Today’s guest blogger is assistant editor Daniel Kessel.
“I began to feel power in my veins. I became completely alert, more awake than I usually am, and I felt so alive. It seemed that power coursed through me like water through a chute. I wanted to sing.”
Think this author sounds like a Mysterious Ways narrator? I did too. Actually, the snippet comes from a piece in The New York Times by T.M. Luhrmann, a writer and a professor of anthropology at Stanford. Above, she describes the spell of clarity that helped her understand a difficult book she needed to study.
She looked inside her backpack just after that intense moment. With no apparent cause, one of the bike lights she’d tossed inside was melting.
Her article–“When Things Happen That You Can’t Explain”–discusses the experiences of people who have felt a mysterious power enter their lives and their different ways of making sense of it. Had they encountered God? A supernatural force? Or something completely outside the realm of imagination?
After I finished the article, I couldn’t help but think of some of the testimonies we’ve shared in Mysterious Ways. Logan Eliasen, for example, writes about the burst of energy that enabled him to wriggle out of a narrow cave he’d been stuck in for more than 20 hours:
“I shifted my hips. This time, my muscles didn’t burn. My body didn’t struggle against the stone. Instead, it slipped around the crags, like water through a channel. I could hardly feel my body moving, but every part went exactly where it needed to go, with precisely the right amount of force.… Was someone pushing me from behind?”
His language is strikingly in tune with Luhrmann’s words. Clearly, both authors came into contact with a similar force, so spiritually powerful they can feel it physically too.
Likewise, Mysterious Ways Senior Editor Rick Hamlin felt transported beyond the material world as a young man when he visited Assisi, a well-known holy town in Italy. Rick first arrived in the dingy gray light of an overcast day and wasn’t much impressed. He sat in the plaza and meditated.
Then something changed. “All at once, the grayness seemed to part,” he writes. “To my eyes the place was lit by holiness, as though God’s hand had reached through the gloom and touched me.” That “touch” inspired Rick to lead a life of faith. Decades later, he still hasn’t forgotten that one moment.
Others, Luhrmann points out, remain uncertain as to what these moments mean. Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer experienced quite the “mysterious way” on his wedding day, but did his rational, scientific way of seeing the world change as a result? Not quite, though he did acknowledge the importance of having an open mind and advised his fellow scientists to “marvel in the mysterious.”
Maybe you’re the kind of person who comes into contact with a mysterious force and finds yourself forever changed. Maybe not. Luhrmann says it’s all a matter of perspective. Regardless of what you believe, one thing is for certain. These “touching” moments can spring up in our lives at the most unexpected of times.
Have you experienced a touch of the divine? Send us your story.
