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Living in the Presence

C. Gourgey, Ph.D.

[Introductory Note: In our efforts to understand and practice the spiritual life, no question is more important than what is faith and how we acquire it. Faith is not simply a matter of belief; belief alone does not transform. In my view, faith is the conscious connection to eternal life. When Jesus said one must be “born from above” (John 3:3), he was not talking about assenting to a religious doctrine. He was talking about transformation. And what transforms us is not belief; it is contact with the eternal. How can we prepare for this contact? There are many ways, as recounted in my article “Practicing the Presence” and as we also explore in this one. This article complements the previous one but does not depend on it and can be read separately. Here we revisit some questions previously raised and take a closer look.]

Spiritual transformation

In my previous article (“Practicing the Presence”) I mentioned my hospice patient Muriel, who found God sitting next to her right in her wheelchair. Her friendship with God, knowing God as a living presence, gave her a sense of well-being that even made the gross discomforts of terminal cancer possible to tolerate. Spending time with Muriel taught me a lot about faith. How wonderful it is to have that kind of faith, especially under such adverse conditions, to know God as a living presence telling you that you are not alone. How does one acquire that kind of faith?

There is no simple answer. For some, it may come from a spiritually transformative experience. This is rare but it happens. For others the road may be longer but no less secure. The Bible provides a record of one who, beginning without faith, was suddenly transformed. His story is instructive. His name was Paul.

Paul describes the faith he found:

We have the mind of Christ. (1 Corinthians 2:16)

If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Corinthians 5:17)

It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. (Galatians 2:20)

And this from a disciple of Paul’s, who learned from him very well:

Clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:24)

I’d like now to revisit Paul’s spiritual transformation in greater detail, looking at it more closely to see what it might tell us about our own lives.

Paul knew Christ as a presence that was constantly with him. He speaks about being “in Christ,” so involved with Christ that it changed him completely, making him a “new creation.” He is a “new self,” different from the old self he used to be.

And indeed, he does seem to have been two people, one before and one after his transformation to a follower of Jesus.

Here is the Paul “before”:

Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. (Acts 9:1-2)

Now granted, this account may not be historically accurate, since the high priest had no jurisdiction in Damascus. But whether or not it actually happened this way, we see Paul as Saul, probably correctly, driven by anger and not showing much love. Then came the Damascus Road. After that, Paul wrote a beautiful hymn to love and devoted his efforts to creating caring communities whose members commit themselves to the common good. If Paul 2.0 seems like a different person, it’s because, in fact, he was.

Above everything else, Paul acquired a faith he never had before. It enabled him to act in ways he never did before, to discover in himself deep capacities for leadership and theological thought. He attributed this not to his own efforts, but to something beyond himself now animating him. “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” He called it the “mind of Christ” and the “new creation.” He knew it was not coming just from himself, but from a spiritual presence that infused him. And even more daringly, he proclaimed this spiritual presence available to everyone: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5). Think of it: the divine mind and Spirit, which Jesus embodied to the greatest degree and which made him unique, can in some modest measure enter our consciousness too, and can direct the course of our lives.

Paul’s most dramatic depiction of this change occurs in his Letter to the Romans, chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 gives us a poignant description of the human condition. He observes that just knowing God’s will does not give us the power to fulfill it, that we are held back by our human tendencies at every turn:

For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Romans 7:14-18)

We should not understand this as Paul talking personally about himself, but rather describing the human predicament in general. This dilemma affects all of us. We all fall short of consistent compliance with the will of God. (This is why the Day of Atonement occurs every year: because we all will sin inevitably.) The chapter ends with this anguished cry:

Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Romans 7:24)

But just a couple of verses later we get this:

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. (Romans 8:1-2)

Bridging the gap

How did we get from there to here, in what seems hardly an instant? From self-condemnation to no condemnation? From sin to Spirit? And so suddenly? For a long time I found this the greatest puzzle in Romans: how to fill the gap between chapters 7 and 8.

If we look closely, we can find some clues:

For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. (Romans 8:2)

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirita is life and peace. (Romans 8:5-6)

For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law - indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. (Romans 8:7-9)

Something happens in one’s mind, in one’s consciousness, that creates a change. Paul calls it being “in Christ.” It is an awareness of something one previously did not know: “the mind that was in Christ Jesus.” We allow this, the mind of Christ, the Spirit of God, to dwell in us. And when it does, we are changed. The change comes about from living in the spiritual presence. That is what Paul means by being “in Christ.” It is the conscious awareness of God’s presence as companion and guide. There is nothing more valuable. This is what Paul had after the Damascus road that he did not have before.

