Anglican Diocese of Perth

Northern Region

A sermon preached by Bishop Brian Farran at S. Nicholas Church Duncraig for Confirmation
August 10th, 2003

(Based on Mark 9:2-9)

When I was a child I heard my mother complain, 'you can't see for looking'! Her exasperation with me was usually the result of my not being able to find something for her. I would look and look, but the desired object just eluded me. My mother would in exasperation search, and find the object almost immediately. It was then I would hear those heckling words, "you can't see for looking'!

I still hear that phrase from time to time. The voice is now my wife's. The scenario is basically unchanged. There is a request to find something. I search unproductively. Enter my wife, and in what seems like just one swoop, the search ends in triumph for her. Then comes the tag line, "the trouble with you is that you can't see for looking."

I even hear myself saying this tag line to myself when I shop (reluctantly) in supermarkets. I envy those shoppers who just know where every item is, and do not need to walk slowly down every aisle, as I find I have to do.

I confess that I am not good at reading the street directory. I even confess that I cannot drive the freeway and read the street directory simultaneously as I notice some Perth drivers do!

I think many of us share the incapacity of the inner circle of Jesus' disciples, Peter, James and John. That is, we have experiences of God, but we can't see for looking (as it were), and we do not recognize the experiences as divine experiences. We can be blinded by the awe of the experience, or by our earlier expectations or notions with which we try to frame the experience in order to make sense of it.

We can misinterpret or not fully appreciate what we have experienced. Often we require another who has more skill, more history with religious experience to help us to be more aware of the depth of the experience, of what the experience is disclosing both of the source of the experience (God), and of ourselves in our need.

I seriously suggest that religious experience is not exotic experience, reserved for bishops or popes, but ordinary experience that takes on the hue of the extraordinary. Think carefully of that word extraordinary. It is composed of two words, 'ordinary' and 'extra'. In other words, there is an addition, an intensity, a depth that is further to the ordinary.

I am sure that everyone here has had religious experiences, although you may not have recognized such experiences as religious simply because you did not have the vocabulary to frame the experience as indeed religious. Mostly, when we are without the vocabulary or the framework that enable us to make sense of an experience, we label the experience 'strange' or 'odd', and rather dismiss it.

But we ought to peruse such experiences, tease them out for they contain layers of meaning that will become significant for us. Now this is precisely what Peter in the episode we heard this morning did not do. Peter jumped to a too early conclusion. Peter immediately went into the cult of adulation - let's make shrines here! Peter failed to detect the significance of the epiphany with Elijah and Moses, and the significance of the intense white robe.

Mountains feature in the Scriptures as places of religious experience. Mountains still do for tourists and travellers. We stop on the side of mountains, take in the view, and describe the view as 'breath-taking'.

Robin and I had such a mystical experience at Montserrat in Spain. When we visited Spain's holiest mountain, it was covered in fog. At the top of the mountain there is a Benedictine Abbey, a place of pilgrimage. Sung Mass is celebrated in the Abbey at noon each day, with the monks singing ethereal Gregorian chant. As we walked towards the huge abbey in the fog, the bell was melodically tolling, and my spine tingled, even more so when we entered the Abbey and encountered its exquisite beauty.

This was a numinous experience, a religious experience that was centred around Jesus Christ. For everything in the Montserrat Abbey focussed on Jesus Christ. There was the most arresting painting of the Raised Christ that captivated me, and impacted upon me with the intensity of sense. It sounds clumsy to say, 'it impacted upon me with the intensity of sense', but the power lay with the painting, and not with me as the observer.

This external power is a distinct feature of religious experience. You are not in control. Religious experience happens to you, captivates your attention, so that you surrender to it. The experience might be momentary, but it seems at the time like an eternity. This is characteristic of religious experience - it suspends you, claiming you, making you passive and receptive, absorbing your attention.

You might think that my earlier claim that religious experience was ordinary experience encountered in an extraordinary is becoming rather exotic. But let me give you a further instance of such religious experience that illustrates its ordinariness.

This account is written by Monica Furlong who became a very significant writer on religious experience. Monica was originally a Fleet Street journalist in London. She had a terrible stutter that made public speaking something of an agony for her. However, Monica tamed words brilliantly in her writing.

This account comes from her early adulthood when she was a working journalist.

"During the two years just before and after was twenty I had two experiences which led to religious conversion. The first occurred when I was waiting at a bus stop on a wet afternoon. It was opposite the Odeon cinema, outside the station, and I was surrounded by people, shops, cars. A friend was with me. All of a sudden, for no apparent reason, everything looked different. Everything I could see shone, vibrated, throbbed with joy and with meaning. I knew it had done this all along, and would go on doing it, but that usually I couldn't see it. It was all over in a minute or two. I climbed on the bus, saying nothing to my friend - it seemed impossible to explain - and sat stunned with astonishment and happiness.

