As from October 1st., 2002:
·
Personal Experience
of God in Christianity
Personal Christian Experience of God
The Christian believer
in Jesus Christ, in particular the contemplatives more than anyone else are
witnesses to God in the world. They are in the world but not of the world;
however, without a personal “experience” this is impossible, the more today in
this time and age of secularisation. When Jesus Christ witnesses to what He
knows, what He lives and what He is, He refers to His own experience. And this
testimony is corroborated by that of his Father in heaven. When Jesus Christ
asks for faith it is because He knows what He is talking about.
Quoting from the
Gospel of John, He says to Nicodemus:
“Truly, truly, I say
to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness
to what we have seen; but you do not receive our testimony.” (John
03.11) (RVS)
He is adding:
“No one has ascended
into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man.” (John 03.13)
These remarks, dropped in the course of a conversation, express the
specific nature of the Christian experience of God. It is that Christians take into their own lives, the very experience of
God. Before the coming of the Word made flesh there already existed in the
world a diffuse experience of God, hesitant perhaps and never quite sure of
itself, but very real all the same. Jesus Christ comes to us in that part of
the globe, known today as the Holy Land, 2000 years ago with a new experience.
“No one has ever seen
God; the only Son, who is the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known.”
(John 01.18)
What John the
Evangelist describes, at the beginning of his Gospel, as the state of humanity
before the coming of Christ, still applies today to those who have not yet
truly met Him. And for John, the incarnation of the living Word, Jesus Christ,
is the beginning of a new era of experience of God. What is there so
particular, then, about the Christian meeting with God? What is so special
about it that forever escapes the grasp of the unbeliever?
For Christian
believers and contemplatives in Asia, this question is certainly primordial.
They cannot just simply tell their Hindu or Buddhist brothers and sisters, that
in all spiritual disciplines the experience of God is identical. They should be
sufficiently aware of their own experience to be able to discuss it without
losing sight of the fact that it is not exactly the same as that of others, and
yet there are great similarities in both the Bhagavad Gîtâ and the Gospels, the
first four books of the New Testament. It becomes easier to admit that each
spiritual experience of God has its own specific traits if in fact that is just
what it is, an “experience”.
1. The
Experience of God in Theology.
At a time when people are
looking for the closest contact with other religions as did Father Thomas
Merton, Roman Catholic priest and Cistercian monk of the strict observance
(1915-1968), in order to understand their experience, they run two risks. The
first is that of making out that all true religious experiences are identical;
the second, that there is no point of comparison between them.
It is always dangerous
to try and judge other people’s spiritual experience; for that, one needs, a
deep own experience. But we have to keep in mind a primordial fact: the close connection between religious belief and the
formulation of experience. Indeed, we might say there are relatively few
religious experiences, even deep ones that are not conditioned as soon as
expressed, and even in the living of them, by a doctrinal system.
Thus, it is quite
possible to imagine two believers or contemplatives enjoying the same objective
experience of God, and immediately translating it, even as it reaches
consciousness, in such different ways that it would be hard to believe they are
talking of the same thing. This is understandable, since, while the experience
itself takes place in the area of the inexpressible, on the conscious level it
is all the time being shaped by each one’s accumulated store of beliefs,
attitudes and words. What the Buddhist would call the rapture of his self when
it becomes aware of its unity with the Absolute, the Christian would describe
as a union of love with God, Who is also the Absolute.
So, when dealing with
the problem of a specific Christian experience of God, we have to reckon
carefully with the fundamental importance of World Faiths. My experience is not
only going to be fitted into a familiar framework, at least, one that
corresponds with my beliefs, but the things I believe are bound to condition my
very experience itself.
When I am suddenly
faced with an entirely new experience, when God breaks abruptly into my heart
in a totally fresh way, my mind pushes me to try and find out if this
apparently extraordinary experience fits in with the faith of my religion. The
only rule is the ruthless abandonment of everything which is in the way. “When
any man God perfectly desires to love, all things as well as inward as outward
that to God’s love are contrary and from His love to let, he studies to do
away.” (Richard Rolle,
“The Fire of Love”)
The concrete vision of
the glorified Jesus Christ has the true mystic quality of ineffability,
appearing to the self under a form of inexpressible beauty, illuminated with
that unearthly light which is so persistently reported as a feature of
transcendental experience. When St.
