Sometime between my second and final year of seminary I was sent to Milton, Ontario, to do a year-long internship in ministry. On lunch break one day, eating an egg salad sandwich in the Acorn Café, I read a poem. It was a deceptively simple poem. But the moment I finished reading it, I was completely transported into another realm. I don’t recall finishing the sandwich. I don’t even remember paying my bill, although I must have because nobody chased after me. It was as though an invisible force lifted me out of my chair and carried me down Main Street.

Everything happened in slow motion. A man sitting on the porch in his rocking chair became a source of enormous delight as I passed by. I do mean “passed by,” for the strangest thing about this experience was that I had no sense of moving my legs, no sense of my feet touching the ground. Eventually, I ended up in a farmer’s field on the outskirts of town, at dusk, looking out at a field of wheat blowing gently in the wind. It was as though someone had peeled back a layer of reality to reveal the invisible radiance of what lay behind and within all creation. I was suffused with love and overwhelmed by the beauty of what lay before my eyes. My prayer was simple. “God, don’t let this end. Let me have it for just a few minutes longer.” Ironically, the prayer itself broke the spell.

Here’s the poem, which is by Jere Pramuk.

This sunset…
This smile…
This word you are writing…
This pain you are feeling…
The question you are asking…
This omelette you are cooking…

The meaning of life
is the tear of joy
shed at the
sight of
the
well-cooked omelette.

The last line was the kicker for me. I’d been a meaning-freak for years, constantly asking questions like, What is the meaning of life? What am I doing? Where am I going?

The experience that began in the Acorn Café has been foundational for my spirituality. Ever since that moment, whenever I become obsessed with trying to discover the meaning of life in a purely intellectual way, I think of the well-cooked omelette. I open my eyes to the radiant miracle of life. On good days, my intellectual curiosity is supplemented by a condition the mystics call awe.

Isaiah, the Jewish prophet, had his own mystical experience “in the year King Uzziah died.” A curtain was pulled back on ordinary reality, which causes him to boldly proclaim, “I saw the Lord” (Isaiah 6:1). And then this: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of your glory.”

It’s interesting that although Isaiah finds himself in the presence of angels and seraphs (one order higher than angels according to Dionysius the Areopagite), it’s the whole earth that he experiences as being “full of God’s glory.” (In a similar way, in movies such as Michael and City of Angels the angels always want the assignment that takes them to earth, because they miss sensuality; they miss the sheer pleasure of physicality, and the beauty of the planet.) In any case, in the biblical story, Isaiah is apprehended by awe.

I’m not certain that I saw “the Lord” that day in the Milton wheat field, but I came as close to whatever we mean by divine as I had ever come. I suspect the reason the experience came to an end was because I didn’t have the capacity to sustain it. No one, the Bible claims, can see the face of God and live (Exodus 33:20). Moses, however, was prepared to take his chances. “Show me your glory,” he demands of God. Instead, God places him in a cleft of a rock, and covers him with a divine hand. Moses is allowed to see only God’s back. Most of us must settle for glimpses of glory. The biblical tradition affirms that a direct hit would be like looking at the sun without any eye protection. It would fry our eyes in seconds, and scramble our nervous system. If the poem I read expressed any truth at all, it was this: if we could truly see what is before our eyes, day in and day out, the sacred radiance of creation would drop us to our knees and render us speechless. We would know ourselves to be in as much divine presence as we can handle in this earthly realm.

Join me Sept.18-23 for my Hollyhock Program

Interview with Mary Hines