Paradoxically, I believe, the more Divine an encounter, the less able you are to talk about it. The degree to which one finds it difficult to describe with any comprehensiveness a spiritual moment — much less to explain it or defend its veracity — that inertia in reporting it is often the very measure of its holiness.
Several conversations of late have me thinking again about remarkable divine encounters.
The small ones that cross our paths any given day, yes; but also the occasional, unprecedented, even once-in-a-lifetime disruptions that so alter our experience of living that we are left without enough words to make any sense of it to those around us. "Go and tell what you've seen and heard," Jesus tells his disciples. But that reporting of the remarkable is often the riskiest part. One is reluctant to share what can so easily be misunderstood; yet one also comes to realize that one cannot keep quiet about never going back to the way things were.
The pricked conscience. The course-altering summons. The voice in the ear or across the room. The timely but illusive stranger. The inexplicable peace right in the middle of calamity. When your breath has been taken away, spiritually speaking, you'll likely later find it hard to make words in your windpipe that anyone can really understand. They will try to comprehend, because they love you. But they will also softly suggest a dozen other explanations for the round peg of your beatific vision in this world of endless square holes.
So be it. If you are the steward of such a moment, simply choose to carry it forward in your life and — for God's sake (truly) — don't overthink it. Trust it first, verify it later. In fact, the verification will only come as you step out into the unknown, knowing only what you now know in your bones. Our educated brains are hard-wired to analyze and analyze until a moment is dismantled and you've talked yourself out of just about everything, even your own existence.
"Don't cast your pearls before swine," Jesus teaches us. That seems harsh, perhaps, when talking about others. It is not so much that he is calling all the persons in your life pigs; rather, it is his exaggerating reminder that often the custom necklace of a divine visitation simply doesn't fit as well around someone else's neck. Not everyone has the ears to hear what you yourself would not have heard before you heard it. Maybe the moment was just for you; probably it was just what you needed, when you needed it. It is a pearl of great price. It is very likely irredeemable for the currency of widespread understanding. Carry it forward in your life the way of mother carries a child, the way a boy clutches a coin. Honor it, protect it, cherish it. It will go with you for the balance of your days.
Finally, do not fret if, unlike John Wesley, your heart has never been "strangely warmed." God's bumps go bump in the nights of those who need them. Nothing out of the ordinary may just mean that no bumps are yet needed in your "long obedience in the same direction." Carry on. Follow Jesus. Love the Lord. Love those around you. Those are often all the encounters any of us need, until we need something more.
Besides, there is a real sense that, as his Church, we are, all of us, stewards of the strangest of stories, that biggest of bumps, that glow of history. Jesus himself is the strange and sacred story we steward as his society. We likely know we are on the right path when, more often not, we get deferential but strange looks from our neighbors. After all, he has a funny way of casting his singing swine before the pearls of hungry hearts.