Teresa saw only the Hands of God, she was thrown into an ecstasy of adoration
by their shining loveliness. (Vida, cap.
Xxviii § 2)
“If I were to spend
many years in devising how to picture to myself anything so beautiful,” she
says of the imaginary vision of Christ, “I should never be able, nor even know
how, to do it; for it is beyond the scope of any possible imagination here
below: the whiteness and brilliancy alone are inconceivable.” (St. Teresa, op.cit.,
cap. §§ 7, 8.) In fact, she learnt how to understand and
express what had happened; and once certain of being on the right road she was
able to throw herself without hesitation into her experience.
One result of this way
of seeing or acting is that everyone normally receives and interprets his own
experience of God according to the spiritual theology of his own religion. In
fact, it is fairly seldom that such an experience is felt so strongly and with
objective clarity that a man is able to go against the doctrine he was brought
up on. However, one does come across instances like that of the Moslem, Al Hallaj, who was executed for professing doctrines based on
his spiritual experiences that were more Christian than Islamic.
This and many other
instances will prove that, though the experience is usually interpreted
according to the belief held, it is quite possible also for it to lead to the
discovery of truths that are in contradiction with commonly held orthodoxy.
2. The
Reality of the Experience of God.
In all the great
religions there have been men and women who claimed to have had experiences
with God or the Absolute. They describe them as a direct perception, a vision,
a touch, a union, and so on. Their testimony on this point converges. But, ask
the sceptics, is such an experience possible? If what we mean is a
psychological happening, then it cannot possible reach God, for evidently, God
in Himself is totally beyond. But there can be something deeper; a perception
or awakening to a reality both immanent and transcendent, or more simply,
something present in concrete reality yet reaching beyond it.
What makes it possible
for us to become conscious of the divine reality is the ontological fact that
we hold our existence from God. If he had thrown us out on our own, cutting off
all contact between Himself and us, we could never “meet” Him. But we exist by
the continual influx of His life. This current of being that flows from God to
us is the ontological way that leads us back to God when, so to speak, we go
up-stream to the source of life and love. If experience of God is possible for
man, it is also because our inmost nature is sculptured in the image of the one
who gives us being. The image, in knowing itself, becomes aware of God within
it.
An experience based
only on these facts would always be relatively poor in objective content
because, if you limit the image to itself, it can only
imagine, not understand, the One whose image it is. But true experience belongs
more to the order of encounter than of deduction. John the Evangelist tells us
that after seeing the empty tomb he believed. At first his faith was the
conclusion of quick reasoning. The experience of the resurrection was already
dawning. But the real experience only came in the face to face meeting with
Christ on that Easter evening in the Cenacle.
It is possible to hold
that Buddha experienced God but only in a purely negative sense, because he
rejected “God” from the world of thoughts. It seems he could never the Absolute
otherwise than as a pure intangible beyond, in a total emptiness of every human
concept. But if this experience of God in pure unknowing is imperfect, it is
none the less a very real one.
Christian experience goes
through much the same stages on the way to God as does the mystical experience
of other religions, but it seems that we should go a step further. Or rather,
God Himself makes it take one more step. However advanced the experience, where
God Himself bursts into the world of our own human experience. For that is
precisely what God did, when He came to us in His Son so that in Him we might
directly meet His divinity.
When John the
Evangelist tells us: “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the
bosom of the Father, he has made him known.” (John 01.18), he is showing us the
reality of an “objective” knowledge based on the testimony of the One who knows
who God is, because He is Himself God. By accepting this “word” which tells me
God, I pass from the subjectivity of my experimental knowledge to lean on the
experience of the One who reveals to me what He is. Here we have, one of the
characteristics of the Christian experience. By faith in the One who reveals
God, this experience takes on the absolute objectivity of God Himself.
(To be continued from October 2002 onwards)