“Lord, you are Lord and I want to live with you”.
Part 5: It’s what we choose to do with our experiences of God that counts
I think most people have some incidents in their lives that religious people classify as a religious experience. However, for many people these events are very rare, and so very out of the ordinary, that they are extremely difficult to make sense of. One person might say, “Wow! That was weird! Weird and wonderful, but what on earth was it?”. They frankly have no idea, because it is completely unlike anything else they have experienced. They may therefore simply “park” the idea in a corner of their mind, as a strange, wonderful, inexplicable experience, and get on with their lives. It could be many years until they have another experience that they would class as being in the same category. They make the connection, but no pattern is emerging and so they think, “There’s another one of those strange experiences”. So they remain agnostic about them, and are fundamentally unmoved in the course of their life by them.
Another person has a similar experience, but they may be committed to atheism. Therefore, they dismiss the possibility that this could be anything to do with God and give themselves an alternative explanation. Perhaps they may tell friends that they were out walking, feeling great at the start of their holiday, when they came to the top of a hill and saw a wonderful sunset which gave them the most extravagant feeling of elation that they’ve ever had. It’s a treasured moment, but not one that they have to do anything about.
A third person has a similar experience. Perhaps they have previously heard about God, and perhaps inclined favourably towards the idea of his existence and now they put two and two together and realise that this is an encounter with God, just as they had been told could happen. Or perhaps it comes out of the blue, and the person just intuitively knows – sorry, makes the internal judgement – that this must be what it means to encounter God. So, in that respect, it becomes a conversion experience.
The interesting thing about these three people is that they are having identical experiences, but the effect on their lives is entirely dependent on the personal value judgement that they make about the worth of the experience. Now the worth of the experience does depend on the status given to the experience – the way it is understood. The first person classified it as “unknown” the second as “a lovely, natural experience”, the third as “a meeting with God”. However, this judgement about how the experience is understood has a judgement about its worth integrated into it.
See how none of the individual’s judgements can be classified as justified by proven facts. The “facts” such as they are (strictly speaking there are no facts because internal feelings cannot be verified by observers) are things like feelings of elation or meaning or love, which the individual knows to be true within themselves, even though they are not verifiable. The essential part of the process is what the individual chooses to do with these feelings.
Spiritual Devotion 