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Saintly persons who are truly contemplatives in action and find God in all things let their lives become a constant religious experience.

They live in the presence of God. They see all created reality for what, with varying degrees of intensity, it all truly symbolizes and reveals:

the divine reality. For those whose faith is magnificently alive, every moment is or can be a sign and sacrament of God’s presence.

The Gospels record for us the final years of one whose life shows itself to have been a constant religious experience. From what we can glimpse of his ‘interior’ existence, Jesus lived in the presence of the God whom he called ‘Abba’ (Father dear), completely given over to the service of the divine kingdom that was breaking into the world.¹⁷ How frequent are religious experiences for rank and file believers?

Or for those who are not (yet) believers but cling to the hope that one day things will open up and they will spot the pattern of it all? I could

16 See C. F. Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1989); J. L. Gellman, ‘Mysticism and Religious Experience’, in W. J. Wainwright (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 138–67: P. Gerlitz et al., ‘Mystik’, TRE xxiii.

533–92; K. Hoheisel and H.-G. Heimbrock, ‘Religionspsychologie’, ibid. xxix.

1–19. Mystical experiences of union with God, coming as ‘flashes’ during prayer or in the ordinary activities of daily life, awaken a new awareness of God.

17 See G. O’Collins, Jesus: A Portrait (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2008), 16–37.

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not claim to possess full and detailed answers to these questions. But what believers testify about their experiences at common worship, in personal prayer, and in the ‘ordinary’ occasions of life suggests some degree of frequency in their consciously explicit experience of God.

Add too the kind of data collected by Sir Alister Hardy and his collaborators in the Religious Experience Research Unit (see Chapter 2above) from a wide range of ‘ordinary’ people. Many situations, from painful and even tragic events through to ‘moments of glad grace’ (W. B. Yeats, ‘When you are old’) in personal relationships, can trigger a vivid sense of God’s loving presence.

Explicitly religious experiences have often been named in spatial terms as occurring in ‘boundary situations’ (Karl Jaspers), as being

‘limit experiences’ (David Tracy) or ‘peak experiences’ (Abraham Maslow), or as associated with ‘the ground of being and meaning’

(Paul Tillich). This spatial language allows us to glimpse two inseparable aspects of religious experience. (a) It puts us in con-scious touch with the totality of things, that is to say, with God as the ground of everything and the all-determining reality. (b) In experiencing God, we also know that it is we who know God. We experience ourselves in our radical dependence and contingency.

We meet God not only in our profound need but also with a fundamental trust that, at its heart, the world holds together and our existence finally has its worth. Explicitly religious experience means, then, co-experiencing God and ourselves. I cannot imagine a religious experience in which we would encounter God without any sense whatsoever of ourselves. Here, as elsewhere, the principle enunciated in point (4) above holds good. All experience necessar-ily exposes the subject as well as the object. The Old Testament narratives of prophetic experiences repeatedly display the two poles. The scenario of Isaiah’s vision of the divine throne room, for instance, displays both ‘the Lord sitting on a throne’ and also the prophet’s sense of being ‘a man of unclean lips’ (Isa. 6: 1–13).

On the occasion of a great catch of fish, Peter experiences Jesus as

‘Lord’ and himself as a ‘sinful man’ (Luke 5: 1–11).

Besides reflecting on the frequency and nature of religious experi-ence, let me add a word about its very possibility. Here I wish to align myself with those like Karl Rahner, who expound the basic dynamism of the human spirit as creating the conditions for the possibility of religious experience. We can explicitly experience God because every t h e h u m a n c o n d i t i o n j 53

human experience reveals its openness to the infinite.¹⁸ When we consciously experience God, what was hitherto dim and implicit becomes illuminated and explicit. We are able to encounter God because all human experiences are already primordially religious. In any experience whatsoever we experience at least minimally ourselves and God.

In recent times and earlier, various authors have explored the dynamism of the human spirit, interpreting its openness to the infinite in terms of our intellect and will.¹⁹ One might put new heart into this approach by altering the terms and highlighting our drive toward the fullness of life, meaning/truth, and love. Spontan-eously we seek to escape from death, absurdity, and isolation. We long to live, to see the basic meaning and truth of things, and to love and be loved.²⁰

We may misinterpret our partial and provisional experiences of life, meaning, and love (see point (7) above). We may dismiss as merely ‘negative’ those experiences of death, absurdity, and isolation which will eventually turn out to be quite the opposite (see points (8) and (12) above). But our primordial drive toward life, meaning, and love will never disappear. The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11–

32) can be interpreted in this threefold way. The young runaway faces death by starvation, experiences the absurdity of his situation, and finds himself abandoned by his good-time ‘friends’. His follies have obscured his vision of where life, meaning, and love are truly to be found. In deciding to return home, he goes back to where he will once again experience those three realities.

18 See Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 19–23, 31–5, 51–71. W. Pannen-berg concurs: ‘we experience simultaneously the Infinite [upper case] that lies within finite things and the finite that is its manifestation’; ‘the confused intuition of the Infinite, which lies, prethematically, at the basis of all human consciousness, is already in truth a mode of the presence of God’ (Metaphysics and the Idea of God, trans. P. Clayton (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990), 25, 29).

19 See e.g. Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, 104–6.

20 See the transcendental therapy of Karlfried Graf Du¨rckheim (1896–1988), who studied situations in which human beings felt threatened by death in its various forms, became overwhelmed by a sense of injustice and meaningless absurdity, and were abandoned, cruelly treated, and hated. Then they could be given life, experience a deeper order and meaning in things, and know themselves to be the object of generous love. These experiences made people long even more for some experience of life, meaning, and love that would change everything.

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The story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24: 15–35) also suggests how religious experiences, especially any profound ones, yield life, meaning, and love. The disciples ‘know’ Jesus in ‘the breaking of the bread’. His scripture lesson has illuminated the sense of what they had been through and had taken to be a meaningless, deadly tragedy.

His words, actions, and presence set their hearts ‘burning’ within them.

The quest for life, meaning, and love constitutes the innate drive of all human beings. This quest has its centre and climax in our primordial search for God as the fullness of life, meaning, and love. It is a process that achieves its definitive consummation in the world to come. Without intending to say all that, Luke in fact illustrates our triple quest through the magnificent Emmaus story, which sooner or later gives us the ‘I was there’ feeling.

With some account in place of what human experience and, in particular, explicitly religious experience entails, we can turn now to the heart of fundamental theology: the divine self-revelation as experienced and interpreted in the biblical record of the Old and New Testament.²¹

21 As a Christian I use the terminology of Old Testament and New Testament.

Here ‘old’ is understood as good and does not imply any ‘supersessionism’, or the view that the New Testament has rendered obsolete, replaced, and so ‘superseded’

the Old Testament.

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