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THE DOOR TO SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

           When you do something right, wonderfully right, spiritual experience plays a quiet role. Your sense of the persons and potentials in the situation had an extra quality to it.  Subtle rather than dramatic, its effect was in the deciding and doing.  Such peak experiences, however, are rare for most people--that is, until, according to psychologist Abraham Maslow, we learn what to look for.  Then peak experiences may become almost daily occurrences.  Though selfish and materialistic living puts calluses on the membrane through which spiritual experience must enter our lives, decades of devoted living make that membrane more permeable.  Everyone has spiritual experiences, though the response to them varies from fanaticism to hardened rejection, from conflict to cooperation.  Souls longing for spiritual realization search for truth beyond science and philosophy.

            With spiritual experience the adventure into truth gets off the runway and takes flight.  In spiritual experience, we touch the beauty and goodness of divine truth.  For a moment or a longer stretch, we live the divine life as much as a human being can.  The maximum experience in any realm connects with our personal center and becomes a spiritual experience.  For example, when Johannes Kepler discovered the elliptical path of the planets, he rejoiced in the revelation of the Creator's law.  When Aristotle enjoyed theoretical contemplation of unchanging truth, he felt he was sharing in God's process of thinking.  Working a job can also become a spiritual experience.  A friend of mine was employed at Oakland's Children's Hospital, caring for babies who had been so neglected that they were literally dying for lack of affection.  Her assignment was simply to love them, to pick them up and hold them, to play with them and befriend them.  They so needed and absorbed all she could give that she found herself drained at the end of each day.  One morning, she prayed, "O.K., Father, you love these children through me."  That day she felt love pouring through her to the children, and in during her following months on the job she never again experienced that awful exhaustion.

What truths of spiritual experience matter most in a philosophy of living?  The first great truth moves beyond skepticism: there is spiritual experience.  None of us is a total stranger to it, and each of us has the capacity for further development.  You can know God, not merely know about God.  Religion need not be content with second-hand reports and with the repetitions of dogmas and creeds and rituals that have lost their life.

At the same time, our capacity for spiritual experience is embryonic.  Our spiritual vision cannot normally see the divine as clearly as our eyes can see rocks and trees.  Therefore it is easy to misinterpret, to think we have discerned more than we have.  The second great truth of spiritual experience moves beyond dogmatism.  Spiritual experience usually blends with inputs from various parts of the mind.  Therefore, in many cases, the sciences from biology to history can contribute to a fuller understanding of your experience.  Spiritual experience causes a version of what psychology calls "the halo effect."  When you have a peak experience associated with a particular book or tradition, you tend to accept the whole of that book or tradition uncritically.  Therefore the concerns that a good humanist will raise help you avoid fanaticism.  You evaluate spiritual experience, in part, by whether it helps you balance your life, promote your health, augment good social relations, add purpose to your work and spontaneity to your play.  Does it make your humor more hearty and inspire you with the love of service?  Even if you receive a revelation and commit to certain definite truths, you can ceaselessly explore to discover new meanings and values associated with those commitments.  The adventure of growing spiritual experience includes interdisciplinary and interreligious dialogue.

This chapter charts a response that moves past skepticism and dogmatism into the adventure of faith.  We begin with a look at what spiritual experience is and explore faith as the cardinal virtue in this domain.  We locate places in experience to look for God, discuss the idea of revelation, and consider diverse responses to the challenge of suffering.

             Non-religious readers can translate the thoughts of this chapter into a biologically and psychologically based approach to satisfying peak experiences.

