Religion begins with experience

Religion does not start out with the notion of God. It starts with a personal experience, the overwhelming experience of ultimate belonging.

Religion of the Heart

Two pictures side by side in one frame hang on the wall of our Texas home. They reveal two views of a snowy cross-country skiing mountain path in Banff, Canada. The photograph on the right shows a mountain stream, with snow-covered rocks. If I use my imagination, I can see the image of a solitary bird.

Pretty. Even arresting, but one might wonder why they’re framed. And on display.

I came late to religion—converted after decades of hostility toward the church and all things religious. The conversion in a Benedictine monastery felt sudden, but in a sense it began on that mountain path., long before conversion. Skiing alone on that trail, abruptly, I was stopped still.

By that stream, the bird, maybe a snow bunting, stared at me in the stillness. Wholly undisturbed by my presence, even perhaps, welcoming it. The only sounds were the cracks of the ice and the whisper of a breeze through the huge evergreens. Had I been agile enough on my skis, I’d have dropped to my knees in awe. Instead, I stood still, drinking in this shockingly tangible sense of order, immensity, majesty, and mystery.

And jaw-dropping gratitude at the realization that I was part of Something.

A few years before, I’d begun writing poetry in an effort to deal with an increasing unease. A sense that all that I’d been doing, at my work, at school was nothing. Meaningless.

I was in pursuit of what I couldn’t name.

One of the first of the poems, I called “Belonging.”

Belonging

Is there a place called home
Where memories and tradition await
Patiently hidden in places made deep
By relentless pursuit of useless truths.
Do we come trailing clouds of glory
Only to don the actors pose
And spend too many years and tears
Reclaiming wisdom lost so long ago
Saved finally by the knowledge
That human truth is shadow and illusion
Yet uplifted by one hope and prayer
That pure path toward peace and
Understanding lies patiently waiting
For our gaze to turn back to the
Place where we began.

The moment staring back at the bird could have been one second. Or a year.

Because of it, something changed, I couldn’t name it nor could I really describe it to anyone.

In his splendid article, Brother David asks what we do with that experience. We do, he insists, three things. We do something with the emotion, we accept in some form, the sense of belonging and we celebrate it.

Look at the image that begins this essay. Copied from Bishop Erik Varden’s piece, How Grace Works, it’s a splendid image of the metanoia of conversion, at least the way it felt all those years ago. And, not infrequently, does today. The figure is pressing forward, but his large shadow is being blown back by a powerful force.

YES!

Metanoia: turning around while walking forward via a powerful external force. It’s my definition, one you won’t find in the dictionary.

There is a profound reason for this. It is involved in the kind of beings that we are. It is part of a larger
truth about our whole experience of life. All life is a tension of apparent opposites. Life abides and life
advances by a sort of counter pull – what I have called a tension – between forces that seem to be the
negation of each other. Thus, our life is conditioned by death: the animal dies and man eats it and lives;
man dies to himself in order to live to God, and living to God finds himself too. Again our freedom is
made perfect by obedience; thus a man is free to live if he obeys the laws of nutrition, is free to build
himself a home, to sail the oceans of the world, to fly in the air, if he obeys the laws that govern his
universe. One might go on endlessly listing such things. And no one of them is accidental or
incidental. Our life is truly seen as a tension of opposites because we ourselves are a tension of
opposites. We ourselves, like all created things, exist because omnipotence made something of
nothing. We are best expressed as nothingness worked upon by omnipotence, the two most ultimate of
all opposites. Because that is what we are, that is how we act. Operatio sequitur esse, say the
philosophers.
As we are,
so we act,
so we experience,
so we know.
There is this vast and fruitful combination of opposites within our very being, at the very heart of what
we are, and you can trace it in everything we do. It means that there is an essential mysteriousness
about us. Our minds cannot wholly grasp omnipotence, it has too much meaning for us; they cannot
firmly grasp nothingness.

Theology and Sanity

Revealed to the childlike.

Wednesday’s Gospel reading from the Book of Matthew puzzles our sophisticated 21st-century ears, no less than the rabbinic scholars at the Temple: the Pharisees, Sadducees, and all men who excelled at following and policing the 613 Jewish laws. How enraged these elders became by the seemingly blasphemous teaching of the upstart from Galilee.

At that time Jesus exclaimed: 
“I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
for although you have hidden these things
from the wise and the learned
you have revealed them to the childlike.
Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will.
All things have been handed over to me by my Father.
No one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son
and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”

Matthew 10:34-11:1

It must have felt that their arduous study, the intellectual rigor of the elders’ teaching, was being mocked by this Jesus.

How do we handle mockery and humiliation?

Exactly the way they did: Us vs Them.

Theology and Sanity

Brother Andrew Koch handed me his copy of Francis Sheed’s Theology and Sanity as he said, “I think you’ll like this book.” Brother Andrew was teaching me the rudiments of Roman Catholicism so that I could be recieved into the faith at St. Benedict’s Abbey.

Like?

I devoured it, thinking as I read each page, Yes, this is sanity, what relief after years of insanity.

This week, I found a PDF of the book online.

For the soul’s full functioning, we need a Catholic intellect as well as a Catholic will. We have a
Catholic will when we love God and obey God, love the Church and obey the Church. We have a
Catholic intellect when we live consciously in the presence of the realities that God through His Church
has revealed. A good working test of a Catholic will is that we should do what the Church says. But
for a Catholic intellect, we must also see what the Church sees. This means that when we look out
upon the universe we see the same universe that the Church sees; and the enormous advantage of this is
that the universe the Church sees is the real universe, because She is the Church of God. Seeing what
She sees means seeing what is there. And just as loving what is good is SANCTITY, or the health of
the will, so seeing what is there is SANITY, or the health of the intellect.
1.2
Now in that sense most of us have Catholic wills, but not many of us have Catholic intellects…So that we have not so much Catholic minds as worldly
minds with Catholic patches. Intellectually, we wear our Catholicism like a badge on the lapel of the
same kind of suit that everyone else is wearing.
If that seems to you too sweeping, consider what the Church does see when She looks at the universe.
For one thing, She sees all things whatsoever held in existence from moment to moment by nothing but
the continuing will of God that they should not cease to be. When She sees anything at all, in the same
act She sees God holding it in existence. Do we? It is not merely a matter of knowing that this is so.
Do we actually see it so? If we do not, then we are not living mentally in the same world as the
Church. What is more, we are not seeing things as they are, for that is how they are…

In short, the truth that God used no material in our making carries with it the not
sufficiently realized truth that GOD CONTINUES TO HOLD US IN BEING, and that UNLESS HE
DID SO WE SHOULD SIMPLY CEASE TO BE.
This is the truth about the universe as a whole and about every part of it. Material beings – the human
body, for instance – are made up of atoms, and these again of electrons and protons, and these again of
who knows what; but whatever may be the ultimate constituents of matter, God made them of nothing,
so that they and the beings so imposingly built up of them exist only because He keeps them in
existence. Spiritual beings – the human soul, for instance – have no constituent parts. Yet they do not
escape this universal law. They are created by God of nothing and could not survive an instant without
His conserving power. We are held above the surface of our native nothingness solely by God’s
continuing Will to hold us so.
In Him, we live and move and have our being.
(Acts 17:28)
Therefore if we see anything at all – ourself or some other man, or the universe as a whole or any part
of it – without at the same time seeing God holding it there, then we are seeing it all wrong.

Theology and Sanity

Sometimes country music nails it: