Anglican Diocese of Perth

Northern Region

A sermon preached by Bishop Brian Farran at S. Mary Magdalene's Church, Heathridge 2003

Mary Magdalene is a helpful model by whom we can better appreciate the nature of religious experience. Mary Magdalene, your patron saint, provides us with a personal face to religious experience, that is, the experience of the Divine as mediated through our Lord Jesus Christ. Religious experience is the basis of Christian belief.

Experience provokes people into consideration of belief. Mostly we do not simply argue ourselves into believing. Rather, we begin to muse about belief because something has stimulated our curiosity, or something has happened to us that gnaws at us long enough to ensure that we explore what has happened.

Some people come to Christian belief through pondering about the nature of the world - why we do exist, why there is existence rather than non-existence. Even such a cerebral starting point is occasioned by some provocation external to the person doing the pondering. In other words, such a person, deep in reflection and logical thought, is responding to an experience.

Mostly, people come to faith through some change in their life circumstances. Such change might be the direct influence of some other person whose life has a vitality that is attractive, or whose quality of life seems fulfilled and meaningful. Such companions draw others into analysis of their own level of life satisfaction, and consequently, people make that famous remark: "I'll have what she's having"!

Still other people have a spontaneous, unexpected experience of God. These experiences seem to come 'out of the blue', as we remark. These experiences can happen in very ordinary circumstances or in distinctly religious environments.

One of the most profound and re-assuring religious experiences happened to me when I walked into the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool, in England. The cathedral is circular, like a cardinal's hat, and is full of the most beautiful coloured glass. The light in the cathedral is ethereal. I felt as if I had been suddenly bathed in the Divine as I slowly walked into that sacred space. The sensation was entirely unexpected. I had just been visiting the huge Anglican Cathedral at the other end of the street, so I was not experiencing a cathedral for a first time.

The sense of the sacred slowed my entrance. The hairs on the back of my neck seemed to stand on end. I felt that spontaneous, uncontrived tingling down my spine. I just had to sit down and surrender myself to this experience. The experience was revitalizing. I felt a closeness to God, a deep serenity, and a delight in God.

I later simply wandered around the vast sacred space, with its beautiful numinous light and colour bathing me as I quietly walked around, trying to assimilate the beauty. I was reluctant to leave, but like all tourists, leave I had to. Then I walked out into what seemed like the glare of Liverpool, with its scars, and grottiness, as well as its swirling humanity of people. I think I emerged somewhat dazed. Thereafter, for some time, I felt I was a kind of vaporous part of the humanity of Liverpool, a kind of silent on-looker, as I sought to digest what had happened to me.

Later on I found that I had a new assurance of God. This assurance was of the wonder of God, the beauty of God, the desirability of God, the attractiveness of God.

That Liverpool experience was very significant for me. Such experiences shape your image of God, and become (over time) a constituent of your meaning system, of how you make sense of your life. And as such a constituent, it affects what meaning you do embrace.

Therefore, it is, I think, very important to attend to religious experience for religious experience has an implicit emotive power that shapes a person's outlook on life. Further, we all have loads of religious experiences, although often we do not recognise them as such, and therefore, do not explore them for the richness of the meaning they will provide. Most religious experience comes through ordinary circumstances. But the ordinary begins to glow with the extraordinary.


I walked into a building full of wondrous colour and light, and I sensed God. Yet colour and light are all around us, most of the time. Colour and light at our usual level of experience are quite ordinary. Yet at this one moment they became (for me) extraordinary, a means of experiencing transcendence, an experience of being drawn out of myself to feel assured and deeply satisfied.

In fact, that experience was not simply a matter of having sensed God. Rather, it was an experience of being further claimed by God. I found myself surrendering yet again to God by sitting down, by being still, by just taking the ethereal light and colour into myself, by becoming passive, that is, allowing the experience to continue of its own accord.

As I said earlier, that was something ordinary that claimed me and so became extraordinary, a means of grace, an expression of God and for me a source of great delight. And I must tell you that as I was typing the text of this memory, I was there, yet again, seeing it again with similar intensity, even though my eyes were glued to the keyboard as my right index finger typed the text! That indicates the sustaining power of such experiences that are never lost to your consciousness. These experiences lie there, unnoticed, still informing your approach to life, still sensitizing you to God throughout the ordinariness of most days.

It is important that active church members know about religious experience, understand the nature of religious experience, because there are many people, if not most people, who are bewildered by their own religious experiences and do not know what to do with such unexpected experiences, nor even how to understand them. So, such people live at that level of non-comprehending, impoverished lives.

