The Experienceless Experience
Mysticism involves the experience of God. Except when it doesn’t.
Maggie Ross has died.1 If you’ve never heard of her, she was a fascinating (and controversial) Anglican theologian and spiritual writer. There was a time when her blog, Voice in the Wilderness, was one of the richest resources for new contemplative writing online.
I never met her, although we traded a few emails over the years. I found her writing and her ideas fascinating, compelling, enlightening, infuriating, and at times just plain wrongheaded.2 Apparently the feeling was mutual; she wasn’t afraid to tell me (either in an email or publicly on her blog) where she disagreed with me on whatever topic I happened to be writing about. But Maggie was like that.
Her real name was Martha Reeves; she had been a religious sister in an Anglican Community but later in life lived as a vowed solitary — almost like a modern day Julian of Norwich. She combined a keen understanding of contemplative spirituality with an almost curmudgeonly capacity to criticize trends in contemporary spiritual life — even when her views were idiosyncratic.
She thought mysticism was a useless word and that most people who talked about mysticism were talking about a kind of spiritual self-focus that was mostly a type of interior solipsistic narcissism (clearly, I disagree with her, although I think her criticism is useful as a cautionary word of warning).
Another word/concept that she gunned for was experience.
Her argument was simple: an authentic mystical or contemplative encounter with God happens at a level deeper than our ordinary conscious awareness. You can’t “experience” a deep encounter with God any more than one experiences a coma, or even deep dreamless sleep. People come out of comas with no sense of how much time has passed. For Maggie Ross, a true contemplative encounter with God is similarly beyond the capacity of the ordinary mind to experience.
But what about people who say — and sincerely believe — “I’ve had an experience of God”?
Maggie is no longer here to tell us what she thinks. But based on her writing I suspect she would have dismissed such “experiences” as little more than imaginary constructions within the psyche. In other words, a person has an “experience” of God in their mind, because they want it so badly that the mind creates it — so convincing an “experience” that it seems utterly real, more real than any dream.
I don’t think I need to point out to most readers of my blog how profoundly countercultural this is, pointing in the opposite direction from the way most people talk about mysticism and spiritual experience in our time.
Not all of what Maggie has to say about experience is negative, however.
Experience—interpretation—is necessary, even vital, not only for understanding the world and functioning in it, but also to feed the work of silence. What we need to remember, rather, is that experience is a construct, a re-presentation, and therefore lifeless; and, if one does not consciously allow for its virtual, provisional, and sometimes deceitful nature, it becomes encapsulating at the very moment that an “experience” is recognized. When the mind is in balance, experience (interpretation) and the resources of the deep mind yield to and enlarge each other.3
Here it is clear that she sees experience as a function of the psyche, a way we interpret the raw data of our lives. Such interpretation (which begins at a level far deeper than our thinking mind) feels so real that we label it an “experience” and trust it implicitly. We kiss someone, and it feels very good: that’s an experience of love. We find out that the person does not reciprocate our feelings, and so we feel devastated: we interpret that as the experience of a broken heart. And on it goes.
Therefore, experience is pretty much what it means to be alive and self-aware. But alongside experience is the normal human capacity for self-deception, self-illusion. Like Jeremiah dourly insisting that “the heart is devious above all else; it is perverse — who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9), Maggie Ross insists that we must have a similarly skeptical view of our conscious experience, no matter how “real” or certain it may seem. If you’ve had an experience of God, that’s wonderful: but it might have just been a figment of your imagination.
Religious fundamentalists (and fundamentalist atheists) will reject this out of hand, since it challenges their brittle worldview. To the religious fundamentalist, an experience of God must be real (unless it conflicts with their religious dogma, of course). Fundamentalist atheists are the mirror image of such literalist believers: to the dogmatically-convinced atheist, an experience of God must be imaginary, since they are utterly convinced that God cannot exist.
In the middle are, well, the humble folks: those who are willing to admit that an experience might be understood in more than one way. So humble believers, humble non-believers, agnostics, and contemplatives all will say, “I have had an experience, that feels really real. I interpret it this way, but of course I might be mistaken.”
Should mysticism be equated with “the experience of God”? After all, some great writers (like Thomas Merton and Ramon Panikkar to mention two examples that leap to mind) promote a clearly experiential understanding of spirituality. Maggie is gone, and if she were still here she would probably make some snarky comment about how mysticism and experience are equally useless concepts. Because she’s gone, it might be easy to just dismiss her as a contemplative outlier. But I want to acknowledge that I see something valuable in her critique.
Whatever one might believe (or disbelieve) about God, I think it’s fair to say that God cannot be poured into the human mind any more than the ocean can be poured into a thimble. With this in mind, it’s easy to see that any human experience of God, mystical or otherwise, must be limited, provisional, incomplete, subject to error, and ultimately ineffable (it can’t be put into words or otherwise communicated). If all of this is true (and I believe it is), then suddenly it begins to make sense why great mystics from Pseudo-Dionysius to Meister Eckhart to John of the Cross to, well, Maggie Ross, all insist that the most reliable thing we can say about God is just how much we cannot say, we cannot experience, we cannot know. God is mystery. God is the mystery that surrounds and deepens our very concept of mystery.
In her posthumously published manuscript Thoughts without Order concerning the Love of God, French philosopher/mystic Simone Weil wrote, “It is not up to us to believe in God, but only not to bestow our love upon false gods.” We cannot guarantee any experience is truly an experience of God. But we can learn to discern when our experiences do seem to be based on illusion, or ego, or narcissism, or anything else that seems to get in the way of God, rather than bringing us closer to the ineffable mystery we call God.
Does this make mysticism useless? Not at all. Our experience remains our experience. I won’t go as far as Maggie to declare all experience as somehow alien to a true encounter with God. After all, I agree with mystics from St. Benedict to Julian of Norwich to Ignatius of Loyola, each of whom insisted that we can behold or find God in all things — even in our apparent experience of God, but also even in an apparent lack of experience of God. God is present even in our imagination of God; God is present in our unwillingness to trust our imagination or take it seriously.
I admit, I have led us into the swamp of paradox here. Mysticism has a way of bringing us to precisely this kind of place. We can become disgusted by the logical impossibility of it all, or we can accept the invitation to “become like little children” and play a game of hide and seek with the Love at the heart of all things. God, once again, is in it all. But our choice determines what our experience will be (even if it turns out to be an experienceless experience).
She passed away on June 11, 2026; ironically, the anniversary of my baptism and also my brother’s birthday (I imagine he didn’t like having to share the day he turned 9 with his baby brother getting baptized).
Sometimes I disagreed with her vehemently. For example, she was outspoken in her disdain for the ministry of spiritual direction; in Silence, A User’s Guide Volume 1, she makes it clear that her criticism was based on a set of patriarchal and authoritarian assumptions that not I (nor any decent spiritual director I know) would ever accept or endorse.
Ross, Maggie. Silence, A User’s Guide, Volume I: Process (pp. 79-80). (Function). Kindle Edition.