Center for Ignatian Spirituality Philippines (CIS Phil)

THE RELIGIOUS DIMENSION OF EXPERIENCE1

William A. Barry, S.J.

Perhaps because of the triumph of psychological explanation and therapy, many, if not most,
religious workers (pastors, priests, rabbis, pastoral counselors, hospital chaplains, and even spiritual
directors) have been reluctant to look directly at the religious experience of the people they serve. We
have been almost as chary of God-talk as psychoanalysts have been. In recent years the pendulum
has begun to swing back to what one might call the heart of pastoral care, the relationship with God.
But many of us may still be wary of delving into a person‟s religious experience, feeling somehow that
we would be in over our heads or that we might be walking where angels fear to tread. In this article, I
want to focus our gaze on ordinary religious experience. The article is an exercise in pastoral
theology, in that I begin with some theological principles and then draw them out to assist pastoral
practice.

TERM DESERVES CLARIFYING

It may be that the term religious experience itself is one of the culprits. The term conjures up
images of the mystical, the supernatural, the ecstatic, the strange. And not without reason. William
James‟s use of examples in his classic The varieties of Religious Experience has set the tone in the
psychology of religion for understanding the term religious experience in this way, even if he is careful
to note that he is using the spectacular because it is more illuminating, not because “religious
experience” refers only to such extraordinary phenomena. Not so careful is Walter H. Clark, writing in
Religious Experience: Its Nature and Function in the Human Psyche, who in effect equates religious
experience with the ecstatic and mystical and uses LSD to induce such states. If religious experience
is equated with such special states, many will shy away from asking about them or discussing them.

In his book Experience and God, John E. Smith avoids the term religious experience and
speaks instead of the religious dimension of experience. This concept may help us to broaden our
view of what can be included under the label of religious experience and lessen some of our fears of
the reality. I will maintain that any experience can have a religious dimension. If this thesis can be
sustained, then we will have a way of understanding an arresting statement by the Anglican
theologian and bishop William Temple cited in Martin Thornton‟s Prayer: A New Encounter: “Religious
experience is the total experience of a religious man.”

First, we rely on Smith to recover the meaning of experience. Experience is not just a
subjective state, nor just data of sense immediately present to the mind. Rather, he says, it is “the
many-sided product of complex encounters between what there is and a being capable of
undergoing, enduring, taking note of, responding to, and expressing it. As a product, experiences a
result of an ongoing process that takes time and has a temporal structure.” Thus, my experience
of seeing a tree involves an encounter with a real tree at a particular season of the year, my past
experiences with trees, my state of mind and feeling this time, etc. I am not a passive tabula rasa
upon which the external world impinges. I am actively engaged in making sense of what I encounter.
My world would be nothing but a confusion of discrete sense impressions if I did not organize them
into a coherent pattern and the organizing capacity is the result not only of innate structure but also of
learned structures built up over my life history.

Think of the difference between the experience you or I have hearing Beethoven‟s Seventh
Symphony and that which Leonard Bernstein has. Both of us “hear” the same music being played, but
our experience is vastly different because of our histories, training, and talent for music. Similarly, you
or I may have very different experience of Beethoven‟s Seventh played at a concert by the Boston
Symphony Orchestra directed by Seiji Ozawa and at a concert by the Podunk Symphony Orchestra

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Barry, William A., S.J. The Religious Dimension of Experience in Human Development, vol. 7, no. 2, 1986.

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directed by Joseph Jones, even though both orchestras play all the notes correctly as Beethoven
wrote them. Thus, as Smith says, experience is the product of a complex encounter.

Experience can also be equated with consciousness, as Bernard Lonergan uses the term. He
points out in Method in Theology that operations of seeing, hearing, tasting, inquiring, judging,
deciding, and expressing are all intentional and conscious; they intend an object and they are
conscious operations of a subject. I can be conscious of the object, but I can also be conscious of
myself as seeing this object. In other words, experience in this sense includes all that I am conscious
of now, where “now” is a temporal process, not a succession of unconnected instants. Such
consciousness or experience depends very much on my purposes, my categories, and my desires,
hopes and dreams, and other factors as well. For example, I can be so intent on trying to puzzle out
the meaning of religious experience that I do not “hear” the music playing on the radio, while my
neighbor is outraged because the music is so loud that he cannot read his book. Martin Thornton
makes the same point in My God: A Reappraisal of Normal Religious Experience: “A rose, then, is by
selection and interpretation something different to different people. To the botanist it is Rosaceae
arvensis, to the gardener it is an Ena Harkness, to the aesthete a beautiful sight, and to the blind man
it is a wonderful smell,” he then goes on to say, “None of these have experienced the rose in its
totality, but when Temple‟s religious man says that it is creature of God which may disclose his
presence, his interpretation is no less valid.”

