Lost—Found

St. Augustine famously described the soul's ultimate meeting with God as a homecoming, a recognition of something known and familiar that has been lost. His uncanny sense of knowing what he was looking for even in the midst of the most intense experience of dislocation is part of what gives the Confessions such evocative power. It captures the strange but familiar juxtaposition of knowing and unknowing that is at the heart of so much religious experience. The question of how dislocation and disorientation can be productive of religious meaning is one of the great recurring themes in the Christian spiritual tradition. At its root, this is a question about how, in light of the fluid, ever-shifting character of human consciousness, one can come to know God or the self. One must consider whether the knowledge and awareness that comes to us through ordinary experience is reliable, trustworthy. Or whether consciousness itself must be broken open somehow, radically challenged and reconfigured, whether one must relinquish all that one knows for the sake of something as yet unknown, something deeper, purer, both more enduring and ever-emerging. But if one is indeed always traveling into an unknown country, what kind of homecoming is this?

One place to begin thinking about these questions is to ask, as Bernard McGinn does in his essay, whether we ought to focus our attention more on experience or consciousness. McGinn argues that the category of experience is more slippery and elusive than we sometimes imagine it to be and that it is not adequate to the task of interpreting the accounts of deep encounter with God found in mystical texts. Better, he argues, to focus on consciousness, a way of thinking about mystical encounter which includes but also transcends the notoriously fluid and imprecise category of experience. What we really want to understand better, claims McGinn, are the remarkable and significant changes—which we experience as a dismantling and reconstruction of the self—that take place in human consciousness when the soul encounters God. In this sense, McGinn argues, "in mystical consciousness, God is not present as an object, but as a goal that is both transcendent and immanent. [God] is active in the human agent as the source, or co-author, of our acts of experiencing (that is, the reception of inner and outer data), knowing, and loving. The infinite horizon of all knowing and loving somehow becomes really 'here' in a new form of awareness in what mystics call the ground, apex, or center of the soul."

This is not unlike what happens to a person who travels deep into the wilderness. Belden Lane's essay invites us to consider how the experience of entering into a wilderness place alters one's consciousness, and in particular how it can help one to encounter the saints more honestly and fully. Reading classic spiritual texts in the wilderness (or in any liminal space), Lane suggests, can inspire a more open response, one that involves the reader completely. Disorientation and dislocation, he argues, make possible a quality of attention and awareness that is not always accessible to us in the ordinary flow of existence. Questions and challenges arising from these texts that otherwise might elude us or simply feel opaque suddenly become sharply drawn and poignant. In this wild, dangerous place, the texts come alive; so do the possibilities they envision.

Here is a powerful convergence of the concrete and metaphorical—an encounter with what Thoreau famously described as "the actual world" and the kindling of the imagination in response to it. Sara Ritchey's essay on "Spiritual Arborescence," or devotion to trees in the medieval religious imagination, attends to something similar. The trees she considers here were both real and metaphorical: trees one could hug (as the fourteenth century nun Alheit of Trochau did), and richly imagine as representing and making present "Our Lord Jesus Christ." The importance of tree imagery (and of trees themselves) for evoking the mystery of Christ in the medieval period has long been recognized. But we have had relatively little sense of how trees figured into the devotional practice of medieval Christians...