People do talk about their experiences, even strange experiences (their term for religious experiences). We are now a café culture. People drink coffee or tea in social settings, constantly. You must have noticed the proliferation of coffee shops in shopping centres, in suburbs, and of course in those distinct areas that we call cappuccino strips. And such drinking is interspersed with talking - talking about ourselves and of course, others! But experiences are the subject of much intimate conversation, especially amongst trusted friends.

I am suggesting that each Anglican will have the opportunity to assist less religiously articulate friends or family members to understand their strange experiences. Otherwise, such folk will be in that predicament of sterility that the great English poet T. S. Eliot described: they had the experience, but missed the meaning.

Let me focus now on Mary Magdalene who features so prominently in the experiences of the Raised Christ that are recorded in the gospels. I think Mary Magdalene is a prototype of religious experience. Within her encounter, that is the subject matter of the gospel story today, we can identify a sequence in her digestion of the experience. This same sequence can be used by us as we inspect our own experiences, even, for instance, our experience of hearing her story of meeting the Raised Christ yet again.

So, what happened within Mary Magdalene? First, the encounter or the experience was a crisis for her. Being in the place of death, a cemetery, simulates a crisis for any visitor. How have you felt when visiting a cemetery? Or when you have been at a crematorium?

You have a mix of feelings that cause you to be unsettled. In fact, such places call us into question, for they are powerful statements about our own mortality, and that causes us unease. Even at that simple level of unease, there is a kind of crisis going on for us.

This crisis is heightened when we are at a cemetery because we are mourning someone we dearly love. I suggest that Mary Magdalene was in a deep crisis, given her devotion to and love of Jesus.

Whilst in this felt crisis, Mary is plunged into confusion by the experience of the Raised Christ, although of course, initially, at the moment of first impact, she is unaware that it is the Raised Christ who is addressing her. So Mary Magdalene moves from crisis to confusion, and out of her confusion to clinging.

She finds a deeply personal attachment in her experience with the Raised Christ - a moment of re-assurance, a very deep, poignant moment. But this is not yet a re-interpretive moment, for Mary Magdalene wants to hang on to what she has known in the past. So she clings.

But clinging is not permitted. There is an instruction from the Raised Christ to let go, not to cling. If there were ever one instruction that Christians need to heed at this time of our mission as a church, it is not to cling.

Just think momentarily of your own personal Christian history. What is the degree of clinging to the past, to what you already know that may be preventing you from progressing with God?

That is for each of us, a salutary question to answer.

Then Mary Magdalene has clarity, appreciating the new level of relationship with the Raised Christ, and undertakes deeper commitment by becoming a messenger for the Raised Christ.

In summary, that is the process of Mary Magdalene's climatic experience: crisis, confusion, clinging, clarity and commitment. I consider that process is generalisable. In fact, that process is implicit in most religious experience. You might care to reflect on your own experiences using this simple template.

The purpose of religious experience is recognition of God, attachment to God, relationship with God, becoming godly, or as we would say in the Christian Tradition, becoming Christlike. Being Christlike means having God's priorities uppermost in our living. But that is not always the case, not even in the church, where one would assume such priorities are automatic.

In recent years when interest in spirituality has flourished, some versions of spirituality in the church have been of the anaesthetising kind. Kenneth Leech, an English priest who has worked in the rugged East end of London for over thirty years, has critiqued such anaemic spirituality.

Kenneth Leech has written, conventional religion has offered a safe neutrality in the face of horror and chaos. Much of the religion which has flourished in recent years in the 'Christian' west is of this neutral type. It offers inner and often corporate security and warmth. It is a religion of comfort and reassurance. It offers no vision, no challenge, no striving towards the new. ¹

Mary Magdalene was plunged by her religious experience into the whirlwind of being apostolic, of telling others about the Raised Christ, and the new world order that God had inaugurated by the Resurrection. My own experience shored me up for the long haul of public ministry. That was back in 1988, but it was important then and upon reflection continues still to be a sign of the sheer loveliness of God.

However, there is an obverse to all that I have said. This is the warning side. And I will use an English Jesuit to voice the warning.

Gerard Hughes in his marvellous book God of Surprises says, when the inner life [religious experience] is ignored, violence erupts in some form or other, whether in physical or mental illness in the individual, or civil unrest within a nation, or war between nations.²

Our public practice of religion in worship should assist us to befriend our own religious experience, and use it as the source and sustenance of our living and of our wisdom.

          1  Kenneth Leech. 1992. The Eye of the Storm. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, p.206.
          2  Gerard Hughes. 1986. God of Surprises. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, p.8.