Background Posting on My Experience with Psychics

The initial story behind this posting took place in 1957 when I was a junior in college. During a math class, I experienced transcendence. Drawn into what neither mind nor heart, nor word nor speech can understand or explain, I knew pure joy. My words cannot capture its essence. I have been able to arrive only at this lackluster definition: For me, joy is the totality of bliss at the height and depth of my being.

As I left the classroom that day, I knew three things: I was going to enter the convent the following year; I’d become a Benedictine nun; and I’d devote my life to prayer for all creation. 

Before that class, I’d not known that in the next hour, I’d come to two divergent roads: One, which I’d cherished for ten years, was to become an engineer. The other had never occurred to me; it was not even drawn on the map of my consciousness. After that class, I knew as well as I knew the sun rises daily that I’d enter the convent in fourteen months. 

The next story behind this posting took place the following year. I was taking a one-credit-hour course in religion. Father Francis, a Benedictine monk, taught the class. He took seriously his responsibility to inculcate the Roman Catholic dogmas and doctrines into the young women sitting before him in that classroom.

On one particular day, he used both the Hebrew and Christian testaments to talk about “false prophets.” He said that when someone predicts a happening, we should be wary if that person gives a definitive time and place. We might have intuitions about the future, he said, but only God knew anything for sure. We were not in control. 

So, he concluded, steer clear of those who shouted from the rooftops that the world would end at such and such a time; or that something dire would happen according to the intoxicating words of a self-proclaimed prophet.

As I listened, I thought of my transcendent experience of the year before. Was I being a false prophet to myself in predicting when I’d enter and where and what I’d do for the rest of my life?  For all those months, I’d felt so sure. As I sat there, examining my experience and my response to it, I could not let go of the belief that I’d somehow been called to a life of service as a nun. I wasn’t being a false prophet.

Then Father Francis began to denounce psychics, tarot-card readers, mediums. He said they were false prophets who claimed to be able to tell the future. As Roman Catholics, we had to resist the lure of exploring our life beyond the present. In fact, he said, to do so was to commit a mortal sin. (According to the catechism I’d begun to study in first-grade, a mortal sin sent an unrepentant person to hell.) Father Francis then explained what might happen to a person who self-indulgently explored the “dark side” of life.

While I let go of the idea of hell and mortal sin in the next three decades, I still remembered his caution about psychics and never sought a session with one. Then in 1990, following a loss, I visited a psychic and came away with my intuitions shored up by what she had said.

In my next posting, I’ll share my experience with psychics, especially the one I spoke with last March. His words tunneled into my mind and left me bereft. 

Peace.

PS: This posting’s first story is detailed in my convent memoir: Prayer Wasn’t Enough.

Photo from Wikipedia.