On Ecstasy and Laundry: Spiritual Experience in the Orthodox Church

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost / Third Sunday of Luke, October 19, 2014
Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.

Fourteen years ago, an American convert to Buddhism named Dr. Jack Kornfield published a book entitled After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. Although a Buddhist himself, in the work he explores the words of many spiritual “masters” of various religions, all centered on the question of how such people go about their spiritual lives after some moment of enlightenment. He notes that most spiritual stories climax with the moment of enlightenment but do little to answer the question of how one is supposed to live afterward. And that is why his book is titled After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

While many of Dr. Kornfield’s readers no doubt have come to this as something of a revelation—and I think he does have a point regarding how narratives usually play out in modern culture—that there might be laundry after ecstasy comes as no particular surprise to the historic Christian tradition. We do not need a Buddhist to tell us this. Indeed, one might even say that Church life is mainly about how one is supposed to do the laundry after the ecstasy.

The ordinariness and even suffering that make up the majority of time in the Christian life are touched on in the famous passage from the Apostle Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians we read today, from its eleventh and twelfth chapters. After first mentioning how he escaped from Damascus by being let down in a basket over a wall, Paul begins telling about an ecstasy that he himself experienced fourteen years before the writing of the epistle.

Now, when he tells this story, he does not say that it is himself he is talking about. He simply says “I know a man in Christ” who had this experience. But it has long been understood that he is talking about himself but in humility does not wish directly to say that the story is about him.

He says that this “man in Christ” (himself) was “caught up to the third heaven,” and he does not know whether the experience took place in the body or out of the body. It was a strange, mystical vision he was given, a “revelation of the Lord” as he calls it. There, in “the third heaven,” which he identifies as “Paradise,” he hears “unspeakable words, which no person is allowed to utter.”

And that’s it. He doesn’t tell us any more about this ecstatic, revelatory vision from God, which may have been an “out of body experience,” though he doesn’t know whether his body came with him as he was caught up into Paradise or not.

So, because we don’t really have any clue as to the content of Paul’s experience, other than that it was mysterious and revelatory, I would like to say two things about the fact that he had this experience at all.

First, this description Paul gives stands somewhat in contrast to the “normal” sensibility that many people have concerning the spiritual life. For many people in churches, even in the Orthodox Church, the idea that spiritual life could or should have any sort of mystical, miraculous side is politely dismissed. Yes, they intellectually believe that all kinds of miracles happened when Christianity got going 2000 years ago, but that kind of thing just doesn’t happen now, and therefore there really is no point in becoming “too religious,” if you know what I mean. Spiritual life fits neatly into the well-ordered, well-adjusted lifestyle, so let’s not get too excited. It’s just church, right?

But Paul is a foundational figure for Christianity, not only in that he is the great Apostle to the Gentiles and wrote much of the New Testament, but in that he teaches us patterns for spiritual life. He preaches the Gospel, which includes teaching what it all means and how to live by it. His mystical contact with God is not an exclusive experience meant only for himself, but it is part of Christian life, or else he would not have mentioned it. Now, most people probably do not experience it quite in the way that he did, but we will return to that in a moment.

The second thing we should note about Paul’s ecstatic experience is an observation made from essentially the opposite angle, and that is that while this is indeed truly something he experienced and that it is truly properly an element of spiritual life, it is not a frequent or predictable element of it. There are some people who want Christianity to be about constant miracles, whether the miracle is a spectacular healing or even just regularly scheduled emotional highs on Sunday mornings. For these people, ecstatic experiences become fetishized, and if not supplied with a steady diet of them, they may either lose interest or they may criticize Christians who don’t behave according to such expectations as not being truly Christian.

But what happens next in Paul’s account of his mystical experience is that he immediately begins downplaying the whole thing. He writes this: “On behalf of this one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my infirmities. For if I would desire to boast, I shall not be foolish, for I shall speak the truth. But I refrain from it, lest anyone should think of me above that which he sees me to be, or hears from me.” So on the one hand, he feels that he has to tell this story, because it’s the truth, but he is reluctant to do so, and he tries to distract the reader by saying that it’s about someone else and that his only real “boasting” is in his infirmities, his weaknesses. He doesn’t want anyone to think more highly of him than what he plainly is to them all.

Paul then says this: “And to keep me from being exalted above measure through the abundance of revelations, I was given a thorn in the flesh, an angel of Satan to buffet me, to keep me from being exalted above measure. For this thing I beseeched the Lord three times, that it might depart from me. And He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.’ Most gladly therefore will I rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

Paul had something that humbled him, some ongoing “thorn in the flesh” that kept him from getting too exalted. He doesn’t say what it is, but we know that he asked God to take it away three times, and God told him no, saying, “My grace is sufficient for thee, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” And because Paul wants God’s strength rather than his own, he therefore would rather talk about his own weakness, because in that weakness is God’s strength increased and made perfect in him.

So even though Paul had the ecstasy, he still had, in Dr. Kornfield’s phrase, “the laundry.” He still had to live the ordinary Christian life, which often includes suffering, sometimes even suffering that makes no human sense and that God will not take away, even when we ask him again and again. But this does not mean that spiritual life consists of occasional moments of ecstasy punctuating a life otherwise abandoned by God’s presence, out of sight of Paradise.

You see, even if most of us have never been “caught up into the third heaven” as Paul was (and I can attest that I have not), we nevertheless have indeed touched Paradise. How many of us here have been baptized? How many of us here have received Holy Communion? How many of us here have experienced the healing and release of Confession? How many of us here have cast aside our earthly cares on pilgrimage? How many of us here have had those revelatory moments when the faith just suddenly made sense in a way it never had before? How many of us have seen Christ?

I am reminded of this dynamic particularly today, as the 19th of October marks for me a moment of “ecstasy” of sorts: Today is the seventeenth anniversary of the first time I walked into All Saints Orthodox Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, a place that would become my spiritual home for the seven years following it, including the path to becoming an Orthodox Christian.

Although it was the second time I’d been to an Orthodox church, I was still overwhelmed by the experience. It wasn’t ecstatic like what Paul talks about in his vision, but it was nevertheless an experience where I felt outside myself, at least in a small sense. And in the seventeen years that have followed, I have been working out what exactly that experience means and how it continues every day.

The path that is laid out before us includes a lot of “laundry,” but it also is intended to be an ecstasy. We often think of that word as meaning only these miraculous, mystical visions like Paul had, but what ecstasy means in its most basic sense is “to stand outside,” that is, to stand outside ourselves, to go where we have not been. And that is what Christian life indeed is, brothers and sisters. It is to go outside of our comfortable preferences and habits, to break new ground, to break through the calcified barriers of our sins and to encounter there the risen Jesus Christ, Who leads us into Paradise, and by His grace and power, someday to the resurrection of all.

To our Lord Jesus Christ be all glory, honor and worship, with His Father and the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.