Pentecost in a Pill - The madness of Huxley's Soma.

When it comes to religious experiences churches can blow hot and cold and thereby end up us lousy environments for talking about this stuff.  It is easy for us to be over sensitive to derision and mocking and forget that there is a huge constituency who really would like to lean on our wisdom in this respect. Consumerism is all pervasive and so it is no surprise that people claim spiritual gifts, seek religious experiences, go for altered states, embrace mystical knowledge, etc without what they see as the baggage of institutional religion.

We are also as societies increasingly allergic to institutions and shy of groups claiming that they are the mediators of this or that. We prefer direct access and relish cutting out the middleman.  A lot of advertising pushes this appealing trope, save money, save hassle, and go straight to the top. Since the Reformation and the Enlightenment our suspicions are that the middleman (like Chaucer’s pardoner) are actually fairly useless, fraudulent, and on the gravy train. 

Where does that take us? Surely we will just keep on cutting? The ultimate excision is described in Huxley’s Brave New World where Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, taunts the protagonist John Savage with the thought that they have created Christianity without tears, or in other words Pentecost in a pill.  Such a world celebrates its supposed ingenuity and gorges in perpetual pleasure with the Soma, happy pill. Soma allows you without any side effects to live off the froth and icing of life at the expense of any real depth. In Brave New World books are not banned, it's just that the doped up population have come to the consensus that it's all too boring to bother. 

Of course, there is a place for ecstatic experiences. These can be profoundly healing.  A lot of us in mainstream churches nevertheless have struggled to know how to explore this in a way that does seem either overly dismissive or kooky. This is a shame and a scandal because Christianity offers the most profound mystical journey into the life of God through Jesus Christ. Pilgrims in this way resonate with what Paul calls the peace that passes all understanding - Phillippians 4.7. I have sometimes made the analogy here of it being ‘life in the eye of the storm’.

Another analogy would be that presented with the gift of fire some churches come to the tragic conclusion that it is dangerous and unsafe to try. We therefore incorrectly relegate the penetcostal experience of the first apostles as merely a one-off story.  Pentecost then becomes a museum piece. 

Here I want to offer two ways out of this situation. (Behind this my desire that we increase in confidence in this subject because it is after all our turf.)  The first thing we should do is build up a body of wise and intelligent believers who are confident in this area and can help ground us while also encouraging us to open ourselves wider to the Holy Spirit. Churches can learn something from Eastern Christians who have a tradition of elders (sometimes called starets). The figure of Zosima in Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov is of this ilk. Elders are not necessarily ordained persons but individuals of whom the wider Christian community or a monastery recognises as having a legitimate voice or charisma in this respect. In the West we might call them spiritual directors or mentors though I think there is something more than that at play here because elders tend to be hermitical and monastic.

I was very blessed in my late teens to have found several such figures, including my local parish priest who had considerable experience in ministries of deliverance and healing. These luminaries helped me to see that religious experiences and the supernatural was not a saccharine disney world but a tough terrain which could include both positive and negative experiences, light and dark.  In my opinion this modern day desire to avoid the dark night of the soul lays at the heart of much of our existential chagrin. We ache for connection. We want God. We also want Easter and Pentecost without Good Friday, Christianity without tears.

My teenage mentor and priest taught me to be deeply invested in the intellectual life of the Church. He put my nose to the grindstone on Biblical Greek which I really struggled with due to some dyslexia.  He gave me the great books to read from Augustine’s Confessions to Screwtape Letters.  Yet he also shared insight into the supernatural and the miraculous. I began to glean that his own spiritual landscape, the inner life, was largely modelled around Christ’s wounds. He was a widower but also had experienced the death of a teenage son.  He knew something about carrying a cross. His constant advice was for me to get to know the deep love and sorrow of Christ for the world. In  other words don’t just come to God seeking sweeties. At the time I pointed out to him that it seemed not that far from the pull of St Francis. Was this a psychological version of the stigmata? This is about as far as you can get from Huxley's psychedelic Soma. 

Here I am reminded of TS Eliot’s words in East Coker (Part of the Four Quartets) in his description of Christ as the nurse or surgeon.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Can we come to God wanting to feel that? Dare we? On Good Friday we often sing the old spiritual, which still makes me choke up a bit. I conclude therefore with these words. They nest both joy and sadness in a profound embrace.  To me they demonstrate that though the Church is born at Pentecost it is conceived at Calvary.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oooh, sometimes it causes me to tremble
Tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?