Drawing on Samuel S. Cohon’s Judaism: A Way of Life, D.G. Myers praises religion’s “practical phase”:
Transcendence may be the “most persuasive evidence of God,” but this is not how it operates in the lives of most religious men and women. They do not require evidence of God; their concern is not to defend His existence, but simply to serve Him. Some of them may never even have a “highly personal transcendent experience,” but for those who do, it is less a great and strong wind or an earthquake or fire than a kol d’mamah dakah summoning the believer to go and return to her way.
In Christopher Beha’s astonishing debut novel What Happened to Sophie Wilder (reviewed here), the title character is attending mass at a small parish church when she is invaded by the Holy Spirit—she is taken over by “something outside of herself, something real, not an idea or a conceit or a metaphor”—but rather than pursuing a repetition of the experience, she dedicates herself to caring for her father-in-law as he dies painfully from cancer.
The ordinary religious duties (or what she, as a Catholic, would call humility) are what gives permanence to the moment of transcendence. Neglecting them she might have managed to “hook up” with God, but only briefly and without meaning.
In a follow-up post, Myers turns to a passage from Beha’s second novel, Arts & Entertainment, to warn of what happens when such “ordinary religious duties” aren’t cultivated:
As a ten-year-old altar boy at his family’s parish in Queens, Eddie had experienced a single unforgettable moment of what adults might call transcendence, when his whole body buzzed with the presence of something other than himself, a moment he had never talked about to anyone and didn’t like to think about now, because it still seemed unmistakably real to Eddie and didn’t make any sense to him.
Instead, Eddie tries to find substitutes for the experience in acting (“Something like that feeling had sometimes visited him while he was onstage”), and it remains without religious significance for him: “If asked, he would have said he was Catholic, just as he would have said he was Irish—it was a matter of birth, not of action or belief.”
Everything that happens to Eddie in the sequel is a consequence of his failure to make “that feeling” the basis of action or belief. Like so many of his contemporaries, he prefers the fever to the habit.
Recent Dish on Myers’s thoughts on death here.
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