Religious Experiencing

I have taken precious few pictures lately, here just so this post gets a thumbnail is one of [a good bit of] my chopstick holder collection from when I lived in Japan as a child, which now lives in a box in the attic but got a short airing on the bed yesterday. 

"Religious Experiencing: William James and Eugene Gendlin" by John J. Shea (1987, University Press of America) was indeed short and sweet. Which is to say, it was a Ph.D. dissertation, and not an overly exciting one. Essentially, he read all the books on this so I don't have to. I'm all up to speed on this topic. As it stood 30 years ago, anyway. 

Both William James (1842-1910) and Eugene Gendlin (1926-2017) were interested in how our psychological lives intersect with our spiritual lives, and both recognized the primary role of what they respectively called "feeling" and "experiencing" in how we learn and grow, and also in how we relate to the divine. Left brain vs. right brain: right brain wins. James wrote:

Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our philosophy is but its showy verbalized translation. The immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels the presence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations, your critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves to change his faith. 

They also agreed on the limitations of language: our full experience is always more than we can capture in words. James again:

Conceptual processes can class facts, define them, interpret them; but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality. There is always a plus, a thisness, which feeling alone can answer for.

Gendlin took up this mantle from James when he created focusing, his six-step method in which a person intentionally creates space to feel the larger "thisness" of a problem before trying to associate words or images with it. Shea summarizes:

Usually a person tells himself or herself how he or she is feeling, what is wrong, what the problem is. “Focusing” is a complete shift in direction. If the person can stop and pay attention to present experiencing, gradually it will say what it is. The process of “focusing” is not only a step-by-step coming to know what is there, but, concomitantly, it is also an organismic way of being released, changed, and carried further in the situation. In “focusing” words come from experiencing, and these words reflect a felt difference in the way one is living. 

So: our deepest knowings are experiential. As are our knowings about the deepest things (which Shea calls "religious"; I think today he'd be more likely to use the term "spiritual"). Where, though, is there room for the experiential in religion? Anyone who has beat their head against the solid walls of a religious dogma would be tempted to throw up their hands and and say there just isn't. Shea quotes Abraham Maslow:

Most people lose or forget the subjectively religious experience, and define Religion as a set of habits, behaviors, dogmas, forms, which at the extreme becomes entirely legalistic and bureaucratic, conventional, empty, and in the truest meaning of the word, anti-religious. The mystic experience, the illumination, the great awakening, along with the charismatic seer who started the whole thing, are forgotten, lost, or transformed into their opposites. Organized religion, the churches, finally may become the major enemies of the religious experience and the religious experiencer. 

Shea outlines three ways that institutions tend to bypass the experiential in trying to communicate the religious: "process skipping" (drawing conclusions about God through logical leaps, failing to take the time for experiential steps), "ontologizing" (focusing on the philosophy of if/what God is to the detriment of how/do we experience the Divine) and "theologizing" (creating a coherent intellectual framework for talking about God but ignoring the experiential roots of theology). The danger here is larger than just talking ourselves into irrelevance--Gendlin warns that shoving values down peoples' throats can backfire:

Value-conclusions can be adopted without the experiential process leading to them, but accompanied by experiences of confusion, denial, conflict, and surrender of certain areas of enterprise. Such an adoption usually makes it less likely that the individual will ever obtain the experiential process leading to these values, than that he will arrive experientially at other values. It has a thousand side effects, including the predictable behavior differences involved in attempting to act as though he really had the given values, along with failure consequences, conflicts or inferiority, abasement, and resentment.[1]

"Attempting to act as though he really had the given values" describes so much of my experience of church.... But I'm still not at the point where I want to give up on organized religion entirely. I think its task is a fundamentally ambivalent one: spiritually is personal and experiential, but it is also about connection and our part in the Whole. The problem of finding *communal* language and creating *communal* practice to express our *communal* experience, our interrelatedness, our interdependence in the face of the Ultimate is not a trivial one. I think (hope!) that we do not need to throw out the tools we have so much as we need to recognize and admit--again and again and yet again--how inadequate and imperfect they are. Shea quotes James discussing what he calls "knowledge of acquaintance," 

...which stresses immediate experience as a starting point or as a prerequisite for knowledge...For example, I am acquainted with the color blue or the taste of a pear, but I cannot transmit knowledge about these things to someone who has not directly experienced them. [James writes:] "I cannot describe them, make a blind man guess what blue is like, define to a child just what a syllogism, or tell a philosopher in just what respect distance is just what it is, and differs from other forms of relation. At most, I can say to my friends, Go to certain places and act in certain ways, and these objects will probably come."

This makes me wonder if Maslow's "habits, behaviors, dogmas, forms" do have their place. They aren't answers, but they might help point us in the right direction. Shea quotes James Michael Lee:

Religious language arises from religious experience and/or points to religious experience and/or describes religious experience and/or seeks to clarify and interpret religious experience. The past, present, and future primacy must therefore rest ultimately on religious experience, not on religious language. The religious educator never ought to allow religious language to get in the way of religious experience.

And that is the take-home message of this book, I think. Religious language is necessary, but it is in all cases incomplete and secondary.

Have I linked to this lovely focusing video yet? If you know me you've probably been subjected to it already. I think there must be a collective equivalent to the left-brain / right-brain / whole brain analogy here: in church we need space for individual experience AND we need space for common words AND we need the participatory processes that will help us move forward with both together. I sound like a broken record on this front, I know. Give a girl a hammer...

...and she will lug it around and see nails everywhere but be too timid to smack anything?

Might happen, someday. Who knows? Onwards.

[1] This from an essay called "Values and the Process of Experiencing," which I would very much like to read in its entirety and good news! It is available from the psychology library at the University of Zurich. But not so fast Susannah - the psychology library is closed for relocation until August 31. So stay tuned on this front.