c. 2000 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In Minnesota, more than 30 percent of 2,000 Christians surveyed by a Lutheran minister and a sociologist reported they’d had dramatic visions, heard heavenly voices or experienced prophetic dreams.

In California, researchers at the University of California in San Diego found compelling evidence that the human “brain may be hardwired to hear the voice of heaven.”

And in Illinois, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that 42 percent of Americans reported contact with deceased loved ones, while 67 percent claimed to have had moments of extrasensory perception.

Add those statistics to the growing pile of evidence collected by Georgia Catholic Eddie Ensley and you may share his conclusion: humanity has lost touch with a significant dimension in its natural response to the sacred.

In his new book, “Visions: The Soul’s Path to the Sacred” (Loyola Press, $17.95), Ensley explores how reclaiming the visionary dimension of spirituality may transform a person and reconnect humanity to its innate yearning for God.

“We are fashioned to see God,” he said. “We have a deep desire for this mystery and an ability to be open to it and receive it.”

Ensley, of Native American descent, has known the healing touch of visions since childhood. His grandfather and father taught him to understand and accept such encounters as natural outgrowths of faith and spirituality.

“Our ancestors _ Christian, Jewish and Native American _ understood the subtle interrelationships of flesh and spirit more accurately than we do,” he said. “When they received visions, they knew what to do with them.”

In Ensley’s parlance, vision falls in the same class with other “transcendant words” such as God or love.

“We cannot give it (vision) a specific definition,” he said. “It’s something more. We always have to sing a song, write poetry. We have to give the word pictures. All our language is inadequate.”

But in the early church the word `vision’ was used for almost any encounter with God, he said. Today “vision” is used much more rarely to describe unusual spiritual experience. In a religious sense, a vision most often is intepreted as something sent by God “like a direct phone line” or a “video feed.”

Ensley uses the word much more broadly.

“God is so much more than we can think of, or conceive of,” he said. “When we bump into God’s presence deep inside of us, we bump into the mystery deep inside of us, which is ultimately the mystery that is God.”

Since childhood, Ensley has been severely learning disabled, coping with problems resulting from an injury to the right hemisphere of his brain. Growing up in Columbus, Ga., he found simple things, including playing sports, dressing himself and organizing items, very difficult. He also suffered short-term memory problems.

His feelings of inadequacy _ coupled with his grandfather’s example of a quiet reverence for God, the Earth, animals and other people _ drew Ensley to search deeply as a child for life’s true meaning. “Pop, as I called him, was Baptist and Native American. He could neither read nor write, but he was the wisest man I’ve ever known,” Ensley said.

“Pop’s mother, according to family tradition, was a full-blooded Cherokee. She was a traditional healer. She had a great influence on my father and on me. Through my grandfather and my great-grandmother, I came in touch with people who still maintained a sense of the mystery that is God, that envelops the whole world. My grandfather was very comfortable with silence. We would call that contemplative prayer.”

His grandfather developed cancer when Ensley was 9 years old and died when he was 13. Before his death, he moved to Columbus.

“I remember he would go into the woods and study the rocks. I asked him one time what he was doing and he said, `I’m looking at the world, the trees and the rocks. I said, `Why are you doing that?’ He said, `If you look at it long enough, it shimmers and you see the glory.”’

The lessons served Ensley well. He graduated high school and was studying at Belhaven College, a Presbyterian school in Jackson, Miss., when he discovered another spiritual mentor, a young priest named Bernard Law. Now cardinal of the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, Law then was editor of the Mississippi Catholic.

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On route to Belhaven, Ensley paused to pray at a Roman Catholic Church in Selma, Ala. As he prayed, he felt a deep sense of spiritual peace and the face of a priest flashed through his mind. Upon moving to Jackson, he met Law who helped him gain perspective on his experiences. Ensley later became a Catholic and earned a master’s degree in pastoral ministry from Loyola University in New Orleans.

He wrote an earlier scholarly book on church history, but continued to study the famous “Desert Fathers” of the early church and other saints. While some are drawn to early church visionaries, Ensley was most interested in deeply spiritual people who lived relatively normal lives.

His book mines their spirituality, Christian tradition, psychology and medical science to present a balanced treatment of visionary experience. His research suggests visions were an accepted reality of life for thousands of years.

“I am honored that Eddie Ensley considers me his mentor,” Law said in a promotional quote on the book’s jacket, “but I can hardly take any credit for the powerful witness to God’s work that Eddie offers in this capitvating book.”

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Now 54, Ensley continues his research on Christian, Jewish and Native American spiritual traditions. He is a popular speaker, and he leads retreats in how spiritual practice may be accessible to average people. Now studying for the Catholic Church’s permanent diaconate, he expects to be ordained next June.

Because sociological, psychological and religious research indicates visions are much more common than modern scholars once thought, the implications are that they should be treated differently by both the church and society, Ensley says.

“People who have mystical experiences are not crazy. Some research suggests they tend to be (mentally) healthier,” he said.

“We need to find a place where people can talk about these experiences. People tend to either `hotline’ these experiences or supernaturalize them,” he said, “meaning they either hide them or they tend to think they have a hotline to God. Or then tend to think something is utterly supernatural. But genuine visions are always part of God and part of us.”

Ensley welcomes people to share their experiences with him. His email address is: yahula(at)worldnet.att.net

KRE END HOLMES

(Cecile S. Holmes, a longtime religion writer, teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina. Her email address is: cecile.holmes(at)usc.jour.sc.edu)