"Defining" terms: spiritual and religious

Thomas Shotwell, a researcher in biochemistry, reported a remarkable experience.  Relaxing in a bar after work, he sat down next to a bay window overlooking the Mississippi River.  In the glow of the setting sun, the river was strikingly illumined, and he began piecing together the various layers of scientific description that, taken together, accounted for the scene--the astrophysics, the geology, the science pertaining to the flowing of water, the reflection of light, and so on.  As he synthesized the understanding gained by years of scientific study, he suddenly experienced a powerful unification of insight and an overwhelming feeling of beauty.  Tears of appreciation streamed down his cheeks; he tried to point out the glories of the scene to his friends, who looked but saw nothing extraordinary.  After a few minutes he was able to get hold of himself, and he began to turn his attention to the dancer on the stage whose reflection played on the window overlooking the river.  But, contemplating this girl, again he began to piece together what he knew scientifically about the spectacle, including biology and psychology, and once again his mind was flooded with a feeling of wondrous unity and ineffable beauty.  Later he concluded that the universe is so beautiful that the human nervous system, if exposed to it fully, would be incapable of functioning; therefore, evolution has made us so that we are usually insensitive to the beauty that surrounds us.  His thoughts made no reference to a Creator, showed no trace of religion.  Instead, he launched a campaign to promote the appreciation of universe beauty as a substitute for religion.

The experience of supreme beauty triggered by this synthesis of science shows that spiritual experience can occur without a religious context.  Science-centered and humanistic philosophies can acknowledge the fact that such experiences occur and can accept them as, in some cases, beneficial events in a human life.  At the same time the question remains whether that biochemist fully appreciated that gift of beauty.

It would be foolish to try to define--set limits to--God or to spiritual experience, but a few things can be said about how certain terms will be used here.  Spiritual experience is a robustly affirmative term.  It does not merely imply that someone feels a certain subjective glow.  The term assumes that there are spiritual realities such as God or the indwelling divine spirit and that spiritual experience connects with these realities.   Spiritual realities are true in the sense of being trustworthy, beautiful in the sense of giving the highest contemplative delight, and good.  (I stipulate this to address the concerns of those who hold that some beings we may encounter in the spirit world are evil).  Some religionists, East and West, see ultimate reality as beyond comprehension and language, beyond truth, beauty, and goodness.  Nevertheless, as philosopher John Cobb urged in a series of talks bridging Buddhism and Christianity, Buddhists who progress in centering their lives on an ultimate reality they regard as impersonal nevertheless show more compassion and other qualities associated with a personal God.  This fact, said Cobb, suggests that what they are getting in touch with has more to do with God than they realize.

Sometimes people speak of religious experience.  As I distinguish these terms, religion has a traditional and cultural character.  When I speak of religious experience, I am thinking of how a particular religious tradition prepares people for a specific type of experience and plays a role in how they interpret their experience.  Most spiritual experiences are religious, inasmuch as some religious tradition has helped prepare for and interpret the experience.  For example, consider five religious interpretations of the indwelling spirit.

·       The Hindu concept of the atman, the eternal spirit Self.

·       The Mahayana concept of the Buddha-nature within.

·       The Jewish concept of "the spirit in man, the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts."

·       The Christian concept of "the kingdom of heaven within you."

·       The Islamic concept of God who is "closer to you than your jugular vein."

All these concepts, though they point to the same reality, have different historical contexts.  Their associated scriptures and religious practices differ, and the resulting experiences blend culture with spiritual experience.  Looking at the history of the religions of the world, we find the sublime and the distorted, sometimes side by side.  I can imagine that the indwelling spirit, generously rewarding our seeking, sometimes bestows spiritual experience in spite of our context rather than because of it.  The spirit encourages us, meets our upreach or inreach, even though it is predictable that we will take the reward, the feeling of experience, as a confirmation not only of spiritual reality but also of the context, the tradition within which we have the experience.  The spirit works within the available context and helps us move forward.

A smile spreads across the face of someone who recognizes the indwelling presence of God.  The smile fades upon thinking that that very experience is more or less conditioned by the texture of our own mind intertwined with other human minds.  The smile returns when it dawns on us that in that long journey, the spirit is with us every step of the way.

