Experience God
Blogged by James Preece on 5th July 2012
Fr Ray Blake nails it...
I suppose what talking about is religious experience. Since the Council of Trent we have tended to be a little suspicious of it, since Vatican II we have become more suspicious of it, regarding it as pietistic or even superstitious. Ladies who do courses on Liturgy and priests who re-order churches despise it! It is essentially about a "feeling" a "sense", New Agers might call it "energy" or find some other word to define such as "otherness", Catholics might describe it as "an encounter with the Holy". It is essentially about "experience" beyond words, beyond explanation. Indeed the there seems to be a diminishing of the "experience" if it is over explained or rationalised because it is essentially something that happens deep in the soul and is beyond words.
I am convinced that we need to find ways to allow people to "experience" God: teaching prayer, sharing ritual gestures, teaching reverence, teaching silence and sense of awe, all these help to give a "vocabulary" that enable people come to and share in this experience. It is unfortunate that so much has been done to undermine, negate and cheapen this experience in recent years.
I would go so far as to suggest the catastrophic failure in Catholic education has been that rather than teaching people to "know" in the sense of experiencing God we have given people knowledge about him. God desires to "be known" and after knowing him we then have a need to understand him. Having first received the experience of faith we then, and only then, want to understand it: faith seeks understanding. To understand without having the experience faith seems disastrous and probably leads to atheism.
I would suggest that teaching a child to say prayers, to genuflect, to kneel, to bow, to hold their hands together in prayer, to be silent and whisper in Church, how to reverently make the sign of the Cross, to light candles, to bring flowers to a statue, to wear a miraculous medal, to use a Rosary, to put a crucifix and holy pictures in his room, to use Holy Water, to make sacrifices and fulfil promises to God, to keep the Commandments as best he can and later to receive Holy Communion with as much reverence as possible are all things that should precede the giving of religious knowledge in any academic sense because these things all provoke the question: "Why?". Doctrine and dogma are ways of understanding what we actually intuit which is the first of God's gifts. In the Gospels people wanted simply to see Jesus or be in his Presence before they came to know him and his teaching, the experience of Him led to the desire
[link]
Most people find it difficult to experience God in books, courses, seminars or intensive study. Relationships are not an intellectual exercise.
I know my children because I have spent years living with them, I doubt I would know them quite so well had I read books on parenting instead. I have no idea how many bones my daughter has in her body, or precisely what chemical processes are going on inside her liver, but I love her anyway.
This is not to say that time studying spiritual things is wasted, but rather to say that God is not a theory or an idea but three persons who can be known far better through relationship than academic study.
We relate to God through the physical signs and symbols of spiritual reality. We experience God in the beautiful (which is why ugly churches are such a crime) and we respond to Him when we kneel, when we sing, bring flowers, light a candle...
This is why the Church needs less study days and more pilgrimages. It's also why you should consider driving for three hours on Saturday to venerate the Heart of the Cure of Ars in Shrewsbury Cathedral.
I'm pretty sure that would be a better use of your time than reading blogs.
Reader Comments
+6
Ben Trovato said...
This reminded me of one of C S Lewis' reflections: Meditation in a Toolshed, which starts like this:
This difference - between 'looking at' something and 'looking along' it - is worth reflecting on. Which is the true experience? Too frequently the unspoken assumption (not least in education) is that 'looking at' is the objective, scientific way to understand something; whereas the experience of 'looking along' is subjective.
That is clearly a nonsense: the professor who defines love as chemical quickenings in the brain knows little of love, I maintain. Likewise, the study of religion 'from the outside' reveals little about God and our experience of Him.
The rest of Lewis' essay is worth reading, of course, and may be found online here: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ivcfgf/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/C-S-Lewis-meditation-in-a-toolshed.pdf
+
+1
Mark Dobson said...
Whereas you’ve got me thinking about music in the liturgy... I may have to blog about it now; I find the whole musical situation in the Catholic Church in England and Italy rather strange.
+
Scout said...
Bishop Davies is reported to have echoed St. John Vianney's assertion that "without priests we would not have the Lord". I found that interesting...what do you guys make of it?
See: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2012/07/05/bishop-davies-hails-priesthood-at-mass-welcoming-saints-heart/
+
Mark Dobson said...
From John 6:
Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
...
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven.
So, yes, basically, especially for us Gentiles. Christ gives us himself through the priesthood.
+
+7
ORA PRO NOBIS said...
This is going to look like a shameless plug for my site, but for the record it is not. I have a DIY letter of complaint letter to parish councils correctly quoting Vatican II on my site which starts to deal with the issues that Fr. Ray does indeed 'nail'.
Is James' post not actually getting to the crux of why bloggers complain about liberals? We know that liberals have done something to injure the Church but we are not very good at saying why we are right and they are wrong. It is time to start changing this.
The problem after Vatican II was that liberal clergy and laity within the Catholic Church embraced this document but instead of adhering to what it set out to do they manipulated the meaning for their own ends to 'push' their own dissenting agendas so that true Catholic teaching was disposed of at the expense of political correctness. They also stripped many Churches (including my own) of original/authentic Catholic spirituality, imagery, incense and music. All these aspects where there to draw you and others towards God i.e. they were there to draw all the human senses towards God. With a 94% UK Catholic lapsation rate it can only be concluded that the liberals and their dissent failed the Body of Christ catastrophically. So the next time you see a Catholic complaining about the fact that there is no longer kneeling for communion or that there is no incense, (the list goes on) it needs to be remembered that the rules that originally put this Catholic iconography in place was not Pharisaical in nature but to help us build a relationship with God. This is the categorical difference between the rules of the Pharisees (which promoted outward signs) and the rules of the Catholic Church which are there to encourage and instil inward conversion. I BELIEVE THAT THIS IS THE CRUX OF ALL OUR ARGUMENTS THAT WE ARE FAILING TO GET ACROSS TO OTHERS & IT IS TIME TO CHANGE THIS!!!!!!
So when the dissenting liberal 'Spirit of Vatican II' clergy and laity misinterpreted the rules, decided to go against these rules, and also made other Catholics veer away from true Catholicism what they were actually doing was drawing people away from God.
James is 100% correct when he states "We relate to God through the physical signs and symbols of spiritual reality. We experience God in the beautiful (which is why ugly churches are such a crime) and we respond to Him when we kneel, when we sing, bring flowers, light a candle..."
This is the message that we now have to give to the liberals of the Church who have done their very best to ruin the experience of God for others. However, when we do it we have to be well armed with the facts so that they have no where to hide.
That's where my letter comes in handy - because it states some of those facts.
+
+1
Michael said...
I like this - it's the right explanation but I feel it's not totally complete.
The prayers and devotions of the Church are essential to Her life but they're not enough in themselves; we need to meet the Saints to know Christ Himself.
Poverty, chastity and obedience are not just for the monastics; we need them in our lives whatever state we find ourselves in; we need devotion to Christ "in our flesh" all week, as it were. That is how we see Christ.
+