It’s been 10 years since Charlotte Rørth had a vision of Jesus: Pastors still don’t know how to talk about such things

Years ago, without any church background or the slightest spiritual longing, I suddenly had to learn to live with, among other things, two visions of Jesus standing upside down in front of me and talking to me. The book I wrote about the faith formation I had to go through was called “I Met Jesus – Confessions of a Reluctant Believer”. It was published 10 years ago and became a bestseller, and no one was more surprised than me. The book has since been translated into six languages and is now coming out in English, I’ve traveled the country giving 300 talks and received thousands of letters, and I still get emails almost every day from people thanking me and calling me brave. I don’t see myself as brave, I’m a journalist and I just write about what’s happening in the real world. Up to one in two of us have experiences, as I documented in the sequel “We met Jesus – And what does it matter to others”, but it’s still not a field that has been researched much about how we as a society or church should live with. There is a lack of knowledge that can help, as I experienced at the time. The first thing I did was call a priest when I had had a Paul-like experience at Rold Forest and then the two visions with Jesus in a sacristy in Spain. What should I do, I asked her, and she gave me the same advice I later received from the Catholic priest in Spanish Úbeda. In super short form, they were: See the experiences as gifts, don’t get lost in them, but live your daily life, pray the prayer of the heart and read and learn about Christianity. With these two as close guides, I found a way to live with the experiences as a member of the Danish national church. Unfortunately, this is far from being the case for everyone. For me, it was and is surprising how many people tell me that they have been rejected by a priest – in addition to their family and friends. I myself have not been rejected by my loved ones and have been invited to speak by hundreds of pastors (some of whom, by the way, have also written to me about their own experiences). Of course, those who would have rejected me do not contact me, but it is worth emphasizing that I have been welcomed in all branches of Danish church life. I mean everyone and all over the country. In real life as well as among those who know the Bible, it is not surprising that people can experience heavenly light, meet angels, sit in a presence at a dying person’s bedside and much more. I have experienced this clearly when I have been to parish halls and libraries and met up to a quarter of a million people. Every single time, someone, often even priests, asks what they should do. How should the experiences fit in with the life they have? The faith they subscribe to? The church? The first thing everyone should do is not reject. Experiences happen, and they are not something anyone can control or decide over. They happen and have always happened. There is also no population group that has more experiences than others, according to Dr. Marianne Rankin and others, based on 7000 letters with accounts of experiences in the archives of The Alister Hardy Trust.

In her PhD on the Fruits of Religious and Spiritual Experience, “Fruits of Religious and Spiritual Experience”, she concludes that experiences change the lives of virtually everyone who has them, regardless of the course and content of the experience. Most become more reflective than before because they have experienced something that makes them think about life and death. Some change jobs. Some go to church, but just as many leave the church because it does not recognize their experiences, they report. Although the experiences are different, the feeling they leave behind is the same: love. And that’s regardless of whether people are believers or not. But if they don’t talk to anyone about the experience, it can leave a sense of loneliness, a distance from others. On the other hand, the joy of it and life itself grows when they share it, according to her 2022 study. So, sharing is good, but with whom should you share the experience? With priests? Will they want to? Can they? Yes and no, concludes Norwegian Jan-Olav Henriksen, professor of systematic theology. He has investigated how people today can understand and live with experiences from a religious approach. The work, “Experiences processed by Religious Means”, has just been published. It’s not easy to understand, but I’ve talked to him along the way, and he uses my books as part of his material, as I have come forward by name with my experiences, which I live with as a Christian. Very few people come forward, he points out in his introduction, in line with my and Rankin’s knowledge. People are shy and shy. It’s unfamiliar to talk about. It’s hard to find words. Also for those who are contacted. Priests for example. Even though on average half of all people in and outside of churches have experiences, there is little training in how to relate to them. Even though, according to both Rankin and Henriksen, those with experiences often attribute them to something religious, even in increasingly secular societies. And if “theology and the rest of academic culture continue to marginalize or ignore such experiences,” Henriksen writes, “religious traditions will remain irrelevant to those who have these experiences and must learn to live with them.” That’s a lot of people we’re talking about. People who need help but are turned away. People who could perhaps find a home in the church. Even enrich it? It’s not easy to talk about, even for pastors, Henriksen acknowledges. Experiences happen to the individual and few of them have a theologically correct language, “an adequate repertoire of language”, for what has happened. As a systematic theologian, he can explain the connection between experiences and the Christian faith with the right formulations. Those who have had the experiences rarely can. According to him, for example, it is not God they encounter, even though that may be the word they use. Experiences happen here and not in another world where God is, he maintains.

But having experiences or relating to them, he writes, can “make one open to the transcendent” without “rejecting a scientific approach to reality.” Often experiences are, as Rankin concludes, and I experience from myself and others, an occasion to immerse oneself in faith. For that reason alone they are theologically relevant. Moreover, they are part of the foundation of religions, including Christianity, as Henriksen also emphasizes, and should not be dismissed for that reason alone. Although experiences do not provide “scientific third-person knowledge”, they can contribute to “finding new forms of knowledge about what matters to us as humans.” As Jan-Olav Henriksen writes at the end, experiences can challenge “closed notions and dogmatism in both science and religion” by showing something of “all the wonder that our reality is so rich in.” I have experienced this in my own life, which of course is just anecdotal knowledge, but the many, many thousands of conversations I have had over the past 10 years approach a statistically valid basis for saying that talking together about experiences is unconditionally good. Having experiences and not being able to share them leads to existential loneliness, Marianne Rankin points out, and I would add that being able to talk safely about them leads to increased curiosity about faith and the community it lives in. That alone makes them worth talking about. For those who have them and for everyone else.

PS
The fine photo is a section of a large embroidery from the pastor’s office in Oslo Mission Church.