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Philosopher Martin Buber separates these moments of truth from the experiences in our day-to-day lives by defining them as encounters. He says that when an encounter occurs, it can only last for a moment, because the minute we realize that we’re having a moment of enlightenment the encounter fades, returning to an experience. For Buber, a moment of encounter means a moment of knowing what God truly is: love.

Back in the 1700s, the word sublime was used by scholars like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to describe these moments, specifically when they occurred in the wilderness and simultaneously included terror and pleasure. While climbing Mount Katahdin in Maine, Henry David Thoreau had a moment of disorientation while connecting with the wildness of the mountain, and exclaimed that he felt contact! with the rawness of the landscape.

Ellen Meloy would call the enlightenment a glimpse, Martin Buber would call it an encounter, while some scholars would call it a moment of sublime. Thoreau might call it contact! Adding my own voice to the choir, I would call it birth.