Most of my prayers were about the ups and downs of daily life and often about my still new relationship.  I often began the day by praying while still in bed.  One morning, I was asking something about Abigail.  For a second time, the answer came in a woman’s voice.  “Is that a female voice?”

Yes.

“Are You a woman?”

When I want to be.

“Why do You usually appear as a man?”

It goes over better.

“With most folks?”

Yes.

Many days later, I had an experience that felt like the feminine presence of God—like a powdery shower, like perfumed talc being sprinkled over my whole being.  When I had unusual experiences like this, I found them both heady and troubling.  “Lord, I could get lost in experiences like this.”

This is a phase because it is new.  Don’t worry, you’ll get over it.

“Lord, is there special meaning to the feminine presence?”

You need both (masculine and feminine).  What you call the masculine presence gives you strength and energy.  It is a bonding in My service.  The so-called feminine gives you grace and peace.  It is a healing between you and Me.

Another notable book by William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, helped answer this question. The founder of pragmatism, the only distinctively American school of philosophy, James taught not only philosophy but, as Harvard professors did in those days, psychology and physiology as well.  He was a man of science but, for him, empiricism did not mean restricting our understanding to what science registers; he looked without prejudice at all kinds of human experience, of which religious experiences are among the most interesting. He talks about famous people such as George Fox as well as ordinary people who have received answers to prayer or psychic intuitions or visitations from recently-departed family members.

Many human beings have had moments of divine or non-natural awareness, probably more than feel comfortable talking about them publicly. Duke English professor Reynolds Price writes about his own battle with cancer.  During the course of his treatment, he had an encounter with Jesus in a vision or, as it seemed to him, in another dimension. After he published his story, he received letters from many people with similar experiences—experiences that they had never told anyone. My experience was not as out-of-line as I had thought.  

I decided to follow the voice and see where it would lead me.

“Lord, I feel you want me to do more of the mystical stuff, ‘entering’ You and so forth.”

Yes, and you can remove the scare quotes.  There is nothing strange about it.  That is how the universe is.  The parts can communicate with the whole.  It is no more mystical or mysterious than your ability to move your arm. 

Actually, since Descartes introduced a sharp mind-body distinction, how the mind moves the body has been a philosophical mystery.  But, in actual life, it is not.  The parts can communicate with the whole and vice versa.  But I had never thought of the universe that way.

I continued to have experiences of divine indwelling and partial union with God.  Now that I am used to them, they do seem similar to getting lost in an experience.  God mentioned music as one example, and we all know that feeling.  Sometimes you are not something separate, standing back and noting the music—you are immersed in it with your whole frame, without reserve.  However, the more radical, “dissolution of self” mystical experiences—I may have had them two or three times—make me uneasy and I avoid them.