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Experiments in Personal Religion: Study I

Religious Experience through the Outer World of Nature
H. N. Wieman

The Method of Religious Experience

In this study we want to do two things. We want to learn how to prepare for religious experience and profit by it, and we want to pool our experiences so that we can learn from one another. The art of how to prepare for religious experience and profit by it is one of the great practical arts of human living. Like every other art it must be developed. The only way to develop any art is for people to tell one another what they have learned through their experiences and efforts. Cannot we all, who have a share in this course, co operate in the enterprise of improving the art of entering into and profiting by the religious experience? Wonderful possibilities for increasing joy and mastery in living are attainable through proper use of religious experience. Indeed, its proper use is the master art in life, for through it all the other arts of living can be improved.

We crudely talk about air and water and food and social group as the factors upon which we must depend for our welfare and improvement. But these are mere fragments in that vast, mysterious, mighty Working which operates in us and upon us and around us throughout all nature. In religious experience there is some conscious awareness of this mighty and blessed Working. When we come into the presence of some great manifestation of nature we may suddenly become aware of this all-sustaining Working. We may feel ourselves borne up by it, or see it gazing up at us in the face of a flower, or towering over us in the mountains, or feel it encompassing us with the greenery of the wood.

But this sense of the mighty Working does not always come to us in the presence of nature. There may be some to whom it never comes. Others it may visit very rarely.

Here we are face to face with a subtle and loathsome temptation. It is the temptation to make ourselves think that we have this exalted experience when we do not have it. Our minds run something like this: It is the proper thing to have this experience in the presence of nature. Poets and prophets and many great souls have had it. I guess I can too. Then we go through all the motions of having the experience and really make ourselves think that we have it.

Can, then, one cultivate this experience? No, not directly. But one can prepare himself for it. One may put himself in the way of having it. It is like love. One cannot make himself love his brother. But the great contagion is likely to infect him if he is receptive to it and puts himself in situations where it is likely to befall him. So religious experience must come of itself, often quite unexpectedly; but one can conduct his life in such a way that it is likely to befall him. That is part of what we mean by the art of preparing for religious experience.
But when the experience comes it may have no value save to provide the luxury of a pleasant or stirring emotion. To have conscious awareness of this all-sustaining Working does not bring one any closer to it, for one is always as close to it as he can get. There are some natures who can enter frequently and deeply into genuine and vivid awareness of God and yet live weak, futile, slovenly lives. To have conscious experience of God does not necessarily help a man at all. To conduct ourselves in such a way that religious experience not only may befall us but that it may have beneficial results for us is the whole of what we mean by the art of preparing for religious experience and profiting by it.

Great living depends on making proper adaptation to that Working upon which all life is dependent. If conscious experience of that Working helps one to make better adaptation to it, his life will be better. But merely to have a vivid and exalted consciousness of that Working will not help him if the experience does not enable him to make better adaptation. On the other hand, a man who does adapt himself to the working of God, even though he may have no conscious experience of God, will live a great life. Through the teaching of others, and through results of careful experimentation, a man can learn how to adapt to many things of which he has never had any conscious experience. This applies to the working of God as well as to other matters. But religious experience may be of great help to a man in making better adaptation to that Working upon which human life is dependent for its greatest goods. In fact, this is the only enduring and practical value religious experience can have. If it does not do this its value is purely sentimental. It is quite easy to be unduly sentimental and rapturous about religious experience for its own sake.

There are, then, two very urgent and very practical questions pertaining to religious experience: (i) how to put one's self in the way of having the experience; (2) how to use the experience in such a way as to attain better adaptation to the working of God as he operates throughout space and time. Let us reduce these two questions to one: how to prepare for religious experience in such a way that it will bring us into better adjustment to God.

We answer this question under four points.

1. One must face the chief difficulties and perplexities of his life and wrestle with them. He must take life seriously. He must draw on his every resource of physical endurance and mental agility and nervous energy and dogged determination to master circumstance and make human life more satisfactory for himself and others. This strain and burden-bearing, this taking of life seriously, is necessary preparation for profitable religious experience. The frivolous and superficial generally do not have great religious experiences. Some of them, however, do; but when they do, their experience is only the luxury of a sweet and exalted emotion such as we described above.