But how did Paul find this so quickly? So suddenly that he could jump directly from Romans 7 to Romans 8 with hardly any transition? And what does this mean for us?

Scholars have been trying to figure this out for ages. What exactly happened to Paul, to change him so completely and efficiently? Some sudden and permanent changes in personality are known occasionally to result from near-death experiences, and some commentators speculate that Paul had one of those. Specifically, they believe it resulted from his survival of the stoning he received in Lystra. According to Acts 14, it nearly killed him. But he survived, and so, these commentators say, it could have radically transformed his personality and deepened his spirituality.

I think these commentators are mistaken. Paul’s transformation began long before Lystra, at his encounter with Jesus on the Damascus Road. That event, not Lystra, is what turned him completely around. The Lystra stoning occurred at the very least twelve years later, and too close to the writing of Second Corinthians to fit its timeline (see 2 Corinthians 12:2). Paul also never mentions the Lystra stoning as anything that occasioned a positive or permanent change in him. But he does speak this way about his contact with Christ. Something very similar to a near-death experience probably happened to Paul sometime between that encounter and his writing of 2 Corinthians, something that did have the power to cause such a radical change. It is called a shared-death experience.

The way of sudden transformation

A shared-death experience is very similar to a near-death experience, except that the occasion is not one’s own coming close to death, but the death of another person to whom one has had a connection. Otherwise the two may be difficult to distinguish. I consulted artificial intelligence about the hallmarks of a shared-death experience. This is what it gave me:

Hallmarks of a shared death experience include experiencing a sense of peace and connection with the dying person, witnessing phenomena such as light or spiritual beings, a feeling of leaving one’s own body, a sense of purpose or healing, and the transmission of information from the dying person or a spiritual entity. These experiences, sometimes called shared crossings, involve a healthy individual sensing or participating in the dying person’s transition to another realm, often providing comfort and insight into the continuation of consciousness after death. (Google AI Overview)

This summary mentions five possible criteria of a shared-death experience. Let’s see how Paul does on each:

1. Experiencing a sense of peace and connection with the dying person. “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1).

2. Witnessing phenomena such as light or spiritual beings. “Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’” (Acts 9:3-4).

3. A feeling of leaving one’s own body. “I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven - whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows” (2 Corinthians 12:2).

4. A sense of purpose or healing. “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).

5. The transmission of information from the dying person or a spiritual entity. “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you” (1 Corinthians 11:23).

There you have it. All five characteristics of a shared-death experience mentioned by AI and realized in Paul. And what Paul got from that experience was spiritual presence, faith, and direct contact with eternal life.

Paul became so impassioned by these positive changes that he wanted everyone to possess them. He faced a challenge: how to give the fruits of this experience to others who had not gone through what he did. And we may ask a similar question: Can we too have God as a constant presence in our lives?

The answer is a definite yes. Paul actually gives us a blueprint. How exactly do we come to be “in Christ,” to know the spiritual presence as a living guide? Let’s go back to Romans. It begins with Romans 6.

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? (Romans 6:3)

What a strange thing to say! But if we see Paul as having experienced faith by way of Christ’s death it begins to make sense. Through his death Jesus was taken into eternal life, and those who had a close connection to him were susceptible to being affected by it. Ironically, Paul was deeply involved with Jesus. Jesus’s existence must have consumed Paul, especially if he really did reach the point of seeking authority to persecute followers of the Way (as they were then called) as far as Damascus. Paul, now aware of this, invites others to join him in his involvement with Christ’s death, as their point of entry to knowing the spiritual presence that changed his life.

The meaning of baptism

Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6:4)

Here Paul expresses the hope that Christ’s death might transform others as it transformed him. To that end, the moment of baptism is highly significant. In baptism we receive the spiritual presence, the divine presence most clearly visible in Jesus himself, but partially manifest in us as created in the image of God. Baptism is our surrender to this presence, allowing it to flow into us and through us, allowing ourselves to be changed by it. It can ba a ground-shaking moment, lifting us into the presence of eternal life. It requires preparation, and further nurturing afterward, to yield its full benefit. But when most successful we will feel changed, no longer quite the same person we were before.

If we understand baptism in this way, we may want to reevaluate the practice of infant baptism, a questionable holdover from Augustinian theology. An infant cannot remember its baptism and so lacks consciousness of the benefits enumerated above. But even if one was baptized in infancy one can still have access to these benefits, by contemplating the meaning of one’s baptism through prayer and recapturing the power of the moment. Some denominations even try to approximate this through the rite of confirmation.

