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ThOne shouldn’t think that devotional feelings refer only to God and to the service of God in a religious context. We often feel awe and other feelings related to the sense of holiness in the context of our everday lives. Those have meaningfulness in that context and refer to matters of importance. He beauty of religion comes to a large part from the beauty of the things that the religion supports. It isn’t meant that the ordinary everyday life and religion should be separate. Instead they should form one unified whole, the everyday side of devotional feelings and the religious practise go hand in hand, so that when we feel a devoltional feelings, we also cultivate the things connected to that in our daily life. That way the religion serves as a repair mechanism for the world at large and for our lives especially.
Like awe is connected to the large scale, pay attention to the big things when you feel awe: take them into account in your life at the level of practise. Feel the need for truth and true rationality and follow their voice, their routes in your daily life. Feel also the need to be a feeling being with great amounts of compassion for all the others – take part in the Red Cross or whatever but do not let your feelings pass without them guiding your life with all of their strenght. Feelings are our way to understand life and the world that we live in. Feelings connect us to our natural healthy goals in life.
If we feel beauty at something, at some fracturelessness of the world, that is a mark of the health of that state of affairs and not just nonsense, and good health is a thing to build upon. For us it doesn’t matter only what our own lives are like: the world at large, our own environment, matters too, the fates of all the others matter too. So the beauty of compassion and of the atmosphere of fracturelessness of the world are things that our lives are build upon, are things to build upon and not just religious nonsense without further signifigance from the point of view of ordinary life.
Hannele Tervola, Finland, Europe