Flame and Vision
Encountering God in fear, retreat, and the cleft of the rock
A few days after I wrote a scene in my novel where Hildegard of Bingen sees the One Enthroned in the sky—fashioned after her first recorded vision—flames of fire erupting out of the top of her head, I heard this: Flame and Vision:
The recording (I can’t quite call it a song), imagines what Hildegard would’ve heard in her visions, imprinting on our ears the intensity of searing light and flame. It was an artistic and unique choice and it moved me deeply.
It’s no wonder that the whole album is a collaboration between the ethereal vocalizations of Jocelyn Montgomery and the famous experimental, surrealist, and some would say ‘visionary’ film director and artist David Lynch.
They take some of Hildegard’s musical compositions and marry them to a dynamic auditory experience.
A week or so after I listened to the whole album Lux Vivens, I encountered God on a spiritual retreat.
I’m not usually one for retreats. If I have a break from my kids and my life, I want to do something quiet like read or watch movies. Most importantly, I want to be alone (or with one or two of my closest people who understand my need to be alone). But my husband encouraged me to go and I trusted the retreat leader, an incredible artist and woman of faith who I’d immediately bonded with on matters of God and creativity.
I didn’t have a lot of expectations for what would happen there but a few weeks beforehand, I began to pray that I would encounter God.
After we’d settled into our rooms and had dinner on the first evening of the retreat, we were led through a Lectio Divina, a close and repeated reading of a particular passage of Scripture. The first passage was from Genesis 32 when Jacob wrestles with God.
As we shared the things we were discerning from the passage, I began to regret asking to encounter God. I mean, I read a lot about the mystics. I know what happens in those encounters. They aren’t fun but, instead, an overwhelming mix of a sense of belovedness and terrifying awe.
Jacob’s encounter with God comes after he sends the women and children in his life across the river alone at evening, awaiting a visit from his estranged brother Esau (who he is worried will kill him).
Jacob is left alone to wrestle with a strange person who comes to him. They fight until morning and Jacob refuses to relent until the stranger (who we are told later is God), pulls Jacob’s hip out of socket. Jacob will still not release the stranger until he is given a blessing.
It’s a weird story (like most encounters with God) and leaves many unanswered questions. But what it left me with was a reminder that, in keeping with the mystical experiences, an encounter with God leaves an indelible mark.
Our next Lectio Divina passage was from Exodus 33 when Moses encounters God. I was beginning to see a pattern here. And I was starting to get a little nervous.
This encounter comes after Israel has been punished for the golden calf episode and God has relented, promising to be with them. Moses asks God for proof of God’s presence and promise. He says to God boldly: show me your glory.
The second and only full day of retreat began with more prayerful gatherings, meals, great conversations and Scripture readings and then a time of silence where we were free to create, pray, or walk. I decided to do all three.
My final few hours were spent in prayer. I was working through some personal issues from childhood and I asked God—per a prompt—to help me see what I was afraid of and lean into that. What followed was an afternoon and nighttime of fearful thoughts, terrible sleep, and early waking in the morning in which I sat weeping and praying on a window seat.
I trudged through breakfast and our last gathering and prayers. I struggled to articulate what I had experienced because, despite the beauty of most of the retreat, I felt weary. Maybe it was self-pity but I was disappointed that I’d asked to encounter God and, in response, my final hours had left me exhausted and with a sense of sadness.
But over the next few hours and days, the feelings began to transform from a sense of confusion and sadness into something else: an assurance of God’s presence and love amidst the sadness and fear. I recalled that our last evening, some wise women had given me some wise words about a situation I was struggling with and then we’d laughed together for several hours.
God had shown me that even through my fears, God was sitting there with me. And I had a strong sense that God had answered my prayer gently, and that, in response, I longed to be closer to God.
There is ample evidence of God’s gentleness in encounters in Scripture. Instead of blasting Moses off the face of the earth for asking to see God’s glory—which is apparently what happens when a mortal actually sees God’s glory—God places Moses tenderly in the cleft of a rock and shields him. All that Moses can see is God’s back.
