If you are interested in the paranormal and all things weird and wonderful I recommend a classic book on the subject — Patrick Harpur’s book Daimonic Realities. Harper is a thoughtful author who is not a Catholic. He takes the reports of strange and otherworldly experiences like UFOs, Bigfoot, fairies, monsters and ghosts seriously and tries to come up with a theory that neither dismisses them as figments of imagination nor accepts them blindly and superstitiously.

For human beings, religion has always been the meeting place of the natural and the supernatural — this world and the next. Harpur also recognizes the reality of religious experience, but ponders what kind of reality it is. How do we perceive the weird and wonderful and how is our perception of things from the twilight zone different from our perception of solid, material reality?

When it comes to religious experience, what intrigues me is how vague and ethereal all other religions are when it comes to the supernatural. They deal in myth and mystical, mysterious experiences of the supernatural, but everything remains foggy and fuzzy. Here a prophecy, there a prognostication. Here an apparition there a visit from the dead. Here a paranormal event, there a demonic infestation. Here a ghostly appearance, there a spooky visitation, a coincidence, a curious connection or an out-of-body experience.

Most religions attempt the commerce between this world and the next through various rituals, disciplines and devotions. The physical world must be ignored and dismissed through extreme meditation techniques or the physical is negated through harsh asceticism. Pagans attempt to communicate with “the other side” through magic and superstitious rituals invoking their gods and goddesses.

Catholicism, on the other hand, is concrete, solid and substantial, but supernatural and spiritual at the same time. “Here,” as St. John Henry Newman said, “is real religion.” Here is a religion that holds in one person like, let us say, St. Teresa of Calcutta, the heights of mystical prayer and the depths of washing the sores of lepers in the gutter. Here is the universal transcendence of Communion with angels and saints on the one hand, and the ordinary rough and tumble of getting on with your family, your friends and the ‘not yet saints’ who you have to deal with every day. Here is the Divine Son of God, the second person of the holy and most glorious Trinity who is also the Son of Mary, the burning Babe of Bethlehem. Here is the logos, the energy and power by who all things were made and by whom all things consist who is also present in the most humble form in this bread and this wine on this altar in this church right here and right now at the hands of this priest who is most unworthy.

What sort of paradoxical and paradisiacal religion is this? Who would every have dreamed it up? What a mass of seeming contradictions which, when put altogether validate each other and confirm the truth of each and every element which on their own could not stand, but together with the others stand as a monolithic and unpredictable truth down the ages. Next to this concrete and solid religion all else seems like fairyland. It seems like a tiptoe through make believe. Next to this concrete and solid, yet universal and transcendent religion the Protestant sects pale into shallow, emotionalism and inconsequential ephemera. Next to this concrete and substantial, yet universal and transcendent religion the New Age Gnostic sects and the airy fairy religions of the East seem abstract, vague and insubstantial.

This is why, the longer I am a Catholic the more I distrust any form of spirituality which is “so heavenly minded that it is no earthly good.” God’s Son took on the form of a slave — and immersed himself into this physical world thereby redeeming the mundane and quotidian. Ever after, spiritualities that are too mystical and mysterious will not have a place in Christianity.

Instead, true Christianity is rooted in reality. 

There is something solid here. Through the sacraments we have connecting points with the vast ocean of the spiritual realm. Through the ordinary rites of the church we have bridges into the unknown, and little portals to the other world. Here the ladder of Jacob stretches from earth to heaven. Here angels ascend and descend. Jacob called that place “Bethel — the doorstep — the threshold of heaven” and to mark that mystical experience he erected a rock. A solid rock therefore marks the link with heaven, and that same reality is marked at Bethlehem — an ordinary town in the backwaters of the Roman Empire — but a town whose name indicates another ordinary, solid thing: bread. For the word Bethlehem means House of Bread.