“For my thoughts are not your thoughts
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Isaiah 55:8-9
One of the most touching things a priest has ever told me in the confessional was “God’s grace is very individual.” In a way that demonstrates the truth of the statement itself, it was exactly what I needed to hear. I confessed certain difficulties I have had since reversion, and the priest’s statement helped me to remember that God has been there in my life all along, even when I never thought about Him. His presence in my life works out differently than it does for anyone else, and in ways I can’t and shouldn’t try to fully explain.
My conversion was the result, I like to say, of God invading my life. In the span of a month or two, I had a child, read The Everlasting Man, and had sleeping and waking visions of God. One of the sleeping visions was a vision of God’s power. The next day, Sunday, I went to mass and have made every effort to go every week ever since.
Some revelations, pun intended, are meant to be shared. The Old Testament prophets received words, images, exhortations and prophecies from God. These, they knew, were meant to be shared with the world. They were written down and distributed and became the sacred texts of the nation of Israel. But not all graces or revelations from God are like that.
My visions of God for example, I don’t think are meant to be shared, at least not in detail. I can remember four of them, and in short, I believe they were visions of God’s power, His peace, His judgment and the bliss of heaven. But to say more about them, especially in writing, is wrong I think. Maybe someday, I could share more detail about these spiritual visions with someone if I thought they would truly benefit from it. I can’t rule it out completely. But until then they will remain with me, and that is a source of some pain.
Visions like these, and many other graces, I believe, are meant to be kept between you and God, to be cherished, pondered, and pulled out of one’s pocket like a gem that you admire in private. If a certain grace is strange, highly personal or emotional, or simply hard to explain, God probably wants us to sit with it rather than share it, or too hastily seek a definitive meaning. This is difficult. When God does something amazing in our lives, we naturally want to share it, but often this sharing doesn’t go how we want it too.
The short story “A Losing Hand” by Seth Wieck deals with this situation. A man experiences what he believed to be the presence of God, and it stayed with him his whole life. First, he describes the experience which he ascribes to God, a light on the porch after sundown:
“Good company is hard to break. We prayed and sang on their threshold. The sun was down. I started us on a hymn I knew, and our voices mingled. Hidden in pain, risen in love. There is no harvest without sowing of grain. We weren’t good singers, but human voices, even untrained, reach for harmony. In that dark little doorway, the summer air thick and hot as goose down, we all had our eyes closed. I don’t know how to jump to this next part, but the light came back on. That summer light, not the porch light. The sun was set. Just in the middle of us, the light was there. It might have been a flash or a thousand years—I mean, I guess it wasn’t a thousand years—but maybe it was because the moment seemed to crack open, like it was skin we’d outgrown and shed. And then it was gone, and we were standing in the dark doorway.”
The narrator realizes it may have been wrong to tell people about this event but does so anyways.
“We told Forrest and Nelda and the other folks at Westway Fellowship about the light we’d seen on the Gerbers’ porch. I wrestled with whether we ought to. Jesus warned a leper not to tell anyone of his cleansing, but the light arrived with no message except itself, so we told the others. Talking about it felt a little like if I’d described my honeymoon to my brother the next morning. I don’t know how we could have kept that a secret.”
The event becomes an object of gossip, shared as you would someone’s illness or divorce, a subject of speculation, or skepticism or envy:
Todd Simon came up and said, “I heard you seen God.”
“Scripture says no one’s seen God,” said Mike. Todd ignored him.
“The Gerbers said you saw God on their porch.”
I cast a glance over to the Gerbers. Harold was packing up his guitar. Gerry stacked hymnals. Todd was one of those people that nosed into conversations like a runt pig on the teat. You tried to cut short conversations with Todd. He wore a polyester suit and enough hair gel to stiffen a wet noodle.
“We saw a light,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why what?”
“Why’d y’all see it?”
Forrest lifted his hand, tapping a line with his fingers pinched. I knew Forrest well enough to stop talking when he did that, but Todd didn’t notice and kept on.
“How’d y’all get to see it?”
“Let Forrest speak,” I said.
“Did he see it?” Todd said.
Forrest dropped his hand.
“Did it speak?” Todd asked.
“It was just a light,” said Sara.
“What do you mean just a light?” I said.
“I don’t mean nothing. It was a light. It didn’t have a voice.”
…
We weren’t skeptics, but the questions made me uneasy nonetheless. The more I answered questions, the more that moment seemed to recede, like when you have a spot in your vision, and it moves each time you try to look directly at it. Everyone wants that to happen to them, I think, and so they ask questions to see if they can get God to show up. Todd asked which hymn we were singing.
At the end of the story, the narrator, having aged a few decades or so and told many people about the light, wonders whether it happened to begin with. His wife, Sara, says it wasn’t actually a light at all.
Sara told her that she didn’t see a light, but that there had been something there. A warmth is the word she used. I’ve thought about that a great deal. Was there a light? Was I so sure of what I’d seen that I spoke for Sara? Have I misremembered, or has Sara?
One of the lessons I took from the story is that it’s usually better not to share our mystical experiences at all, especially for those of us who live in close proximity to nonbelievers. This is the approach taken by Blessed Elisabeth Leseur, a holy woman who experienced a conversion after marriage, but remained a devoted wife to her beloved husband, Felix. She wrote in her journal:
Other people’s absolute incomprehension or ignorance of much that concerns the supernatural life is a good reason for practicing the silence that is recommended so much by the ascetic writers.
Leseur stringently avoided mentioning spiritual topics, including graces she suspected to have come from God, to her atheistic husband and their friends, all of whom were strident atheists. Here life was full of suffering. She agonized over the fate of the soul of her husband, whom none of her efforts could convince to believe. She was physically ill and weak, until her untimely death at the age of 38. She stopped talking on spiritual topics, but lived a deeply holy life of silence. Her holy quietness bore holy fruit. After her death, her husband Felix, the atheist, converted to Catholicism and became a priest.
Not all famous Catholics have taken this approach. JD Vance reported a serendipitous breaking glass at a bar as a “strange coincidence” that led to his conversion to Catholicism:
I almost wish it hadn’t been so gradual—that there had been an “aha!” moment that made me realize I just had to become Catholic. There were some weird coincidences that hastened my decision. One came about a year ago, at a conference I attended with largely conservative intellectuals. Late at night, at the hotel bar … a wine glass seemed to leap from a stable place behind the bar and crashed on the floor in front of us. We both stared at each other in silence for a bit, a little startled by what we’d just seen, before ending our conversation abruptly and excusing ourselves to turn in for the night.
I believe that Vance is a sincere Catholic, but he may not quite understand how stories like this come across. I’m not questioning that God worked through a broken glass. He can work through the most unlikely means, I’ve experienced that myself. It’s our conviction that God was present in some event, more than the event itself, that comes from grace. But I do question the wisdom of including the broken glass incident in explicit detail in a conversion essay, leaving it wide open for skepticism or ridicule by the whole world.
This, then, is the pain of grace: to be utterly convinced that God is real, that He has spoken to you, and to be unable to share that meaningfully with anyone. It is to receive something too intimate to give away. Like the Apostles, whose preaching often fell on deaf ears, the way we share our faith is not just by speaking the truth, but living the truth. We can’t simply tell someone about our experience of God and think it will have the same impact on them. The graces we receive from God are precious, but they are meant for us as consolations, encouragement for the journey. There is no shortcut to the Christian “Way”. We must live every day with joy and charity, for the sake of others.