"Taking my lead from such scholars of religion as William James (1902), who emphasized the importance of religious experience, Rudolph Otto (1952), who contended that religion originates in the experience of the holy, and Clifford Geertz (1966), who defines religion as a set of symbols which purport uniquely to explain the meaning of life and serve as templates for responding to and shaping the experience of life, I have contended elsewhere (Greeley, 1978) that religion begins with experiences which renew human hope, that these experiences are stored in the memory as symbols — special memory traces which act as templates for life's ultimate problems — and that they are shared with others through experiences. Our overarching religious tradition provides the repertoire of images with symbolic potential which antecedently dispose us for hope renewal experiences, shape the experience itself, act as 'storage containers' which hold the memory of that experience, and facilitate the storytelling by which we share our hope renewal experiences with others who possess the traditional images in common with us.
"For example: Discouraged and depressed with the futility of life, I wait for an endlessly delayed flight in December at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. I see a young mother holding her baby with passionate and protective adoration. In the beauty of that instant recognition of grounds for hope, my confidence in the purpose of life is revitalized and renewed. The friends who meet me at the end of the plane flight are astonished at my good spirits. Today, I tell them by way of explanation, I met a madonna.
"The madonna image, lurking in my memory on the threshold of consciousness, especially in December, disposes me to experience renewal in the presence of a mother with a child, shapes that actual experience, provides a 'pigeonhole' into which I can insert my new experience, and becomes a shared symbol with which I can explain my unusual (after plane flights) cheerfulness to my friends. If someone should preach a Christmas homily about the madonna, I remember both images — Bethlehem and O'Hare — and 'correlate' them; each gives emotional vitality and resonance to the other. Catechisms, creeds, doctrines, philosophy, and theology — essential reflection on and criticism of the moments of raw religious experience — all come later. The origin and raw power of experience reside in life-explaining experiences. Religion is a meaning-bestowing story before it becomes anything else."