When I blogged on Rowan’s suggestion, I was not sure what would happen.  I am delighted.  I’ve learned a lot.  (Thanks, Rowan!)  

I was struck in particular with one comment made in a response to my last post, a comment that struck me as potentially very illuminating. xiananarchist suggested that Christianity for many Christians was fundamentally experientially based, and that identifying it with a particular religious world view was missing something important.

I thought back to why I am a Wiccan.  It is due to an encounter with the(a?) Wiccan Goddess at a Midsummer Sabbat many years ago.  I had never been to anything Wiccan before, did not have a particularly receptive attitude to it, and was bowled over.  “Here’s a religion that asks their God to come, and She does!”  I thought.

I never read a Pagan document or talked with a Pagan that would have ‘converted’ me into being one.  But She did.  In a flash.  I joked now that just like Konrad Lorenz’s little ducks, the first deity I encountered, I bonded to.  

Because I never had any significant spiritual/religious experience in a Christian Church, I assumed that others did not as well, other than perhaps a sense of peace, that I have experienced there.  Perhaps Pentecostals experienced eruptions of ‘energy.’  I have also experienced that, but in Pagan rituals, not Christian ones.  But in my experience, this ‘energy’ did not carry with it any qualities of limitless love and compassion, beauty, and personal awareness.  Good stuff for sure, but not life changing in the same way.  And then there is that long tradition of Christian writings seeking to prove that God exists.  Why seek to prove it unless you have not experienced it?

xiananarchist suggests that perhaps many Christians base their belief on personal spiritual experiences that might be different from ours.  But how different, I wonder?  So much of what we experience we interpret by the context in which we experience it.  A Christian experience of Jesus or God might be similar in vital ways to mine with the Goddess.  Certainly I have had a similar encounter in terms of a sense of unconditional love in a Buddhist context. But then again, it might be quite different.

This raises all sorts of interesting issues.  Perhaps all religions are like training wheels on a kid’s bike, to help us get our balance.  Lucky is the person whose wheels fit his or her bike, as mine did. When we learn to ride we can ride without the wheels.

Perhaps earth is a garden of spiritualities, where the sacred cultivates many different forms of spiritual expression.  We are in a sense seeds that Spirit waters and nurtures into a complex sacred ecosystem.

Perhaps theologies are only useful within a community of practice, and only if subordinated to the practice.  (I’ve been reading Joyce and River Higgenbotham’s Christopaganism,   and while I personally dislike the title, I found the book in many ways valuable.  For me, the authors’ most interesting part was their accounts of different Christopagans’ experiences. 

As theologies, Western Christianity as usually conceived and Paganism as usually conceived are simply antithetical.  But the theology was unimportant for the people interviewed, who included Christian ministers, and involved a lot of picking and choosing o their part.  So what?  I finally decided.  Experience trumps theory on these issues, at least so long as you use good sense.

Finally, perhaps if we are to think clearly about religions, their similarities and differences, we need to make three distinctions:

1. What happens at the level of individual experience.  This is primary in my view.

2.  How does the religious community of practice make sense of these experiences?  There are lots and lots of such communities even within a single religious tradition.  I suspect a community in this sense is whoever says they are a part of it and is accepted by the others. Could be a coven or a congregation.

3. How do religious organizations treat these experiences and their interpretation?  This is the level where Ananta Androscoggin’s comments seem to me to fall.

It may be that a religious practice may have wonderful experiences, be personally transformative to those who have them, and botch the latter two, especially the third.

If I might just add one additional idea, I think we Pagans are particularly well placed to honor a wide variety of spiritual experiences, from the mystical nondual and monist to deities of infinite love and compassion, to deities and spirits for which that is not a central characteristic, to the subtle energies and forces that we so often encounter. Similarly, our persoal experiences go from feeling energy, trance, incorporation of deity, adoration, and probably everything else.  We are open to the whole spectrum of spirit and experience, generally have a tolerant community regarding individual interpretation, and thank the Gods, have no big organization with any authority over us.

I wonder whether accounts of personal encounters might be a productive way to engage not only in interfaith dialogue, but also in trying to map out a framework that honors different seemingly very different spiritual paths?  (I am a theorist to my bones, I can’t help it.)