"Conversations With the Sacred"

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Conversations With the Sacred

Throughout human history, one common characteristic of every culture is that there are people within the society who seem to have a special connection with the sacred – and, of course, what is called “sacred” is defined in very many different ways by the world’s religions and philosophies. We often call this type of relationship or bond a “mystical connection” and we call the person who can experience it a sage, a guru, a shaman, a priest or something similar.

There are of course, skeptics who suggest that what appears to be a special relationship or a mystical connection is really in the mind of the believer – that in truth there is not such connection.

I would be the first to agree that some examples of a supposed mystical connection are simply fraudulent. Some people who say they can talk to God or spirits are often out of touch with reality. And there are far too many examples of ministers and other supposedly holy people who report these types of conversations for their own particular purposes and often for personal financial gain. There are also examples of human experiences that may appear mystical but are created in the mind of the believer.

All of this said – there is little doubt that mysticism and mystical connections can be very real. Simply put, there are just too many instances of mystics throughout human history, in all cultures, to refute the phenomenon and mystics often times seem to have many common characteristics with other mystics – despite the fact they may come from vastly different cultures and religious backgrounds. For thousands of years, the words of mystics have been orally transmitted or written down for all to hear and see and read. Medical scientists today can see what mystical experiences actually do to human brain activity.

Mysticism according to historical and psychological definitions is, “a direct intuition or experience of the sacred. A mystic is a person who has, to a greater or lesser degree, a direct experience with what they consider to be sacred, however that is defined. In other words, a mystic does not accept their religious faith on commonly held beliefs or practices, but “on that which he or she regards as firsthand personal knowledge and experience.” They feel it! (See the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions – p.671).

Mystical experiences often do tend to reflect the doctrines and beliefs of a particular religion and mystical experiences often occur with common rituals found in a given religion. A good example of this is the Native American “sweat lodge” experience. Through elaborate prayers, chants, fasting, and meditation in a sweat lodge which is a kind of homegrown sauna, Indians claim to reach a oneness with nature and the sacred.

Another example of mystical ritual is the famed “whirling dervishes” of the Islamic Sufi tradition found in the Middle East. Through prayer, meditation, and literally a whirling dance, Sufi mystics say they are able to attain a level of connection with the sacred unavailable to the common believer.

By following various religious and meditative rituals, the mystic attains a state of being where they say they are able to apprehend a transcendent entity, or a connection with some “otherness” that lies beyond the spatial temporal realm in which we normally live - the here and now – the reality which we perceive every day. The mystic touches another space and place not connected to our reality.

In most cases, the state of being or connection that is achieved creates a kind of bliss or serenity – a kind of peace and unity. Curiously, the state of being that is achieved by the mystic through their faith and attention to ritual detail is a state similar to the one hoped for by those who take hallucinogenic drugs. I for one am skeptical that drugs can create a legitimate mystical experience.

Researchers tell us that the brain of a person undergoing a mystical experience shows dramatic neural changes which can actually rewire the person’s brain creating a change in how a person thinks, feels, and behaves.

 I find it quite curious that people who have a near-death experience often describe their experiences, their feelings and their descriptions of events that are quite similar to the descriptions of mystical experiences.

It is important to note that although mysticism and deep spirituality are almost completely intertwined, mystics do not necessarily have to have a belief in a god or gods – nor do they have to have a theistic approach to reality at all. Many types of Buddhism, for example, have a mystical tradition – often an elaborate and powerful one, but Buddhism is not a theistic religion – at least not in the traditional sense of the word.

I remember talking about this to a minister at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Arlington Virginia (the congregation where I did my ministerial internship). This minister explained to me that she was a “mystical humanist”. Although she did not believe in the traditional god of the Bible, she somehow knew that creation was sacred and she believed that it was possible to connect with the universe in a mystical way through meditation, prayer, and ritual. From what she told me, she seemed to have moments of mystical connection every bit as profound as those experienced by Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Islamic mystics.

Mysticism is one of those puzzling aspects of religion that I personally find very fascinating. I mentioned this some weeks ago in another sermon and I did suggest that Unitarian Universalists can, indeed, have mystical experiences.

