On January 13, 1522, the German reformer Martin Luther wrote a letter to his friend and fellow Wittenberg reformer Philip Melanchthon about how to deal with the so-called “Zwickau prophets,” men who had come into Wittenberg proclaiming themselves to be the recipients of heavenly visions. In the letter, Luther, following 1 John 4:1, instructs Melanchthon to test the spirits. His advice for such a test is as follows:

In order to explore their individual spirit, too, you should inquire whether they have experienced spiritual distress and the divine birth, death, and hell. If you should hear that all are pleasant, quiet, devout (as they say), and spiritual, then don’t approve of them, even if they should say that they were caught up to the third heaven. The sign of the Son of Man is then missing, which is the only touchstone of Christians and a certain differentiator between the spirits.… Therefore, examine and do not even listen if they speak of the glorified Jesus, unless you have first heard of the crucified Jesus.

What this means is that, according to Luther, a spiritual life that is all brightness and light, joy and peace is not really Christian at all. Those who claim spiritual authority wholly on the grounds of such blissful experiences must be disregarded. Apparent spiritual health turns out to be its opposite, because the criterion of a genuinely Christian spirituality is the experience of spiritual suffering. This is what it means to be marked with the sign of the Son of Man, that is, the cross.

I wish that someone had shared this message with me as an adolescent. But instead, without ever being explicitly taught it at home or in my church, I absorbed another vision of the Christian spiritual life, one common in conservative American Protestant circles. In it, the strength of one’s spiritual experiences is a key measure of one’s Christian maturity – and these experiences are normatively positive ones of comfort, joy, and peace in the divine presence. In a blending of pietism with American optimism and informality, Christianity is understood to result in feelings of pleasant spiritual nearness; prayer is understood as predominantly a matter of casual conversation with God. When experiences of spiritual suffering or hardship are narrated, it is typically in the “before” part of a before-and-after story: safely relegated to before conversion or to repentance from a besetting sin. The experience of divine absence is legible only as a failure.

Whatever advantages this understanding of the Christian life may have, it posed one huge problem for me: I didn’t seem to have these ­experiences, at least not with any regularity. They were supposed to be the sine qua non of true Christianity, but for me they were unattainable. I read my Bible, I prayed, I went to church, but I just didn’t understand what people meant when they talked about hearing God speak to them in prayer or about feeling God’s presence. I remember receiving communion for the first time after my confirmation as a teenager and looking out of the corner of my eye at the person next to me as he silently wept, overcome by the experience of eating Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament for the first time. While I certainly believed I was receiving Christ’s body and blood, I – to my deep frustration – felt nothing like that at all. The ­experience was just that of chewing a tasteless wafer and drinking some not-very-good wine. Experiences (or, rather, the lack of experiences) like this made me worry that there was something very wrong with me, even when reassured otherwise by parents or pastors.

It is hard to overstate what a relief it was for me to discover that this is just one approach, and a minority one at that, to what Christian spiritual health looks like. In fact, most of the Christian tradition rejects this sort of spiritual prosperity gospel, in which the proliferation of positive spiritual experiences is the mark of Christian commitment, in favor of an approach to the meaning of spiritual health that is ­simultaneously more biblical and more realistic. My reading in the history of Christian theology helped me to come to a broader understanding both of the proper place of religious affections or experiences in Christian life and of what sorts of experiences “count” as religious.

I came to see that it was a mistake to place private religious experiences of an unusual, seemingly immediate, highly emotional kind at the heart of Christianity, because God does not only use such experiences to draw us to himself. In fact, he does not promise us (while in this life) such experiences at all. Rather, God has chosen to use outwardly quotidian and undramatic means as instruments to bring us into relationship with him, above all the water, bread, and wine of the sacraments and the text of scripture. As the 1530 Augsburg Confession puts it, “through the Word and the sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Spirit is given, who effects faith where and when it pleases God.” He promises to be present to us by these physical elements, the gathered Christian community, and the poor, whether we apprehend his presence there or not.

The criterion of a genuinely Christian spirituality is the experience of spiritual suffering. This is what it means to be marked with the sign of the Son of Man, that is, the cross.

