A girl in one of my classes mentioned how her epileptic seizures induced the most thoroughly religious moments of her life, a stunning sense of spiritual intimacy and reality.

I think a lot of people have had the experience of having a sudden experience of intense wholeness, reality, and depth, with no seeming reason behind it. It may seem to have been triggered by some object, sensory experience, thought, or whatever, but the effect might seem quite disproportionate to the cause.

Is this religious experience? This summer, I read The Year of Living Biblically, in which an atheist strictly abides by the prescriptions of the Bible. He's mostly doing it as a stunt to write his book, but he mentions that he's also hopeful that it would induce that feeling of profound ease, wholeness, and alertness.

Would those experiences be called spiritual? Maybe by some. It's weird that that would get tied up with sacred. And the sacred is so vast a topic; it can apply to so much, and be both favorable and unfavorable. It can be the deepest experience imaginable; it can be as trivial as putting a dish in a separate dishwasher.

It's a weird little word. On the one hand, it seems like it would be helpful to have a larger vocabulary to categorize all these different things. But then you miss so much, and perhaps you lose the ground for relating them? I dunno...