I go to church many Sundays and sing in the contemporary ensemble. My dad used to say I go because that’s where they’ll let me sing every week.
I view my faith as a means to touch the spiritual in human experience. Which implies, of course, that I believe in a spritual experience that has reality. And many days I do, while others I don’t.
I’ve had several experiences which I can explain through brain chemistry, suggestion, what have you.
The first was at a pentecostal church down the corner from my house. A friend (now head of the philosophy department at a well-regarded liberal arts college in the U.S. ) suggested we go due to a common interest in exploring faith. There was an “altar call” to accept Jesus as one’s personal savior. I went up and knelt. The pastor put his hands on my hand, declared that I was saved and I went into an altered state. My body felt filled with electricity and my mind expanded and exploded. I won’t go into more long history about what happened after. Suffice it to say that I went through a period of believing that the experience was caused by a connection to God and then a period in which I saw it as chemically induced trance. These days I sort of see it both way. I believe the two are not mutually exclusive.
The second was very recent. Before my heart surgery, I prayed with a chaplain, who led a visualization based on a scene where the risen Christ appears to his apostles while they’re fishing. He basically runs a quick beachside fish fry, and it’s (to me) an utterly charming story. After my surgery, when I h]was in considerable distress and pain, a nurse told me to essentially go to my “happy place”. I intended in that moment to picture our camp in Maine, but instead found myself on the beach in Galilee at night in front of a small fire encountering a welcoming and powerful figure in the shadows. My distress vanished and I was back in my body in the hospital and through that part of the ordeal.
Of course, Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus, “animists”, and others will relate their own stories of how they were touched by the eternal otherness, or what have you. My experience is in keeping with theirs and in a Christian context because that’s what I’ve found useful (and frustrating, maddening) in my life. It’s my context, so it’s the frame of these experiences.
I hate the phrase “everything happens for a reason.” Bullshit. I remember a quote from a novel I read in college. “Remember, things do not slide, glide, form, or fashion. They fall in place.”
But I’ve had these experiences and they are real. They may be self-hypnosis of a sort. I can buy that. But only up to a point. So in the meantime, I go to church where they let me sing each Sunday. I’m a fine singer.
