Wrestling the Angel—Notes on an Ecstatic Moment

 by John Coats

HOUSTON, TX—It was my first time in a Catholic church. At twelve, having grown up Southern Baptist, I’d never seen the likes of the silken altar cloth, the golden candlesticks, the statuary.  And that faint fragrance in the air—something of the place itself, spicy, old, remnant-like, haunting, mysterious. The music swelled, we stood, turned, and through the sea of adults, I saw a boy about my age swinging a smoking pot and another carrying a cross on a varnished broomstick. As they passed, a bit of the smoke wafted toward me, and it was the same scent. 

     It was like a scene from an old movie when someone remembers the past and the picture dissolves into wavy lines, but this was only in one spot, sort of oval-shaped, just above and in front of the cross. Then it blinked. Something seemed to hit me in the belly, though not hard, and immediately I sensed a heaviness that had not been there, a numb heartache—and the presence of something I could not name.

     I went to bed early that night and as I drifted toward sleep, suddenly I felt myself tumbling backwards in slow motion, and into some other place where I was surrounded by stars.

     Then: Who am I?

     The voice was soft, intimate. But whose voice? Mine? That presence? Was it about me? About it? I was more curious than frightened. The tumbling continued, and the question repeated every ten or fifteen seconds until I fell asleep. The next night and most every night for the next few years was the same. The question was never intrusive, but more koan-like, satisfied to be rather than demanding answers—a relief, since I had none.

     Something about me was different, but what? And what was I supposed to make of a peculiar experience I’d had in a Roman Catholic Church, one that wouldn’t go away, and, depending on the day, was making me a little nuts? I wanted to talk to someone, but my non-religious father would’ve said Talk to your mother, who’d have dragged me down the street to the pastor’s house. I was pretty much on my own, with two boys inside my skin, one who wanted it all to go away, another who couldn’t wait to turn out the lights, who hadn’t a clue what was happening, but trusted it more than the other boy had ever trusted anything. Besides, there was a certain logic to what was happening. It had started in a church, so it followed that I was having a “religious” experience, and that my attitude toward church would shift. And it did. Soon church was so intolerable that I feared I might lose control and start screaming, though at what, or about what, I didn’t know.

     Though it was a single moment, a split second in my sixty years, the man I’ve become, all that I’ve done in my professional life can be traced to it. And yet it remains a mystery. I’ve tried saying it was “of God,” but the name arrives like a king and his court; there is simply too much baggage and too many extras for my small house. Other names present the same. I’ve come to prefer the mystery, the illogicalness in the fact that I understand it far better when I don’t try to understand it.

     Understanding has its own timetable and comes when I’m not looking for it. While still a teenager, the word “milieu” came as a welcome guest because that was the sense of it for me that Saturday afternoon—an immersion, a surrounding too vast ever to say, “It’s here, but not there” or “under this roof, but not that one.” Later I would stumble across the Latin, Mysterium Tremendum, and know its meaning without asking, and the vast experience to which it pointed. Some years back, I came across the German mystic Meister Eckhart, who centuries ago wrote, “That which one says is God, he is not; that which one does not say, he is more truly that than that which one says he is.” Except for the “G” word and the gendering, it fit for me, sort of. I’ve loved the image inherent there, of the definition of the infinite existing only in the spaces between the words.

     There has been no form, no pillar of fire or burning bush. Moreover, there’s been nothing to believe in. In fact, I’ve come to think that trying to believe in what happened that day is the worst idea of all.

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