When I was a small child, I would often wake up and panic because I could feel a shell around me, and it seemed to be suffocating me in the darkness. I could feel my eyes, but they were glued shut and my eyelashes were wet with some kind of sticky substance. I screamed in the night and panicked because I had tactile sensations but didn’t know where I was or that I could breathe if I just calmed down. The darkness seemed to have gradations of black and grey, and then a light seemed to emerge from behind that darkness and arms reached out for me, calming my breathing just by being there. I could feel warm water on my face, washing away the stickiness around my eyes and opening the darkness until the incoming light made me squint, and I could see those arms and the face that belonged to them. I felt like the world was back, even though it had been me who had been away, drunk on sleep and shrouded in a dream world. That is where I returned to when sleep overtook me again and the light blurred and dimmed with the touches of the blankets that were wrapped around me. Voices whispered assurances and drifted away, and I was gone again. Although I didn’t know where this darkness was, I felt safe, and I could breathe again.
I suppose that I had conjunctivitis at that time, although I do not know because I was very young, and it was more than once. The experiences remained in my memory and I still dreamed of it in later life. It was above all the experience of darkness, with a light that seemed to be behind the blackness, but slowly shone through that stirred me. It was almost a religious experience, or perhaps the ground of religious experiences later on. A sense of awe, later of the sublime or the ineffable accompanied me without clear guidance. I don’t remember my family being particularly religious. Meeting my Methodist Great Aunt was at least very other-worldly, and we moved to a new house so often that there were many other things to discover. There was also a sense of healing in that memory that came to me later when I heard of the story about Jesus healing a blind man, and of belonging. When those arms pulled me out of the shell in which I felt trapped, I came home again. And the experience lasted only in my imagination over decades, ephemeral as the dream at night.
Many religious people I met later on in life were very dismissive about my interpretation, except one who warned me that the devil also gives us dreams, but also said that I may be very attentive to the inspiration that God gives us. I have probably conflated many impressions to one, and I feel that this has happened a lot in my religious experience. But could this be that which gives us a religious tingle? It seems to be very present in the middle of the night, when I wrote the words above. Or in solitude, whether amongst people or alone in one’s proverbial “chamber”, on a cushion, or in a prayer. In difficult times it made me ask myself whether it is all just made up, but this led me to avoiding the middle of the night and solitude. Then it didn’t happen, of course. However, religion is also community, which people want to be vibrant and resilient. Jamie Wheal, the co-author of the global bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominated “Stealing Fire”, said in a video talk, religion has to “make sure that the signposts and footpaths to the wishing well remain weeded and uncluttered” so that other people can go and look for themselves. “So, sacraments that provide initiatory experience seem like they’re probably an important piece of keeping tradition alive, and progressive versus static, or stagnant and retrospective. And then we need stories.”
I think that the dismissiveness of religious people has been as a result of insecurity. I regularly got the idea that people were saying that I wasn’t better than others, which wasn’t what it was about. It was about personal experience rather than the experience of other people thousands of years ago. It was about that whisper that is heard after the earthquake, the thunder, and the fire. I feel that the stories of the past show us what to look out for, just not in the way many religious people interpret it today. The stories are inspirational, but instead they are made to represent something that was back then physical, material, graspable. That whisper is between the lines. It happens after the event when one is relaxing. It happens when we are not poised and ready. Likewise, it happens on a bus, in a train, or in the sauna. That whisper could just as well be my imagination, but it says something of meaning. That is why you cannot prove anything, as non-religious people demand. You can just be inspired and live accordingly.