            Some people would like to have spirituality while doing away with religion, context, and tradition, but there is in fact no experience of God outside some scheme of interpretation.  Spiritual experience does not come with a tag on it saying "This experience is brought to you by a divine Person."  The indwelling spirit does not come in a package with a card saying, "A gift from a loving God."  Spiritual experience often has a touchingly personal flavor, but this fact does not, in and of itself, prove the personality of God.  This is why it takes faith to move beyond skepticism.  You can neither prove nor disprove the validity of spiritual experience or the reality of God.  Discarding religion as many people do today because of the worst aspects of the history of religious institutions means disengaging from much of the human adventure toward God and from much of God's adventure of communicating with people enmeshed in our historical cultures.  To discard religion is in fact to embrace an alternative culture, but one lacking much of the best the planet has to offer.  To discard religion is to say, "I already have enough inputs from others; the world's religious traditions have nothing more to offer me."  There is moreover a great diversity of spiritual experiences, and familiarity with others' experiences helps you realize that your own experience doesn't represent all facets of the kaleidoscope.

            If religion is man's relation to what is limitless and therefore cannot be defined, religion cannot be defined either.  Nevertheless some definitions of religion highlight facets of a many-sided theme.  Many define religion by taking their own religion as a paradigm and then generalizing its features to make room for other religions.  For example, we could generalize a paradigm and define religion as the worship of God and service of humankind.  Another way to define religion is in terms of its function in motivating the human personality.  For example, religion is wholehearted devotion to what the believer regards as of highest importance for humankind.  Each kind of "definition" picks up something the other omits.  Using a paradigm may mask the religious character of the lives of some professed secularists.  A functional definition may be blind to the One to whom the religionist turns.

The adventure of spiritual experience in love and service makes religion real.  According to psychologist C. Daniel Batson, there is no correlation between religion and altruism in people whose religion remains self-centered and external.  At the surface level of religion, the religious person is no more altruistic than the average nonreligious person.  What about people for whom religion is intrinsically worthwhile?  For this group, psychologists had expected to find more altruism, since religion teaches concern for those in need.  Even with these subjects, however, religion did not make a statistical difference.  Then Batson and his colleagues came up with the concept of religion as a continuous adventure of growth.  When they tested people in this category they finally did find an appreciable increase of altruism.

The topic of spiritual experience is often studied under the heading of mysticism.  In the literature, many classified as mystics fall into two partially overlapping groups: those with abnormal mental disorders and those who supremely devote themselves to loving God and the neighbor.  Some mystics practice extreme self-denial and cultivate trance or euphoric imaginings, confusing subconscious and superconscious sources of inspiration.  In some cases, the spiritual progress that these mystics achieve occur in spite of these practices, rather than because of them.  Then the spirit responds to their wholehearted quest, not their obedience to unfortunate instructions.  Studies in mysticism often overemphasize brief and extraordinary experiences and underemphasize the lives of ordinary men and women of faith.  Most of us are more like the sparrow than like the eagle.  A philosophy of living does well to emphasize garden-variety experiences of sincere prayer, intelligent worship, and loving service.  Spiritual experience, in the end, is a way of living the whole of life, not a collection of dramatic moments.

Therefore this philosophy of living emphasizes a sane and well-balanced approach to friendship with God and better communion with the indwelling spirit.  A commitment to health, sanity, and happiness promotes a sound response to that great law of the spiritual realm: Seek and you will find.

Faith: Entering the door

Faith is the single most important key in really living.  Faith lets life into the mind, linking the life-energies of the organism with the dynamic and eternal life of the spirit.  Faith is the ticket for the adventure of time and eternity, the price of entry into the kingdom of heaven, the family of God.

Faith has two phases, a phase of gift and a phase of accepting the gift.  In the first phase, you are given some recognition of spiritual truth.  You know the import of what is before you.  You see it on the page or you feel it in your heart or you are singing or walking in the woods and some realization dawns.  You intuitively grasp its truth.  For the moment at least, doubt is not even on the horizon.  The phase of accepting the gift is your response--to put yourself into, appropriate, authorize, and act on what you have been shown.  Once the gift has been offered, scientific sorting and philosophic weighing only postpone the essential: wholeheartedness.  Without haste or anxiety, you mobilize the full powers of your personality.  Truth invites, "Come on in, the water's fine!" and you jump in.  Your life becomes a YES.  Anything less will not satisfy your soul.

