Cathedrals

A couple comments, here and on Facebook, gave rise to a discussion with myself, last night, as I walked under the night sky. Some people said, they have never had any interest in any religious topic, never had any religious experiences, and they were well content that it should be so.

In some moods, I think I could almost say the same; perhaps I have said the same. After all, have I had any religious experiences? Really?

One irrelevancy has to be cleared away at once. It is not at all surprising to me that people who equate religion with what happens in a typical North American church should be uninterested in religion, and devoid of religious experience. What mostly happens in those churches is lectures, by remarkably ignorant and stupid people, consisting of attempts to assert obviously false propositions, accompanied by crude petitionary prayers and maybe some mediocre 19th Century songs. At no time does silence supervene -- possibly for fear that God might get a word in edgewise. I would not blame anyone for a lack of interest in these proceedings. The boredom they inspire is intense, and is well-recognized even by the people who willingly attend them.

So leave that aside. No, the question that I paused on, was "do I actually have any religious experiences at all, or do I just imagine them? Do I just make them up because at one point I had an audience that liked to hear me speak about them?" I walked under the restless night clouds and thought about that.

The trouble is that these experiences are fleeting and fragile, while the memories and descriptions of them are durable and robust. What I call to mind, when I try to bring them back, is my own words, and a few vivid images: poplar leaves trembling in afternoon sunlight; the blaze of a sunrise through wet twigs, forming a fiery circle around an intolerable brightness; things I have written about repeatedly, I'm sure. I grope backwards and find the words, and the images. I don't find the experiences. They're not to be summoned at will. "Not a tame lion," you can say: but anybody, with any motive, might say that.

On the other hand, the analytical mind has its own weaknesses. It prefers to dismiss as illusory anything that is can't be frozen in time and broken into constituent parts. It's always questing after atoms, fundamental particles, elements. And these experiences are experiences of totality, of gist. No wonder the left hemisphere of the brain shrugs impatiently. They are not the sort of thing it can cope with.

I finally concluded: yes, I have had these experiences: though I had more of them when I was younger, and I have been very bad, lately, at putting myself in their way. You can't summon them, but you can invite them. "I don't go to church because God is there," somebody or other said, "I go to church so that if God does come, I'll be in the right place to receive him." Just as wise writers go regularly to their writing desks, not because inspiration lives there, but so that, if inspiration does happen by, they will be in the right place to make use of it.

So when I speak of "church" I mean partly just any place or circumstance that make it more likely that God will happen by. The wild places, the sea and the mountains and the waterfalls, are obvious instances: and I must spend much more time in them. But a "church" is also a community, a sangha, that is oriented towards -- whatever it is. Because in groups we are more than we are as individuals, loath though we Americans are to acknowledge that; loath as I am to acknowledge it. We build ugly convenience stores: but we could build cathedrals. It has happened before and it could happen again.