Why can’t we talk about numinous experiences?

Meister Eckhart sculpture at Bad Wörishofen (Wikimedia Commons)

If the title of this post seems a little ambiguous, it is intentionally so – for it is about why we so often find ourselves incapable of talking about experiences of the numinous, but it is also about the social conventions and pressures that so often hinder such conversations. These are problems of the human condition, far broader than the history of belief; but for the historian of belief it should nonetheless be a matter of significant concern that it is so hard for people to talk about supernatural experiences in the here and now – for how, then, can we write with authenticity and honesty about the supernatural experiences of people in the past? In recent years there has been an ‘ontological turn’ in writing about the history of religious experience, exemplified perhaps most notably by Carlos Eire in his book They Flew; but there is a great danger that this renewed focus on the reality (or possible reality) of what people experienced will turn into a kind of wistful nostalgia for the days when such men and women of faith walked the earth. Unless we are prepared to confront the fact that people living today also have strange experiences – and, indeed, unless we are willing to confront the fact that a majority of all of us have had a strange experience at one time or another – then I am not sure how our historiography of the supernatural can execute an ontological turn with integrity.

Religious and spiritual experience comes in many forms, from the most dramatic (apparitions, levitations, spirit-journeys and so on) to the understated yet transformative ‘still small voice of calm’ in which something of the divine is quietly yet unambiguously present. But even when it is at the more undramatic end of the spectrum, people find it really hard to talk about religious experience (and I include myself in this). On one level, perhaps, that is down to a regionally specific reluctance to seem overly expansive on certain topics (‘No mysticism please, we’re British’). But I spend quite a lot of my time in a church context where talking about spiritual matters is normal, even encouraged – and, remarkably, even there very few are willing to open up; mundane matters swiftly return as the main subject of conversation whenever a spiritual matter comes up. But reticence is not the only issue; even the minority who do speak regularly about spiritual experiences have a tendency to do so in stereotyped and stylised terms, and I have noticed for myself that whenever I have chosen to speak to others about a spiritual event I have found myself drawing, almost unconsciously, on the prevailing context and on a certain ‘expected’ vocabulary in order to characterise or describe it.

The words we use to describe it, of course, re-fashion our memory of an experience – and it seems to me that it is in this way that numinous encounters quickly become domesticated, straitjacketed in acceptable terms we can readily process in our various religious and spiritual silos. This process bothers me deeply. At its most extreme it can become manipulative; many years ago, I remember a friend telling me about his experience of astral projection under the guidance of a magician who made him recount his experience and then interpreted it in terms that reinforced his own magical practice. This happens in charismatic (and non-charismatic) Christian circles too; it’s not just important to have religious experiences, but also to have the right kind of religious experiences. Mostly, however, there is nothing very sinister going on - it is just that we’re incredibly bad at being openminded about this stuff because we are so inexperienced in dealing with it, and often completely blindsided (cognitively, conceptually, and spiritually overwhelmed) when it comes along.

At one time I was able to speak with honesty about spiritual experiences to friends at university, who often belonged to different religious traditions from mine (or indeed to none at all) - in a way that seems impossibly unattainable now. One factor that is irrecoverable is simply to do with time; all of us back then had a degree of ignorance about our respective spiritual traditions – we were all still searching. Inevitably, as we get older, most of us tend to settle into spiritual paths like well-worn clothing, and the searching diminishes for various reasons; not least because at later stages in life few people have the intellectual energy to maintain genuine uncertainty and spiritual curiosity (except perhaps in moments of crisis). There is nothing wrong with being certain, or with being comfortable in your spiritual tradition, of course – but a malign corollary of such complacency can be a tendency to stereotype spiritual experiences that are, by definition, incursions of the numinous unknown into our merely human lives. A category of person I despise is the smug classifier of the spiritual world who is always sure exactly what to make of any strange experience, as if intrusions of the spirit-realm are a problem to be decoded so we can get back as quickly as possible to not worrying about such things and living mundane lives. I find myself despising such entomologists of spiritual butterflies far more than the atheists and doubters who deny the reality of the spirit altogether (who I disagree with, but also respect for their honesty).

