I like to walk around a little pond that is not far from my house sometimes, and the ducks like it. There are at least a couple of families of adult ducks and growing youngsters that live there. As I was walking today, I was reflecting on some truths about religious experience and our relationship with God.
If you have a particular romantic temperament — and here I’m not talking about eros or love in the modern sense of “romantic” — I mean if you are someone who experiences things with a particularly emotional temperament, who tends to feel deeply whatever he or she reads about or thinks about — religious experiences are not hard to come by.
But it is not unlike every other realm of life, we can easily delude ourselves — confirmation bias is not only a problem in science, but can happen in the spiritual world as well.
And I don’t think religious experience is rare: it is not something we are used to thinking about in the West, it is something our culture has been educated out of. But I am sure the Hindu sincerely sees the light of God emanating from the Bhagavad Gita, just as the Zen Buddhist feels himself walking a foot above the ground when he believes him( or her) self to be enlightened. But the fact is, these beliefs rationally exclude one another. If the God of the Hindus is real, then the caste system is good and true and Zen enlightenment is not real, and vice versa; yet all these people’s experiences are undoubtedly spiritual experiences that are true to them, but how can all religions be grounded in truth, when they contradict one another?
And the question is, where is the fruit? What is the fruit of these beliefs?
I remember when I tried meditation, quite genuinely and devotedly, for a while. I would sometimes feel quite a sense of peace as I was meditating, in my withdrawal from the world, but this simply didn’t translate into my daily life: I found the contrast of the problems of daily life, after the peace of withdrawal, would irritate me beyond belief: I would get angry and frustrated with other people because the world didn’t conform to my expectations of peacefulness. What meditation did, really, was to expose my heart — the selfishness and self-centredness of my inner being — and I found it entirely unhelpful in dealing with these problems.
I tried reading theology and philosophy, and for me this really was a matter of deep spiritual experience — I remember reading the Thomistic — i.e. Thomas Aquinas’ — discussion of the existence of God — his discussion of how God is the ens realism — the most real thing, the ultimate reality — brought me closer to God than meditation ever did. When I read Aquinas, God seemed to be just around the corner of existence — everywhere present, more real than physical reality — this seemed to me to point the way to Him — but it didn’t give me what I really needed.
In the end, it was reading the Bible that satisfied my spiritual thirst: and seeking to know Jesus. I tried nearly everything else. But in the Bible, I found the spiritual sustenance I was looking for, and help, not to withdraw from the world into some navel-gazing inner reality, but to deal with daily life in a positive, life-affirming, forgiving, loving, self-sacrificial way. (Not that I’m there yet; but I can see the Lord increasing my patience and endurance every day.)
I think, by the way, that most Christians daily experience the presence of God in numerous ways, very deeply, but it is not something many of us would talk about.
This is because the Bible is ultimately not about getting spiritual experiences but about relationship: the Holy Spirit mediates a relationship with the Father, through Jesus Christ. This relationship bears fruit: the fruit of loving one another, loving and praying for even one’s enemies, the ability to cope with the challenges of life without getting angry or frustrated but trusting the Lord, instead, to get us through these trials and difficulties.
This relationship is not something anyone can understand who does not really know God through Jesus Christ. It is a complete gift: it is an act of grace, an act of kindness on God’s part, it is not something anyone earns at all, or even can earn, because this relationship is something that was already earned by Jesus, when He died on the cross and paid for our sins and closed the immeasurable gap between humans and God.
No one can know God in any other way. This is the true God, the author of creation, but anyone who knows and loves Jesus knows and loves God Himself, not because he or she has earned it by trying hard, or been a good person, or ferreted out some secret knowledge, but because God has graciously bestowed the gift upon us, the gift of His Spirit.
This relationship is indeed something that anyone can seek and ask for and try to find: but anyone who seeks a relationship with God the Father through Jesus Christ by the grace of the Holy Spirit is already called by God, in some deep way in the depths of time and in his or her own spirit and soul, to know God truly.