“VARIETY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE”

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, October 17, 2004

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

When I was in college, I had a part-time job driving and working on a city bookmobile. Most of the time, I had a partner on the job. He was an old guy. When I say he was “an old guy,” I mean he was then about the age I am now, and to a twenty-year-old, that seems old.

Anyway, it was around 1969 or 70, at about the height of the generation gap in our culture. My generation was suspicious of anyone over thirty, and his generation was unimpressed by the young know-it-alls like me. Nevertheless, we got along quite well, and each of us learned something from the other. I remember that once I helped him find the courage to wear bell bottom jeans, which everyone under thirty did at that time. He taught me a few things as well.

One day, as we were driving to the spot where we would sit for an hour or more, I complained about a wart that had appeared on my hand for the last week or so. I said I tried all kinds of things to remove it but nothing worked. I used lotions and ointments, anything I could find, but nothing would get rid of the wart.

My friend was quiet as I spoke. The conversation went on to other subjects, but I could tell he was contemplating something I had said before. Finally, out of context, he said to me. “I can get rid of that wart for you, if you want me to.”

“You can!” I said with excitement. “How do you do it?”

Here he paused a long time. “I can charm it off,” he said.

“Charm it off? How do you do that?”

“You may think I’m crazy before I’m done,” he said cautiously, “but my grandmother was an American Indian, and before she died she taught me the charm to use to get rid of warts.”

“Really?” I said. “What do you do?”

“Do you have a nickel in your pocket?” he asked.

I did, and I took it out.

“Now,” he said, “put that nickel over the wart and hold it tight with the thumb of your other hand. While you’re doing that, I will say the charm silently to myself. At some point the nickel will start feeling warm against your hand. When it does, let me know.”

I held the nickel tight, while my friend closed his eyes and silently said his charm. After a couple of minutes, the nickel started to feel warm, and I told him so.

“Now remove the nickel,” he said. “It’s done.”

“It’s done?” I asked. “What do you mean, ‘it’s done’?”

“Well, your wart will be gone soon. If you believe in the charm, it will be gone tomorrow. If you don’t believe, it may take a few days. But it will be gone.”

“By the way,” he added. “Get rid of that nickel as soon as you can. But whatever you do,” he said ominously, “don’t give it to a friend.”

I didn’t ask why I shouldn’t give the nickel to a friend, though I suppose I knew the answer anyway. I promptly put the nickel in a coke machine.

The wart was not gone the next day, by the way. It took about three days, but it went away, never to return. Just like he said.

What are we to make of such an experience? What possible natural explanations can there be? Is there some chemical component in a nickel that is toxic to human warts? Is it possible that the human mind, by the mere power of suggestion rather than the power of will, can have control over the body and make such changes? Is it possible that we can remove warts by hypnosis, and that is how it was done, even though I wasn’t aware of being hypnotized? Maybe it was just time for the wart to go away, and the timing of his charm was sheer coincidence. Or is it the case that a native charm does tap in to some cosmic power that can remove warts?

There is a difference between hearing this story, and actually experiencing it. When one hears the story, the mind immediately goes looking for explanations. When one experiences it, the mind immediately goes to a place of amazement, perhaps even awe, and then eventually, a while later, the mind may seek out explanations. What I am interested in this morning is not the explanation, but rather those brief moments of mystery and awe that accompany the experience before the mind seeks out an explanation.

It has been a hundred years since the psychologist and philosopher William James wrote his classic book entitled, The Varieties of Religious Experience. It is one of those few books that acquired “classic” status almost immediately upon publication, and has continued in that category for several generations. The book, a collection of lectures James gave at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, was James’ attempt to understand the human experience of that realm we call the “religious” experience.

William James came to this study with an amazing spread of knowledge. He began his career as a zoologist, studying animal life around the world with Louis Agassiz, the prominent student of Charles Darwin. Eventually he returned to Harvard and received his M.D. degree as a doctor. He specialized in a relatively new field of psychology, and with his medical knowledge tried to understand the physiological sources of human behavior. Today he is recognized as the founder of Modern American Psychology. He ended his career in the field of philosophy, having stretched for more than thirty years across the Harvard faculty from the Medical School, to the Psychology Department, to the Philosophy Department.

