One of the anxieties the advocators of systematized religions has at present is, will the people turn back to the churches and temples after the Covid-19 period? Because, the faithful have begun to manage their religious craves without the communitarian worships and the religious customs. The anxiety of the religious leaders is legitimate as the organized religions sustain their structure and vivacity through public gatherings and social traditions. If the believers can manage their religious needs by themselves, then the religious enterprises will be at a loss.

People depend upon the institutionalized religions as the latter are the powerful mediations to communicate with God. Those who cannot by themselves face the enigmas of life searchfor intermediary agents to relate with the powers of divine order. The so called holy agents within the religions, namely the priestly class, and the acts that are considered sacred by the society, namely the religious sacraments and rituals, play the role of instrumentation between the vulnerable human beings and the Transcendent. The institutionalized religions from its vast reservoir of myths, symbols and signs supply varied forms of experiencing the Holy in life. Words of the holy functionaries and exercise of the rituals help men to come to terms with their helpless situations, give meaning to their sufferings and ensure hope about the future. It is this mediating role that is being affected due to social distancing imposed by the pandemic.

It is a fact that the absence of public worship has led a good number of believers to discover religiosity as an intrinsic element in the individual than in the thematised doctrines and externalized rituals. William James’s (American philosopher and psychologist, 1842-1910) innovation that ‘direct experience of the individual is the main locus of religion’ has come true in the life of many faithful. Even in the case of public worship, people gather in large numbers because, those who are well disposed undergo a personal and direct experience of the Holy even though they are in the midst of the crowd. However, I feel that the religious apriori in the individual cannot exist without an organized experience of the Divine in a public milieu. Rudolf Otto’s findings about the religious experience is helpful to further our reflections in this regard.

The German Lutheran theologian, Otto in his book, ‘The Idea of the Holy’ explains that in every experience of the Divine there are two factors: a rational element and a non-rational element. The individual gets a direct and personal experience of the Holy due to the non-rational content of the religious experience. Otto then adds that though the subject of this sensorial experience is the human person, the object of the experience remains outside the human individual. To me, the fact that the subject matter of religious experience is outside the human person unveils the need of mediation for a genuine religious experience. How?

Those who have the religious experience sink into two sorts of feelings: happy excitement and dreadful fear. The former is beautiful and glorious whereas the latter is unpleasant and tiring. In both cases, the individual is not sure whether his/her experience is right or wrong. The individuals are overwhelmed by sublime moments that they are not in a position to take their distance vis-à-vis their experience and verify their authenticity. People always need a group to check it get known whether their religious experience conform to that of fellow beings, which is impossible without community. Hence, I believe that even though the faithful can temporarily manage their religious needs at the subjective level during the pandemics like Covid-19, they cannot have, in the long run, a sense of religious fulfilment without a fellowship.

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