To state the obvious, it is very difficult to find the words to speak about experiences of the numinous that are convincing to ourselves or others, or which accurately communicate even a fraction of what we feel or the difference an experience has made in our lives. The problem of ineffability is one that theologians have grappled with for millennia. The difference in past centuries, however, was that finding some sort of inadequate simulacrum for the ineffable was at least considered a worthwhile aspiration – whereas our society casts doubt on whether we should even be trying to talk about direct experiences of the supernatural. I have had few such experiences; I am not the sort of person who readily has access to the mystical realm (although that doesn’t stop me thinking about it a lot): but when I have experienced something of this kind I have found it very hard to hold on to. The best comparison I can make is to trying to remember a dream on waking. It is as if the dream doesn’t want to be remembered – we are, presumably, fighting an evolutionary response to dreams where our minds are programmed to forget them lest dream and reality become confused. Something similar happens with experiences of God; the original experience is (at least for me) a fleeting one, and almost immediately it feels as though my memory deprioritises it (even though I earnestly want to remember it!), probably because I have so few referents for such experiences, and memory needs a cognitive peg to hang on.

Nothing like that is available for religious experiences, and so we have a tendency to record over them immediately, as on an old magnetic tape. They are hard to remember precisely because they do not happen often, and they belong to a wholly different category from strong feelings and emotions (which are often memorable). It is as if God speaks to us in a language that memory finds difficult to process; and sometimes, when I feel the presence of God or have the sense that He is speaking to me, I am aware that I am trying to refashion that experience in real time as a clear message in words or a clear description. But in truth there is nothing clear about it. It is deeply strange to come into contact with the divine. It is irreducibly strange. And in the same way that a record of a dream always falls painfully short of what was experienced and felt by the dreamer, so any record of religious experience is always inadequate – to a farcical degree. I am ever more convinced that the spiritual world is hidden from us not because it is elusive but because most of us are unable to process it - like Magellan’s fabled ships, supposedly invisible to the Patagonians because they had no conceptual or perceptual referent for a Portuguese galleon, so spiritual realities are very much present but we don’t know how to make sense of them. Re-enchantment is a skill issue.

Mystics like Meister Eckhart regarded descriptions of mystical experience as bordering on the blasphemous; so great is the difference between the experience and our capacity to describe it that we make fools of ourselves in even trying to do so. Ineffability is certainly a non-negotiable theological problem, but I don’t think it excuses us from talking about spiritual experiences. The attitude of our present society to the numinous reminds me of the middle-class Victorian approach to sex; it is fine to speak of the social context surrounding it (who is getting married to whom) and fine to speak about its consequences (the birth of children), but the act itself is beyond unspeakable, and utterly veiled from discussion and even from thought. In the same way, in contemporary religious contexts it seems fine to accept that people have had numinous experiences and that those experiences have had consequences (conversions, even miraculous healings, etc.) - but getting into the nitty-gritty of what it actually feels like to encounter God is as taboo in 2026 as it would have been to talk about the physical mechanics of sexual intercourse at the dinner table in 1876. We are content with the packaged experience, as Victorians were content with marriage as an institution, but we are profoundly reluctant to look inside the back box and see what happens inside it.

But just as the Victorian social moratorium on speaking of sex bred obsession (and unhealthy obsession at that), I think our discomfort about religious experiences breeds obsession with a spiritual life and spiritual longings that most people in our society have scant means of realising. Even when people approach what ought to be a fount of understanding of the spiritual dimension of life - the Church - they are too often fobbed off. Who among the clergy has the time to spend hours discussing incursions of the numinous? Everyone is busy. Clergy are managers and administrators of complex and demanding organisations, whether they like it or not. So people turn to dubious online outlets for finding information about the supernatural world, and more often than not find themselves more confused than ever.

I am not sure what the solutions are here. I suppose what I long for is a world where we are curious about one another’s encounters with the numinous. I long for a world where that curiosity is also accompanied by genuine and open listening – not glib spiritual pigeonholing. I don’t care how certain you are of the foundations of your faith (I am very certain of mine) – people’s spiritual experiences are still strange because we do not understand God. We do not understand the spiritual world He created. We do not know the rules. I yearn for us to be honest about that – an honesty which doesn’t require us to question our faith, still less to become occultists, but which does require us to acknowledge that the cloud of unknowing is genuinely impenetrable. Religious experiences are something that happen to us as human beings; they are part of life. In my view, they are the single most interesting thing that happens to us as human beings. It is nothing short of a tragedy that most of us just do our best to shove our own and others’ numinous encounters into a closet and keep them there.