The Two Channels of Faith

Every year I read an additional book during Lent, often with designated readings for each day of the season. This year I selected Lent with Evelyn Underhill, edited by G.P. Mellick Belshaw. Underhill (1875-1941) was an English, Anglo-Catholic mystic and retreat leader who still provides guidance to the Christian mystical tradition through her writing.

In one passage from The School of Charity, Underhill describes the “mysterious inner light that glows at the heart of Christianity” as being fed by two different parts, or in her words “channels” of our learning about and understanding that which is Holy.

Along one channel a certain limited knowledge of God and things of God enters the mind. . . . Along the other channel, God Himself comes secretly to the heart, and wakes up that desire and that sense of need which are the cause of prayer.

In a world which tends to focus either on intellectual knowledge or on emotional feeling of/for God, she provides a much needed reminder that there is a place for both the mind and the heart. It took me many years on my faith journey to learn this simple truth of how closely they are tied together.

Underhill continues by pointing to a more challenging reality:

with the deepening of prayer, its patient cultivation there comes – perhaps slowly, perhaps suddenly – the enrichment and enlargement of belief, as we enter into a first-hand communion with the reality who is the object of our faith.

As a reluctant mystic, I have had small glimpses of “the reality who is the object of our faith,” but am far from any first-hand communion. Have you had a sense of God being with you in particular times or situations?