Faith is the door to spiritual experience.  We each need to enter and re-enter many times until we abide permanently in the house of faith.  We begin our spiritual career in faith, and every forward step along the path takes faith.  In a worldly sense we can accomplish much without faith, but cosmically we cannot advance without faith.  The need for faith is obvious in a dark night of the soul where our normal capacities collapse.  Our need is equally acute in a noonday of the soul when our physical, social, and intellectual capacities bring outward success.

Faith means relating in love and trust.  We can have faith in one another.  Ultimately, however, faith is a relation to God.  In faith personality reposes trust in Personality.  This can be seen even in Buddhism, which emphasizes divine personality least of the great international religions: "I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Teaching, I take refuge in the Community."  Although faith in yourself and other human beings, particularly in the supreme desire to do the will of God, is part of the fullness of faith, faith is primarily relational.  Mere willingness to act on an unproven hypothesis is not yet faith.  In faith, philosophy, having carried the seeker as far as it can, yields to religion.  Philosophy contemplates meanings; religion interacts in relationship.

People's experiences of beginning to exercise faith vary greatly.  Some grow up in a loving and religious family and from early childhood feel close to God.  They do not spend years of their lives in deliberate disobedience to God.  Their process is more smooth; they may have no conscious rebirth, no watershed moment that demarcates a committed future from a wandering past.  The quality of consistency in their character is a powerfully attractive testimony to the potentials of a positive family life and the momentum of a young person who stayed on the path.  Nevertheless they too come to a time when they must focus more seriously and individually on what has been affirmed in their social environment.  They, too, must enter the family of faith.

Others go through a rough and dramatic process.  Their childhood may have been unhappy; they may have acquired destructive habits.  Everyone must go through a more or less rough transition from living with a material center of gravity to living with a spiritual center of gravity.  Nevertheless, children of these backgrounds may well need to repent--honestly acknowledge wrongdoing and seek forgiveness before they can enjoy the life of the better way.  Although we all have occasion to confess and receive forgiveness, those who have seriously wandered have before them an extra treasure of rehabilitation awaiting them in the joy of being deeply and thoroughly forgiven, forgiven in friendship and cleansed in light.  Those who stray far are more grateful to be found.

Faith goes beyond appreciating the truth, beauty, and goodness, though, since faith is a personal relation to their Personality Source.  Spiritual experience is not merely a self-contained enjoyment of inner depths.  Much of the meaning in practice of the concept of the God as Parent and the concept of the indwelling spirit is that we can experience God.  Faith, then, is our initial experience of God.[i]

Spiritual experience is thus in orbit around God.  True, each individual is a center of consciousness; but faith affirms that the subjective experience is a response to something beyond self.  Whoever accepts spiritual experience for what it appears to disclose cannot do justice to that experience without speaking from the standpoint of its truth.  It is necessary to relinquish the seemingly humble position of claiming that we merely seem to experience such and such, although we "don't really know" and "shouldn't presume" to assert what others may find unwelcome.  Being aware of human limits, then, does not mean regarding oneself as cut off from God and the knowledge of God.  It means that whatever divine truth and beauty and goodness we do recognize we grasp imperfectly and that there is infinitely more ahead of us in eternity.

In scientific and philosophic discussions of spiritual experience there has been a tendency to distinguish "the experience itself" from the faith-interpretation as though the faith-interpretation were mere opinion surrounding a core whose validity is essentially psychological and subjective.  Experience then becomes an inner occurrence, ripe for interpretation in biological or cultural categories, without any essential reference to any realm beyond the psyche.  Once we open an inquiry into the truths of spiritual experience, however, we find a viable alternative to the modern divorce of a psychologic core from its interpreted meaning.  Religious philosophy accommodates the insights and cautions of scientific and humanistic thinking while affirming a more complex, full, mysterious, interactive, and satisfying universe.

