One of the problems with religious experience is that it is raw and unmediated. There are no labels attached, no identifying tags, no introductory explanations. It comes and, after a while, it goes. They are, as William James described, ‘states of absolute knowledge. They are states of insight into the depths of absolute truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance… and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.’ (Varieties of Religious Experience, Fontana, 1970, p. 367) The recipients would often claim that they were never more certain of anything and that from that moment their life changed. And ever since Sir Alister Hardy set up the Religious Experience Research Centre at Oxford it has become clear that such experiences are far from uncommon. One of the more unusual experiences from the archives of RERC is the following.
Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre Record No. 000861 10.3.70
Name: {name} (Widow); Age 73; British. Father, a well-known author, dead. Mother, dead. Father an agnostic. Mother, Church of England. Neither parent tried to influence their children towards any religious faith; but we were taken regularly to church, and I was educated at a very religious Anglican boarding school where we were taken to Church three times on Sundays and once every day. My husband was a deeply devout Roman Catholic, converted by a vision of the Virgin Mary, which changed his whole life. We respected and never sought to change each other’s beliefs.At the age of nine, at boarding school, I knelt one evening as usual to say my prayers, as I always had done, when suddenly, like a flash, came the question, as if asked from outside myself ‘Is there anyone to pray to?’ and the answer seemed to come: ‘No!’ There was no God. This was followed by a great sense of relief, thankfulness, pleasure. I need never pray again. Why pray to nothing and no one? I never did pray again. Even during the most tragic experiences, and one overwhelming tragedy when my husband died, I have never felt that I needed anything supernatural on which to lean, to whom to appeal, but just the reverse.
At the age of fourteen, standing alone in the stem of a steamer taking me to France, leaning over the taffrail, watching the wake and smoky wraiths from the funnel diminishing to the horizon, rising from the water as if the waves spoke to me, I heard a voice saying: ‘All men are brothers! Every land is home’. And I felt quite stunned with joy. Henceforth I had a sublime faith. The whole world would be home and every person in it my brother. National frontiers and racial differences would be no more than walls between rooms and variations between members of one family. Every journey would be from home to home. Thenceforth all barriers of class, religion, colour, culture, race, for me broke down, and all people in truth became my brothers. I travelled all over the world, and everywhere people were akin to me. With such a religion, no supernatural beings were necessary or needed. I feel no lack of one, rather joy. It is much easier to explain many problems – example, of evil – without god and devil etc. than with them.
I wish I could impart to everyone else my happiness and relief in being freed from any supernatural-centred religion – and I have studied them all with the deepest attention and sympathy – The universe became for me much more sublime and wonderful when I ceased to believe in such a faith. Man must be his own salvation. He can be, if he wills to be. So could he be his own destruction.
Her unbelief was not an intellectual one but derived from a profound intuition. She knew in some way that the God of school assemblies and childhood prayers – what Pascal called ‘the God of philosophers and savants’ – did not exist. Her initial intuition blossomed when she was fourteen, alone, leaning over the stern of a ship, between the sea and the sky. Her experience is far more complex than the brevity and simplicity of her account would imply. It’s noetic content is a clearly defined concept – all men are brothers, every land is home. She says the words were spoken in her mind ‘as if’ by the waves. I suspect, however, that what she experienced was an intuition which she herself interpreted and articulated and which included far more than two simple phrases. How otherwise can one explain, the unshakeable conviction, the ‘stunned with joy’, ‘sublime faith’ and the ‘sublime and wonderful universe’? The waves ‘spoke’ to her. ‘All men are brothers! Every land is home.’ With such a religion she said, ‘No supernatural beings were necessary nor needed.’ The most interesting characteristic of her experience, almost unique as far as I am aware, is that the profound sense of unity she experienced was not with nature, nor within herself, or with God as she understood him, but with others. Every person was her brother. Here is a penetrating relational consciousness. As she leaned over the stern she became aware, not just of the unity of nature, nor of her union with it, but of a deep bond linking her and all persons. She experiences a communion which remains just that and is not subsumed into a generalised other, nor merged into an absolute Other.
Are we missing something, I wonder, if we think of God only in a vertical dimension. When we receive communion why are we never aware of our union with each other in Christ? The scholastic theologians said that the essence of God is to exist. It might be more correct to say that God’s essence is to relate. As one theologian puts it – for God being is communion.