I read a description of something that I have long struggled to put into words. I have had moments of being drawn into a sense of total harmony, at one with the universe, an exhilarating sense of complete peace, contentment, joy and love. I call them Transcendent Moments, for it feels like I transcend the material state of my life and realize with astonishment that I am more than a physical being, that life is much more than having a beating heart and a functioning brain, that there is a spiritual dimension to my existence, and that God has just touched my face with the gentleness of a Father for his newborn child. 

Here is what I read, it is contained in an article in Plough, by Ian Marcus Corbin. https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/literature/the-abyss-of-beauty 

The Polish poet, philosopher and future Prime Minister, Vaclec Havel, was imprisoned for resisting the Communist Regime. One day he was in the exercise yard, sitting on a pile of old rusty junk metal when, as he wrote to his wife Olga, I “… gazed into the crown of an enormous tree that stretched, with dignified repose, up and over all the fences, wires, bars, and watchtowers that separated me from it.” He is overcome by “a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once, I seemed to rise above the coordinates of my momentary existence into a kind of state outside time in which all the beautiful things  I have ever seen and experienced existed in a total “co-present” … I was flooded with a sense of ultimate happiness and harmony with the world and with myself, with moments I could call up, and with everything invisible that lies behind it and has meaning. I would even say that I was somehow “struck by love,” though I don’t know precisely for whom or what.” 

The First Time

The first such experience occurred soon after I surrendered my life to Christ. I walked home from the evening worship and sat under the night sky where stars were scattered like diamonds on a vast velvet cushion. I shivered, not with cold, for it was a warm subtropical evening – I can only describe it as shivering with delight. The Transcendent Moment arrived and I knew, in something beyond words, the reality of God, the Creator, therefore logically necessarily outside of the universe, as my Father, loving me with infinite love. Earthly love is delicious beyond description – consider all the poetry and music that attempts to describe it, yet can only touch on one or another aspect of it. It is so vast that a complete description is beyond expression. The sensation of that love that night is unlike any love I have ever known, different as a candle when compared to the sun. The feeble lumen of my life was connected to the immense luminosity of the entire universe in dizzying reality, my chest cavity expanded to fill with the heavens, and my heart pulsed to the rhythm of the stars. The hymn we sang that night in worship probably prepped me, and in His infinite grace, God granted me the delight of going beyond the singing of it to the superb joy of the actuality of it.

My song is love unknown,

  My Savior’s love to me;

Love to the loveless shown,

  That they might lovely be.

I an unable to recall how long I sat ashiver with joy in the radiance of a Radiant God under that sparkle-studded sky. Eternity, outside of time, is where a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day.  The hymn captured the wistful longing of my heart –

Here might I stay and sing,

  No story so divine;

Never was love, dear King,

  Never was grief like Thine.

    This is my Friend,

   In whose sweet praise

    I all my days

    Could gladly spend.

It was not to be. I live as a physical being in a material body, created by God and therefore just as important as the spiritual dimension of my being. 

The Christian focus is on the resurrection of the material body. Who has not known such a transcendent moment? Falling in love, holding your newborn child, being filled with awe at some majestic scene, floating in the joy of family, gaining an important insight – an “aha moment” when something suddenly made sense. All these are examples of transcendent moments informing you there is more to life than just the material, and beckons you to explore the spiritual dimension to enjoy being a full-orbed person.

Is this your “aha Moment”?