Dear InLight - thank you for directing me to this thread. I tried for days to get the link to work, and finally, tonight, it did! (No explanation – God’s sense of humor? Devil trying to get me to give up on finding it?)
What a wonderful thread; I’ve been reading the posts and don’t even know where to begin, except to thank everyone who has contributed so far. (Especially those kindred lovers of Hinds Feet on High Places

. Have you also read the sequel - Mountains of Spices?)
I’m not an expert in much of anything, but I’ve always thought that what we Catholics call Baptism in the Spirit is akin to what our Protestant brethren would call accepting Jesus as personal Lord and Savior. I believe the experience may be the same, and we just use different terminology. For me, after going through a Life in the Spirit Seminar, I didn’t have any major experience on the night of the Baptism in the Spirit (other than that there was major blizzard

, the bus wasn’t running, and after not even seeing a car pass for nearly an hour, a man – angel ? – pulled up, offered me a ride which I accepted, and I got to my destination!) but I had already had a profound conversion experience a number of years before.
I was involved in prayer meetings for a few years, but they started to attract me less and less. I had a longing for greater depth, but did not feel that the Charismatic Renewal was where I was going to find it. Don’t get me wrong – despite the very, very many good and holy people I encountered, I felt that I met more who were having a “first-timer” type of experience and who were stuck there.
Sure it’s great to pray and praise and sing the Lord’s praises, but I had a greater need to just sit down with the One I love. (I guess it must be like when a married couple - I’m single - host a dinner or party. It’s enjoyable. They are with friends. They love their friends. But there’s a time for the friends and guests to go home so the couple can have alone time together.)
Not ever being one to love “labels”, I guess I never really gave it much thought as to levels of prayer that I may have been moving through. I know that at one point, many years ago, I tried reading John of the Cross, but there was absolutely no way I was near ready for it then.
Over the years, I have had those “mountain top” experiences that I rarely share with anyone other than my SD… prayer moments so intimate between my Divine Spouse and me that it’s like telling a doctor the most intimate of things.
A few years ago, my health took a nosedive, which was one of the things which lead to a Dark Night. I don’t know how Mother Teresa held on as long as she did. Mine was about two years, although it had started brewing for quite a while before that. In this past 14 months that I’ve had to spend in a nursing home interspersed with 7 hospitalizations, I hit spiritual rock bottom. All I can say is - if not being able to sense God’s presence in any way… to feel abandoned and rejected by God… is how those in hell feel, then any pain of fire would be a blessing from God to distract from the pain of feeling God’s absence.
During my last hospitalization which began in mid-September and lasted for 7 weeks, He who knows the heart so well, swooped down and came to my rescue. Without going into details, He came to me in a dream with a message I knew was from Him and would be meaningless to anyone else. I awoke immediately and was so changed that from that moment on, nurses would come into my room, look at me as though startled, and ask me what had happened… I looked changed… I wasn’t the same patient they had admitted three weeks earlier… I was “glowing”… etc.
When I returned to the nursing home, the nurses here have said the same thing.
All I have been able to tell them is the absolute truth: Any change they see is only God’s grace.
If all this were not enough, it was as though spiritual “arteries” long clogged were opened again, and since mid-October our good and gracious God has allowed me to write 19 new songs and about 15 new poems. (I write.)
Spiritually, I have been doing a lot of reading… have started to make a second attempt at John of the Cross… am finding “buried treasure” in reading the Letters of my spiritual father St. Paul of the Cross… reading St. Faustina’s Diary, etc. Although I think I can see spiritual growth in me, as I said before, I’ve never liked to label anything, so I can’t identify what “level” I’m at. I seem to be having the new experience of somehow being aware of being in God’s presence without feeling anything.
!!! POST TOO LONG – WILL CONTINUE IN NEXT POST !!! 