In this use of physical means and ordinary experiences to convey divine presence, we see God’s mercy as God accommodates himself to the sorts of creatures that we are – physical, earthy, easily distracted, unapt for constant spiritual raptures. John Calvin writes particularly movingly about this. He talks about God’s use of anthropomorphic language for himself in scripture as a sort of divine baby-talk adapted to our capacities: “as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us.” Similarly, about the sacraments, he writes that we are fleshly, and so “in the sacraments the merciful Lord accommodates himself to our senses, so that he leads us to himself even by carnal elements and makes us contemplate what is of the spirit even in the flesh.”

This understanding shifts the focus away from our own experiential capacity (or lack thereof) to God’s promise. What is important is not dramatic spiritual experience but trust that our faithful God accomplishes what he promises through the humble means he graciously chooses. What a difference such an understanding would make in thinking through, for example, my underwhelming first experience at communion. The point is not that God never grants particular awareness of his presence in receiving the Lord’s Supper. I have since had a few such experiences, and I treasure them. But it is to say that neither the reality of God’s offering of himself in the sacrament nor the faithful reception depend on a numinous “experience” of God. The subjective experience of God’s presence is less important than God’s promise that he is there. This, for me, is good news indeed.

Not only did I come to understand that ­subjective religious experience was not the be all and end all of the Christian life, but I also came to expand my understanding of what counts as Christian religious experience. For one, I think I had internalized an idea, which owes less to scripture than to William James, that true religious experience is non- or even anti-rational, that the intellect is not involved at all. Now, to be sure, there is a long debate in Christian theology, worked out in particular detail in the Middle Ages, about the respective roles of knowledge and love in the soul’s apprehension of God, and there are some Christian texts (say, The Cloud of Unknowing) which argue strongly that intellect must eventually be left behind in the soul’s ascent to God. But even texts in the affective tradition generally allow some place for intellect in the Christian’s relation to God; and there are numerous examples of texts in which people think themselves to God, including Augustine of Hippo’s On the Trinity, in which an investigation of the image of the triune God in the human soul becomes the means of ascending to the vision of God.

What’s more, I learned that religious experiences also don’t need to be positive. Here the Christian mystical tradition has been a great help to me, in its insistence that moments of despair, divine absence, and spiritual suffering are just as much a part of the spiritual life as moments of joy. There is John of the Cross and the dark night of the soul, Ignatius of Loyola and his indefatigably practical advice about how to act in times of desolation (among other things, he counsels against making significant changes or decisions in such times), Julian of Norwich and her prayer to experience Christ’s torment on the cross, Hadewijch’s daring articulation of divine absence as, paradoxically, the highest form of divine presence.

In fact, many of these authors not only see spiritual suffering as an unsurprising part of the spiritual life but as definitive of truly Christian spirituality. This view is already reflected in the scriptures. Jesus himself experiences agony as well as joy, and tells us that the Christian life is one of bearing the cross. Paul, with all his talk of mystical rapture, also talks about the thorn in his flesh and suffering as means of conforming himself to Christ. Building on this biblical background, the medieval author Johannes Tauler warns us that we must never seek to remain in moments of comfort and consolation; we should give thanks for them but not make them the goal of our spiritual lives. The anonymous author of the Theologia Germanica makes one’s attitude toward suffering the distinction between a true and a false Christian spirituality: false teachers posit an escape from all suffering in this life, whereas true Christianity embraces the total self-abandonment of the cross as the only way to God, path of suffering that it is. Thus experiences of abandonment or spiritual suffering are signs of a genuinely Christian religious experience, just as the cross is the necessary sign of the Christian life as a whole.

At this point, I have argued that dramatic, obviously supernatural ­spiritual experiences are less important in the Christian life than trust in the promises of God’s efficacious presence and that an account of Christian spirituality as all sweetness and light misses the cross-shaped pattern of Christian living. With this said, I am compelled to share an experience that really took me by surprise. A few years ago, I began experiencing the sort of ecstatic prayer that Pentecostals call praying in tongues. It happened like this: I was up all night tossing and turning in my bed, tormented by struggles in ministry and a sense of divine absence. I woke up my wife sleeping next to me and asked her to pray for me. She laid her hands on me, somewhat groggily prayed, and then quickly fell back asleep; to this day she does not remember what she prayed. But suddenly, nonsense syllables that were simultaneously mine and not mine, simultaneously willed and not, started filling my mind. I got out of bed and knelt on the floor in our living room before a cross and prayed like this for an hour, after which I was quieted in mind and able to sleep.

