Faith Matters 12: The Experience of the Sacred
For the Gardner News, Saturday, October 14, 2006
Have you ever found yourself profoundly moved by an experience in worship, or even in the natural world, only to realize that someone sitting right next to you has had a totally different response? When it comes to spirituality, our fundamental connection to the sacred in our lives, we are not all the same. Although all humans seem to be “hard-wired” for spirituality, we experience it in different ways.
For centuries our tradition has recognized considerable variety in how individuals experience God’s presence and how they pray to God. One fundamental difference is between those who experience the sacred primarily through images and symbols, and those for whom the experience of the holy lies beyond images, beyond symbols, beyond words. Kataphatic spirituality recognizes and embraces symbols and images as vehicles for bringing us closer to God. Many of our churches are full of images—paintings, statues and stained-glass windows that help us form interior images of God. At their best, timeless Greek icons, the glorious paintings in the Sistine Chapel, or figures of the Madonna and Child are images that help us in our prayer.
Likewise, our liturgy and our prayers are often full of word-pictures and metaphors of God that help us pray. Hebrew and Christian scripture are rich with word-pictures of God, each poetically capturing some aspect of the mystery of our creator and our relationship to the One who made us and nurtures us and loves us. We speak of God as our shepherd, our king, our rock, a mother eagle, a lamb, or bread. Scripture talks of God’s face, God’s hand, God’s back. The images are important to our understanding and our prayer, allowing us to focus and deepen our relationship with God and to appreciate the special qualities of that relationship. But all images are ultimately only that, pictures seen as if we were looking through a hazy mirror.
From earliest times the church has also recognized those who experience God primarily in the wordless mystery of apophatic spirituality, “beyond” words and symbols. Sometimes these individuals are called mystics. For them, the sacred is revealed, or more accurately, hinted at, in clear glass windows streaming with sunlight, or the deep movement of the ocean or the dark of the night sky. Here the sunlight and ocean and sky are not images of God, but simply a springboard for the experience of that which is beyond images and symbols. For these individuals, the true experience of God only comes after all the images and words have been exhausted or left behind.
There are ancient traditions of men and women going to the desert or the ocean so that they can experience God more clearly in the silence and emptiness. Their prayer may not be addressed to God by any specific name or image. They are more likely to simply open themselves to God as the reality within whom we live and move and have our being. They may bask wordlessly in God’s presence or feel most close to God in the emptiness beyond all that is seen and unseen.
Neither way of experiencing God is better, deeper or loftier than the other; they are simply different. Over the course of a lifetime, many people with a decided tendency towards one or the other spiritual style will find that their own prayer and experience of God may embrace both. Ultimately though, each way of experiencing and relating to the sacred calls us to stand in humility before what it ultimately a mystery, a mystery only partially and always incompletely revealed to us, the reality we call God.