Experience of Place

I have come to this topic of experiential religion or spirituality in a class entitled Experience of Place. A student in the class noted that when you're a part of REI culture (Recreational Equipment Incorporated) and you are asked "are you going to church on Sunday?" you are really being asked if you are going to participate in some outdoor activity like snowboarding at Stevens or hiking Mount Si. Having heard that Seattle - possibly the entire Pacific Northwest - is the most notorious for NOT going to church, the class instructor wondered aloud if it is because the people of this area are experiencing spirituality in another way.
It is in this moment of connecting NOT going to church WITH participating in outdoor activities that I realize what the challenge of Northwest evangelists might be, and I see the opportunity to take my spiritual experience to a new level with experiential religion. My fullness of Spirit is not contained to a weekly fellowship meeting in a church, and I had already noticed a connection in conversations with others where they admitted that their outdoor activities were spiritual experiences. It was not until this one conversation in Experience of Place did I realize that spiritual experiences outdoors could be intentional.

In looking for confirmation as to whether people have Divine encounters outdoors I found a book entitled Spiritual Brain (2007) that looked at religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences and noted that being outdoors can prepare a person for the "supreme effort and self-sacrifice" it takes to connect them to their "emotive center" (p. 205). In fact, the three biggest triggers of a religious, spiritual, or mystical experience are (p. 199):

1. depression or despair
2. prayer or meditation
3. natural beauty

This blog is my way of exploring this topic as well as marrying together my new found love of the outdoors with the faith and fullness that I attribute to my relationship with the Divine.