EXPERIENCE DISCLOSES GOD

Here is where our discussion of experience leads us to the religious dimension of experience.
The religious dimension is supplied by the subject who believes and by the Mystery encountered. Any
experience can be religious for the religious person, because God is everywhere and because the
religious person believes this of God and wants to meet him. I believe that this insight is behind a
somewhat enigmatic statement by Smith. He is underscoring the idea that experience is encounter
and says, "Experience is at the very least a dyadic affair and it is even possible that it is irreducibly
triadic in character. . . . “ Given everything else that Smith says in his book, I take the latter phrase to
mean what I have just indicated, that every human experience can also be a disclosure of God.
Hence, we can understand Temple‟s dictum: Religious experience is the total experience of the
religious person when he or she is intentionally religious, i.e., conscious of his or her status as a
believer. Then, any and every experience is also a God experience, at least on reflection. Even the
experience of God‟s absence is religious for the believer because the believer is conscious of the
relationship and the problem he is facing.

Religious people have been somewhat leery of asserting that their faith is experienced-
based. Yet, a God who is not somehow experienced by us would have very little interest for us. Again
Smith makes a telling point: “Whatever is totally different from all that we can experience and
apprehend must be something that we neither experience nor apprehend, and far from calling this
God, we should rather call it nothing at all.” Faith and experience mutually reinforce one another. If I
did not believe in God, I would not experience him, although I might have to engage in some
rationalizations to explain away some of my experiences. But because I believe in God, I discover in
my experience more than what at first blush seemed to be there and name that "more” God. The
experience reinforces my belief. Karl Rahner, in Spiritual exercises, makes this point about the
experience of resurrection: "Naturally, the situation is not much that we first have the experience:
Aha, everything is going just fine! - so that we are then led to believe. Instead, somehow or other this
faith and the believer can have this experience – and because he has it, he believes.”

But if the religious dimension of experience depends on my faith, my prior expectation of

finding God in my experience, is it not suspect? Am I deluding myself? It is helpful to realize that
every experience I have depends on my prior expectations. I have experience nothing without having
assimilated it to schemata, or structures, built up over my history. All experience is partly a
construction of the one who experiences. So both the believer and the nonbeliever approach life and
the advantage of being more "objective,” or "realistic,” or "rational.” Moreover, belief in a God who

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discloses himself can be grounded by recourse to reflection on our experience. So, to approach life
as a believer need not to be illusory.

But even if I am not deluding myself by my belief that God can be encountered in my
experience, can I not be deluded when I affirm that I have met God in this experience? Here we touch
on the classic question of the discernment of spirits. How do I tell the marks of God in an experience I
have? It would take us too far afield to explore this question in depth, but we can note the following. In
the Judeo-Christian tradition, decisions have continually been made about the authenticity of a
particular version of God‟s self-disclosure. True and false prophets were discerned in the history of
Israel. Among all the stories told about the creation of the world, about the patriarchs, and about
Moses, the people of God had to choose those that more authentically presented God. There were
many books about Jesus and many epistles purported to have been written by apostles and disciples
in circulation at one time, and the church had to decide which ones were authentic and classify them
as canonical. Individuals down through the years have had to decide which of their experiences or
what parts of their experience were God and which not. The criteria for such decisions have been the
Gifts of the Spirit (cited in Gal 5:22-23), touchstone experiences of God that could not be doubted, the
accumulated wisdom of the centuries, and others. It has been and is possible to discern what is of
God in our experience.

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE EXEMPLIFIED

If, then, religious experience is taken to be the experience of a religious person precisely as
religious, i.e., as a believer and seeker after God, what is it like? One way of finding out is to pay
attention to one‟s own experiences as a believer. Another is to ask believing people about their
experiences. A third is to read spiritual autobiographies, such as Augustine‟s Confessions, or books
that give examples religious experiences, such as James‟s The Varieties of Religious Experience. I
would like to indicate some of what I have discovered about religious experience through all these
ways.

It need not be esoteric or out of the ordinary. William Connolly and I, in The Practice of
Spiritual Direction, gave the following examples:

A woman might be walking along a beach at night and see the moon touch with silver
the crest of a wave. She delights in the sight and suddenly feels at peace and in the
presence of Someone else who himself delights in such things. Unaccountably she
may feel that she is still loved, even though she does drink or eat too much, gets
angry with her family too often, or has just lost a job, and she may feel free herself
more honestly and with less self-pity. Or a young man might sense his insignificance
under the stars, and yet feel that he is important in the whole scheme of things. Or a
man quietly looking at a mountain peak wreathed in cloud might sense a call deep
inside himself to change his ways of life.

Here are some more examples. A young lady as at a secular retreat where the members
were asked the question, “Who are you?” Though she had not been particularly religious in recent
years, she heard herself say interiorly and with conviction, “I am a child of God.” At a liturgy, one man
felt overwhelmed with peace and gratitude after communion. After very satisfying lovemaking with her
husband, a woman experienced a welling up of gratitude to God for all his gifts. One morning I was
half listening to music, a Bach cantata; most of my mind was preoccupied with self-pitying thoughts. A
particularly striking tune caught my attention, and after a while I noticed that I was no longer
wallowing in self-pity. I felt free and less self-centered and grateful to God for helping me to
experience the difference between the two states.

