DID YOU KNOW?

This week’s Did You Know is from a soon to be released book entitled God and Spirituality by Glenn Chesnut. The experience of the sacred: In finding new life and new meaning and purpose in the midst of destruction and uncertainty, the most important life-giving vision arises from the experience of the sacred. Rudolph Otto, in his book, The Idea of the Holy, gives a series of excerpts that a variety of people wrote about the live giving nature of the “experience of the sacred,” excerpts that he drew from William James’ book Variety of Religious Experience:

For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exaltation remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great orchestra, when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards and almost bursting with its own emotion.

The conceptions that the saints have of loveliness of God and that kind of delight that they experience in it are quite peculiar and entirely different from anything that a natural man can process or of which he can form any proper notion. [Jonathan Edwards]

But I can neither write nor tell of what sort of Exaltation the triumphing in the Spirit is. It can be compared with naught, but that when in the midst of death life is born, and it is like the resurrection of the dead. [Jacob Boehme]

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And in particular, those who feel that their lives have been destroyed, and that they are surrounded by nothing but failure, hopelessness, pain, torture, and death—the dark side of reality that so preoccupied Carl Jung during his youth—should hear the words which Rudolph Otto drew from St. Catherine of Genoa.
O that I could tell you what the heart feels, how it burns and is consumed inwardly! Only, I find no words to express it. I can but say: Might but one little drop of what I feel fall into Hell, Hell would be transformed into a paradise. [St. Catherine of Genoa]

What is the meaning of suffering? It is pointless to engage in endless philosophical discussions and arguments and attempts to make sense of God and the universe at the intellectual level. Thomas Merton said that he learned from St. John of the Cross, that, the only way to learn the meaning of suffering is to go through suffering. These are the wisest words I have ever read on the subject, but I do think that what St. Catherine of Genoa said should be added to them. The way to understand the meaning of suffering is to go through suffering while lifting our eyes upward to the experience of the numinous which St. Catherine had learned to cling to:

Might but one drop of what I feel fall into Hell, Hell would be transformed into a paradise.

St. Catherine of Genoa was a very wise woman who spoke the truth.