Sophy Burnham
https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-F-_u_n-damuKGwLR/Fingerprints%20Of%20God%20[The%20Search%20For%20The%20Science%20Of%20Spirituality]_djvu.txt
"When she was ten or eleven, she was out riding with her father on their remote Maryland farm
"My father said to me, 'For some reason the horses are really spooking. ' Because they were
dancing all over the place. And I said, 'Well, of course they are, they're feeling all this electricity in
the air.' He said, 'Oh? Is there electricity in the air?' And that was the first time that I realized, Oh,
not everybody feels this. Isn't that interesting? I just assumed that everybody was intimately attuned."
I wrote down her comment and circled it in my notes. As I talked with more people, I would find
that mystical adults were once mystical children, as if they were genetically wired for the spiritual.
Over the next thirty years, Sophy would attend Smith College, stray from her Episcopal upbringing,
and dabble in atheism. She would marry a NewYork Times reporter and give birth to two girls. In her
thirties, the part of her psyche that was a spiritual nomad broke free. She began to seek answers from
a Hindu guru and Buddhist meditation. Sophy arrived at age forty-two with teenaged girls, a caring
husband, a glittering social life, and a demanding career as a freelance magazine writer.
"I was happy, and yet there was something deeply missing," Sophy said. "And it was a deep, deep
longing that couldn't be satisfied. I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, Is this all? And then
thinking, I have everything. I have a loving husband and a house and children and friends and a
career.Why am I yearning for something else? And I didn't know what I was yearning for."
She found it on assignment. Town & Country magazine sent her to Costa Rica and Peru to profile
the World Wildlife Fund. As an afterthought, she added a side trip to Machu Picchu, the sacred Inca
mountain ruins in Peru.
She was sitting in the airport in San Jose, Costa Rica, when she had a premonition of the mystical
experience to come.
"Suddenly, I saw everything shining, shining, and the people were shining," she
recalled. "Everyone was luminous, and it was so profound that I just sat at my table, I just shook, with
tears streaming down my face, it was so beautiful. And I thought, Oh well, that s it. That s as good as
it gets."
She was wrong. Two days later, when she was climbing the terraces of Machu Picchu with a group
of other tourists, "I felt a nagging little chord in me, saying, 'You've got to go away, you've got to go
away. You don't have much time. Hurry. Hurry. ' "
She left her companions and scrambled up to the terraces, where she could be alone. She sat down,
closed her eyes, and instantly was in "another place."
"The first thing that happened was frightening," Sophy said, looking into the middle distance. She
spoke slowly, carefully, as if she were narrating an event she was witnessing in that very moment. I
can do justice to her story only by repeating it verbatim.
"The first thing that happened was the sound of a hollow darkness. I've never heard it except there.
It was very, very big — sort of like an oncoming train — but I knew it was in my ears, it was not
external. And then there was a hand at the back of my neck, pressing me very strongly down.
Everything is dark. Everything is black. And a voice that said, 'You belong to me.' And my response
was, 'If 'you are God. I belong to God.' And immediately everything turned to light."
She paused for ten, fifteen seconds, as if absorbing the light.
"The rest of the time, I was captivated in this mystical revelation. I was shown things that I don't
even have the wit to ask questions about," Sophy said. I thought of Saint Paul's vision of third heaven,
when he claimed he was "caught up in paradise," and "heard inexpressible things, things that man is
not permitted to tell."-
"I don't remember most of it now," Sophy said, reeling me back to the moment. "But I do remember
two things very vividly. One was the sense of seeing the beginnings and ends of the world — how it all
began. And the other was this image — it's very difficult to describe — of electrons or atoms being
swept along in the path of the hem of the garment of God. I think it was the passing of the Holy Spirit,
which I could not see, because to see that would blind me."
Sophy laughed self-consciously, embarrassed to place herself in the company of Moses watching
the back of God from the cleft of the rock.
"And seeing the aftereffects! It was all love and joy and sparkling particles, swarming up and
circling — it was just exquisite. And knowing that everything is going to be all right. It's that idea of
Saint Julian of Norwich, although I didn't know it at the time: 'All shall be well and all shall be well
and all manner of things will be well. -
"And then, slowly, slowly, slowly, coming like a turtle up to the surface of the water again, I
opened my eyes. And I was blinded by the light. It was piercingly painful so I shut my eyes again.
And I went back to the spiritual light for a while, and then came out again, and when I opened my eyes
this time, I could see. And I realized the whole thing had taken forty-five minutes, a huge amount of
time. And I realized I had to hurry for the bus. And I came galloping and springing like a gazelle
down the terraces, my heart filled with joy! And watching this light radiate off my hands and light off
my arms and light off the grasses and the trees burning with light, everything flaring!
"I suppose that's what God sees when he sees us," Sophy reflected, turning to look into my eyes.
"Just light. Nothing else. And then I got on the bus and I noticed that a blood vessel had burst in the
back of my hand about the size of a quarter. It startled me, but also pleased me because it meant that
yes, something had happened. And other people knew it. I remember this university professor coming
up to me and sitting next to me and saying something like, 'Something happened to you, didn't it?' I
said, 'Yes,' and that was all."
I sat immobilized by her story. I felt like a body surfer who had been slammed down by a wave.
Then I asked Sophy a question that many a neurologist has pondered as well.
"Did you think, Gosh, I just had a temporal lobe seizure!"
"Oh yes! Absolutely that occurred to me!" Sophy admitted happily. "Was that an epileptic fit? Did
I have some kind of electrical burnout of the brain? But everything seemed to be functioning," she
said, adding that nothing like this had recurred in the past twenty years.
She leaned forward, speaking urgently.
"The experience is not important," Sophy said, and then she laughed. "I've just spent fifteen
minutes telling you about an experience and now I tell you — and I cannot reiterate it enoughs — the
experience is not what was important. It's changing you on a cellular level that is important. It's
providing the hope and joy that's important.""
any thoughts?