A prolific source of instances of religious experience is the Religious Experience Research

Unit of Oxford, England, founded in 1969 by Sir Alister Hardy. Since its founding, the Unit has
collected over 4,000 first-hand accounts of religious experiences. Through ads in newspapers and

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through pamphlets, the Research Unit asked readers to send in reports of their religious experiences,
along with relevant personal information. Pertinent to our theme is Hardy‟s defense of the research
against those who would say that the Bible and the works of the mystics provide us with enough
information about religious experience. He wrote, in The Spiritual Nature of Man: A Study of
Contemporary Religious Experience, “I fully agree, of course, that the scriptures and writings of the
mystics contain some of the most profound examples of such experience. What is also important,
however, is to demonstrate that these experiences are just as real and vital to modern man as they
were in the lives of those of long ago.”

In a pamphlet asking people to contribute reports, Hardy insisted that he was interested in the
“seemingly more ordinary but deeply felt experiences. Again, some may have been misled by the
very term „religious experience,‟ thinking that it must only refer to the more dramatic isolated
experiences; I want to make it quite clear that we are just as interested in accounts of that continuing
sense of spiritual awareness which many people feel makes a difference to their lives.” In spite of this
insistence, the Unit received from the very beginning many examples of the more ecstatic religious
experiences. Perhaps, as Andrew Greely reports in Religious Imagination, such experiences occur
more frequently than we know. Still, even these more dramatic types of experience need not make us
any more nervous than ordinary ones.

A few examples from Hardy will reveal their flavor:

I heard nothing, yet it was as if I were surrounded by golden light and as if I only had
to reach out my hand to touch God himself who was so surrounding me with his
compassion.

It seemed to me that, in some way, I was extending into my surroundings and was
becoming one with them. At the same time I felt a sense of lightness, exhilaration and
power as if I was beginning to understand the true meaning of the whole universe.

One night I suddenly had an experience as if I was buoyed up by waves of utterly

sustaining power and love. The only words that came out near to describing it were
„underneath are the everlasting arms,‟ though this sounds like a picture, and my
experience was not a picture but a feeling, and there were the arms. This I am sure
has affected my life as it has made me know the love and sustaining power of God. It
came from outside and unasked.

On the first night I knelt to say my prayers, which I had now made a constant
practice, I was aware of a glowing light which seemed to envelop me and which was
accompanied by a sense of warmth all around me.

Suddenly I felt a great joyousness sweeping over me. I use the word „sweeping‟
because this feeling seemed to do just that. I actually felt it as coming from my left
and sweeping round and through me, completely engulfing me. I do not know how to
describe it. It was not like a wind. But suddenly it was there, and I felt it move around
and through me. Great joy was in it. Exaltation might be a better word.

FOCUS FOR MINISTRY

Religious workers, if no one else, ought to be interested in experiences of God, even in the
more ecstatic ones. If we are not, or are too wary of them, then many people may never have a
chance to look more closely at the religious dimension of their experience and may thus miss
discovering the depth of their relationship with God. Ministerial schools need to impress on their
students the importance of asking people about their experiences of God and of listening to them.
Many say that preaching has come on hard times, and that may well be true. The assumption,

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however, we must admit that interest in and effective listening to the religious experience of people
has never had good times from which to fall away.

One of the most fascinating and encouraging things about a ministry that focuses on the
religious dimension of experience is the discovery that God really is effective in people‟s lives. I have
seen individuals move from a depressive, self-concerned style of life to a generally other-oriented,
buoyant outlook by a sustained focus on their experience of God. Hardy has presented numerous
testimonies of how these religious experiences transformed the lives of those who reported them.
Admittedly, we need to be discerning in this area. We have all met people who report remarkable
experiences of God and yet seem to betray in their attitudes and behavior few of the fruits of the Spirit
spoken of in Galatians 5:22-23. And we have all heard of pious dictators who crush their people with
an iron hand. But discernment means that we do minister must be willing to listen to their experiences
without subconsciously conveying to them that we have already judged their experiences as illusory.

At the beginning of this article, I noted that religious workers have been reluctant to look
directly at the religious experiences of those we serve. I indicated that such reluctance might be
explained by the triumph of psychological theory and by a fear of the arcane. Let me now touch upon
what I believe is the more powerful motivation. We are human beings and as such are highly
ambivalent about the Mystery we call God. We are both attracted and repelled by this Mystery. The
attraction draws us into ministry and the study of theology; the repulsion often deflects us from the
core of ministry-helping people to know their God-to its peripheral aspects. Our own resistance to
God may well be showing in the way we do ministry.

RECOMMENDED READING

Barry W., and W. Connolly. The Practice of Spiritual Direction. New York: Seabury, 1982.

Clark, W., et al. Religious Experience: Its Nature and Function in the Human Psyche. Springfield, Illinois: Charles
C. Thomas, 1973.

Hardy, A. The Spiritual Nature of Man: A Study of Contemporary Religious Experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1979.

Robinson, R. The Original Vision: A Study of the Religious Experiences of Childhood. Manchester College,
Oxford: The Religious Experience Research Unit, 1977.

Smith, J. Experience and God, New York: Oxford Press, 1968.

Thornton, M. My God: A Reappraisal of Normal Religious Experience. London: Hodder Stroughton, 1974.