His book on religious experience was controversial, and still is. He wrestled with what was then, and still is, the modern notion that no answers outside of scientific proof are worthy of belief. James passionately resisted this growing world view which sometimes goes by the name “scientism.” He wanted to allow, not so much for the existence of a non-scientific dimension to reality, but rather at least allow for human experiences that transcend scientific reality.

In an earlier work (The Will to Believe), he cited British mathematician W.K. Clifford who argued that no one should ever believe anything unless there is scientific evidence which supports that belief. Clifford wrote this startling sentence:

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

There could hardly be a more clear-cut statement of the modern view. Science not only has all the answers we need, it is our only reasonable source of answers. It is irresponsible (Clifford even called it “sinful”!) to believe in anything, such as the supernatural, that cannot be proven.

So what are we to make of charming warts off of someone’s hand? Do we allow only for a scientific explanation, and in the absence of such an explanation consider the entire experience as suspicious? The prevailing scientific view said “yes.” We cannot consider any explanation which cannot be subjected to scientific explanation.

This was the educated view by the time William James was writing at the beginning of the twentieth century; it appears to remain the educated view today at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

But James had more than a little trouble with this view. He felt that the world, and especially people, is a lot more complicated than a scientific formula. One way to observe that complexity is to examine human religious experience. In a series of twenty lectures, he sought to examine what it means for people to have religious experiences.

We should take that phrase, “religious experience” literally. He is not concerned with institutional religions. James was first of all a psychologist and he was far more curious about the feelings people expressed rather than their specific beliefs. He was not interested in theology. He was not interested in creeds. He cared not if they believed in one god or many gods or no gods. He wanted simply to understand the experience of religious feeling that is shared across all human religions.

The book, then, is filled with very specific examples of people articulating how their religious experiences made them feel. James was thorough in his study of religious experience, and explored deeply topics which I don’t have time to consider here: mysticism and conversion, for example. But his conclusion was that what religious experiences seem to share in common is some level of feeling connected to something greater than ourselves – whether it means a connection to a god or to nature or to justice. Here is how he said it:

What religious experience “unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves, and in that union find our great peace.”

James took those feelings seriously, and regardless of the specific beliefs, he was convinced that those feelings genuine and authentic.

Indulge me a moment to return once more to the experience of having warts charmed away. It may be a stretch to categorize that as a “religious experience,” though some of the elements are there. The feelings in that experience were awe and amazement. There was a sense of something going right in the cosmos. There was a feeling of experiencing something mysterious, and being personally connected to that mystery within the universe. I don’t want to make too much of this, of course, but for maybe a few seconds there – probably not much more than that – the words I would use to describe my feelings of that experience would be identical with the words others would use to describe their religious experiences, though they would be decidedly different from mine.

This is the part that James found worthy to examine. It is irrelevant whether a scientific explanation can be supplied. What counts is the experience itself. Even if a logical answer could be given to the phenomenon, still the feelings of awe and mystery and unity with the cosmos might still be present.

Religious feelings are human feelings – they are religious only because of their context. James says, for example,

“Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations.”

Religious experience, James made it plain, is a feeling people have, not a philosophy of life. What is that feeling?

Near the end of his book, James describes it as a feeling of “more,” that there is more meaning to our experience than we can describe. More. We look for meaning in experiences, something more than the surface. Anything and everything can communicate meaning to us, something beyond everyday experience.

He quotes the writer Charles Kingsley as saying:

“When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has meaning, if I could but understand it, and this feeling of being surrounded by truths which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes.”

Here is what religious experience is about:

T You see a star, and feel that there is something more than a star there, that maybe it can guide you if you just let it;

T You hear a piece of music, and feel it is speaking to you beyond the notes and rhythm, that it produces waves of contentment which are meant to flow through you, or waves of discontent that disturb you;

T You feel worthless and inadequate, but in moments of quiet contemplation or even prayer, you are able to find strength within yourself that you didn’t know was there, and you feel complete and worthy once again;

You may be familiar with the fact that in the field of philosophy, James was one of the founders of what came to be called the “pragmatist” school. What this means quite simply – maybe even too simply – is that our ideas should be judged on how useful they are to our lives. Ideas which have no consequence for life are irrelevant.

This notion is easily applied to religious experience. Is there an “unseen” or mysterious world beyond our mundane existence? James documents testimony from numerous people who say how their belief in an “unseen” world has affected how they live. The fact that such a belief has such a strong impact on so many people, the fact that such belief has important and often positive consequences on their lives, means that there is something real about an unseen world (even if it is different from what people generally think).

