In the Zhuangzi, how
can Zhuangzi possibly know that the fish are happy? To know what it is like to
be a bat, a person must be a bat. This is not to say that we disagree with
bats. Sonar represents the “sheer otherness” of a bat. In Christianity, how
does eternal joy and bliss differ from happiness? Happiness is not a theological
concept. There are different kinds of experience, and it follows that they have
different kinds of truth-claims. To treat every such claim as the same kind of
thing is premised on conflating domains of human experience that are
qualitatively different. I contend that the domain of religion is both distinct
and unique. Our ordinary ways of describing the world and even ourselves are
not well-suited to our endeavors in the domain of religion.
Pseudo-Dionysius, a Christian
theologian, made the point that God goes beyond—is sourced, as it were—inherently
beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. According to
Montaigne, humans cannot provide truly convincing arguments on any topic, especially
theology. “Human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially” in theology. Augustine
stressed that revelation must make it way to us as though sunshine making its
way through a smoked, stain-glass church window. Hume argues in The Natural
History of Religion that the human mind has a great deal of difficulty grasping
the notion of divine simplicity for long, and so the mind inevitably starts
hanging artifacts on pure divinity that, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, are
human, all too human. God is angry. God is pleased. God is benevolent. God is
just. God even has a human form. God has a mother.
I submit that what any of us
think we know about what God does and even what divinity is goes beyond what
creatures can possibly know. That faith is premised on belief rather than
knowledge is all too often forgotten as claims about God are treated as if they
were facts of reason. Religion within the limits of reason turns out to be
human, all too human. So too, efforts to reduce religion to psychology, and
emotional needs in particular, miss the qualitatively different nature of
religion as transcendent in reference to a wholly other. All too often,
the legitimate instinctual yearning to transcend beyond the limits of human
cognition, perception, and sensibility becomes conflated with knowledge of
divine attributes.
In terms of liturgical
worship, all too often services can be consumed by speeches by religious
functionaries who know so much about God at the expense of time spent by a
congregation in transcendence as experiential yearning of the wholly
other. This is not to say that it is metaphysical or ontological; not even
presence in a religious sense need be conflated with those fields of
philosophy. Rather, the yearning itself, as in for example being prefaced by a
ritualized ingestion of the divine, goes beyond knowledge and description.
Worship, in other words, is inherently experiential, rather than analytical and
descriptive. Focusing on a sermon, or even on a ritualized way of getting to an
experience of wholly-other-directed transcendent yearning, misses the point of why
people gather to worship. All too often, religious services are programmed to a
stultifying death by humans who are too interested to leave their imprint.
Stepping out of the way to let the divine be present in people’s distinctly
religious experience does not come naturally to programmers.
This is not to say that ritual and preaching cannot play a useful role as prep for religious experience; rather, the problem lies in confounding the means with the ensuing experience that can be facilitated by them. Ritual and preaching in the context of sacred space and time, set apart from ordinary life even by stained-glass windows, have great value as means, which should know when to step out of the way and even point to what comes next as more important. In the ritual of the Christian Eucharist, for example, priests could encourage congregants to stay in the pews after receiving Communion because the point of the ritual is arguably merely to prepare for the interior yearning experience of the divine once ingested. This inward experience, back in the pews, rather than the consecration, is the high point of the Eucharistic liturgy. To treat the high point as a short time to reflect while the “dishes” on the “table” are washed demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding on the role of ritual in terms of worship experience that goes beyond the limits of symbol and ritual.
