Experience of the Holy

Chris Jimmerson

February 20, 2011

You may listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

Sermon

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously asked, “Why should not we enjoy an original relation with the universe?”

Last year, when we were in the process of discerning that wonderful mission statement, along with our values and ends, our facilitators had us participate in an exercise they called the “Experience of the Holy”. They put us in pairs and asked that each of us in the pair tell the other of a time when we had experienced the holy.

Here is how they described such experiences and encouraged us to recall them:

“I invite you to reflect on an experience of the Holy in your life — A time when you felt connected to something larger than yourself, a time when you felt your heart and mind expand.”

As a member of your Board of Trustees, I was fortunate not only to get to participate in this exercise myself but to be asked to observe as other pairs described to one another their experiences of the holy.

I remember that the irony in a bunch of non-theistic humanists sitting in a church talking about holy experiences was not lost on me.

On the other hand, I do not remember anyone saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I have never had such an experience.”

But mostly, I remember how powerful and moving it was.

The individual stories of what prompted peoples’ experience of the holy varied widely. Some people spoke of it happening right here in the church, when the actions of our community evoked something transformative within them.

Some of the women spoke of giving birth. Other people spoke of quiet times surrounded by the beauty of nature. Some spoke of being moved into the experience through listening to music, viewing a wonderful piece of art, watching an exhilarating moment of live theatre. Still others told of experiencing the holy during the simple or the seemingly mundane – just catching the beauty of patterns of sunlight streaming through the kitchen blinds. One war veteran told of holding a dying buddy in their arms, of being the last person who would hold and comfort their friend.

The stories were beautiful and evoked a wide range of events from the solitary to occurrences of being a part of something terrific in a large group. The descriptions of the experience of the holy though, were remarkably alike, and people expressed that they were struggling to convey their experience because normal, everyday words and emotions were inadequate.

This is how some of your fellow church members struggled to describe their experience of the holy:

“I was enveloped by mystery, awe and wonder.”

Another person said, “I felt suddenly at peace with myself and with everything – connected to something larger.”

Another said, “It was hyper-realistic, being truly present and in the present, receptive to greater wisdom than can be known in words.”

Someone else put it as “timeless, transcendent, a sense of unity and compassion with and for, well, everything.”

We described these experiences as deeply meaningful, profoundly moving and powerfully motivating, sometimes life altering.

Reverend Dr. William F. Schulz, the most recent self-described humanist to serve as President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations called this the “apprehension of the holy” and spoke of the holy being “embodied in the abundance of a scarred creation.” One of our church’s values, “Transcendence – To connect with the wonder and awe of the unity of life”, is another way of trying to describe this.

Humanistic psychology’s founder, Abraham Maslow, described essentially the same type of experiences as what he called “peak experiences”, and he believed that they were instances wherein people become maximally what he referred to as “self-actualized”. More recently, researchers have examined similar phenomenon, such as “quantum experiences”, a sort of peak experience that the person evaluates as profound in a life changing way, and “flow” experiences, a sense of timelessness and ultimate fit in the universe.

You probably remember that Maslow was the creator of the pyramid or hierarchy of human needs. In Maslow’s hierarchy, as our basic needs, such as food, water and shelter get met, we move up through successions of higher level needs. Finally, if each of the preceding levels of needs have all been met, human development results in our fulfilling our highest need, self-actualization. He described self-actualized people as, creative, fulfilled, fully alive, connected with something larger, dedicated to justice, compassionate, playful – well, basically what most Unitarian Universalists want to be when we grow up.

Maslow described these characteristics as “Being-values” and found that they were parts of the knowledge people reported carrying forward from within their peak experiences. He found descriptions of such experiences across all cultures and within all of the world’s major religions.

Maslow thought that peak experiences were random occurrences of self-actualization that arise when uncontrollable life events happen to push us into a moment of such self-actualization. In fact, he said, “In general, we are ‘Surprised by Joy’. Peaks come unexpectedly…. you can’t count on them. And hunting them is like hunting happiness. It’s best not done directly. It comes as a by-product, an epiphenomenon, for instance, of doing a fine job at a worthy task you can identify with”. Thus, he did not think we could induce our own experience of the holy; although, he did seem to think that self-actualized people might be more likely to have peak moments.

Recent research has found that Maslow was only partially right – that there may be a neurobiological mechanism behind peak experiences that can be activated not only by random life events of being “surprised by joy” but also though meditation and other forms of what I will call spiritual ritual and practice. Using a brain scanning technique called Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography or SPECT, researchers examined brain activity in a group of experienced meditators. What they found is that while meditating, particularly at the point of reaching a deep meditative state, wherein the meditators reported experiencing a sense of universal connectedness, a peak experience, there was decreased activity in the areas of the brain normally associated with a sense of ones own body image and with the sense of the time and space one inhabits.

Could this explain the experience of the holy? Could this elucidation of a potential biological mechanism behind our peak experiences mean that such experiences are really just delusions?

Further research examined long-term meditators and found that their brain patterns, even in a non-meditative state, were different from the patterns in people who do not meditate. The researchers also found that the brain patterns during meditation were different from those induced by dream states, as well as different from those associated with delusions, including delusions with religious themes. In fact, they reported that, unlike people who experience a delusion, people who have these peak experiences articulate them as hyperlucid and MORE real than their normal state.