In throwing a ball, countless micro-events of neural transmission and muscular contraction and extension occur, though the event is lived as a single smooth action.  Knowing the intermediate steps in the action does not oblige anyone to correct a statement about throwing the ball.  It is not necessary to say that what we really do is get our neurons to move our muscles.  The sense of immediacy in throwing the ball is mediated by biological processes, but the mediation is successful: a person can throw the ball.  Seeing a tree, light waves of various wave-lengths impinge upon the eye, setting up a chain of events from the retina, through the optic nerve, to the occipital lobe.  Perception, analytically regarded, is a complex affair, and yet it is lived as a simple and obvious event.  It is possible to deny that we see a tree and insist instead that what we really see is a pattern of radiation.  But again, the mediation is successful: we do see the tree, and a sense of the reality of the material realm pervades perceptual experience.  In a similar way, faith is the first human awareness of spiritual realities, however much analysis may disclose about the mediation of such experience in mind and brain.

Lacking the attitude of faith, the striving of the human intellect that wants to see God only yields a blank as its object.  Indeed, some people mistake that blankness for the ultimate revelation instead of taking it as an occasion to reopen the self to a personal relationship with the invisible, divine Person.  Spiritual experience needs to accept the fact that perceptual and intellectual vision does not deliver the spiritual "object."  When experience in the spiritual domain occurs, spiritual faith spontaneously conveys its sense of reality.  It took faith for the biochemist to affirm his ecstasy as a revelation of universe beauty.

Divine personality

Can anyone prove that the experience of a loving God is not one whose overtones of personality are merely humanly projected?  Some types of spiritual experience imply the existence of a loving Person.  When such experience dawns there is a spontaneous tendency to infer or assume that the event is an experience of a loving Person.  But strict proof is not available.  Faith opens our relating to divine Personality. 

To emphasize the personality of God is to affirm that God knows and loves--and can be known and loved by--the individual human personality.  The great religious invitation is into a personal relationship with the God of all personality.  We, as whole personalities can thus relate "wholeheartedly" with the God whose wholeness we relate to as Personality.  In inter-human relating, it is possible to reflect that--or pray for enhanced realization of the truth that--self and other are embraced in universal Personality.  This knowing is not of the order of scientific or philosophic knowing.  French distinguishes connaitre, personal acquaintance, from savoir, scientific knowing.  German does the same with kennen and wissen.  Knowing God involves a growing ability to discern God's presence and activity.  To say that God is personal implies that we can not only know theological propositions; we can know God.  Our limits in comprehending the Infinite do not impede the personal friendship that can grow up between the creature and the Creator.  Philosophers may envision God as a universal goal for the aspiring intellect, but communion with the God of religion is something that anyone can enjoy in the present.

Philosophers, striving to formulate a concept of ultimate reality to surpass immature, popular images, have not only removed merely human qualities from Deity, such as fickleness and wrath; they have also tended to depersonalize the concept of God.  True, any human concept of personality will fall short of the infinite and eternal nature of God.  But unfortunately our concept of divine personality has usually had no room for other and newer, emerging ideas of Deity--for the source of energy, the origin of gravitation, the first cause of evolution, the controller of quantum events, the primal pattern of all things.

God is eternal truth and the source of truth, and thus beyond truth.  God is beauty and goodness and their source and thus beyond them.  All that we could ever comprehend of God falls into these categories.  The glory of personality, divine and human, is that there is always more than we can comprehend.

Human personality expresses the composite nature of human beings, body, mind, and spirit, as little integrated as these may be.  When we speak of the personality of God, we mean the unified expression of all aspects of original reality.  To deny personality to God is to shrink, not expand, the concept of God.  The tendency is to try to become like whatever we conceive God to be.  To deny personality to God, therefore, leads people to devalue their own personality and to try to identify themselves with some impersonal, intellectual dimension of being.  In consequence, the person tends toward a dissociated and abstract sense of self in which feeling starves and relationship wanes.

If the validity of spiritual experience is challenged, it is not possible to prove it in general.  The whole spiritual realm correlates with a capacity of the mind that is so basic that, to repeat the thought, any attempt to prove its validity will assume too much or prove too little.  This is not to say that one must simply accept a particular experience at face value.  Not at all.  To sharpen one's experience, to grow in discernment, even to develop spiritual reason and wisdom--drawing conclusions and coordinating diverse insights--are all worthy projects for the adventuresome soul.

