signs-living

A Living God

I grew up the only child of divorced parents. My father was

an architect, highly analytical and an agnostic. My mother was

a scholar of English literature and a Christian who, neverthe-

less, always carried some element of doubt with her faith. His

rationalism and her question-filled faith shaped me. Then, as

a young adult, over the course of a year, I had some extraordinary

and transforming experiences of the presence of God.

I am not by nature prone to mystical experiences, and I am

not of the opinion that seeing visions or hearing voices “proves”

anything. These experiences certainly do not validate any truth

claims I may make—though my claim to have had these experiences

may prove something about me! I have been warned

against making too much of these encounters. I should realize

that these things were a sign of how very needy I was, not how

worthy! In any event, the absolute certainty of Christ’s living

reality that these encounters provoked made me evangelical,

but the intellectual inheritance from my parents made me

skeptical of too easy piety. Here is what happened.

I was emotionally exhausted. My first wife had left me to

escape my clinging neediness that psychologists might trace

back to my childhood. The political activism for peace and justice

that had given shape to my life from my high school years

no longer felt compelling or clear. I was sitting with a few other

men in quiet waiting influenced by Quaker worship: one considered

himself a Buddhist, another an agnostic; I considered

myself vaguely Christian. In that silence, for a moment—or

was it longer?—I had a vision of eyes looking at me, enveloping

me in totally unexpected love and compassion. I knew

deeply, instinctively, that these were the eyes of Jesus and that

he was looking at me from the cross.

That Jesus had chosen to come to me in compassion

changed everything. Perhaps the immediate circumstances of

my life continued, but my sense of reality was irrevocably altered.

No longer was God a “concept,” nor was Jesus an admirable

but long-ago teacher of ethics. Here was the living God!

And, behold, God cared about me—even in the midst of my

confusion and “untogetherness.” In the pain and compassion of

those eyes, I saw that at the center of the universe was love.

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter

of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured

the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the

right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2,

NIV)

Jesus is the “author” of faith because, in the end, faith is

not based on deductions or principles of logic. Rational arguments

for the existence of God that occupied the Scholastics

are ultimately unsatisfying. Christian faith is the result of an

encounter with a man who lived like us, and died, and yet lives.

Christian faith is the response of hearts to the fact that Jesus

has—in contradiction to all reason, and beyond any expectation—

come to us in love.

This is grace: unreasonable, unearned, unanticipated, personal

love, showered on us by the Living God. It is experienced

in a thousand ways and conceived of in a hundred theories; it

can never be fully comprehended, and its riches are inexhaustible.

Several months after Jesus changed forever my understanding

of the universe, he came again to change my understanding

of myself—this time as Light. I was, at the time, employed

part-time as a dishwasher in a downtown restaurant. During

the rush of a noon-time business lunch, surrounded by buckets

piled high with dirty dishes, amid the clamor of servers

needing clean plates, God chose to confront me again. I’ll never

know how the dishes got washed, but they did; perhaps it

was symbolic of what was being done to my soul. At any rate,

what happened was that I felt a light shining on me. It was

no gentle glow, but a nearly blinding beam like the light of an

interrogator in a police drama.

I later discovered that John the Apostle wrote about this

aspect of God’s Light. Generally we think of Jesus’ claim to

be the Light of the World as a comfort, but in John, after the

famous verse about God loving the world so much that he sent

his only begotten Son, we read:

And this is the judgment, that the light has come

into the world, and people loved darkness rather

than light because their deeds were evil. For all who

do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so

that their deeds may not be exposed. ( John 3:19-20,

NRSV)

Amid the din of dishwashing, I saw myself in the Light of

Truth. Whereas I had, for instance, treasured an image of myself

as a forbearing and forgiving Christian suffering patiently

my former wife’s infidelities, I now saw how emotionally manipulative

I had been in relation to her. Where I had believed

myself to be an advocate of peace, I saw the anger that alienated

me from others. Where I had seen myself as a person of

love and a promoter of life, I saw that—in the pursuit of my

selfish aim of retaining my wife’s affections—I had willed to

get her pregnant even though I knew that the result would be

abortion and thus the murder of my child. That pregnancy

never happened but, in the Light, I now knew the truth of my

heart: I was manipulative, selfish, a potential murderer, and

totally self-deceived.

Even at the time that I was experiencing this vision, what

struck me as peculiar was that I did not feel particularly

shamed. Doubtless to the confusion of my friends, I began to

announce, “I am a sinner.” Surely not a badge of honor, it was

for me a simple and even joyful reality: at the center of the

universe was God’s love, at its periphery my sin, and the gravitational

force of love was greater than the entropy of sin. I now

understood that it wasn’t my loveableness that held the universe

together, but God’s. I didn’t have to be my own Savior,

much less the Savior of the world. Someone else had already

done that!

In the prologue to the Gospel of John, comes a verse that

appears on the title page:

The law indeed was given through Moses, grace

and truth came through Jesus Christ. ( John 1:17,

NRSV)

Is it not a defining mark of the divine, to be able to unite grace

and truth? I am grateful that in my life Jesus has brought both,

and that grace infused the truth when truth was difficult.

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