By Bill Lewellis
[The Morning Call, Saturday, Feb. 20]
You’re kidding. A religious experience?
Not kidding. It may have happened in church or elsewhere.
It happens from within. In-sight. Not from external manipulation. You may not perceive what you’ve experienced as religious. Nothing outside of you changed. Your reality is the same. Somewhere in time, however, eternity opened, a significantly different outlook on life or relationships or responsibility, even religion.
It may have been a sudden inner appropriation of something you already knew in some way but whose energy and intensity had not until the moment shouted out from within, "Aha!" and became entwined with everything that identifies you as you.
Having had an insight experience – religious or not – you can never be as you were before. You may contradict it by how you live – that's essentially what sin is, inauthenticity – but you can't ignore it. You have taken a step out of hiding into the light. The next step is conversion.
You may think of it simply as experiencing greater integrity. Transformation, however, ought not be reduced to “simply.” Our experiences of integrity are part of the process of God’s self-communication. That’s how I see it. You may not. That’s ok. Makes no difference. What makes a difference is that, in the process, you have become a more authentic you. You may have experienced that many times. The path to integrity or authenticity is lifelong. Many conversions, many transformations.
We church people often use words that conceal rather than reveal reality. Revelation, for example. We put God in a box and let God out only when our preconceptions are not threatened.
We may limit revelation, for example, to truths handed down, to facts rather than acts, rather than opening the concept to insights that bring us out of hiding.
During the mid-1980s, a Jesuit professor at Holy Cross College (Worcester, MA) suggested that revelation might more fittingly be seen as "our coming out of hiding into the light created by the holy mystery of God."
"God's self-communication," William Reiser wrote in Drawn to the Divine, "continues to take place … in the desires of the human heart, in the questioning and wondering of the human mind, in our thirst for true freedom, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, in the experience of having been loved and forgiven, in the conviction that we have been personally called to know and follow Jesus, in countless circumstances of daily life, and in the deep-down sense that we are meant to carry the divine presence within us."
So with religious experience … or whatever you might prefer to call it.
If you have had such an experience, you may be wrestling with God. When you wrestle with God about what you have been resisting, one of two things eventually happens. Winning isn't one. You walk away from the relationship or you wrestle until you lose. When God wins, you have reason to celebrate.
When you allow God to find you and bring you out of hiding, you are on the verge of a religious experience.
[Canon Bill Lewellis, blewellis@diobeth.org, a recently retired Episcopal priest, served on the Bishop’s staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for the past 24 years and on the Bishop’s staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years.]
[The Morning Call, Saturday, Feb. 20]
You’re kidding. A religious experience?
Not kidding. It may have happened in church or elsewhere.
It happens from within. In-sight. Not from external manipulation. You may not perceive what you’ve experienced as religious. Nothing outside of you changed. Your reality is the same. Somewhere in time, however, eternity opened, a significantly different outlook on life or relationships or responsibility, even religion.
It may have been a sudden inner appropriation of something you already knew in some way but whose energy and intensity had not until the moment shouted out from within, "Aha!" and became entwined with everything that identifies you as you.
Having had an insight experience – religious or not – you can never be as you were before. You may contradict it by how you live – that's essentially what sin is, inauthenticity – but you can't ignore it. You have taken a step out of hiding into the light. The next step is conversion.
You may think of it simply as experiencing greater integrity. Transformation, however, ought not be reduced to “simply.” Our experiences of integrity are part of the process of God’s self-communication. That’s how I see it. You may not. That’s ok. Makes no difference. What makes a difference is that, in the process, you have become a more authentic you. You may have experienced that many times. The path to integrity or authenticity is lifelong. Many conversions, many transformations.
We church people often use words that conceal rather than reveal reality. Revelation, for example. We put God in a box and let God out only when our preconceptions are not threatened.
We may limit revelation, for example, to truths handed down, to facts rather than acts, rather than opening the concept to insights that bring us out of hiding.
During the mid-1980s, a Jesuit professor at Holy Cross College (Worcester, MA) suggested that revelation might more fittingly be seen as "our coming out of hiding into the light created by the holy mystery of God."
"God's self-communication," William Reiser wrote in Drawn to the Divine, "continues to take place … in the desires of the human heart, in the questioning and wondering of the human mind, in our thirst for true freedom, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, in the experience of having been loved and forgiven, in the conviction that we have been personally called to know and follow Jesus, in countless circumstances of daily life, and in the deep-down sense that we are meant to carry the divine presence within us."
So with religious experience … or whatever you might prefer to call it.
If you have had such an experience, you may be wrestling with God. When you wrestle with God about what you have been resisting, one of two things eventually happens. Winning isn't one. You walk away from the relationship or you wrestle until you lose. When God wins, you have reason to celebrate.
When you allow God to find you and bring you out of hiding, you are on the verge of a religious experience.
[Canon Bill Lewellis, blewellis@diobeth.org, a recently retired Episcopal priest, served on the Bishop’s staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for the past 24 years and on the Bishop’s staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years.]
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