There is a collective dimension to this: all the early Christians experienced the same thing. Like alien abductees, the first Christians had a shattering experience in common. This brought them together. But this experience was not an institution.” – Paul Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life.

Watch Zahl speak about this book:

I receive monthly greetings from a Benedictine abbot, Abbot Philip. He’s the Abbot of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico. They were the site of a Discovery Channel show in 2006.

I wrote and asked his permission to quote his recent letter. He said yes! I explained to him that much of his letter reminded me of what we’ve been reading in Schleiermacher’s On Religion. Here’s Abbot Philip’s letter and my comments.

Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession

The first two chapters are precious, in the best sense of the word. It recalls a kind of religious devotion and sensibility that is not at all a part of my religious vocabulary. Yet I can appreciate the palpable reality of her childhood faith. What’s interesting to me is that this period of her life was what she called “preliterate”. While I don’t remember not being able to read, Rice has memories of a rich inner and outer life unadulterated by the text.

She admits being a lousy reader in school and through college. (That was a surprising factoid!) But perhaps for the novelist or creative writer the development of one’s own vocabulary used to interface with the world outside and within is a part of what makes great writers. I’m just guessing.

Rice beautifully juxtaposes the menagerie of nature with the riotous panoply of sights, sounds, and smells from the pre-Vatican II liturgies. I’ve yet to attend one but now that Benedict has more or less given a full-voiced imprimatur, more and more parishes are going back to this earlier form of worship. Certainly Rice has made me temper my Protestant rejecting anything as “worship” which the participant can neither pronounce nor understand. Temper, not abandon.

I think part of the difference here is the reliance on “the Book”, the texts, the lyrics of the hymns. That was the main focus of my childhood religious experience. Rice reached the Divine through the phenomena of mostly non-literate sign and symbols of the Divine. Reading Schleiermacher again while picking up this Rice memoir has made me take a step back to realize the spiritual efficacy of this non-literate path. I say “efficacy” only because of the impact these experiences apparently had on Rice. In this Jamesean sense, it certainly “worked” for her. It had an indelible impact on her even though she spent more decades away from the faith that within it. Or perhaps, as Schleiermacher might conjecture, she simply was unaware of the Infinite even as it, or some sense of it, never left her.