46

There is a class of events, a lot of them, really, over the years, usually called mystic experiences.  They are hard to define, but the central idea seems to be that one has an inner experience within which the boundaries of time and space disappear and the individual finds him or herself in another kind of reality.

An English writer who used as an alias the name, Ancilla, or ‘The Handmaid,” had that kind of experience in 1934, the forty-third year of her life. She was with a group of students and other teachers in Germany in those pre-war years. Few expected war although Ancilla noted a “slight feeling of tautness” during her visit. One afternoon she was by herself visiting a medieval German church.  She was sitting, looking at some woodcarvings, relaxed, reflecting on some of the experiences of her trip when “she “moved off the center of her own consciousness.”

Best to listen to her own words: “How can I explain! I can only use negatives. I saw nothing, not even a light. I heard nothing, no voice, no music, nothing. Nothing touched me. Nor was I conscious of any Being , visible or invisible. But suddenly simply, silently, I was not there.  And I was there. It lasted for a moment, yet it was eternal, since there was no time.  And I knew, as certainly as I know I am tying to write it down . . . that this world, this universe . . . is as we see it, hear it, know it, is at the same time completely different . . . .  It is also and at the same time wholly other.”*

The experience cannot be reconciled with our familiar material universe, yet the usual dismissive explanations won’t do. Ancilla did not believe in God. She did not attend church. She was not isolated in some medieval convent. She was not traveling with a religious group. She was not mad. She had not used drugs. She had not been drinking. She was not trying to experience something she had heard about. She was not doing or thinking any of the things generally associated with visions or trances. She was never able to repeat the experience in the slightest way. Years later she continued to hold that “the world we know is as we see it and is yet at the same time totally other.”  Ancilla had undergone something which might as well be called a ‘mystic experience.’

In our scientific age we can and must say Ancilla’s experience is at the moment inexplicable, but we cannot say it did not occur. Note also the irony that currently there is another dystopian handmaid in our popular culture.

* The Following Feet, Ancilla, (Grace A. Wood), The Seabury Press, 1957.