The second experience occurred some months later. I left my office at lunch-time, stopped at a small Greek café in Fleet street to buy some rolls and fruit, and walked up Chancery Lane. It was an August day, quite warm but cloudy, with the sun glaringly, painfully bright, behind the clouds. I had a strong sense that something was about to happen. I sat on a seat in the garden of Lincoln's Inn waiting for whatever it was to occur. The sun behind the clouds grew brighter and brighter, the clouds assumed a shape that fascinated me, and between one moment and the next, although no word had been uttered, I felt myself spoken to. I was aware of being regarded by love, of being wholly accepted, accused, forgiven, all at once. The joy of it was the greatest I had ever known in my life. I felt I had been born for this moment and had marked time till it occurred."¹

Psychologists term such experiences 'peak experiences'. These experiences become foundational in our lives. They interpret our lives, put down layers of meaning upon which we draw for our sense of who we are and of life itself. These peak experiences often have a flow of emotion in them, are usually very visual and concrete, and we can retrieve them easily. In fact, such experiences shape our implicit understanding of God. They can be simultaneously both inviting and fearful.

Let me offer you another experience from an older person. This is given in detail in Archbishop Anthony Bloom's classic on prayer, School for Prayer. The Archbishop tells of an old lady who came asking for his counsel: though she had prayed continuously for fourteen years she had never sensed the presence of God. How could she learn the secret? He gave her wise advice, and later she told him of her experience.

She had gone into her room, made herself comfortable, and begun to knit. She felt relaxed and noticed with content what a nice shaped room she had, with its view of the garden, and the sound of her needles hitting the arm-rest of her chair. And then gradually she became aware that the silence was not simply the absence of sound, but was filled with its own density. 'And', she said, 'it began to pervade me...All of a sudden I perceived that the silence was a presence. At the heart of the silence there was Him.'²

I find that a powerful story. It is a deep assurance from a simple life that God is very much in the ordinary, especially those moments when we are relaxed, almost day-dreaming, when we are not trying frantically to be in control. It is in that moment of voluntary suspension that the ordinary (like silence) can claim us in an extraordinary way - we can sense a density in that silence that is more presence than absence.

There are, however, times and locations when religious experience is more usual, and more pressing. For instance, if we are travelling, especially in foreign countries, we are more susceptible to awareness of God simply because we are less shackled by routine. Routine is like exterior insulation, shutting out many stimuli from us that themselves alert us to God. The gasp of the unfamiliar can incite us to God's presence or wonder.

This perception lies at the heart of the difference between a tourist and a pilgrim. It is said that tourists pass through places, whereas places pass through a pilgrim. And I think that this difference begins to define those who live with awareness of God, and those who are blind and deaf to God.

In the Hebrew and later the Christian traditions, experience of God led to assurance and to service. Experience of God was never like a religious perfume that you daubed on occasionally in order to help you feel better about yourself.

So when I confirm a person the prayer that invokes the work of the Holy Spirit for that person speaks of them being strengthened, being empowered, and serving God. Confirmation is not a religious graduation, nor a membership certificate, but rather a commissioning for Christian ministry. The Holy Spirit makes us aware of the service that we are called to provide in Christ's name to others. This religious experience (confirmation) is about commitment to Christian ministry.

Poor Peter thought that his religious experience on the mountain was just about making a shrine. The experience is given at a crucial time of discouragement, and the figures of Elijah and Moses reinforce this, for both had mountain top experiences that revitalised them. And the shining white robe represents the martyrdom that lay ahead for Jesus. For Jesus lived out of the assurance of this experience as He faced the collision between His representation of God and the crude power plays of both religious and political forces that conspired his crucifixion.

There will be tough times ahead for every one here. But as was said in that classic film Romancing the Stone, 'when the going gets tough, the tough get going'! That at least is one expectation from confirmation, that you will stay faithful, however tough life gets.

Always, I believe, surrounding us are opportunities for religious experience. My mother would exclaim in exasperation of something, 'look, it's right there before your eyes!'. I will take her words and gently assure you about religious experience (as I hope I have shown in what I have said) 'Look, it's right there before your eyes'.

1 Monica Furlong. 1971. Travelling In. London: Hodder & Stoughton, pp.26,27.
2 Anthony Bloom. 1971. School for Prayer. London: Libra Books, p.61.