Sacred encounters in times of crisis: Spiritual experience and the search for meaning during the pandemic
This piece, written by Professor Bettina E. Schmidt, Professor in the Ҵý of Religions and Anthropology of Religion at the Ҵý (UWTSD), was originally published in the Italian newspaper during the held in June on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.
The article is based on an academic essay first published in Revista Sociedade e Estado (Brazil, 2024) and is reproduced here as part of UWTSD’s ongoing commitment to exploring the intersections of religion, spirituality, and wellbeing. The research featured is rooted in the work of the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, based at UWTSD, and reflects the university’s distinctive academic provision in .
In 2020, the world suddenly came to a halt. In response to the rapid and shocking spread of COVID-19 across the globe, governments closed borders, schools, offices, and shops, imposing sudden lockdowns on citizens. Religious communities were also asked to shut their doors, leaving many believers socially isolated and forced to cope on their own.
Research has long highlighted the positive impact of participation in religious communities on mental health and well-being. However, when the doors closed and in-person gatherings were restricted, the sense of community and personalized support suffered as well. Transferring religious rituals online seemed to diminish the quality of the experience compared to the effect of being together in the same physical space. While the lockdown helped save lives and relieved some of the pressure on healthcare systems, as medical research focused on developing vaccines against the virus, it did not come without costs - namely, social isolation and loneliness.
During the first stage of the pandemic, a BBC journalist responded dismissingly to an interviewee who claimed to have had a religious experience while in the hospital with COVID-19. This sparked the idea for research into the “non-ordinary” experiences people had, including perceptions or sensations - visual, auditory, phenomenological, or physical - that differ from ordinary everyday perceptions.
These experiences are sometimes dismissed as products of vivid imagination, brain malfunctions, or side effects of substances. Even those who have such experiences often don’t know how to explain them. Although reported throughout history and across cultures and religions worldwide, there remains a certain reluctance to write or speak about them in academic settings.
The research was conducted by the Religious Experience Research Centre at the Ҵý (UWTSD), in collaboration with the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston, Massachusetts. We created an anonymous questionnaire aimed at collecting narrative accounts of religious, spiritual, or otherwise non-ordinary experiences that occurred during the pandemic. Participants were encouraged to describe their spiritual experiences in as much detail as they felt comfortable sharing. The questionnaire also asked how the experience had influenced their perspectives, behaviour, relationships with family and friends, future plans, and their connection to a spiritual or religious community, if they had one.
We also included a series of questions drawn from phenomenological inventories and items assessing the impact of these experiences on their lives and worldview. The survey was distributed online via social media posts and received responses from around the world, including Nigeria, Ukraine, Pakistan, Australia, the US, Nicaragua, the UK, and Finland.
Following the initial presentations of this research, more people contacted us expressing a desire to contribute to the ongoing study by sharing their experiences. One, for instance, wrote to us:
“During the lockdown, in isolation at **** Park, I experienced something so profound I can only describe it as divine bliss. The noise of the world had stopped. The noise in my head had also stopped. I simply was. […] I felt in a state of pure, unfiltered awareness. The first time lasted a few hours, and I wanted to experience it again. So I kept meditating, walking. It happened again, and again. Something profound happened.”
Our research revealed a variety of experiences, ranging from encounters with divine bliss to anger, in response to the threat of illness, fear of death, lockdown restrictions, and social isolation. Some were explicitly tied to religious content, others were characterized by a general intensity - all included meaning-making processes that helped shape their understanding of what they had gone through.
In the absence of a spiritual community in which one might feel safe enough to share their experience and begin a process of meaning-making and integration, people sometimes face these experiences alone.
Sociologists and anthropologists have a long tradition of analysing worldviews. Through ethnographic encounters with various cultures, they have collected accounts of interactions with phenomena that go beyond the materialistic and biomedical conceptualization of human bodies and physical reality typically adopted in academia. Yet scholars are bound to a stance of rational objectivity. This makes religious experiences or emotions less frequent subjects of sociological analysis. Still, this hesitancy - though legitimate - has at times prevented scholars from exploring an essential dimension of religion. In reality, we should acknowledge the social and psychological realities of religious experience without abandoning questions and concerns about empirical validity. For this reason, a growing number of sociologists and anthropologists are highlighting the ethnocentric nature of the post-Enlightenment approach to reason and rationality.
Bettina E. Schmidt
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