2. But earnest wrestling with the serious problems of life is only preparation for profitable religious experience. Such wrestling does not ordinarily in itself yield the experience. Rather the experience is likely to come when one stops the fight for a breathing spell and a short period of relaxation. One goes off, let us say, where he can be alone with nature, in a scene quite different from that in which he has been trying to solve his difficult problems.

This, then, is the second requirement for entering into a profitable religious experience. One must leave the struggle of life, occasionally, for a little spiritual relaxation. In this month's study we suggest turning to nature. Further suggestions for the use of this time of relaxation will be made in later lessons. In this period of relaxation, if rightly conducted, the religious experience is most likely to come.

3. The experience that comes in the interval of relaxation should provide some insight toward the solution of the problems which have been engaging one's attention in the struggle of living. Here we have the chief function of religious experience. It is an experience through which discoveries are made concerning how to live more effectively and more abundantly; how to achieve mastery over difficulties and mount to higher levels; in a word, how to live in better adaptation to the working of God. Religious experience should be the moment of profound insight and new adjustment to the total environment. Great conversions occur in such experiences. All the famous conversions, from Paul's down, have occurred through such experiences. A conversion is simply the discovery and adoption of some new way of living in better adaptation to the Working which is God. But conversion is not the only form of moral and spiritual discovery and initiation that may occur through religious experience. After "conversion" one may make further discoveries. Often the new insight is of such a nature that you cannot word it. You simply have found out how to live with peace and power you never had before.

4. The fourth requirement is that this new way of living which has come to one in the religious experience must be carefully, observantly, and patiently tested by living it. A new way of living is not necessarily successful at the very start. Generally it is not. And often its success is not apparent to any save those of deepest insight. But one must be teachable in the conduct of his new way of life. He must modify and adapt and reshape it to fit the conditions with which he has to deal. No one is worse than the hair-brained fanatic who will not learn from the results of trial and error, but insists that his way is unalterably right because he got it from God.

It is even possible that one's new way of life, discovered through religious experience, may be a mistake. The human mind is always fallible, and it does not cease to be human even when it undergoes religious experience. He who must have an iron-clad guaranty that he will make no mistakes can have no share in great living whether through religious experience or otherwise. But the great insights, the great transformation of personality and human history, have been initiated in such experiences.

The whole value of religious experience, we repeat, aside from the luxury of emotion, is that through it we discover how better to adapt our human lives to the Working upon which we are dependent for the greatest good. It should enable us to make better adjustment to God.

Two final points must be clear. The experience need not be highly emotional. The important thing is the insight that is attained concerning how better to live with God. There may or may not be a thrill and sense of exaltation. Secondly, the insight may not be something that will revolutionize human history. Generally it is not. It may be a discovery of how better to deal with your child; or how ro win the good will of your neighbor; or how to make better use of your time; or how to get over some nagging perplexity which is important to you personally, although it may never be known to any other.

And we must remember that anything which truly and in the long run benefits human life is, ultimately, a better adaptation to the vast and mighty Working which lifts us to the highest when we find how to yield ourselves to its lifting power.

Keeping in mind, therefore, the nature of religious experience, the possibility of placing one's self in the way of it and the resultant effect upon the art of practical living, can we, after our observations of the experience of historical characters, turn our eyes upon our own immediate environment, and learn to recognize the results of religious experience in others, and to recall some data regarding our own religious experience.

It will be a good plan to keep a notebook with this course, jotting down observations, memories and new experiences which seem to you to have some bearing upon the question, this month especially observing the extent to which contact with the world of external nature may foster and suggest a religious experience, always distinguishing those experiences which will stand the test of the points raised in this portion of our study. Students of the course are invited in addition to answering the review questions to report sach observations and experiences. On the following page will be found an outline of work for those who desire to have criticism by correspondence.