How to write a religious experience?
I'm currently writing a story with a strong theme of spirituality and divinity. At around the halfway point my protagonist has a religious experience which changes them. This experience is a highly important and pivotal to the make-up of the story.
The story is from the first-person perspective of the protagonist in question.
How would you write a life changing and pivotal religious experience?
Also, any examples of religious experiences in fiction would be a great help.
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Simply and directly is usually the best way to write about religious experience. And focusing on the emotions. There are some classics on religious experience in real life (not fictional accounts) such as "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramahansa Yogananda and "The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James. More contemporary accounts: "The Experience of No-Self" by Bernadette Rogers and "A Christian Woman's Secret" by Lilian Staveley.
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It is easy to imagine that moments of religious experience are great strum and drang affairs, but they are more often moments of quietness. Not the storm but the calm after the storm. Consider 1 Kings 19:11-13:
11So He said, "Go forth and stand on the mountain before the LORD." And behold, the LORD was passing by! And a great and strong wind was rending the mountains and breaking in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. 12After the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of a gentle blowing. 13When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave. And behold, a voice came to him and said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"
They are moments when one feels a great clarity or certainty. They are not the noise but the thing that cuts through the noise. They are the coda, not the crescendo. This may not be universal (sometimes, like Paul, you get knocked off your horse) but I believe it is very much the norm.
The religious experience is above all a moment of recognition. "Then the two told what had happened on the road, and how they had recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread." (Luke 24:35) C.S. Lewis describes his conversion something like this "I broke down and confessed that God was God, the most reluctant convert in all Christendom." Just because you have the moment of recognition does not mean you are happy about it. But it is still a moment of recognition. And of course, recognition can be a profoundly life changing event.
To describe a moment of recognition, I think, is more a matter of preparation than anything else. Consider a scene in which a man sees a stranger approaching him on the street and then suddenly recognizes that it is his father. The impact of that moment of recognition depends not on how you tell the meeting itself but on whether they have been separated for a long time or dad just went down to the shop for a bag of chips. It depends on it there is some grievance between them, or if he has special need of his father, or if his father is missing. What the reader knows about these things will determine how they react to the moment of recognition. The impact is all in how it is set up, not how it is described.
If you set up the moment of religious recognition so that the reader appreciates the gravity of it (whether they share it or not) they will feel its impact on the protagonist.
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