But how is this possible? How do we know something beyond our capacity to speak about it, imagine it or even clearly feel it?

Perhaps a description of a life-changing experience from her life can be helpful here. In her autobiography, Before the Living God, she shares this incident: In her late teens, she was sitting in chapel one day. She wasn’t there for a particularly prayerful purpose, but had been consigned there as a punishment. As she sat alone she had a mystical experience, not that an angel appeared to her or that she had some special vision or some altered state of consciousness. The opposite. She had a moment of rare, simple and privileged clarity, a deep grounding in herself and in reality, where, for that moment, she was in touch with what was deepest and most true inside her and with what is deepest and most true inside of reality. And, in that, she knew, beyond the explicitness of words, imagination and feeling, something of the reality of God and something of her own truest being. The experience changed her life. She knew what she had to do and, against much of her own temperament, she became a contemplative nun — and eventually, a woman whose spiritual insight has helped mentor many of us.

C.S. Lewis, sharing his own conversion to Christianity, describes something similar, though in his case the experience was a longer, protracted one which crystallized in a moment of privileged clarity that had him, for that moment, in touch with what was deepest and most true inside of him and inside of reality itself.

Describing the moment when he first knelt down in the acceptance of Christianity, he shares that the moment was far from ecstatic. Rather, he knelt down as “the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom.” But he knelt because “I had come to realize that the harshness of God is kinder than the softness of man and God’s compulsion is our liberation.”

How does Lewis understand God’s compulsion? In much the same way as Burrows understands her mystical experience, namely, as a moment of simple clarity within which one touches and comes to realize what is deepest and truest inside of oneself and inside of reality itself and, in that clarity, knows what one has to do.

And what makes up our mystical centre? Bernard Lonergan called it the brand of the first principles — oneness, truth, goodness and beauty — inside the human soul. Henri Nouwen called it “first love,” namely, the dark memory of once having been loved and caressed by hands far gentler than any we have ever met in this world, the unconscious memory of having been with God before we were born. Some mystics call it the inchoate memory of God’s kiss as He puts our souls into our bodies.

Most of us don’t have a name for this, but we speak of something as “ringing true” or as “not ringing true” to us. But to what does something ring true or false? Do we carry some kind of “bell” inside of us? In fact we do. We can call it our conscience, our deepest centre, our moral centre, but we all know that there is a place inside of us where we know the brand of the first principles, inchoately remember God’s kiss, and know what we need to do to be true to who we are.

When we are in touch with this deep centre we are living a mystically driven life.