On Re‐reading Goldman

Extract

I’m sitting next to Evelyn, in the choir stalls of the hospital chapel. Evelyn, who has been a patient in this hospital for at least twenty-five of her fifty years, is singing away lustily with the rest of us. But the words she is singing are quite different from the ones I’m singing. So different in fact that I can’t make them out at all. But, no matter; ‘God is his own interpreter, and He will make it plain’, the rest of us sing.

In Religious thinking from Childhood to Adolescence, Ronald Goldman says that ‘some religious experiences are so profound and personal and mysterious that it is doubtful if they are communicable at all, except through the emotional language of the arts’. In Evelyn’s case, it is simple enough. She can’t read. She is simply feeling religious emotions and singing religious words in a religious way; the result is, she sounds just like the six-year-old child quoted by Goldman:

‘Thy deliberately Faith I full,

Faith against almighty worship God,

And Faith all unto you,

Faith against thy holy prayer’.

In fact, Evelyn is perfectly capable of what Goldman would consider to be ‘adult’ religious thinking, and I know this because I’m preparing her for Confirmation in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, not understanding the words of Cowper’s hymn is certainly not stopping her from undergoing a genuinely religious experience. In fact, she is worshipping more completely and wholeheartedly than we are. She is more totally involved in an experience of Divinity. Although they are opaque to us, the words she is using fit her experience exactly. The parallel with glossolalia is obvious.