A fellow journalist who lives on the West Coast (I will call him Joe) has shared with me his spiritual experience of the most recent Yom Kippur holiday. Though he does not consider himself an entirely observant Jew, this particular observance means much to him and each September he embarks on what he calls a “Yom Kippur trek.”

The trek is a journey he takes on foot, often in mountainous country of California. There, freed from the constraints of ordinary life, he can be more open to extraordinary feelings and insights. Close contact with nature endows him with experiences of beauty and unspoiled splendor that can stir within him awe and reverence.

Joe especially values what he terms the “epiphany” that emerges from these treks. He gropes for a definition of this word, calling it a “sudden manifestation, a connection with the divine, a physical tingling, a sense of oneness with the universe, and eyes welling with tears.”

With an earthy comparison, he sums it up by saying of this experience: “It’s a feeling even better than good sex.”

The first time he remembers experiencing this epiphany was after he climbed a mountain and came to a place known to locals as Paradise Valley. He had stopped there to rest after coming down from the 2500-foot peak. Soon he was overwhelmed with feelings about the beauty of the place and something beyond. Fasting all that day (and drinking only water) may have disposed him to a special sensitivity.

Here’s how he describes what he sensed: “I felt connected and part of the world, the universe and whatever mystical experience exists. The goose bumps and electricity up my spine were more intense than even the most moving operatic arias produced.”

These sensations lasted only a minute, he says, but adds: “I don’t know if I could have taken any more, it was that intense.”

Joe recognizes something similar in what his religious friends tell him about experiencing epiphanies in church. But he fears the fanaticism that persuades some believers that they have found the only way to what he calls “this kind of connection with the prime life force.” To him, there are many ways and he acknowledges his own as only one of them. He hope that the church people will say the same.

With disarming frankness, my friend acknowledges not getting epiphanies every time he goes on his Yom Kippur treks. Rather, he sees these manifestations of spirit as something extra and undeserved. “It’s a wonderful bonus when it happens,” he says.

Joe’s experiences sound much like those of other people who take the life of the spirit seriously. Ordinary women and men have epiphanies from time to time but they usually keep them secret; the great mystics of the various spiritual traditions, of course, have become famous for them. It is a mistake to judge such manifestations of something beyond as out of bounds for you personally. To be human is to be eligible to experience hints of the divine.

Those who have written about mystical experience vary greatly in the way they describe it. A woman named Florida Scott-Maxwell, for instance, writing in her old age says this: “Some of it must go beyond good and bad, for at times – -though this comes rarely, unexpectedly – – it is a swelling clarity as though all was resolved. It has no content, it seems to expand us, it does not derive from the body, and then it is gone. It may be a degree of consciousness which lies outside activity, and which when young we are too busy to experience.”

If this sounds vague it is not because the woman is writing about something unreal.  Rather, she is trying to describe the indescribable, something bursting with reality for which words are always going to prove inadequate.

Her experience is of a piece with my friend Joe’s. His epiphanies occur in the mountains amidst the awesome beauty of nature; hers take place in the room where she lives. His rise from a holy day observance in the great Judaic tradition; hers come from daily experience of her later years.

Both sets of epiphanies witness to the presence of spirit in the world and in the lives of human beings.

Richard Griffin