Varieties of religious experience

CATHOLICS GATHER at the site where the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared in an apparition in Medjugorje, south of Sarajevo, on December 24, 2014. Millions of pilgrims from all over the world have visited the small Bosnian town after six Bosnian youngsters claimed that the Holy Mary appeared to them there 33 years ago.

It’s Christmas; indulge me. One of my hobbies is collecting what you might call nonconversion stories – stories about secular moderns who have supernatural-seeming experiences without being propelled into any specific religious faith. In some ways these stories are more intriguing than mystical experiences that confirm or inspire strong religious belief, because they come to us unmediated by any theological apparatus. They are more like raw data, raw material, the stuff that shows how spiritual experiences would continue if every institutional faith disappeared tomorrow.

Here are some public cases. Three decades ago A.J. Ayer, the British logical positivist and scourge of all religion, died and was resuscitated at 77. Afterward, he reported a near-death encounter that included repeated attempts to cross a river and “a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful… responsible for the government of the universe.” Ayer retained his atheism, but declared that the experience had “slightly weakened” his conviction that death “will be the end of me.”

As a young man in the 1960s, filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, of RoboCop and Showgirls fame, wandered into a Pentecostal church and suddenly felt “the Holy Ghost descending… as if a laser beam was cutting through my head and my heart was on fire.” He was in the midst of dealing with his then-girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy; after they procured an abortion, he had a terrifying, avenging-angel vision during a screening of “King Kong.” The combined experience actively propelled him away from anything metaphysical; the raw carnality of his most famous films, he suggested later, was an attempt to keep the numinous and destabilizing at bay.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the left-wing essayist and atheist, had shocking, unlooked-for experiences of spiritual rapture as a teenager, which she wrote about in 2014’s don’t-call-it-religious memoir, Living With a Wild God. The “wild” part is key: Ehrenreich rejects the God of monotheism because the Being she encountered seemed stranger, less benign and more amoral than the God she thinks that most religions worship.

Lisa Chase, wife of late New York journalistic icon Peter Kaplan, wrote an essay for Elle Magazine last year about her experiences communicating, on her own and through a medium, with her husband after his 2013 death. There is no organized religion in her story whatsoever. But if you read the essay carefully, it’s clear that her quest was shaped by the fact that more than a few highly educated liberal Manhattan professionals have also had experiences like hers.

William Friedkin, director of “The Exorcist,” had never seen an exorcism when he made his famous film. A professed agnostic, he decided recently to “complete the circle” and spent some time shadowing the Vatican exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, just before Amorth’s passing at 91. Friedkin recounted his experience in Vanity Fair this fall; it did not make him a Catholic believer, but it did seem to scare the Hades out of him.

Sometimes at Christmas I’ll write a column that gently tweaks the sterner sort of atheist, whose theories seem ill-matched with the empirics of the universe and the stuff of human life. (I suspect many of them know it; hence the zeal for ever-zanier God-substitutes. Yesterday, the multiverse; today, the universe-as-simulation; tomorrow, some terrifying omnicompetent AI.)

But the implausibility of hard materialism doesn’t mean the cosmos obviously confirms a Judeo-Christian paradigm. And the supernatural experiences of the irreligious – cosmic beatitude, ghostly enigmas, unclassifiable encounters and straight-up demons – don’t point toward any single theology or world-picture.

I can make the Friedkin and Verhoeven experiences fit with Christian doctrine; Ehrenreich’s aren’t perhaps as distant as she imagines. But Ayer’s weird red light and the ghost of Peter Kaplan? If I were coming to these kind of stories with no preconceptions, I might reach for polytheism or pantheism to explain the variety and diversity of what reaches through the veil.

And not necessarily comforting forms of polytheism or pantheism. As a strictly intellectual matter, I am very confident that God exists. In dark times, though – and this has been a dark year in many ways – I wonder if the Absolute relates to us in the way that my church teaches, if he will really wipe away every tear and make all things that we love new.

This is the wager that Christmas offers us, year in and year out. It isn’t Pascal’s famous bet on God’s very existence; rather, it’s a bet on God’s love for us, a wager that all the varieties of religious experience, wonderful and terrifying and inscrutable, should be interpreted in the light of one specific history-altering experience: a divine incarnation, a baby crying beneath a pulsing star.

The odds on that wager feel different year to year. They change with joy and suffering, tranquillity and crisis, sickness and health.

But I haven’t found better ones. Merry Christmas. KATHLEEN MAGNER attributes paranormal activity occurring in this corner, such as the unexplained tapping on the window and inside the corner closet, to a young ghost named Timmy in Richfield, Ohio. Magner and her husband host lantern tours of the supposedly haunted mansion and its grounds for the Halloween season.