I'm reading off-and-on from William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. Today, I want to comment on something that I read on pages 53-54:
"We shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in later lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does come,---a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say,---it is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste."
This quote makes me think of so many issues:
Can God command us to love him, and hold us responsible if we don't? How can we help what we feel or don't feel about God?
Was there a conception of a "religion" or an "atheist" gene as far back as the 1950's, when James delivered his lectures? Maybe or maybe not. But James does talk about people who regarded religion as biological in origin.
Are only those with the "gift" of religious rapture pleasing to God? Some act like such is the case, which is one source of elitism within Christianity. But I think of Philo, who said that Abraham was educated to become virtuous, that Isaac was virtuous by nature and by grace, and that Jacob worked to attain virtue. There are different ways to be righteous, in my opinion.
Does one need religion to be happy? Sometimes, it's religion that creates (or contributes to) the "waste" within.
Yet, I like the concept of my inner life thriving, even if my outer life is not. Paul talks about that when he discusses his contentment in whatever circumstances he finds himself. In Milton's Paradise Lost, God refers to a "paradise within" that will accompany Adam and Eve, even after they have been expelled from the comforts of paradise---and as they go into a cold and harsh world, where they will have to scrape and scrap for their survival. For me, the Church of James Pate's Brain---a sermon of encouragement that I give myself as I try to fall asleep---is a source of inward renewal, as I experience terrors without and wrestle with fears within. For me, the Church of James Pate's Brain is an oasis of faith, hope, and love.