In defense of the charismatic experience of religion
We are called to love the Lord with our whole person: all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, and with all our mind.
Lately it’s become fashionable on the interwebs to bash the charismatic experience of religion. With the generation that birthed the Catholic charismatic renewal aging, and the ascendance of the traditionalist movement, it’s not too surprising that many online are either ignorant of exactly what the charismatic movement was, or have re-evaluated their experiences with it as “mere emotional froth” or even “dangerous paranormal activity.” I think this smacks of a pride that is unbecoming to Christians. Sociologically, it is the lower class who typically engages in charismatic Christianity, and it remains very popular in what used to be called the Third World. The left-brain orientation of the Internet makes it even easier to “punch down” when it comes to critiquing something as subjective as a charismatic religious experience. It is by its nature a “phenomena” that is hard to capture effectively in words. Nevertheless, I’m going to mount a defense of it, specifically as I have experienced it as a Catholic Christian.
I should begin by mentioning that I am not going to attempt to specifically defend it theologically. Others have done that better than me. Recently some veterans of what has become known as “the Renewal” sat down with an interviewer to recap and answer some of these online questions. I cannot do better than they did: and here’s the interview for anyone who wants to seriously go chapter-and-verse on issues of theology, discernment, Church authority, and Church history, as well as its valuable and ongoing contribution. Definitely if you’re new to the whole debate, this video would also be a great place to start.
The Catholic charismatic renewal started with one 1967 student retreat near Duquesne University. The remarkable book The Cross and the Switchblade had become a best-seller, and participants were asked to read this story of how a country pastor in Pennsylvania ended up converting a New York City gang leader as a preparation for the retreat. One aspect of the book—which I read as a teen and would recommend—was a deep experience of God known as the “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” referencing Mark 1:8, and apparently the retreat participants discussed among themselves what it could be. On Saturday night, during a recreation period, the participants felt drawn to the little drab paneled room that housed the Eucharist and served as a chapel for the retreat house. There, in the stillness of that room, they experienced something absolutely extraordinary. Listen to one lady who was there describe what it was like.
That experience, which clearly was emotional and psychological as well as intellectual—but no less real for all that!—spread from one Catholic to another like wildfire, setting hearts on fire for God—until it wrapped across the country, around the world, and reached even to the Vatican.
I often call myself a non-practicing charismatic. My first experiences of God were charismatic and coincided with my parents’ own journey, as I’ve detailed here. I have never been ashamed of either my or my parents’ experience, and have always been grateful for it. But my own earthly journey has led me to abide in the land of traditional Catholicism, Front Royal, and so I’ve become relatively familiar with the ins and outs of that movement, which in general I wholeheartedly support. As I’ve said regarding Christian music previously, it is to support traditionalist Catholicism that I want to offer my perspective and some free advice.
Despite the widespread rationalist denial of the spiritual, to be human is to be a spiritual being as well as a physical one. The spiritual world is everywhere, accessible through imagination and perception, interpretation and belief, subjective and trespassing on the objective, especially when it leaves behind physical relics—the Tilma, the Shroud, the healing spring at Lourdes and thousands of more smaller and less-famous cases. Just as the physical world is both good and broken or neutral, both healing and damaging or merely present, so the spiritual world contains the good, the bad, and the indifferent. It can be confusing, deceptive, and malicious as much as elevating, meaningful, and beneficent. The spiritual world is not only confusing because it is full of chaotic forces, but because we ourselves are as well. Thus many times we humans get out of the spiritual world what we put into it.
I would put it this way: the spiritual world is reality with no filter or distraction, and it can easily deceive or even unhinge the unprepared mind. It can be terribly dangerous to our souls, and since our own soul is what we are charged to protect in this life, it can be perilous for mortals, especially mortals unlearned or unpracticed in virtue, to attempt to access it out of mere curiosity or thrill-seeking.
Religion has been famously described as the means for controlling and shutting down religious experience. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is religion which offers human beings a safe way to encounter and transverse the universe of the spirit. King David, no stranger to the perilous realm of warfare in the spirit, sang praises of the Law of the Lord as restoring the soul, reviving the heart, enlightening the mind, and keeping straight the path for this very reason. Right religion is not a tool to quench spiritual experience: it provides a fireplace for its fire, a well for its flood, a channel for its rivers, a window for its blinding light. We want and need the spiritual: but plunging in to its elements without direction is playing with fire (or metaphorical wind, water, and earth) in a way that is dangerous for us and for our world, as every good fairytale warns us.
The Catholic Church, claiming to rule it all through the authority of her Spouse, Jesus Christ, deliberately straddling both the spiritual and the concrete, not only has separated the geography of the earth into dioceses but has assigned spiritual jurisdiction of each inch to her bishops to oversee. Yes, the Catholic Church is definitely the weirdest and boldest of religions. Feet firmly planted on earth, eyes on the heavens, she teaches we are souls who have bodies: our bodies are not machines or clots of clay but the embodiment of our soul.
This may be one reason why the miracles blessed by the Church usually have physical embodiments: bodies that don’t decay, bone fragments or pieces of cloth that bring healing, the reformed lives or physical healings worked by saints—today no saint can be canonized without two bona fide miracles attested to by physicians. The Church welcomes questions and questions every experience herself. What other religion has a bureaucracy to examine miracles, and hires psychologists and scientists to examine apparitions?
So in 1969, when a group of college students and professors claimed to have an extraordinary experience of God on a retreat, one that was highly contagious and spread like a spiritual wildfire around the world, the Church set out to examine it fairly quickly, the same year it occurred. In fact, since religious professors were on the retreat where the Catholic charismatic renewal all began, they themselves immediately approached Church leaders and asked for discernment. And over and over again, bishops and popes approved, blessed, and sanctioned the activities of the charismatic renewal. Every pope since Paul VI has blessed the Catholic charismatic renewal, as well as hundreds of bishops in every continent of the earth.
The experience of the renewal began with speaking in tongues and singing and raising hands but channeled itself swiftly into ministry, whether reaching inner-city youth, feeding the hungry, becoming counselors, or contemplative adoration of the Eucharist. But there were also healings, intense Scripture study, apostolic poverty, new religious orders, transformation of lay and family life, and more.
I myself have experienced almost all the Renewal offered—I’ve spoken in tongues, given and received prophecy, been slain in the Spirit, experienced tears, trembling, and laughter. More than anything else, I have bonded with fellow Catholics and Christians receiving the same experience.
And yes, I’m sure there’s some kind of psychological mimetic group behavior going on there—because Christ works through the human—but I’m also sure that it’s more than that. Just as I’m sure that there’s a biochemical reaction that happens when I kiss my husband or hug my children, but I’m also just as certain that my relationship with them is far more than merely that. Let’s not be foolishly reductionist about the human aspects of phenomena, okay?
And I have experienced these gifts in solitude as well, apart from any group suggestion. I’ve recognized and followed gentle internal nudges that direct me to read a certain Scripture, talk to a certain person, say certain words, pick up and read a certain book, explore a certain path, and it has all been a fruitful learning experience. I have learned not to absolutely trust these nudges—everything needs to be discerned, and I’m fairly weak, unreliable, and can be deceived—but the fruit from these nudges has been so consistently good that I feel confident saying that I have learned to hear God’s voice through these experiences.
I’ve also seen the dark side of spiritual experience—demonic activity, mental fragmentation, people whose darkness or illness is terrifyingly magnified by a spiritual encounter. Hence my warnings that spiritual evil is real and it’s not good to be curious about it. A healthy respect of any spiritual experience is prudent.
I hope I speak for many charismatics when I say that after encountering Christ, I have found spiritual evil has certain defining characteristics, even when it masks itself as an angel of light: demons emanate confusion or compulsion, and particularly hopelessness. They are bullies: impatient, demanding, and throw a veil of anxiety, fatalism, or even despair over everything.
Whereas the Good Shepherd always leaves you free. He gives you a yoke, but it’s easy. He asks you to pick up a burden, but when you do, it’s light. Over time and consistency, you learn to recognize His voice. When He calls you to do something, it’s usually something you had a sneaking suspicion you were supposed to be doing it all along, but were too stubborn or scared to do it before—but suddenly the grace is there and you can begin doing it easily and with freedom, whether it’s renouncing a bad habit, sharing the Catholic faith with others, giving up a distracting habit, or loving a previously annoying person—what you dreaded is, after the experience, possible and even joyful. And embracing even the most painful suffering becomes a source of joy. I really don’t know how else to explain it. He is so good.
As a child, I always had a very active and powerful imagination, and hence was constantly preyed upon by nightmares or visions of bad guys, wars, or ghosts that were so real that I could become petrified. I found solace in sitting beside my parents at charismatic prayer meetings, listening to the echoes of the singing in tongues or the praise of Jesus, and feeling absolutely bathed in joy. I drew pictures, wrote stories, wandered up and down the aisles of the empty church nearby, read the Bible, and felt completely at peace in a way that was unlike anything else I’d ever experienced. So I literally grew into the gifts, and my parents were able to explain things as I aged. I never really left the Catholic faith, but I was certainly tempted like any other teen. But I did have a moment—several moments—where my sins, small and pathetic as they were—confronted me and I realized I needed a Savior just as much as my peers who were wallowing in the mortal sins trending at the time. And in a prayer meeting, I experienced Christ as truly present and gave Him my life again. I became serious and intentional about actually living my life for Him there. It all kind of began there.
I say “again” because I was already baptized, shriven, communicated, and confirmed, and this was not too unexpected, because I knew that in the Catholic Church, it’s never “one and done.” You’re on the journey—towards Christ or away from Him—until you die, and you always have a choice. Yet everyone has their pivotal moments, and I had several crucial ones when I was still a teenager, and I’ve had periodic other ones throughout my life so far where I was challenged to move beyond anger, or selfishness, or weariness, or just plain laziness to go deeper, have more of Christ. There’s always more.
My husband’s reversion dates from the first time he accompanied his brother, a student at Franciscan University, to a charismatic Mass. Although raised Catholic, he himself was not practicing his faith at the time. He was flabbergasted to see what looked like normal young adults and teens intensely focused on the words of the Mass, whispering the prayers of repentance with actual tears, real joy on their faces when they beheld the Lamb of God, singing His praises with all their voices could muster. He walked away thinking, “I'm Catholic and they're Catholic, but they know something I don't know.” It all began there.
What happens when you have a charismatic experience? Well, for me, Scripture became alive. I could feel Him speaking to me through the Bible in a way that no other book has ever spoken to me, and I was moved to begin to study the Bible and make it part of my daily routine.
You actually desire Christ. You want to be with Him. You go into a church just so you can sit in His presence. You want to tell Him about your life. It all suddenly becomes easier. It’s like you’ve suddenly fallen in love with a person you’ve known all your life, maybe someone you knew primarily as your parent’s friend. But now suddenly it’s all different.
I was fortunate. In the midst of the chaos in the 1980s American Catholic Church I somehow stumbled in the right direction and found support so that the experience didn’t evaporate like a teenage crush, but was channeled into a structure where I could actually grow. I found a good support group of charismatic Christians (98% of them Catholic) who met regularly in order to grow in virtue, not just have cool experiences (although we had plenty of those). I was challenged to have a regular prayer life, to avoid habitual sin, to become a kinder and more generous person, to think of others before myself, and to befriend others I didn't feel personally interested in befriending. It was hard, but it certainly made a difference—and it was fun, too.
From there I went to Franciscan University and joined a household so I could continue to be challenged. Here is where I really began to figure out and take hold of my Catholic faith, or at least the particularly Catholic parts of the faith: the Eucharist, devotion to Mary and the saints, a deep dive into Church history, and began to realize just how old the religion I was experiencing actually was.
All throughout college, I was haunted by the sense that I was about to leave the regular experience of charismatic gifts very soon. My imagination had matured into a crazily accurate intuition that was sometimes nearly prophetic, and I remember tearfully telling my friends in charismatic community that I was never going to live in their area again. I also had a strong interior impulse to begin praying for my future husband, and I began to do so. Little did either of us know that the impulse came just when my future husband had definitively returned to the Catholic Church and begun mission work.
After graduation, I wandered about for six months, trying different jobs, before being hired as assistant editor at Catholics United for the Faith. Thus began my plunge into a parallel world I had only vaguely been aware of: traditional Catholicism.
I had met traditionalist Catholics before. My senior year of college in my acting/directing classes, I had met my first “trads”: Catholics who preferred and sometimes refused to attend anything but the Tridentine Catholic Mass in Latin. They wore black, were artsy and bohemian, and were dead set on driving two hours every Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon to attend Mass in Latin. I respected them as artists but thought they were seriously wacked out, as we used to say in the 80s.
But the “trads” kept coming to Franciscan. When I finally met and married my husband and moved back to the University with him so he could finish his masters in theology, the scattered artistic individuals had grown into a robust and vocal community who demanded—and largely received—more Latin in the Mass, more Gregorian chant, and stricter attention to the rubrics. I detected that change was in the air.
Then our family moved to Front Royal, Virginia, and I toured Christendom College, which I had never visited, and was profoundly impressed. I found that they had been trying for years to straddle the divide among the nascent traditionalist movement—trying to keep “mad trads” from going all sede, trying to temper the tone of “rad trads” towards charity, and hopefully making everyone into “glad trads.” Hence the College was criticized by both ends for doing this—by regular Catholics for tolerating and being “trads” and by trads for not being “trad enough” (they had the Novus Ordo in Latin, but until around 2017, did not allow the Tridentine Mass to be said on campus).
