The Spiritual Experience

When reading about the strange experiences of Ezekiel and Isaiah, with creatures that are also chariots and beings of multiple wings and animal faces, it may seem to most that all of this is so alien that it speaks to nothing in their personal experience. But this is not so for me. When I read about the wheel within the wheel with eyes all around, or animals with multiple heads and human bodies...all of this seems rather familiar to me.

There is an inescapable randomness to the spiritual experience. When one touches the face of God, one encounters something so radically different, that everything feels rather filtered. You get a jumble of images, some strange, some wonderful, some frightening. There can be a consistent theme or message, but it has to be discerned. My own encounter includes droplets of art, movies and television I watch come alive, comic books brought into direct experience, images from the Bible, and a general feeling of encounter with something great. God pulls from my experience in order to try to reach me. But there can be no doubt that however familiar the individual imagery, the overall experience is something quite alien. It is like an ant contemplating the universe.

Of course my experiences are sometimes hellish rather than heavenly. Those experiences are as terrifying as the others are profound. Thanks be to God, hell experiences are relatively rare. I see the divine more than I see the diabolical. One cannot deny, however, that within the hear of every person save Christ, both reside. It seems to me that Isaiah, Ezekiel and others were having a similar kind of encounter, but the imagery accessed is more amenable to their place and time. Mystical experience remains culturally conditioned, even as the messages contained there in point beyond that conditioning. The spiritual is the non-physical expressed in physical terms. It is the inexpressible symbolized.