One could try to defend the validity of spiritual experience by appeal to revelation; but even an appeal to revelation leaves open the question of why a particular person or text is to be regarded as revelation.  Any answer to that question will have to appeal to experience of one sort or other.  So revelation can provide assurance, but there is a circle of justification with no absolute resting place, even though the higher source, if correctly identified, should surely be regarded as a more trustworthy anchor for justification.  Such a circle is not embarrassing to those do not presume to refute skeptics.  Indeed, it is through advancing spiritual experience that one becomes more discriminating in accepting data as revealed, even as continued reflection on revelation stimulates the growth of spiritual experience.

Even to speak positively of God, then, implying the unity of God and the personality of God, requires faith.  Faith is required to sustain a vision of the sovereignty of God in the face of events that do not manifest divinity.  When in a beautiful moment we glimpse a personality at its best, we see the inwardly illumined masterpiece of the Creator's art.  But it takes faith to affirm an indwelt creature whose mind is distorted by mental poisons.  Life brings challenges that no human power can handle, only faith.  But when faith is living, its strength and power are stunning.  God calls the individual from the tomb of indolence: Come forth!  And faith summons spiritual power to respond by breaking through every obstacle.

At any stage of spiritual growth, we can profit by returning to the basic faith that enables us to enter into the relationships of the spiritual domain.  Sometimes the term faith  is used in contrast with the unchallengeable clarity of spiritual insight or the radiant evidence of God-consciousness, where the cosmic or divine or spiritual reality is so manifest that doubt is unthinkable.  Only after the peak of presence subsides may one question it at all.  Thus there is the prospect that spiritual insight will supplant faith.

Our ability to perceive things becomes sharp in early childhood.  Our ability for moral discernment develops with the exercise of reason.  But, to repeat a point made earlier, our capacity for spiritual discernment is embryonic by comparison.  Because our grasp of spiritual realities is usually so dim, we need to rely on faith to grasp what our consciousness usually registers only faintly.  Even if we were in the very presence of God on Paradise and sufficiently mature to discern the Deity, it would still require faith to grasp God's infinity and eternity.

The question of revelation

We can hardly find the personal God without consciously or unconsciously being beneficiaries of revelation, truth expressed from a higher-than-human source.  Without revelation, what source could there be for spiritual truth? 

How do you know when you find truth, spiritual truth, revealed truth?  Your spiritual intuition will let you recognize it.  You will find it coherent with the best of what you know and believe.  In addition, it will take you somewhere new and offer correction of some beliefs you previously held.

If faith does not undertake the disciplines of exploring and sifting alleged revelation, the job is left to skepticism.  Fear and doubt proceed from suspicion.  Those who specialize in searching out the shadows of power interests and shameful stories have material for a lifetime of critical study.  Faith, however, engages a higher quality of thinking, places sobering observations in a higher context.

Revelation is a great boon and a great danger.  The danger is the tendency to absolutize one's regard for a holy book or historic personage and become intolerant.  Those who grow up seeing Moses as one of the greatest religious leaders in human history usually do not recognize Mohammed as a prophet.  Those who see Jesus as a revelation of the Father usually do not celebrate Buddha's enlightenment under the Bo tree or search the Vedas for advanced concepts of God.

Sometimes revelation comes as a personal and subtle gift, perfectly adapted to the needs of the moment.  But even when revelation comes as a gift for humankind for an age or more, its adaptation to its own historical context should be understood.  Even when eternal truth has spoken, it requires discernment, historical study, philosophic reflection, and prayer, to interpret its implications for today.  To bypassing the disciplines of discernment risks fanaticism.  To be sure, one can nourish oneself to eternal life by cherishing gems of revealed truth.  We all need to move between the complexities of inquiry to the simplicity of faith.  But putting revelation into practice--knowing when to say what, how, how much, and to whom--all this remains an art.

