Lying Awake by Mark Salzman: A Divine Gift in Sickness Vanishes Painfully in Health. “A cloistered Carmelite nun in
Southern California
experiences a prolonged burst of
ecstatic illumination. The poems
Sister John writes as a result are
published and praised; the Vatican
invites her to Rome to read them.

One day she collapses after what
seem to be flashes of light and a
series of blinding headaches. She is
taken to a hospital, where a
neurologist diagnoses treatable
epilepsy. He removes a tiny brain
growth; the symptoms cease, and so
do the visions. So do the poems.

Were Sister John’s flashes of
divinity medical or mystical? Were
her poems the product of art or of a
raisin-sized tumor? A variation on
the mind-body problem —
God-body, in this case, or art-body
— the question goes beyond the
religious or artistic. It continues to
ferment in the centuries-old debate
over the nature of human thought
and endeavor. How free and
distinct are they from biological
mechanics?” New York Times