Tell me, God, do I belong here? Do you want me now? God, give me some sign. But the more furiously I prayed, the deeper the silence I was hearing back. There was no answer for me. So I prayed even more furiously. Until finally one evening in chapel as I knelt and intensely prayed I heard a voice behind me, to my right, two pews back, “Be quiet and do your studies.” Or I think it might have said, “Shut up, and do your studies.” I looked back. The voice had been loud and clear and firm. But there was no one in that pew. There was no one even near that pew. The voice was not one I recognized. Not a student. Not a faculty member. I had clearly heard it. But no one else in the chapel looked like he had heard it. And it was not the answer I’d wanted. I went home from chapel befuddled. What had I heard? Had I hallucinated? Had I needed an answer so desperately that I’d unconsciously manufactured one? But if I had, this was not an answer I would have wanted. I did not trust people who said that God talked to them, they were crazy, hallucinating. But I had heard it. It took several days to accept that I had in fact heard it. That the answer had been directed at me. That, even though it was not an answer I’d wanted, my prayer had been answered. But it had not taken away the pain, had not relieved the anguish, had not stopped the tearing out of everything that had brought me here. The answer was there, clear as a bell; but so was the pain.
That event got me through a few more weeks, but the pain was still winning. I needed to get the hell out. I needed to leave, to quit. Suzy (my first wife, long dead of cancer) reasoned, pleaded, cried, and finally suggested one thing I could grab hold of, “Go talk to Al Dalton first.” Al had been my chaplain that summer in the Clinical Pastoral Training program, he had opened doors for me, and I had come to trust him. So I drove that night in complete desperation to talk to Al. He sat me down and he listened, long into the night, and quietly, gently suggested to me the same thing that voice had, do my studies. That was a course financially feasible, it was not fatally final, and if when I completed the course, I could still choose not to go on. Al was considerably gentler and kinder to me than that voice had been, and he suggested to me just about the same thing that it had. But he had taken the time to help me understand the wisdom of that option. I went back to Bexley and finished the course. I consented to ordination and ministered for many years, not without rough places, but to the end, with no regrets.
I’ve never heard that voice again. Nor have I ever sought it that furiously. I have no doubt that it was God I heard. But I did learn from that event to listen for God in other ways, in the sound of others’s voices. And I’ve heard His answers many times. But never again in that voice. At least, not yet.
Karl Barth
I remember hearing about an interview of Karl Barth, the premier conservative theologian of the last century. He was asked to summarize what he believed as simply as possible. After a long pause he quoted the children’s song, “Jesus loves me, this I know. . . .” The interviewer asked back, but why would you believe that? And Barth answered, “My mother told me.” I guess for me that’s getting down to the bedrock fundamentals. We believe because sometime in our history someone whom we trusted implicitly said, “Believe this.” It may be as simple as that.
My Relationship with Jee-zuz
In retrospect I realize that, despite having given myself to Christ at that summer youth conference, I have nowhere identified as one of my foundation stones a close, personal relationship with the Christ (or JEE-zuz, as some would prefer). That is an important curiosity for me. There is, has always been, so much talk in the church of one’s relationship with Christ, of the warmth and strength and power of that relationship. It clearly is the cornerstone of faith for very many Christians, if not most. In some corners it is promulgated as the only sure foundation of a true Christian faith. But just as clearly it is not for me! William James has observed that some can pray while others cannot; and I have similarly concluded that is true of the Christward relationship as well; it is for some people and for others it is not.
I remember one summer afternoon when I arrived at the Cincinnati airport for an impromptu interview arranged by a seminary classmate with his bishop. I was out of work and desperate for a parish. I should have been willing to say anything needed to get the job. The interview progressed quickly to the fateful question, “Tell me about your relationship with Christ.” As I heard the words come out of my mouth I knew there was no job for me with this bishop. To my detriment I told him the truth, that I really felt no strong relationship with Christ, that my relationship was primarily with the godhead. I supposed aloud that as I had no brothers, only sisters, a brotherly relationship with Christ was less natural to me than one with God the Father himself, that it was He to whom I regularly prayed. The interview proceeded, but there was no fire left in it, and I heard no more from that bishop. Obviously my lack of a close, intimate relationship with Christ was a liability, not an asset.
I have aggressively sought a Christward relationship at several points in my life, but Christ seems never to have chosen to befriend me (or perhaps God knows that would not be appropriate for Jack Bowers). I remember kneeling at the altar rail at St. John’s in Cambridge and fervently praying for, pleading for that relationship. The small parish was in trouble, slowly dwindling in the heart of a slowly declining small city. I was flailing about, grasping for any tool that would lift us out of our survival mode and make us strong. We had a small prayer group meeting weekly to sing and share and offer intercessory prayers together (a “Prayer and Praise” group). A few of that circle were zealous advocates of the charismatic route, and a few others, while not so zealous, were passively compliant and willing. And I was silently asking myself whether I could, if it were beneficial to the parish, go that route. So after going with them to a charismatic workshop at the Mecca of charismania in Ohio led by the national star Chuck Irish himself (in whose voice I still could hear the same anger-fulled cynicism I’d heard when I taught him Greek in seminary) and after wrestling with myself about that charismatic possibility, I concluded that while it ran counter to my fiber, I could. So I knelt at the altar rail several days in a row and prayed, pled, really. I asked for Jee-zuz to come into my life (in the newly devised tradition of charismania the pronunciation “Jee-zuz” seems to be preferred, along with the very frequent use of “ . . . I jess wanna . . . ” in every spontaneous prayer). With some reluctance and trepidation I even prayed for the gift of speaking in tongues (i.e., glossilalia), which is (in that tradition) the absolutely surest proof that one has received Christ into his/her life. I may have prayed nearly as furiously as I had that middler year in seminary, but this time no voice. No consoling warmth of “the Baptism in the Spirit.” And no tumbling words of an unknown tongue (I tried, and only a few poorly contrived scraps of oral garbage came out.) I had to conclude that this salvific solution was not for the people of St. John’s or for me.
But throughout most of my life I have been content relating only to the one God. The Trinity, described as an unsolvable mystery, has always been a problem for me. I have preached it, have proclaimed it; but I have always stumbled some over it. I am too damned logical; the math of the Trinity just doesn’t work for me. And that, coupled with my non-relationship with the Christ, (and at seminary I was accustomed to refer to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as “the Blue Blur,” which was as close as I could come to defining it), has urged me to see this lack as an important foundation stone, perhaps, to follow my metaphor, a limen through which an alternative understanding (or better yet “opportunity”) might enter, or be sought. It may be, in some odd, inverse kind of way, that this lack of an intimate relationship with Christ is one of my most important foundation stones, perhaps the cornerstone.
John O’Donohue
Sr. Cintra Pemberton’s pilgrimages were life-giving during a decade of spiritual famine in my life. She was a monastic, of the Episcopal Order of St. Helena, who made a ministry and a specialty of putting together and leading pilgrimages in Celtic areas, and she was exceedingly good at it. She understood the need to see something ancient and holy but new to us, and also to have time and space to stop and reflect, to ponder what that ancient, new holiness is pointing toward in one’s life. This was her way of helping fund her order, but also do a very specialized ministry. I have gone with her to Wales, both north