At a dinner with Christendom grads in our new home in the early 90s, I heard for the first time the opinion that all Catholic charismatics were probably possessed by the devil. I admitted that I was charismatic, and to judge by the facial expressions, it was as though I had unveiled myself as a Satanist. “But have you prayed in tongues? Been ‘slain in the Spirit’?” When I said yes, my new acquaintances changed the subject and by common consent, never addressed the matter with me again.
But I eventually did make trad friends, good friends, who helped me understand the movement, and now decades later, after having spent most of my life within these traditional Catholic circles, I feel the time has come to re-open that conversation, in case it’s helpful to my friends, and to others, who have heard but not experienced “the Renewal,” even as it fades into the distance along with the 20th century.
So while one should not actively seek after a religious or charismatic experience, as the saints warn, I want to affirm that it’s not necessarily dangerous to have one if the Lord sends it to you.
And if He does send you one, you certainly have to discern it against the truth of the Catholic faith and the wisdom of His Church. That I can say with emphatic certainty.
The Church, sailing into any spiritual experience she is called to examine, either blesses, shrugs, or puts a warning label on it. She is busy with the Gospel, but the evaluation of the spiritual is also her domain.
And when it comes to spiritual experiences, you learn that it’s yourself and your experience that needs to be questioned, not the truth of God as revealed through His Church. This is because any of us can be deceived: even great saints who were seasoned veterans of spiritual experiences like Joan of Arc or Catherine of Siena sometimes wrongly read or misinterpreted their visions.
It’s also wise to learn how to correctly see yourself: those who feel hatred and disgust with themselves instead of the correct love and care one should have for one’s self often seem find that having a religious experience is threatening, skews one’s mental health, or just disorients or confuses them. What I would say is that you need to truly learn to see yourself as God sees you: as His beloved child. And yes, as Patti Mansfield details in her testimony above, often it is precisely a genuine religious experience that opens your eyes for the first time to His love. So much of religious experience is accepting and receiving that Divine Love, instead of arguing with Him or keeping Him at a safe distance.
As the Church would affirm in the words of the Bible: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that each one who believes in Him might not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.” (John 3:16-17)
The Church, who is outside of personal religious experience, is really a rock in that regard. After all, Christ, when He walked on the earth was not a vision, an apparition, or a spiritual experience: He was a real Man with a verifiable Jewish bloodline Who when He walked, left actual footprints, ate actual food, made actual friends, and spoke audible words. That was kind of the whole point. Of everything.
And yes, it’s completely possible to follow Him without any personal spiritual experiences of any kind whatsoever. If that’s you, that’s completely fine.
But yet, the charismatic experience of the Catholic faith—whether that comes to you during a Tridentine Mass or in a church basement prayer meeting, whether when you’re praying the Rosary alone before the Eucharist or when gathered with other Catholics and earnestly praying together—is a blessing. An incredible enrichment.
It’s like this:
Becoming Catholic means being given a hefty dose of material — the Sacred Tradition, the ritual—the history alone is encyclopedic!—plus the expectations, the responsibility, the call to be a saint, the possibility of failure—both the holiest humans and the worst scoundrels of history seemingly eyeing your progress—plus there is no predestination, no consolation of guaranteed salvation, your own free will haunting you to the end—what a burden it can seem! Hauling this thing around can seem like dragging a loaded thousand-pound weight behind you as you trudge along in Christ’s footsteps, trusting that there is a God up there somewhere Who is helping you, but sometimes He can seem so distant within the endless inner monologue of self.
What is the charismatic experience? It’s the Holy Spirit sticking out His wing and tripping you—and as you, the good Catholic, fall on your face, He whispers in your ear something like this:
“Hey buddy, that thing you’re pulling? It’s actually a Lamborghini. Here’s the keys. Quit striving: get in and start driving.”
What. A. Difference!
With that sweet surrender, Catholicism goes from being an incredible burden to an unstoppable force. You’re driving forward, and Our Lord is both beside you and ahead of you, the saints are in the seat with you, you’ve got the wind in your face and a song in your heart, and you’re laughing at yourself because it’s just so ridiculously crazy that you, a cradle Catholic, never figured this out before. This is what it’s MEANT to be like.
Now, not everyone has this experience. In the mystery of God, I don’t know why He denies this to some. But for the life of me, I don’t understand why anyone would not want to have it. Or be terrified of experiencing this. Or deny this experience exists if they’ve had it, or cease to yearn for it if they have not.
Does it last? Of course not! And why should it be expected to last? Everyone that Christ heals dies eventually: even Lazarus had to die again. The miracle is a signpost pointing forward, a tremor of bliss, a wink of heaven, a gift.
Or a “charism,” as St. Paul put it.
That’s why it’s called a charismatic experience.
If you are a Catholic, I pray you encounter it someday.
Or even if you’re not.
Yet.