I myself can relate to mystical experiences. There have been moments of epiphany in my life where, for a brief instant, I have felt and sensed a oneness with creation and I have felt a connection with the sacred forces of life – what some would call God – although, I too do not believe in the Biblical God. My definition of the sacred is much more complex and more grounded in scientific theory. My experiences are almost indescribable but there is no question in my mind as to their reality nor as to the impact they always seem to have on my life when they occur.

I would have to say that without the mystical experiences that I have had in my life since I was a child, I would never have become a minister because religion would never have played such a central importance in my life. Without having experienced mystical connections, religion would for me, at best, been an intellectual study of human efforts to reach the unknowable. With my inherent cynicism and relentless desire to question and challenge widely held religious beliefs, I might easily have had no sense or appreciation of religion and spirituality at all. My mystical experiences have made religion but, more specifically, spirituality quite central to my life.

These mystical experiences have influenced me greatly over the years – so much so – that I left my career when I was 36 and went to seminary to try to find out what religion and spirituality are all about and to try to understand the meaning and purpose of life. My mystical experiences literally lead me to seminary.

It is said that some people who begin the study of psychology and psychiatry do so because they are really trying to understand themselves and their own perceived unusual nature. I think the same can be said for at least some people (not all) who enter seminaries. I found many of my colleagues in the seminaries of the Graduate Theological Union – from numerous religious faith backgrounds – to be profound people who had a burning desire to understand their own spiritual self in the context of a religious and spiritual backdrop.

As I have already noted, many mystics, not surprisingly, describe their mystical experience through the religion they are most familiar with. Mystics who write about or teach the religion through which they experience the sacred often profoundly alter that religion or they create a new religion.

Some of the Jewish prophets were mystics. That’s pretty clear from reading Hebrew scripture – the Old Testament. Jesus, himself, was a Jewish mystic. The Buddha was a mystic. Mohammed was a mystic.

In a sense, it is mystics and mystical traditions that give real meaning and personal connection to otherwise bland religious doctrines and creeds and ritual.

Jesus, for example, remained a Jew to his dying day. He never once called for the creation of a new religion. Nor did he claim to have some new religious knowledge not previously revealed through the Jewish experience. Jesus did believe he was the Jewish Messiah as described in Hebrew scripture, but in the first three gospels, he never claimed to be God.

What Jesus did say was that the Judaism of his day had become too wrapped around the religious ritual and the religious laws that had become part of the Jewish tradition. It was not that he disavowed these laws – he simply ignored many of them and he saw them as an impediment to establishing a personal connection with God. It was his mystical spiritual connection that enabled him to speak with authority and believability.

Similarly, the Buddha did not endeavor to create a new religion in the India of 2500 BCE. He simply noted that the Hindu ascetic rituals of the period prevented a person from truly understanding the nature of the universe and the oneness of all things. It was his profound mysticism and his deep sense of the universe around him that lead the Buddha to simple yet elegant religious truths – an understanding of the oneness of all things, an understanding that pain and suffering are the result of desire, an understanding that the secret of balance and harmony leads to happiness and that balance and harmony can only be achieved through the middle path – by living one’s life in the middle, between overindulgence and asceticism.

And like the great mystics before and after him, Mohammed sought the sacred through a mystical connection with God – the God defined through the Jewish and Christian experience of the sixth century CE. As a young man, Mohammed’s mystical experiences were very strong. Mohammed was married to an older woman Kadija – who financially supported him and encouraged him to spend time in spiritual contemplation in the Cave at Hira in the mountains near Mecca. Like the Buddha and Jesus, the result of Mohammed’s retreats and meditation was the creation of a religious following that would alter the history of humankind and set into motion a new world religion that would grow and evolve through the centuries – to become the fastest growing religion in the 21^st century.

It is mystics who give life to religion. It is mystics who alter or create new religions and it is mystics who continue to transform religion.