This has led some to question a purely reductionist interpretation of the SPECT research as failing to explain the whole of the experience – to find yet more awe and mystery in the fact the we appear to be biologically equipped with the capacity to experience the holy.

The SPECT researchers themselves, taking perhaps a more postmodern viewpoint, stated “…spiritual or mystical states of reality recalled in the baseline state as more certainly representing an objective condition than what is represented in the sensorium of the baseline state must be considered real”. Whew! In other words, intellectual investigation alone cannot reveal the experience itself. Knowing the potential mechanism may not fully explain — or explain away — the phenomenon — or epiphenomenon, as Maslow put it.

Beyond this, there is also evidence that peak experiences can be beneficial. Studies have found that meditation and other spiritual rituals can reduce anxiety and stress, even blood pressure, not only in the moment, but also over the longer-term. Even more fascinating, research has shown that peak experiences can lead to what some psychologists have termed “quantum change” – a sudden shift in one’s values from things like achievement, fitting in, attractiveness, career, wealth and power to values such as peace, humility, spirituality, forgiveness, growth, creativity and generosity.

It appears Maslow’s theory about “Being Values” and self-actualization may have been correct. Perhaps, we should lock our political and economic leaders in a retreat center and tell them “we will not let you out until you have experienced the holy!”

More and more, I have come to believe that we do enjoy Emerson’s “original relation with the universe”. I have had too many of these experiences to answer otherwise and believe that they can have profound implications for how we live our lives – how we are ABLE to live our lives.

I’ve known the movement toward wholeness and self-actualization, the shift in values, that can occur in these experiences, but this knowing comes from within the experience of the holy itself and is a knowledge that like other people, I have trouble expressing in normal, everyday language. I’m struggling to express it now.

Maybe I can come closest though, by sharing one of these peak moments that, for me, led to a beneficial change in life direction, even though it occurred during a time that was contained a sense of sadness over an anticipated loss. Maybe, it is the sharing of these experiences, no matter how difficult it is to find an adequate vocabulary for describing them that allows us to bring forward those “Being-values” that Maslow talked about.

My parents divorced when my brother and sister and I were very young, so my maternal grandparents became more like a second set of parents to us. They helped raise us while my mother worked often long hours. They were our role models and always instilled in us a sense of worth, value and respect for ourselves and for others. I owe much of the adult I became to them.

Later, they welcomed my partner, Wayne, into our family with great love and genuine warmth. In fact, my grandmother always called us “her boys”, even long after a time where either of us could claim any resemblance to the term. However, we had never discussed the … exact nature … of our relationship with my grandparents. My Grandfather was a deacon in the First Baptist Church of Groves, Texas, after all. Still, to their great credit, they treated us both with genuine love, even if it was never openly discussed.

After my grandfather died, my grandmother only lived two more years. Wayne and I were visiting her in the hospital for what we all knew would likely be the last time – she had congestive heart failure and had decided against any more medical intervention after having been in and out of the hospital too many times, after deciding to let go with grace and dignity.

As we said our goodbyes and prepared to leave, she took us both by the hand and said, “Take care of each other.”

Then she locked her eyes with mine.

It was only a moment, maybe even less. Just an instant.

In that instant, we knew as much love as it is possible for human beings to comprehend — more love than the mere humans in the room could contain. The love rushed forth, sweeping us into a different state of experience, spreading us out into an ever expanding way of being, permeating us with all that is holy.

In that instant, we experienced existing in connection with, being one with, not just each other, but with all that has ever been and ever will be. In that instant, we experienced existing in all times and all places at once and yet outside of linear time and in no material space at all.

For an instant, we knew all that we would ever need to know.

I still carry something of that knowledge with me now, but in fragments, in smaller pieces of understanding, because the knowing that occurs during these experiences is a knowing that is outside our usual language of thinking and emotions. That is why it is so hard to express our experiences of the holy to others.

Perhaps, it is a level of understanding that occurs in a more fundamental, yet more encompassing language; a knowing that exists in a language we can only rarely fully access – a language that we have sometimes called, “God”.

Still, I believe those smaller pieces of understanding we are able to retain are important, because they are the burning embers that have the potential to spark further peak experiences and quantum change — what we call in our church’s values, “transformation — to pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world”.

I wonder, since research has shown that these peak experiences can lead to a shift in our values, if it is possible that the reverse is also true. I wonder if, combined with spiritual practice, living those values can help us experience the holy more and more, further reinforcing and deepening those same values? I wonder if living lives of transcendence, compassion and courage, if gathering in community to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice wouldn’t be the ultimate experience of the holy?

I say we find out! Let’s conduct our own experiment by bringing our best translation of that “language of mystery and awe”, our values and mission, into a growing, vital, thriving reality.

I invite us to actualize the Holy in our lives — to actively seek connection with something larger than ourselves, to continuously expand our hearts and minds.

I invite us to embrace our original relation with the universe.

Benediction

In “Our Humanist Legacy”, Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz wrote: “What is of supreme importance is that I live my life in a posture of gratitude-that I recognize my existence and, indeed, Being itself, as an unaccountable blessing, a gift of grace. Sometimes, it is helpful to call the source or fact of that grace God and sometimes not. But what is always helpful and absolutely necessary is to look kindly on the world, to be bold in pursuit of its repair, and to be comfortable in the embrace of its splendor. I know no better term for what I seek than an encounter with the Holy.”

May we each go forth and encounter the holy in our world, be open to its presence in our lives — however we may know it.

Amen.