📝 Want to play pen pals?

I'm launching a kooky creative project based on the epistolary relationship between Sister María de Jesús de Ágreda and the king of Spain, Felipe IV.

I’ve fallen down a mystical rabbit hole, and I can’t get out.

It all starts when I meet Julian of Norwich, and her divine revelations.

The writer in me is flabbergasted by her literary achievements in plague-era East Anglia. It’s a profound demonstration of the relationship between sight and insight - and the depths that can be mined from a single bolt of inspiration, if one does the work.

She has a revelation - or series of them - on what she thinks is her deathbed. She’s thirty. The visions prove relatively fleeting - they may last a few minutes, at most a few days. She spends the next 50 years of her life slowly and deliberately unpacking them through meditation and reflective writing.

Julian challenges me. I have bolts of inspiration every day. I spend very little time cultivating them. I could and should go deeper. Waiting for a more worthy or fully formed one is an act of procrastination and self deception.

I want to know more about Julian, and that leads me to discover The Christian Mysticism Podcast - and its co-host

Carlos M. N. Eire - the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University.

He is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe.

Eire, in conversation with Alberto de la Cruz, introduces me to some frankly 😮 people. Spiritual athletes. Most are active, and regularly witnessed in their spiritual athleticism. They do their thing well after Reformation and Age of Reason critics deny and dispute the possibility of doing the things these holy folk are regularly and widely witnessed doing.

I can never hope to experience most of the things they experience.

I’m unlikely to experience the levitations of St. Joseph of Cupertino

I’m unlikely to experience the stigmata of St Francis of Assisi

I’m quite pleased that I’m unlikely to experience the transverberation of St Teresa of Avila (though she feels it to be a grace)

“I saw an angel beside me toward the left side, in bodily form. He was not very large, but small, very beautiful, his face so blazing with light that he seemed to be one of the very highest angels, who appear all on fire. They must be those they call Cherubim…I saw in his hands a long dart of gold, and at the end of the iron there seemed to me to be a little fire. This I thought he thrust through my heart several times, and that it reached my very entrails. As he withdrew it, I thought it brought them with it, and left me all burning with a great love of God. So great was the pain, that it made me give those moans; and so utter the sweetness that this sharpest of pains gave me, that there was no wanting it to stop, nor is there any contenting of the soul with less than God”

I am unlikely to experience the physical bilocations of Sister Maria de Jesus

She never bodily left Ágreda, Spain, but successfully converted Native Americans in a story so wow that it defies summation and truly rewards a google.

But I can experience the way she and King Felipe IV of Spain write letters to each other.

She is his advisor and confidante. Their surviving correspondence runs to hundreds of letters over 22 years.

He has a preferred style of correspondence. You can kind of see it in the image 👆. He writes on the left hand side of the page, she replies on the right.

Simple, but delightful. And kooky. What a clear record of thoughts and counter thoughts. What an interesting record of a relationship.

That, I can experience. And so can you. In fact, I will experience it WITH YOU if you like.

Want to play with me? I have an idea for a project. I’ll likely write as a fictional character - and you can too. Or you can just be yourself. Either way, I’ll send you a letter to your mailbox, and you can reply to mine. My thoughts will run down the left hand side. Yours can run down the right. That’s all I know for now.

If you want to play, just send an address and your preferred nom-de-plume to arthurmeek@substack.com

Let’s see what happens.