When the Ordinary Begins to Glow

What if Jesus is less someone to believe in than a brother of light who awakens us to the hidden depths of everyday Life?

I always return to Jesus. And, to be clear, I’m no Bible thumper or fundamentalist. I’m a devotee of the numinous felt within immanence, of discovering the mystic within the ordinary things of daily life: the beauty of a sunrise, the freshness of morning, that first sip of coffee. And, if you’re fortunate, waking beside the one you love, a soft kiss greeting the new day. These moments can seem utterly commonplace until, for reasons we cannot quite explain, something within them opens, and we feel ourselves participating in a depth of Life that was there all along.

When I speak and write of Jesus, I’m not referring primarily to the literal personage claimed by institutional religion, doctrinal certainty, or prescribed belief. Instead, I experience the spirit of Jesus as a brother of light, a numinous presence who has accompanied my inner life through dreams, intuitions, and spontaneous experiences. None of this has much to do with conventional Christianity. I have never felt compelled to turn these encounters into theological claims or persuade anyone else of their metaphysical truth. Their authority, if that is even the right word, comes from their recurring emergence and their effects: they have deepened rather than narrowed my relationship to Life.

I capitalize Life because I mean something more than biological existence or the circumstances through which we make our way each day. Life is the pulse within what we encounter, the atmosphere of places, rooms, and meetings, the barely perceptible energies coursing through what happens and what is trying to happen. I mean a depth within existence that sometimes approaches us, addresses us, unsettles us, and invites us into realms of feeling and perception we had never before imagined.

We glimpse it through dreams and synchronicities, intuitive flashes and spontaneous waking images, unexpected encounters, and those peculiar moments when the ordinary world suddenly becomes translucent. The street remains the street, the tree remains a tree, the person across from us remains entirely themselves, and yet something more seems present. There can be a glow from within, almost one shade this side of literal.

This is the territory of what I call the everyday mystic.

She may never call herself mystical. She may have no interest in esoteric teachings and may not belong to any spiritual community. She gets up in the morning, goes to work, pays bills, worries about her children, makes dinner, loves imperfectly, loses people, grieves, dreams, and begins again. Yet every so often the membrane between ordinary life and its mysterious depths seems to grow thin.

Imagine a woman whose mother has recently died. One morning, she wakes before sunrise after dreaming that she and her mother are sitting together at the old kitchen table where they had shared coffee for decades. Nothing spectacular happens. Her mother simply looks at her with that familiar expression that always meant, You know what you need to do.

The woman wakes with tears in her eyes. She goes downstairs, makes coffee, and sits by the window as dawn begins to spread across the sky. A bird lands on the fence, one her mother had always loved. For several moments, she feels something she has not felt since the death: not that her mother has somehow returned, exactly, but that she is accompanied. The crushing finality of absence loosens its grip.

What happened?

The everyday mystic need not answer too quickly.

Perhaps grief gathered dream, memory, bird, and sunrise into a moment of psychological consolation. Perhaps synchronicity brought inner and outer experience into meaningful correspondence. Perhaps something of the mother genuinely drew near. We do not know, and our rush to decide may diminish the very experience we are trying to understand.

What matters first is what follows.

The woman does not become preoccupied with signs from her dead mother. She does not begin each morning by searching the fence for another bird or by constructing a metaphysical system around what happened. Instead, something in her grief has shifted. She understands, emotionally rather than intellectually, that continuing to live does not betray the person she has lost. Later that morning, she calls her estranged sister. They speak for the first time in months. Grief remains, but it has become permeable enough for love to begin moving through it.

This is the kind of mysticism that interests me: not an escape from ordinary life but a return to it with greater depth.

Jesus as the brother of light has functioned similarly within my own experience. His presence does not tell me what everyone else must believe, nor does it establish a theology. It opens something. Like Hermes crossing thresholds between worlds, the figure mediates between what I know and what I have not yet become capable of knowing. He encourages depth and downwardness, a willingness to enter those regions of psyche and Life where familiar explanations no longer suffice.

In one dream, Jesus led me through a desert toward the opening of a cave descending into the earth. He entered the darkness, and I knew I was expected to follow. The darkness did not feel evil or destructive. It felt immense, fertile, and fearsome in the old sense of awe: a depth that could not be mastered before entering it.

That image has remained with me because it reverses our usual spiritual expectation. We tend to imagine light as something that leads upward and away from darkness. Yet here the brother of light led downward, into it. The dream suggested something I have repeatedly encountered in psychological life: authentic illumination does not necessarily rescue us from darkness. Sometimes it gives us enough courage to enter the darkness in a different way.

Another person’s mediating figure may be entirely different. It might be Mary, Buddha, Krishna, Sophia, an ancestor, an animal encountered repeatedly in dreams, an unnamed presence, or no personified figure whatsoever. The doorway may simply be music, wilderness, making art, holding a newborn child, sitting beside a dying parent, or watching morning light move slowly across the kitchen floor.

The particular form matters because intimacy is always particular. Yet the form need not exhaust the mystery encountered through it. My experience of Jesus need not become someone else’s Jesus, just as another person’s encounter with the sacred need not conform to my language for Life.

This is also where psychological discernment matters. Not every intuition is wisdom. Not every coincidence carries meaning. Not every powerful dream should direct our behavior. The mystical life becomes psychologically generative when it opens rather than closes us—when we become less rigid rather than more certain, more capable of relationship rather than more isolated, more alive rather than more frightened by Life.

Perhaps William James had it right in insisting that we pay attention to the fruits of such experiences. We may never settle their ultimate metaphysical status. We can, however, observe what grows from them.

Does the experience deepen us? Does it make us more compassionate, creative, receptive, and capable of bearing uncertainty? Does it help grief begin to breathe? Does it permit an old wound to loosen? Does it return us to the people we love with a little more tenderness?

If so, perhaps we do not need to decide too quickly what world the experience came from.

The everyday mystic is not necessarily someone who believes in another world. She is someone becoming increasingly receptive to the unsuspected depths of this one. She learns that the sacred does not always announce itself with visions, revelations, or voices from beyond. More often, it slips quietly into the familiar: a dream before dawn, a bird settling on a fence, the smell of coffee, a remembered face, a hand reaching across the bed in the half-light of morning.

Nothing outwardly miraculous has happened.

And yet, for an instant, everything is different.

The ordinary world has not disappeared. It has become more intensely itself. The tree is still a tree, the beloved still the beloved, morning still morning. But something within them has begun to glow, one shade this side of literal, reminding us that perhaps the mystery we have spent so much of our lives searching for elsewhere has been quietly waiting within the depths of Life all along.