I've been thinking about what an experience of God looks and feels like. So many of us wonder, I think, what people mean when they speak very confidently about having had one...

If I authentically had such an experience, would I know it for sure, and never question it again? It's hard for people--anyone--to be very articulate about what an experience of the Divine feels like, so it's hard to know whether your own experience fits into a pattern. Evangelical traditions have tried to frame it into a sort of formula: You "ask Jesus into your heart" or pray words about giving your life to Jesus (which should cover you even if you don't feel anything significant at the time). But some of us concrete, literal thinkers have trouble with even the meaning of those words. All John Wesley could say was that he felt his heart "strangely warmed". And that's about as close as I can get to it too. By definition, this kind of experience is about meeting Mystery. Marcus Borg talks about "thin places", those moments when we sense that whatever curtain that usually stands between the sacred and the every-day concreteness of our lives has shifted, or become transparent, so that you can stand in your own life and see, just for a moment, something on the other side.

And here's as good a description as I've read for a long time, from Diana Butler Bass, who's been studying Protestant churches. This appears in a book called The Life of Meaning, edited by Bob Abernethy and William Bole:

"I can't even begin to say how many times I have been in church, and I'll be sitting there with my family and my heart will sort of melt, and I'll realize that I have not been as intimately connected with my family and as gracious as I should be. So I begin to experience my family and my neighbors in a new way.

And then from that I begin to think about God. And that worship service is the one place where I have an hour and a half during the week that I am focused on what it means to be a Christian, and who God is, and how my relationship with God has an impact on the rest of my life. And so I move to this place that I do not have in the regular bits of my life, and I move there not by myself." (p.260)

It is enough. What does it look like for you?