Jacob, selfish and impetuous, is offered God’s companionship and blessing, not because he deserves it but because he asks for salvation and blessing and because he is invested in the struggle. He is left with hip pain. A permanent reminder.
I don’t mean to compare myself to Jacob and Moses (although I am selfish and sometimes impetuous too) but it felt a little familiar: as though my encounter was a soft launch but it left a mark on me for days afterward.
Now, many of you know that I read a lot of the mystics and write a lot about the mystics. And I’ve always been interested in what it means to have a mystical encounter with God.
In that vein, I don’t want to imply that I had a vision, at least not in the way of the medieval visionary. But I did feel an overwhelming sense that God came to me in a way that I could recognize and then God gave me the tools to respond.
Our church has been going through a prayer course by Pete Grieg and one of the most powerful things about a relatively simple set of lessons is that all of us can hear from God.
It doesn’t have to be through flame or rock, through the sky opening up and knocking us over. We don’t have to be Moses or Jacob (and, really, thank God we aren’t). We don’t have to be Hildegard of Bingen or St. Francis of Assisi (again…no thank you).
All of us can encounter God. And, if we are willing to simply sit and listen, God can speak to us in ways that we can recognize. In fact, that is what God wants more than anything else: to be in communion with us so that the world might be healed and reconciled.
How have you encountered God?
Speaking of reconciliation and the brokenness still evident in the world, I cannot stop thinking about all the immigrants who have been deported without due process—one innocent man (the Trump administration has admitted this and refused to do anything about it) was sent to a notoriously horrific prison in El Salvador—and the students who have recently been detained by ICE despite their legal status. I get to meet with ESL students and I see both their fear, their faith (most of them are Christians), and their courage each week.
If you’re interested in calling your Senators or members of Congress, 5calls.org is a great place to start. It makes it super easy to call your representatives and speak out about the issues that are important to you. It even gives you a script.
Kristin Du Mez’ substack is really informative and an important call to action for Christians (and anyone who is disturbed by what we are seeing in the Trump administration).
Podcast
I’ve been listening to “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God” by a British broadcaster who has been hosting interviews between atheists, Christians and agnostics for decades. It’s a fascinating listen.
Inspiration
During Corey Booker’s marathon, record breaking speech before Congress, he spoke about his Christian faith.
Just for fun
When men say they aren’t emotional…
And
If you have a cat, you know.
I’ll leave you with a quote that perfectly sums up my experience at retreat. It’s from Come: God’s Invitation to Rest and Renewal by Christine Labrum. In it, she quotes Chris Webb:
“…the Bible resists us at every turn. It will not cooperate, it will not conform to our schemas, it will not be tamed. But then, of course, Scripture does not seek to be analyzed and understood. The Bible is not a theological textbook, a philosophical treatise or answer to life’s questions. It is a thin place through which the presence of God breaks into this world and bursts with unpredictable consequences into our lives. Even though it is not consumed, this book burns with unquenchable fire.”
This moved with the cadence of something ancient - Jacob’s limp, Moses in the cleft, but also the unmistakable tone of our time: the soul asking, trembling, laughing, enduring the strangeness of God’s nearness. I’ve come to believe, and try to trace through Desert and Fire, that every true mystical encounter is less about spectacle than surrender. That God, still today, comes not with wind or flame, but with something far riskier: gentleness.
What you’ve described here is what the mystics rarely speak of plainly but all seem to bear - the hidden wound that glows, not bleeds; the weight of divine presence that doesn’t always console, but remains. This is the heart of incarnational mysticism: that the sacred does not always arrive to lift us out of fear, but to sit beside us in it, to form us not despite our sadness but through it. And somehow, inexplicably, we are changed. Not like a vision changes, but like water shapes stone.
Thank you for trusting the sadness, and for naming the joy that came after - not instead of it, but braided with it. This is what I think Moses felt, walking down the mountain after seeing only God’s back: that holiness doesn’t always answer us - it simply marks us. And quietly, it stays.
Thank you, Christiana, for these beautiful and challenging and vulnerable words. It sounds as if this retreat was exactly what was needed, and came at a time when you could receive it as a gift.