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Bearings:
Most people have some experience of the stages of romantic and sexual love. The initial euphoria of infatuation and attraction peaks and then declines, giving way in due course to a bond that is more sustainable and down-to-earth. And this common script for intimacy isn’t something merely cultural; we haven’t just been brainwashed to expect the “honeymoon” stage of love to be short-lived. It is, we have recently discovered, rooted in our body’s chemistry, as the levels of different ‘love chemicals’ - dopamine, norepinephrine and many more - fluctuate in the brain in ways we can’t control. Amazing! It is a script worth remembering when we consider typical patterns of religious experience. Many people have an exciting period of conversion or spiritual intensification when God’s closeness becomes very real for the first time. Often there are peak religious experiences of devotion, awe, gratitude, compunction. We feel exalted, and we are blessed by feelings of warmth and uplifting purposefulness. But usually this doesn’t last long and we don’t always know how to cope with the onset of spiritual let down that can follow. Some of us turn to religious stimulants to jump-start the earlier feelings - another revival service, Cursillo, a retreat, new forms of devotion. Others fall prey to feelings of guilt - “I mustn’t be a very good Christian after all.” Or anger - “God has let me down by abandoning me after a brief honeymoon.” Others settle for a life of faithful Christian service and worship, and keep as a secret the fact that inside they feel pretty secular and have given up expecting God to touch them with any ‘religious experiences.’ Many of the great spiritual classics deal with just this common story. The best teachers acknowledge the initial value of religious peak experiences as ways in which God seizes our imagination. But they are very aware of the risks associated with them. They know only too well that if we have all sorts of consoling and sweet and passionate feelings, we can begin to confuse them with God and start to be dependent on them. When we are deprived of the pleasure of those beautiful spiritual feelings, then we can respond with a melodrama of our own creation, and start resenting God for ‘abandoning’ us. This resentment can fester as cynicism. Often the bitterest agnostics are those who used to be devout and committed Christians. Perhaps Jesus was alluding to this tragic reversal when he spoke about the vulnerability of some of those who have a deep spiritual awakening and healing only to be invaded by “seven devils worse than the first.” The mystics teach us that God is responsible for weaning us off the early religious “highs.” In spite of the stress of feeling so much less spiritual than we used to, the disappointment that God no longer visits us in special moments of closeness and consolation and insight, the end of the honeymoon is for our good. It is an invitation to another stage of intimacy with God, a more mystical one. And by mystical we mean one marked by a deep intuition that God is in and around every experience, not just ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ experiences. The onset of a more mystical sense of God can only come when we give up identifying God with this or that special type of feeling or event. It dawns on us that God is not one of the actors in life’s drama, entering the stage one minute only to exit again. God is the theater and the play. Alan Watts has written one of the best summaries of the classic spiritual teaching. “A mirror is only present to our eyes by reason of what it reflects, whether light or darkness, white or black, shape or color. But we are nonetheless aware that there is a mirror transcending and underlying the reflection. The color of a mirror does not distort or contest place with the color it reflects. In the same way the mystical awareness of God does not contest place with other experiences and states of mind. Mental states such as joy, sorrow, exaltation, dejection, pleasure and pain, are as a rule mutually exclusive. But the mystical stage is inclusive, just as God and His love include the whole universe. There is no conflict between experiencing the Now and things which happen in the Now.” Losing our dependence on special religious experiences can open us to another perspective from which we can sense God as the presence which invisibly contains all our experiences, however humdrum or vexing, or beautiful or complicated or ordinary. We can stop expecting God to get between us and the things we encounter and learn to appreciate God as the oneness, the connection that enables us to relate to each and every one of them. Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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