Yesterday morning I was settling in at one of my favorite coffee shops. Sitting close to me were two folks and as I was opening my backpack to retrieve a book one of them was concluding a sentence with these words: ‘Now that is what I call a religious experience.’
For the next few hours I held a question: ‘What is a religious experience?’ Early in the afternoon I thought of the great English poet, Wordsworth. So this morning, Gentle Reader, let the word on ‘Religious Experience’ be with a poet. Consider Wordsworth’s lines; the lines he composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth describes the energy of his earlier enthusiasm for nature and the way in which this has given way to something deeper:
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
Here nature is experienced as self-transcending – leading the mind to that which is ‘far more deeply interfused’.
Here, Gentle Reader, is the raw material of religious experience. Thanks, William. [Gentle Reader, if these lines speak to you I invite you to spend time with the poem in its entirety.]
Searcher-Seeker 