Later, Luhrmann embarked on a study of evangelical religion. The very essence of divinity, of God, is immaterial. God cannot be seen, felt, or heard in the ordinary way. How, she wondered, in the face of this lack of evidence, does God become a real, intimate presence in the lives of so many evangelicals and other people of faith? Many evangelicals feel they have literally been touched by God, or heard his voice aloud; others speak of feeling his presence in a physical way, of knowing that he is there, walking beside them. The emphasis in evangelical Christianity, Luhrmann writes, is on prayer and other spiritual exercises as skills that must be learned and practiced. Such skills may come more easily to people who are prone to being completely engaged, fully absorbed, by their experiences, whether real or imaginary—the capacity, Luhrmann writes, “to focus in on the mind’s object . . . the mode of the novel reader and the music listener and the Sunday hiker, caught up in imagination or appreciation.” Such a capacity for absorption, she feels, can be honed with practice, and this is part of what happens in prayer. Prayer techniques are often focused on attention to sensory detail:
[Congregants] practice seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching in the mind’s eye. They give these imagined experiences the sensory vividness associated with the memories of real events. What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them.
And one day the mind leaps from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant
These yearned-for voices and visions have the reality of perception. One of Luhrmann’s subjects, Sarah, put it this way: “The images I see [in prayer] are very real and lucid. Different from just daydreaming. I mean, sometimes it’s almost like a PowerPoint presentation.” Over time, Luhrmann writes, Sarah’s images “got richer and more complicated. They seemed to have sharper borders. They continued to get more complex and more distinct.” Mental images become as clear and as real as the external world.
Sarah had many such experiences; some congregants might have only a single one—but even a single experience of God, imbued with the overwhelming force of actual perception, can be enough to sustain a lifetime of faith.
Even at a more modest level, all of us are susceptible to the power of suggestion, especially if it is combined with emotional arousal and ambiguous stimuli. The idea that a house is “haunted,” though scoffed at by the rational mind, may nonetheless induce a watchful state of mind and even hallucination, as Leslie D. brought out in a letter to me:
Almost four years ago I started a job that is housed in one of the oldest residences in Hanover, PA. On my first day, I was told there was a resident ghost, the ghost of Mr.
Gobrecht, who lived here many years ago and was a music teacher. . . . I suppose he died in the house. It would be almost impossible to adequately describe how much I do
NOT believe in the supernatural! However, within days I started to feel something like a hand tugging on my pant leg while I sat at my desk, and once in a while a hand on my shoulder. Just a
week ago we were discussing the ghost, and I felt (
Children not uncommonly have imaginary companions. Sometimes this may be a sort of ongoing, systematized daydreaming or storytelling, the creation of an imaginative and perhaps lonely child; in some cases it may have elements of hallucination—a hallucination that is benign and pleasant, as Hailey W. described to me:
