This exploration of religious experience has focused on how to design some action or expectation that will invite an intense moment that could be called "Holy." The beginning point was ceremony/ritual/liturgy that was created or traditional and that would strengthen a feeling of meaning in existence. There were two strong approaches, one based on the accounts of saints when intensely struck, who described the event in terms of two conflicting poles like light/dark, held/dropped, warm/cold. That is, contradictory sensations happening at once. The literary term is "oxymoron."
The other strategy is Victor Turner's design of liminal space/time with the sequence of going over a threshold into safety, sharing solidarity and equality with others in a way that allows transformation, and then returning over that threshold, changed. Both ideas are good tools for analysis or kindlers for worship.
But maybe it's a good idea to return to the nature of the experience. In the past that overwhelming struck resonance of Holiness has been seen as relationship with something supernatural, access to transcendence, almost entirely felt rather than analyzed. My systems do not allow for Heaven or God, though it's clear that mystery and the inconceivable are involved. One's limits are felt but along with a unity, a belonging to everything.
Paul Tillich lived through a time of turmoil and doubt when good and evil were grappling hard for dominance in the terrifying terms of Nazi genocide (which seems to be returning.) Maybe it wasn't Tillich who made this solution explicit, but it may have been. Our time sees good and evil again irresolvable. One solution for an unresolvable binary is to analyze the two into a multitude, so that there are hundreds of different kinds of evil and different kinds of virtue. Then there's a better chance that the smaller dilemmas can be resolved.
The other solution is to define a unity that accepts both, for instance, seeing both the existence of evil and the presence of good as sharing the Ground of Being. I'd have to go back and read to remember how Tillich framed this, but my own idea is that both good and evil are human constructs within the same vast uncaring universe. This will not be a popular idea but it may strike others as realistic. Maybe Buddhists will have something to say about it.
The point is that sometimes religious experience is purely felt and intense but contained. Other times the Sacred can point to meaning in the most human sense of knowing how to live.
If the approach is through meaning, the next step must be to the experience of the people who are gathered. What is their physical world like, their ecology? Robert Schreiter, writing for missionaries in "Constructing Local Theologies," discusses the difficulty of translating the basic Christian metaphor of Communion into a new culture with a different ecology and how that changes the meaning. If bread and wine are unknown, can one substitute rice and tea? At Union Theological Seminary a women's group expressed their exclusion from the priesthood with a Communion of bread and water, associated with penalties. The original Communion developed out of Passover and therefore the bread was "flat" or unrisen, but now some Christians use yeast bread -- is that a pun on "risen"? And then there was the cynical "pop" Communion of Coca Cola and Twinkies.
The other access to experience is through story. What is the dominant story of these people? Seeking? Raising family? Displacement? Recovery? The strength of the Bible is not its various cultural dogmas but the wealth of stories. The weakness of the Bible is that the terms of ancient Mediterranean life don't always fit modern urban ways.
Not only geography affects the ways of organizing rituals, but also congregations and their felt understandings are shaped by socioeconomic forces as described by H. Richard Niebuhr. This has meant that American middle class Christianity is quite different from the same-named faith of the displaced-person camp of tents in a third world country. What is mockingly called "smells and bells" or expensively embellished high church ceremony depends upon affluent patrons with elevated taste. But the poorest person can always pray.
One year I was the temporary preacher for the Blackfeet Methodist Church, though I'm formally a Unitarian Universalist. My rational decision for being true to the identity of the institution while bringing my own ideas was to use the Universal Lectionary program for Bible verses organized around a similarity of theme, but to illustrate with examples from the place: cattle on the land, sunrise over wheat fields, mountains on the horizon. I used those images for prayer and readings as well. The people smiled. They knew these images.
One spring in Kirkland with a congregation that was lively and artistic, I proposed a service to celebrate the jubilation of Spring by asking everyone to bring everything they had about frogs from Kermit t-shirts to stuffed animals or photos or masks. One boy brought a jar of real frogs he caught in a pond near his house. I still have the wax frog another boy made and gave me afterwards. I handed out sheet music with songs like "Froggy Went A-Courting." There was no order of service. We just went to what felt like it was next. At the end I summed it up with a bit of poetry and reflection. It worked very well because of who, where and when it was.
But, like sex, much of ceremony is due to habituation, being familiar and confident of knowing what to do: kneel, stand, cross oneself. Still, despite the acts being shared by many and established by history, like porn, ceremonial impacts are always unique according to the persons and their experience. That's what makes it so hard to define ritual in a universal sense. In spite of the dependable duplications of liturgy, each person will take it their own way. The experience is in the person's response, not any supernatural interference. Again, some people don't like to be surprised during the sexual or religious act and others welcome the novel with enthusiasm. Maybe this is never discussed because the similarities are too suggestive.
Again, because the subjective "felt" value of ritual, institutions always try to "own" them and maybe even charge admission. or erect [sic] special buildings. I'm still shocked by people who want to "sleep with" the clergy to prove their worth. Seminary didn't prepare me. Neither did Clinical Pastoral Education, though it showed Glide Methodist vids of how to "make love. The forbidden is always powerful.
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