Perspectives on suffering

Spiritual progress depends on moral sincerity, a fact that shows an interesting connection between goodness and truth.  We do not simply load up on truth and then go forth to do goodness.  The higher we ascend in truth or beauty or goodness, the more closely we find them intertwined.  Moral sincerity requires us to share in relieving suffering, bringing joy, and coping with those moments when suffering is inexplicable.  Joy does not come from fleeing suffering, and spiritual heights do not open to those who shun life's depths.  Indeed, it is often in the hardest times that the brightest insights dawn.  Those who have tasted the goodness of God are ready to address one of the perennial questions.

The issue is crucial for a philosophy of living.  A person enmeshed in inexplicable suffering needs a philosophic perspective in order to participate wholeheartedly in worship.  Talk about the beauty of truth breaks down if there is no philosophic bridge between the unwelcome fact and the experience of living truth.  In order to speak of truth in the fullest sense, embracing the entire spectrum from fact to spiritual truth, there must be a way for the mind to achieve an integration that provides at least a limited philosophic satisfaction.  Although we often cannot see how a particular episode of suffering fits into the wider story, but at least we may affirm some possibilities.

Some people refuse to believe in God because, they say, they cannot accept a God whose creation is so full of suffering.  A skeptic determined to press that objection cannot be refuted, even though the real issue may lie somewhere else, for example, in the skeptic's need to experience divine love.  An atheist may insist that this issue be resolved before saying "Yes" to God in faith, but without beginning to experience God, how will we know the one we are talking about?  How can we become open to possible answers and to the companionship that renounces explanation and passes all understanding?  On this issue, most religious philosophies rest their defense on just a few considerations, whereas a broader inquiry with an expanded concept of God can come up with at least a dozen.

Imagine a group of religious thinkers giving speeches at a banquet about what they have said to people in response to questions about suffering.  They can all recall times when their answers helped someone.

Thinker #1.  Think of all the reasons why things happen.  Some suffering occurs simply because the finite creature chances to get in the way of a material process, such as a fire or a flood—one of the accidents of time.  Such events are not acts of God.  Despite the natural human tendency to say, "Why is God doing this to me?” it perverts the character of God to make him into a pantheistic Deity who does everything that happens.  Let us organize to reduce the number of accidents and to cooperate to insure that victims' losses are lessened.

Thinker #2.  Some suffering occurs because we have misused our freedom and lived in violation of the laws of living.  We should accept responsibility and not blame the universe or God for the suffering we have brought on ourselves.  Some suffering occurs because we are part of a group that is harvesting the consequences of wrongdoing.  We should exercise patience and help teach the hard lessons to restore new paths for the next generation.

In addition, some suffering occurs because God chastises us.  We should learn as much as we can from the experience.  The chastising of God has none of the destructive venom of anger, none of the generalized contempt that undermines self-respect.  It is the purest precision surgery.  The fresh path ahead is open; hearty repentance and acceptance of forgiveness need not take long.  Get on with it.

Thinker #3.  We must never imagine that this world is the best God can do.  God created the heavens and the earth.  There is a Paradise of eternal perfection wherein the will of God is done.  Here it is only possible to glimpse threads of pattern and purpose and hints of perfection that suggest the Creator's true character.  What a wonder it is that the Creator chose to create imperfect beings who could participate in evolution toward perfection.  We should be grateful to exist.

Thinker #4.  The work of creation has been shared with subordinate beings who are not infinite and eternally perfect.   The subordinate creator personalities venture forth to replicate the heavenly pattern in time and space.  The imperfections of earthly life testify to the fact that the planet's immediate creator is less than the infinite, eternally perfect Deity.

Thinker #5.  In addition to the God of eternal perfection, there is an evolving phase of Deity, an evolving Supreme Being.  As the universe evolves, mind gradually gains control of matter-energy, and spirit gradually gains mastery of mind.  But the fulfillment of such an achievement is a very long way off.  Let us contribute to the process as best we can within our own personalities and in our own spheres of responsibility, trusting that our finite contribution will intertwine with the growth of the evolving God.  Each one of us has the opportunity to paint a brush stroke, as it were, on the face of this God of evolution.  Let us be about making the best contribution we can.

Thinker #6.  The magnitude of human suffering indicates foul play on a superhuman level.  There has been a rebellion against God, a war in which the life and death of souls is at stake, and the consequences of the acts and attitudes of rebellion cause much suffering on our planet.  Let us get to work to help rehabilitate this planet to make it worthy of the Deity who has so generously bestowed freedom on finite creatures.

Thinker #7.  It is misleading to think of God as giving wrongdoers permission to afflict his children.  Life is short.  Those who have abused others are in his hands more quickly than they imagine.  He is relentless in pursuing the wicked even in this life as he works to quicken the reactive forces of the oppressed and the moral conscience of those who can respond to the oppressor.  Although we cannot get involved in every issue, let us be sure that we are morally active in finding appropriate and effective responses to the abuses that are in our path.

Thinker #8.  "God's ways are higher than human ways as the stars are higher than the earth."  All things work together for good.  This does not mean that all things are good.  To bring forth the greater good, however, requires us to undertake any needed repentance and rehabilitation.  Whoever affirms that good prevails in the end must join in the labor to heal, educate, rehabilitate, and uplift humanity.

Thinker #9.  Why God permits suffering on the scale we observe on this planet we cannot fathom.  Nevertheless, "in all our afflictions he is afflicted with us."  He never leaves us to go through things alone.  Call upon him, and you will find him near.  And as you are able, bring comfort to those who are suffering.

            Thinker #10.  God has come in the flesh to live a human life and to share the trials of human existence and undergo human suffering.  Such a one can truly comfort those who must endure misery on earth.  Let us bring that heartening story to others and live that courage and compassion every day.

Thinker #11.  Bring to mind an episode of your suffering that has come and gone.  The suffering seemed overwhelmingly real at the time, but once it is over, really over, you look back and, behold: the suffering is gone; you cannot feel it any more; it is a vanishing wisp of the past.  Only the lessons of the past remain.  In the truth of hindsight, we can say that suffering is not enduringly real.  This is not the sort of thing you say to someone in intense pain; but a person who can reflect without distraction can adopt a perspective that will be helpful when the need arises.  In the light of this perspective, even the suffering with which human life ends can be regarded as the moment just before awakening into new life.

            Thinker #12.  There is an unfortunate and widespread tendency today to appeal to self-pity.  You'll never go broke telling people to recall how they have been victimized and how they need to go through a healing process of expressing their reactive emotions.  In the face of all that sentiment, there is a need to exhort people to strength and courage, a need to move forward despite the conditions of mortal existence.  Sufferings, actual and potential, are necessary for the acquisition of a noble character.  God did not create this universe to be a pillow.  It is rather "the vale of soul-making."  Once this is understood, the profound question about suffering melts away.  Let us learn the vigorous attitudes of the progressive faith sons and daughters of God, ascending in a mighty universe.

I imagine these twelve thinkers discussing how consistent their answers are with each other and enjoying a harmonious banquet together.  A complex theology can actually incorporate all these perspectives.  Beyond theology, there is a more powerful testimony.  Some of the spiritually happiest people I have met have gone through suffering and live with handicaps that other people would use as evidence against the goodness and reality of God.  Faith harvests vigorous attitudes in response to suffering.

Conclusion

This chapter has led into the domain of spiritual experience, the encounter with spirit realities.  The leading message is, "Come on in, the water's fine!" and the message comes with the assurance that you already know what I'm talking about.  You are not a stranger in this realm.  The waters into which faith leads us sustains us even in the depths of suffering.  A variety of cosmic perspectives suggest how the misfortunes of our life on earth might have a place in the larger drama of eternity.

Religion interprets the meaning of spiritual experience, and only religious faith lets us enjoy a personal relationship with God.  Faith, the assurance of spiritual truth, is a gift of God.  We exercise faith, the primary virtue in this realm, by responding wholeheartedly to truth.  The mind of faith lets our life in a biological sense link up with the life of the spirit.

We can find God as a You to whom we turn in prayer and worship, as the Infinite that encompasses everything finite, as the very center of our selves, and as a transformative influence on the character of our experience.  The adventure of finding God takes us into a ceaseless quest for new revelation, inner and outer, and for better discernment in our understanding of the truths of spiritual experience.