Father James Martin and Andrew Sullivan on the difficulty of describing religious experience
In our conversation on “The Spiritual Life” this week, the author and social commentator Andrew Sullivan describes a moment of grace that he experienced on a beach during a moment of personal crisis.
I just felt something I’ve never felt before, which is not that God did not exist, though I was struggling with that, given so much horrible stuff had happened to so many good, innocent people around me. But it occurred to me for 15 minutes, [as] I knelt there in the sand, that God was evil. That’s the real alternative. And that was a dark night…. And all I can tell you, Jim, is that I got up after that and walked to the beach, and I did not get up of my own accord. I promise you that. I was picked up and told, “No, not evil.”
I was honored that Mr. Sullivan shared this personal moment of grace. But the words that caught my attention were “all I can tell you.” It was a reminder that no matter how articulate we are (and Mr. Sullivan, a former magazine editor, is probably one of the most well-known masters of the English language), in the end our spiritual experiences are mainly incommunicable.


