The Lord is here; his kingdom has come. (Part 3)

The Lord is here; his kingdom has come

Part 3: Our experience of the sacred

Crucial aspects of being human show us to be intrinsically religious. We just do have the ability to be aware of the sacred. We have a deep desire to make contact with the sacred – to feel that, within this turbulent, transient life, in which suffering can be so severe, and our lives so mundane and blighted by poverty and powerlessness, and by our own inadequacies and mistakes, to feel that we can make contact with something that is utterly precious, pure and good. We form the word, “holy” to try and express the intense otherness of this experience – so completely different to everything else that we experience – including other experiences that we readily call good and beneficial. We recognise the sacred when we experience it – and we do experience it. I suspect that just about everyone does at some point in their life, though a committed secular life will constrict the opportunities for such experiences, and may well induce the person to not understand or value the experience when it does happen, but instead to simply “put it to one side”, not to be thought about lest it prove too troubling to their world view. In contrast, those who have committed to a religious way of life are open to the sacred; they consciously seek opportunities when they might encounter God; and when they do, they hold the experience as supremely precious, and they incorporate it into the very heart of their lives.

We simply do have the capacity to experience the transcendent. This, and all terms that we use, can be examined in more detail to clarify what we mean, but we just do have the ability to have experiences which seem to transcend all our normal experiences and to give us a sense of unity with the absolute and eternal, an experience of pure bliss, where, caught up in what strikes us as the ultimate experience of peace and joy, we feel that if we died in that moment we would die content for we have experienced all the fullness of what life can offer, and that experience, which we often describe as “communion with the divine” is worth more than all the rest of life put together. It is completion.

There is no doubt that this experience exists. I am happy to debate just what it is. I consider that it is best explained as making contact with God, but if someone insists on excluding God as an impossibility, then it would need to be explained as a faculty of the human mind. Either way, it is astonishing that secular society regards this experience as not worth bothering about. After all, freedom from a religious world view leaves you free to do so many other interesting and enjoyable things. Why spend Sunday in worship when you can spend it shopping?