Religion and Connection

Yesterday, September 8, was Antonín Dvořák’s birthday (1841). I celebrated it briefly by listening to two of my favorite pieces by this composer: the American Suite, and Wodník (usually called the Water Goblin). For me, this was an intense religious experience. The word religion comes from the Latin ligere, which means to connect. I felt connected not just to the beauty that flooded the composer’s mind as he wrote this music, even though he died over 50 years before I was born, but also the connection that he felt with the entire world of beauty.

This is an example of the connectedness of which religion, at its best, consists. There were no words, just music. But the music also told stories: I could just see the nineteenth-century American countryside in the American Suite, including the last movement that sounded like a wild dance of Native Americans; and the musical themes of the goblin and the young woman created images in my mind. Stories with words also create a feeling of connectedness: fictitious characters can provide a connection between you and thousands of people whom you will never meet. I felt this connection later in the evening when I read part of John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies, one of his most empathetic novels.

What these experiences did not have was doctrine. These experiences carried with them no assertions to which I had to give assent.

Religious leaders enhance their own power (and often their own wealth) by insisting that you have to give assent to the doctrines that they purvey to you. You can’t just go out in the woods, or read the Bible stories for yourself. You have to receive salvation through their preaching. They ride the wild horse of religious feelings, whoop and whirl their hats, and proclaim that they and their doctrines are the source of the feelings; and then they lasso you into their domination. Then they say that those religious experiences do not exist outside of the little kingdom of their preaching.