The Individuality of Religiousity

I thought that the St. John's Passion by Bach was a beautiful piece, which I really enjoyed listening to. However, despite the swelling music and beautiful singing, the experience didn't feel like a religious one to me. Perhaps this was because it was in a language I don't really understand and about a gospel I don't really believe in, but I could tell there was something more to it than that. If ritual is a mode of paying attention, then this piece of music clearly represents this mode in both its composition and its performance. It is religious music, but I didn't feel it. This is obviously not a shortcoming of the music, but a matter of what I find religious, what I feel compelled to pay attention to. Listening to this beautiful work of religious devotion, yet feeling no religious experience caused me to realize how personal a religious experience is, and I began asking myself some questions about what I do find religious, and what it means to find an experience religious in the first place.

In class we agreed that what religious experience is the application of meaning to the mundane, and I do believe that this engagement is what makes an otherwise secular experience a religious one. St. John's Passion definitely does this -- it elevates music, a mathematical arrangement of sounds that create an experience in the listener, by applying further religious meaning and intent to the composition. However, it is the individual experiencer alone who can decide whether an experience has that additional meaning for them, and in this case I did not feel it. I was raised with an awareness of religions, exposed from an early age to Judaism, Christianity, and Hare Krishna, but never raised into a faith. Having grown up experiencing parades, holidays, prayer meetings, and religious music from multiple faiths, I've always enjoyed these experiences for themselves, not because I was applying meaning to the mundane. Even prayer and meditation, to me, are forms of shaped contemplation, not experiences in applying new meaning, but discovering the meaning already present. Thinking about this concept of a "religious experience," I began to panic that I hadn't truly experienced it.

I'm a pretty literal minded guy, and I began to worry that this just inherently means that I am not an incredibly spiritual person. Because the meaning I take from experiences tend to be the literal experience, rather than any deeper meaning I add upon reflection, the traditionally religious events I have experienced didn't feel religious at that hard to describe deep personal level. I can enjoy religious dances as beautiful dances, religious music as beautiful music, but I enjoy the experiences themselves; I don't experience with these events any application of additional meaning to the mundane, as we defined religious experience in class.

However, casting about in a panic, I realized there is at least one experience where I apply meaning beyond the apparent. When I'm sitting on top of a mountain back home, seeing Vermont unfold beneath my feet, or even when I'm sitting on a fallen tree or stump in the middle of the Wheaton woods, listening to the sounds around me and smelling the distinct smell of growing things, I feel connected to something, a part of something larger, that I am both incapable of expressing, and not even totally capable of experiencing. Standing in the woods and just experiencing, I feel connected to the world and to beauty in a way that man-made expressions of devotion simply cannot replicate. Thinking about this, I realize that I can enjoy the so called "mundane" beauty of art created by man, but the experience of something more comes instead from the natural world.

Lately I've been asking myself a lot of questions about my own beliefs. I don't consider this a "crises of faith" or anything so melodramatic, but as another step in my ever changing understanding of the universe.  I consider faith a personal, not public, matter, as religion governs behavior and relationships of the individual with other beings, and I believe the first step on that journey is discovering you're relation and connection to those beings, whether gods, men, or squirrels. In retrospect, it was silly of me to panic that I had no true devotion or religious experiences. Applying meaning to the mundane is human nature, but everybody needs to find for themselves the experiences that can mean more to them than the experience itself. Following in the tradition of the transcendentalists and the Hassids, I will continue enjoying more in the experience of nature, and I will find my place relative to nature by experiencing it, because that is where I find Religious Experience.