To a great many people, such experiences as feeling connected to an unseen power outside ourselves points to a God; that God is one possibility, but not the only one. The painter Vincent Van Gogh found that “something more” that was not God. In a letter to a friend, Van Gogh said this:

“I can very well do without God, both in my life and my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life – the power to create. . . . And in a picture I want to say something comforting as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize.”

For many, this sense of being connected to something greater than ourselves leads to a reverence for our place in nature, and nature provides a vast repository of opportunity for feelings of wonder, awe and mystery. This was certainly true of the transcendentalists. Thoreau, for example, said humans should think of themselves as a member of nature more than as a member of human society. Then he said this:

“I believe there is a subtle magnetism in Nature which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”

When the modern scientific era approached, it was a common claim that religion will become irrelevant; that religion was, in fact, developed by pre-scientific cultures which needed some kind of explanation for the world it did not understand.

That prediction did not come to pass. Quite to the contrary, religion not only didn’t die, it flowered into a vast variety of sects that few people could have imagined. It turned out that religion was far more deeply imbedded in the human psyche than we imagined, and that the religious impulse is not tied to specific beliefs or sectarian creeds, but that those beliefs are a by-product of something deeper in the human subconscious.

William James was the prophet of this view of religion. His classic study looked at human religious experience separate from religious belief and found there something integral to human character.

We might have thought that religion would have withered away in society, as we became more sophisticated and civilized. The fact that James’ detailed description of the religious experience is almost identical with what we discover today indicates that he was able to locate religion in the human psyche, which doesn’t change, much more than in human society, which does.

But James’ conclusion was also that this innate human impulse toward feeling connected to ideals or forces greater than ourselves, finds expression in enormously diverse ways. Catholic monasticism, Buddhist chanting, Quaker silence – he cites nearly endless varieties of expression – but they all are forms of expressing the experience of feeling that union with something outside ourselves, and greater than ourselves.

It turns out, by the way – as some of you no doubt know – that there is no mystery about charming warts off of your hand. Decades after that experience, I ran across an article by the late Lewis Thomas, the popular science writer, biologist, and physician, who explained there is substantial scientific data to support the claim that warts can be eliminated by hypnosis. He even pointed to an experiment in which people with warts on both sides of their body were instructed under hypnosis to use their minds to eliminate only the warts on one side but not on the other. The hypnotic suggestion worked.

Having an explanation, however, in no way invalidates the feelings that accompany the experience of awe and wonder. If it weren’t there with charming warts off of hands, awe and wonder and mystery would be there in numerous other circumstances: viewing the landscape from an airplane, watching the birth of a child, or sleeping outdoors under a canopy of starlight. Awe and wonder and mystery surround us constantly, if we look for it.

In his article on how warts are removed by the mind, Thomas suggests that even with hypnosis as an explanation, we are left with an even deeper mystery to contemplate. Hypnotic suggestion works through the human unconscious mind, and how and why the human “unconscious” works – or even how and why it exists – remains a fundamental mystery.

Thomas wonders how our unconscious mind can perform feats as technically adept as cutting off blood supply to a wart, when in fact our conscious mind can’t even get close to doing such a task. It turns out that far more profoundly mysterious than a primitive charm is the explanation that it is done by the human unconscious mind. We don’t understand how this works but, Thomas writes, if we did understand the unconscious, we just might discover

“a kind of superintelligence that exists in each of us, infinitely smarter and possessed of technical know-how far beyond our present understandings.”

So it seems that by offering a natural explanation for this phenomenon, we have traded one mystery in on a far greater mystery.

This is the point of religious experience – to welcome and embrace the mystery, to value and to watch for those moments when we feel connected beyond ourselves to ideals and forces greater than ourselves. This is nothing to be afraid of. It is part of being human, of being in this universe. William James said it this way:

“The experiences which we have been studying. . . plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. . . . Science and religion are both of the genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure house.”

Religious experiences can come from the awe and amazement of being treated respectfully and kindly from someone from whom you didn’t expect it, from having an unusual turn of good luck, from a feeling you have after a philanthropic or service gesture toward another person or toward an important institution, from a child’s naive but profound insight, or from a simple walk in the woods, piece of music or art; in fact, whenever and wherever we can stay open to and willing to embrace mystery and awe, we find religious experience in all its variety.