Some religious thinkers believe that we are regularly peppered with messages from the unseen, but we inadvertently dismiss the messages or quench the spirit. Sometimes we do this because of our over-reliance on rational and common sense faculties. In my experience, this occurs more often with those who perceive themselves as more modern and intelligent than the majority. They let pride and intellect completely shut down any possibility that there might even be a remote chance of a supernatural explanation for an extraordinary experience.

Commenting on our rationalistic and secular times, the English writer Peter Stanford says: 'We imagine we are so much cleverer than past ages, that their wisdom can be surpassed by our own, passed through the filter of science and logic and reason.' (C. S. Lewis called this chronological snobbery'—the belief that modern opinions are always automatically better than ancient ones.) 'The results are misleading and dispiriting,' Stanford concluded.

 One of the more extreme results of intellectual pride is the willful ignoring of any sign emanating from outside the five senses. This zealous spiritual scepticism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We will not witness what we do not believe to be real, and we can't expect to have profound personal experiences of something we're convinced doesn't exist.

The Unnameable Mystery

What if we have interpretations of the unseen and signs from the supernatural backwards? Instead of starting with scepticism and being 'scientific' when we experience something extraordinary or mystical, we might begin by being open to the mystery and wonder of it all. I'm not saying that we should abandon science, reason, or logic. But, supposing, as the mystics have been saying for thousands of years: that the invisible world is not only real but is in actuality more real than this world and that our earthly reality is just a limited expression of greater unseen realities.

'Reason gets us to where unnameable mystery begins,' Thomas Aquinas said in the 13th century. This is the beginning of the true relationship that should exist between reason and the spirit world. It is the starting point where we can become aware of the invisible but enormous supernatural power and the endless divine love available to us.

The even better news is that the object of this love and goodness is always the individual, not some abstraction called humanity. So the signs and messages from God and the Holy Spirit are often just for you.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson says there is a visionary quality to all experience:

'Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there are two sides to your encounter with the world. You don't simply perceive something that is statically present, but in fact, there is a visionary quality to all experiences. It means something because it is addressed to you. You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision.'

More Quotes on Seeing

'I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.'

—Thomas Aquinas

'As we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal'

— 2 Corinthians 4:18

'What the heart knows today, the head will understand tomorrow.'

—     James Stephens  (1880 –1950)  Irish novelist and poet.

‘Who is to say what “reality” is? Only the Creator. So we regard the different forms impartially, with detachment. One can be manifested as easily as another...we need not cling to the appearance of illness as being more ‘real,’ nor do we need to insist on the form of health as being required for our life to be meaningful. We are real and meaningful, quite independent of whether we ‘appear’ as healthy or as ill.’

—Beatrice Bruteau, in her book: Following Jesus into Faith.

Resources:

Hunting Magic Eels - Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age, by Richard Beck.

Richard Beck is a Professor of Psychology at Abilene Christian University in the USA. I recommend reading his blogs on his website: Experimental Theology (richardbeck.substack.com).