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professor coming up to me and sitting next to me and saying something like, ‘Something happened to you, didn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and that was all.”
    I sat immobilized by her story. I felt like a body surfer who had been slammed down by a wave. Then I asked Sophy a question that many a neurologist has pondered as well.
    “Did you think, Gosh, I just had a temporal lobe seizure ?”
    “Oh yes! Absolutely that occurred to me!” Sophy admitted happily. “Was that an epileptic fit? Did I have some kind of electrical burnout of the brain? But everything seemed to be functioning,” she said, adding that nothing like this had recurred in the past twenty years.
    She leaned forward, speaking urgently.
    “The experience is not important,” Sophy said, and then she laughed. “I’ve just spent fifteen minutes telling you about an experience and now I tell you—and I cannot reiterate it enough— the experience is not what was important. It’s changing you on a cellular level that is important. It’s providing the hope and joy that’s important.”
    If a spiritual experience is real, she said, it will transform you, fling your worldview and priorities, your relationships and your personality, up in the air like a two-year-old hurling a deck of cards. It can make you a stranger to your friends, to your family, and to your own psyche. It was a disorientation I knew all too well. I remembered my own return to Washington after researching the Los Angeles Times story, when I, too, felt my world upended by a brief brush with something mystical. I remembered how my friends and even my family felt foreign, how I declined invitations to dinner so that I could stroll for hours at night, reveling in the unseen company of a God I had just discovered.
    “What was it like coming home from Peru?” I asked.
    “It was dreadful,” she said quietly.
    “But your life in Washington was so rich,” I protested.
    “Oh yeah, I’m a successful writer, I’m married to a successful journalist for The NewYork Times ,” she conceded.“But that was ashes in my mouth. I could not bear it. It was physically painful to sit at a dinner party and listen to the shallowness of the conversation. I was so sensitized. I could hear what was going on underneath people’s conversations. This woman is telling a story at a dinner party in a brittle, gay, happy way, and underneath it, I can hear her heart breaking! I just wanted to shake people and say, Stop it. I can’t bear it! ”
    I persisted, prompted less by journalistic curiosity than by a need for guidance, affirmation perhaps. “A lot of people would say, ‘Yeah, that was a remarkable experience, but now I’m back in my real life in Washington, D.C., with my friends and we talk politics, we talk economics, we talk journalism.’ Don’t you think it’s easier to fit back in that way?”
    “That’s true. Except that you’re forgetting one thing,” she said. “You’ve fallen in love.”
    This is the paradox of the person who is tethered to earth but has touched the sky. The memory robs and enriches you, reveals your life to be drabber and more magical than you had imagined.
    “Anyone knows, when you’re passionately in love everything is heightened,” Sophy explained.“And you can find yourself in this wonderful state, the state of being in love that so many saints talk about when they speak of being the ‘bride of God.’ We always think it’s metaphorical, but what it really means is that they’re in a perpetual state of being in love. And just the way you can’t scientifically measure being in love, although you know it’s a madness, and that surely it will end—it’s the same with a spiritual experience. It’s a madness and it will die down and be replaced by something else.”
    Eventually, perhaps, but not without exacting its price. It is an imperious love. It usurps all rivals. It did for Sophy.
    “I can remember my husband saying at some point, ‘How can I