“A mystical experience—and by this I mean to include those experiences of spiritual release and transcendence (in nature, in prayer, in art, etc.) that are available to every single person who will prepare himself for and accept them—does not simply result in action; its reality is confirmed only within action. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before his death, Jesus is said to have prayed so hard that he sweated blood—a metaphor, I take it, but in any event a suggestion that his experience of God at that moment was what we would call mystical (it’s not all harp music and happy rapture, this brush with Beyond).”