I bring this up not to narrate a simple before-and-after story of conversion or transformation (“once I was so spiritually benighted that I didn’t feel anything when I took communion, but now I pray in the Spirit!”). My spiritual life remains one of very occasional scintillating moments of divine luminousness and similarly rare feelings of despondency. Most of the time, it is about trusting that God truly is present in his power in the bread and the wine, the words of scripture read and preached, the cycle of daily and weekly worship, and my feeble attempts to lift my mind to him in prayer, even when I have no sense of his presence distinct from ordinary sensation or thought.

The subjective experience of God’s presence is less important than God’s promise that he is there. This, for me, is good news indeed.

But I wanted to share this story all the same, because the experience has helped me to avoid another danger in thinking about Christian spiritual experience. Avoiding a reliance on dramatic spiritual experience should not cause us to write it off where it occurs. The churches of the magisterial Reformation can be particularly prone to this posture – as more broadly can any church of upper-middle-class, well-educated Western types anxious to seem reasonable to a secular world. Similarly, the recognition that sorrow, absence, and despondency are necessary parts of the distinctly Christian spiritual life can become an excuse to baptize lukewarmness and doubt, as if these were the same thing as the mystical dark night of the soul, and so fail to believe that joyous experiences of divine nearness are possible. On this account, the only way to really be spiritually mature or spiritually healthy is to be perpetually miserable. Once again a sense of intellectual condescension toward more emotional forms of Christianity is often at play.

But I don’t think that scripture or the Christian tradition will let us dismiss dramatic and wonderful spiritual experiences so easily, just as they won’t let us dismiss suffering. The same Paul who discussed the thorn in his flesh also talks about being rapt up to the third heaven, in a passage beloved of medieval mystics, and has a lot to say about tongues and prophecy and other things that make us good moderns shift in our seats. The scriptures as a whole are full of divinely sent dreams, of direct divine speech, of miraculous healings and resurrections. As ­Pentecostals love to remind us, God’s promise to pour out his Spirit abundantly on his people, that they may see visions and dream dreams, came true at Pentecost.

The same Paul who discussed the thorn in his flesh also talks about being rapt up to the third heaven, in a passage beloved of medieval mystics.

And indeed the history of the church makes it clear that such miraculous happenings did not cease at the end of the apostolic age. The Christian mystical tradition in particular is full of stories of souls’ dramatic, earthshattering encounters with God. This is what the Christian tradition means by contemplation. Thus, for example, Bernard of Clairvaux talks about loving God with such a love “that the mind, drunk with divine love and forgetting itself, making itself like a broken vessel, throws itself wholly on God and, clinging to God, becomes one with him in spirit.” He adds, “I should call him blessed and holy to whom it is given to experience even for a single instant something which is rare indeed in this life.” Nor should we carefully separate the mystics into mystics of joy and of suffering – many of the same thinkers who write movingly about the experience of spiritual suffering as a marker of genuine Christian spirituality also describe ecstatic experiences of joy.

What, then, do “spiritual experiences” of a dramatic and obviously supernatural kind have to do with spiritual health? On the one hand, God frees us from basing our faith or self-confidence as Christians upon them. God turns us away from looking within ourselves, from anxiously scrutinizing our experiences of God, to simply receive with trust the external means that he has appointed to communicate himself to us. One does not need to feel spiritual raptures, or have a particular dramatic experience of being born again, to be a genuine Christian. Yet the redemption that God works involves what an older Christian tradition called the spiritual senses, the way that by the Spirit’s power we come to intimately know God in a way analogous to the immediacy of sensation. Salvation involves directing all parts of us, affections very much included, to find fulfillment in God. This means we cannot but be attentive to spiritual experience. But what sort of spiritual experience?

Here on earth, the cross is the necessary accompaniment of Christian living and the prosperity spirituality that denies the centrality of spiritual suffering must be rejected. But all the same, we must always remember that we await an eternity of the ecstatic, joyous contemplation of God – and that God in his mercy sometimes gives foretastes of that joy to us in the time of our pilgrimage. May we give thanks for those moments if we have them, and trust to God’s providence if we do not, as we await the fulfillment of all God’s promises in the life of the world to come.