A Walk with William James, Part 9: Broken Like Bubbles in the Sun

The high point of the The Varieties of Religious Experience is when William James turns to the issue of "saintliness," to those people who are the spiritual artists and giants among us.

I will say more about saintliness, but today a short and personal post reflecting on a lovely passage early in James' lectures on saintliness. Specifically, James is speaking of those expansive religious impulses that can come over and grab us. These grand and good impulses, which the saints seem to experience more than most, help to crash through all our moral idleness and psychological inertia to move us to act in a way that seems sublime and transcendent:

"Given a certain amount of love, indignation, generosity, magnanimity, admiration, loyalty, or enthusiasm of self-surender, the result is always the same. That whole raft of cowardly obstructions, which in tame persons and dull moods are sovereign impediments to action, sinks away at once. Our conventionality, our shyness, laziness, and stinginess, our demands for precedent and permission, for guarantee and surety, our small suspicions, timidities, despairs, where are they now? Severed like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in the sun..."

This is the quintessential religious experience. When some feeling of love or moral indignation takes hold of us and causes us to push aside convention, shyness, despair, fear and timidity--breaking all these as bubbles in the sun--moving us to ACT in a good and holy way. I think of Rosa Parks refusing to move, St. Francis rushing up to kiss a leper, Gandhi's march to Dandi, and Stephen standing before the Sanhedrin.

And, of course, I think of Jesus. You know what facet of Jesus' life fills me up with this feeling the most? His eating with sinners. Every time I think about that great, grand and good facet of his life and ministry my heart just swells.

Maybe there is a God. Maybe there isn't. Round and round it goes in my head. But every time I think of Jesus eating with sinners something in me breaks--like bubbles breaking in the sun--and I say, screw it, I'm living my life like that guy.