Note here that Paul talks about the “newness of life,” and elsewhere of being “a new creation.” The conscious awareness of our connection to eternal life can give us this sense of newness, that a life under guidance of the Spirit has begun, and that temporal existence has been transformed by the awareness of its place within eternal life. In this way Paul hopes to show others the spiritual presence he found on the Damascus road.

This is what Paul’s ministry stood for: The spiritual presence, or Christ Presence (the same eternal presence with which Christ was infused, the “mind that was in Christ Jesus”) is not reserved for the dramatic and is not the province of just a few. It is offered to all - especially those who feel unworthy, untouched, or spiritually numb. The path is not through spectacle, but through surrender. “And we shall be changed”: not through grand visions or lightning bolts, but by approaching the spiritual presence with reverence and allowing it to do its work within us.

Putting it into practice

Later on Paul gives us practical advice:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God - what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2)

When you receive the spiritual presence, you are no longer a creature only of this world. You belong to eternal life. And you will be guided accordingly. You may not always feel you are in the light of that presence, but prayer can help you return to it. The deepest function of prayer is not to ask God for things, but to bring ourselves into the awareness of eternal life. Then we know we are not alone. There is a presence, call it the Holy Spirit, that accompanies us.

Paul goes on to describe life in a loving and caring community, with our calling to be grateful for our individual gifts and use them for the common good. One can even hear the voice of Jesus behind many of Paul’s words (“Bless those who persecute you,” “Do not repay anyone evil for evil”). Here we have Paul at his best, guided by the Spirit to create a community based on eternal values.

And here is one very pertinent instruction:

Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. (Romans 13:14)

This is not necessarily a call to asceticism. Paul uses the term “flesh” in different senses, usually not meant literally. “Flesh” in Paul refers to our human desires, our natural tendencies to be ego-centered and selfish. This is balanced by the spiritual presence, received in baptism and nurtured in prayer.

And now Paul’s instructions on forming caring communities point us toward a different way of acquiring faith.

A less sudden, more subtle way

We have a choice: our experience of the spiritual presence depends on where we set our attention, and that is within our power: “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6). We experience the spiritual presence, or Holy Spirit breaking into our lives, in many ways. For example:

And also in quiet ways:

(For other examples listen to John Denver’s “Singing Skies and Dancing Waters.”)

Not everyone can have a near- or shared-death experience as happened to Paul. Baptism also does not play the same role today as it did in Paul’s time and in his community. Still, we can have that sense of companionship with the divine that Paul knew and wanted so much to share. Paul may have needed Jesus to nearly hit him on the head in order to wake him up. We may not need to go that far: through an ongoing spiritual practice we can get there too. The Christ Presence is not reserved for the dramatic. It is offered to all - especially those who feel unworthy, untouched, or spiritually numb. Paul’s letters reveal a rhythm of transformation that does not depend on miraculous visions, but on steadfastness and commitment. And this preparation elicits a divine response: a conscious connection to eternal life, ready to receive us whenever we return - even if we need to return over and over again.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux called this the “Little Way”: finding the spiritual presence not through spectacular accomplishments or miraculous interventions but through small, everyday actions done with great love. This is as sure a path to God as was Paul’s shared-death experience. Every act of kindness, demonstration of patience, extension of forgiveness to one in broken-hearted repentance, when done in love, brings us into contact with eternal life. Be a channel for the Spirit in the smallest of ways: wash dishes in love, answer emails in love, listen in love as another speaks. Making the Little Way a regular practice can establish a sense of spiritual presence in one’s life. And this presence will befriend you when you find that you need it most.

Finally, while the spiritual presence came to Paul through the intervention of Jesus as the Christ, it can affect us in different ways and its transforming power is not for Christians only. Many from other traditions have known this presence and have set an example. Judaism speaks of the shechinah, literally the indwelling presence of God, which is traditionally taken to be feminine. It is parallel to the Holy Spirit in Christianity: neither is a separate deity; rather, they each represent the aspect of God that dwells and companions with human beings.The Hasidic master Baal Shem Tov (literally, “Master of the Good Name”) taught that one can cleave to God as a constant presence in one’s life. The Spirit speaks many languages. We are fortunate to have Jesus transmitting the language of the Spirit through the Gospels - we could ask for no better teacher.

However we may come to it, in large ways or small ways, sudden or gradual, may the spiritual presence enter and direct our lives, making of us that “new creation” which, though we are still here on earth, brings with it our participation in eternal life.

October 2025