Some years ago, I ran across a series of books entitled “Conversations With God.” The books were written by a man who had reached his late forties and was feeling very unsuccessful both personally and professionally. He came home late one evening and found himself asking God in a loud voice things like, “where are you?” “What is the meaning of my life?” “How come you never answer my questions?” “How come my life is so rotten?”

Much to his surprise, God began to answer his questions on that night and so he took a yellow pad and wrote down “God’s answers.” For over a year, these conversations continued, and the result was the book series, “Conversations with God.”

Needless to say – I was somewhat skeptical when I listened to the books and it was little surprise to me that God’s answers seemed to take on a decidedly Jewish/Christian perspective since the author had been educated in Catholic schools. Still, Conversations with God is an intriguing set on books and well worth reading or listening to. Somehow, someway, I do believe that the author’s mystical experience in these conversations was real in some mysterious way.

Perhaps the one passage in Conversations with God that most fascinated me was when the author asked God why – why did you created the universe? God’s answer – “because I had to experience myself.” (An interesting idea that is in keeping with other religious traditions.)

To me, what makes mysticism so difficult to believe is that it is easy to fake and it is also easy to identify something as a mystical experience when, in fact, it is really either a psychotic event or something created in the mind.

One time, I was visiting a friend in Florida. He knew I was a minister so he asked me if I was aware of the appearance of the Virgin Mary on a nearby office building. When I told him I was not, he drove me to a three-story office building. It was all glass. On the side was a kind of a rainbow-colored figure that, with some imagination, looked like a human figure. I suspect the inground sprinklers which sprayed the bushes and grass around the building had sprayed chemicals onto the glass which then gave the appearance of a human figure. Well, that was enough to convince a group of people who then bought building and turned it into a shrine.

And another instance – in 1993, I remember doing my clinical pastoral internship for ministry in a Washington DC hospital. One day I was at lunch with several other ministry students and the hospital chaplain who happened to be a very liberal Methodist minister. During the course of lunch, the minister began laughing about people, “who speak in tongues” which is the whole basis of Pentecostal Churches. He simply could not understand how anyone could start mumbling gibberish and think that they were having some kind of a personal encounter with God. (I quietly agreed to myself that this was most unlikely.)

Much to my amazement and to the embarrassment of the minister, three or four of the people in our group said that they regularly spoke in tongues.

So, the point is – what identifies something as a mystical experience versus something that is mystical in one’s mind only? What is really a genuine mystical experience or are all spiritual and religious experiences simply real to a person or a group of people? This is a very tough question – but not one without an answer.

First of all – it is not that difficult to identify phony mystical experiences – those created by people for some particular purpose. And it is not really that difficult to identify a psychotic experience because the person claiming the experience is not well grounded in reality. It is also not that difficult to dismiss group experiences that create a reality or belief because of the group’s intense belief or desire to believe in something.

If you take a hard look at religious mystics through the centuries you will find that they have several common characteristics. They lack personal motivation for their mystical experiences. Mystics generally do not claim a particular personal authority leading to some gain, financial or otherwise, because of their mystical experiences. Nor do they usually claim to know or perceive some hitherto unknown knowledge. What they do generally claim is to see and sense and feel a connection with the sacred, with God or a god or with something they define through their cultural experience and understanding of the world and they speak about the truth of it as they understand it.

Mystics characteristically develop an aura of peace and tranquility, and they and they are eager to share this with others. Many of the great mystics of the ages are people of love. Often through their life, their work, their teachings, and their writings, they literally exude love. If fact, it can be said that a mystical connection with the sacred is a connection with love for love is the glue that binds the fabric of the universe together and is found operant in all of its parts.

In the words of Walt Whitman, “ They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things. Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”

There are sages, gurus, shamans and priests through the ages who are intuitive mystics. Many of them have a special gift and an intuitive connection with the sacred that finds its way into their outlook on the world and into their writings.

Should you want to try to better understand the mystical experience, I urge you to spend time with the mystics who have lived and loved in all the ages of humankind. In learning to understand them you may even find yourself on your own mystical journey to the edge of forever.

Reverend Christopher McMahon

UUMH Chatham

October 5^th, 2025