We are so blessed in this modern era! We don't often acknowledge it, because that would mean we'd have to not try to talk all the time about how dire the problems we have are, or how we're heading for a national catastrophe because of our political divisions. The very fact that I have this little page to write out everything I am thinking about and publish it to a world-wide audience and not have to find a publisher or become famous in some way. But being able to proclaim my own ideas about everything and get it up on the world wide web instantaneously is miraculous. The fact that I haven't published anything since June of 2018 is also incredible. I just haven't had the self-discipline to write out my ideas; and it isn't that I haven't had ideas, but I just have been lazy and distracted.
One of the ideas that most invades my thinking day in and day out is how to talk about my faith in God and how I have been able to connect in my own way with the tradition, the Roman Catholic Church and all that was supposed to have "died" along with God back in the early 60s. When I read about the "Nones" that seem to be seen as the wave of the future, I wonder how they too will be returned. God will find a way!
So how did I come to feel so confident that there is a "presence", "a force" that our human consciousness is rooted in and that our cultural fabric and language has been so good over the years at carrying this reality through history so every generation can find the words and images to deal with it and make part of their lives.
Like most children born since the end of World War II in America and may all children ever born into what society they happen to be in, I was handed the language and a culture that incorporated the idea that there was a God, but it wasn't imposed on me; it was kind of a distant thing - no regular church attendance demanded. And the key people in my life - my grandfather, father and mother - all denied any belief in this "being". Indeed my father and mother were hooked on Marxist ideology and the idea that religion was the "opiate of the masses." So how did it happen, that one night when I was nine years old, lying down to sleep for the first night in a new place where we had just moved, I felt an undeniable "presence" with a very firm "message" that I had to affirm/swear/promise that I would never lie again. The lying I had indulged in for more than a year with friends or people I was hoping might be my friends in a new town my grandfather and I had moved to when I was in 3rd grade must end. It was a life-transforming moment, the most intense of any such thing I've ever experienced, but it wasn't going to be the only time I would experience something that only the words "divine presence" can capture. There are, I think in everyone's lives, moments that are so deep and real and powerful that they really defy simple words or any words, but they are "Words" that guide us, comfort us and connect us to our existence.
l would call that moment when I was nine years old a "covenant experience" - I wouldn't have called it that then; I had no clue what a covenant was at that time in my life. But my trek into the biblical narrative, which would not start for quite a while was also rooted in a very early experience I had in that same room with one of the very first new friends I made in this new town. I had to have been around 10 and was in the 5th grade. I was chatting with this new friend about what book we would choose if we were stranded on a distant island and could have only one. I told her the Bible, since it had been so important over the generations with so many people. It didn't happen instantaneously, but a few years later, I asked my grandfather to get me one for my birthday, and he did - and it has been a mainstay of my intellectual life ever since. So thankful for these moments, which I don't think will ever slip away from my memory because they are rooted deeper in me than my memory. I'd love to know what "God moments" others have experienced if you would like to share.
