All my life I have been searching for the depths of God’s love and an experience of profound spiritual transformation.
The first mystical experience occurred in 1998 when I was living alone in a small flat in Melbourne’s leafy eastern suburbs. My life was not going well. Much tragedy had befallen our family,
including several deaths of immediate family members. I despaired, and
grieved endlessly. There was much darkness.
I was forever seeking solace for my wounds but somehow this seemed to evade me at every turn.
This constant search for healing also became a much deeper search. I desperately wanted a divine experience of God touching my life.
As I was sitting in the flat after receiving the news of having to leave, I was more despairing than ever. Where would I live now? I did not know.
So I simply said a prayer and handed my life over to God, saying, in effect, “I can’t manage all of this alone now. It’s Yours. You deal with it.”
Within minutes I was filled with ecstasy, a radiant love and profound sense of peace. I was amazed.
This was what I had been wanting for so long. Everywhere I looked the world was transformed into a brilliant goldenness. Not only was I filled with an ecstatic brilliance, but I could also see it in everything around me.
Within a week I had found new and far better accommodation in more settled surroundings.
I felt filled with joy and peace which I wanted to last forever.
Ten days after this mystical experience,m as I like to call it, the ecstasy vanished.
But now, unlike before, I knew something had opened in me which had profound significance.
Not long after this experience I awoke one morning and was gripped with an extraordinary desire to write.
It was bursting in me and could not be ignored so I quickly boned up on freelance writing, bought a dictaphone, then found someone to interview who worked in the area of lay Catholic ministry. I sent the article off to the Catholic press and it was published soon after.
So began a new direction in my life with freelance writing, albeit occasionally.
I still yearn to write as words just seem to tumble out of me like rushing waters in a mountain stream.
Four years after I began writing, another deep desire emerged in me: fiction writing. I was truly stunned.
I had no intention or want to do so previously. But again, a similar pattern emerged, a bursting desire to write. I read as many books as I could on the fiction writing process.
I also delved into biographies about fiction writers and began trying to sense my own unique method of crafting narrative.
After some years and many failed attempts, four short stories poured out of me that were publishable, finally.
By now I felt more than ever a continuing desire to write fiction and saw this as a yearning from the depths of my soul.
Fiction was not something that I could have ever constructed.
In fact, that was one of the first lessons I needed to learn before anything emerged. I needed to sit back and write out of that free space in myself, writing from the images that arose from within.
What began in non-fiction had opened into fictional expression. Life was more hopeful now, and hope-filled.
Over the ensuing years there were at least another six mystical experiences much like the first but these rarely lasted more than anywhere from minutes, to a few days.
But, at other ‘low’ times, similar but less intense experiences also occurred.
I remember one when I was simply standing in the queue at Safeway (supermarket) waiting to be served.
I looked up at the large number of people and suddenly I experienced that brilliant ecstasy for several minutes.
I felt touched by the Spirit once more, and deeply reassured that things would work out for the best somehow.
To seek God’s divine touch in our lives ultimately opens us to the ways of the Spirit and a much deeper, richer way of being in the world than we could ever imagine possible.
It is a pathway to the core of our self and a truth-filled vocation, whatever that may be.