By Barbara Markhoff

Over the years I have heard occasional stories from people who feel they have had some kind of direct experience of God or however they named it. I have heard descriptions such as God saving someone’s life who almost got electrocuted in a bathtub, seeing an apparition that the person was certain to be God nearby, or just the intense feeling of God’s presence on a regular basis.  I have experienced nothing of the kind and have felt envious of those who have had such visceral experiences.

Waiting for that “still small voice inside” that Quakers open themselves up to during Meeting for Worship is not the big God experience I have always hoped to know.  But recently, during MFW, I had an epiphany that anything that comes to us “out of the normal” (as defined individually), is, in fact, an experience of the divine.  Even that epiphany was!

So, after MFW I looked in an online thesaurus for words like epiphany and saw words such as a moment of awe, inspiration, revelation, insight, sudden realizations, deep clarity, enlightenment, awakening, eureka—just to name some.  I now believe that I have had experiences of the divine because I have had moments that several of these words aptly describe. This has left me with a sense of peace deep inside and I no longer feel the need to have a more dramatic knowing of God.

Accompanying Painting created by Jill Berentsen-Bottum