Jay in the light – photo by Gordon Humphreys

A number of accounts of people’s experiences of glimpses of glory involve a deepening awareness of our interconnection with all of creation. It is as if the false consciousness that tends to separate us as human animals from the rest of nature is broken down, and we can feel our deep connection with all of creation.

This account from Bede Griffiths describes an evening when he was 17 that changed the course of his life, and changed him from being ‘a normal schoolboy’, towards a lifelong search for God. He was walking alone near the school playing fields, where he had often walked, but this time it was different:

I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all the year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked on I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.

The account isn’t just about heightened senses, but also about the overwhelming emotion felt from a glimpse of both the glory and the unfathomable mystery that lies behind creation and our own existence. After this, the young Bede Griffiths began to walk more in the country, getting up early to hear the birds and staying late watching the stars. This took the place of the organised religion in which he’d been brought up, which then began to be seen as empty and meaningless in comparison. The glimpse of glory became a sacramental moment, a glimpse of a deeper reality beyond the mind. His life then became directed to that end. As one biographer expresses it, it was this glimpse that led Bede Griffiths to his own lifelong search which enabled him to express ‘with the simplicity and directness which can come only from experience, the underlying unity of religions’, and attain a spiritual wholeness granted to only a few.