The Story of Passerby
“[She] does not ask much of us, merely a thought of [Her] from time to time, a little act of adoration, sometimes to ask for [Her] grace, sometimes to offer [Her] your sufferings, at other times to thank [Her] for the graces, past and present, [She] has bestowed on you, in the midst of your troubles to take solace in [Her] as often as you can. Lift up your heart to [Her] during your meals and in company; the least little remembrance will always be the most pleasing to [Her]. One need not cry out very loudly; [She] is nearer to us than we think.”
―Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
Father Helder,
I grew up without religion or spirituality. On my mother’s side, the great claim to fame was related somehow (Great, great, uncle) to Samuel Clemmons or Mark Twain, a well-known atheist. My mother’s father had our family tree traced back to a Viking by the name of Olaf the Black on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. My father was from the “Temple Lot Mormons” group in Independence, Missouri. I met a couple but knew none of them. There are no family stories or traditions that I can recall. I know very few family stories.
And yet, even as a child, my inner experience invited me “further in and higher up,” as Lewis wrote in “The Last Battle.”
• • •
Dad, who grew up as a farmer, told me when the ions in the air reversed their polarity—warning of the inbound rainstorm—the horses in the pasture responded with joy, racing and kicking, inspired by unknown forces inviting them to enjoy life to the full.
And I felt it, too. Grabbing my brother’s winter coat, several sizes too big, I relished the wind as the storm moved in. Insistent and cold. I have always enjoyed the wind. It makes me feel good. It helps me feel Her presence.
Laying in a hollow in the grass in our backyard, the only remaining evidence of the tree that once held our tire swing, I tucked the coat around me and lay still, fetal position, eager. I know now that I was having my first mystic experience of the Holy, which was not what I could have expected. Life-changing, though I didn’t know it. I was in Love. While there was no one with me, I was certainly no longer alone. A warm embrace, not like a hug—this one I could trust—different from anything I had words for. Holding me—every part of me—and comforting me from within and without. She spoke of Her Love for me without words, and I knew Her. Loved Her, and I was okay. Finally,…safe.
• • •
I recently read Marcus Borg’s “Meeting Jesus again for the first time’. His experience as a boy of learning God was about believing and how long it took to realize that She was never about believing but was instead only about the experience of relationship with Her. He grew up in a theologically traditional Lutheran home where personal salvation was a function of the quantity and quality of belief. Specifically, belief in Jesus as your personal lord and savior. Since I had no religious instruction to guide my growth in such things, I, thankfully, began with the relationship. Whether I believed was never a question for me. Still isn’t.
I learned some things about Her over time, but She had no name that I knew. The voice heard but not spoken—which is how I described Her to myself—responded to stillness. Not quiet so much as stillness. And She came as it pleased Her when I waited.
• • •
“Helder, as I turned 20, hoping that the Christian God was the origin of the voice I knew, I ‘accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior’ while overseas in the American military. I returned to a family in complete chaos, infidelity, betrayal, and broken promises, and it was into that chaos that the Spirit spoke the words….” Be the Lover of God.”
As a product of very poor child psychology, I could not have told you what the word, Love meant. I did not learn it in the war zone; that was the house where I got taller. Nothing about my experience had taught me anything to contradict my observation. Based upon my childhood, love was a sentimental notion with no real purpose or meaning and was how some got their way with the vulnerable and unsuspecting. Manipulation is a virtue from whence I come.
Reflecting on the extraordinary experiences I had with creation as a child, it is easy for me, looking back from this point, to see that my Creator has loved me my whole life. Learning that I needed to be saved from what, or who, and for what, I could not imagine was quite a foreign concept.”
• • •
“Hmmm…Passerby, Christian fundamentalism would have us believe we need to be saved from the wrath of god. But Peter’s exhortation on Pentecost was, “Save yourselves from this wicked generation” (Ac 2:40). Not save yourselves from God. He thought we only needed to be saved from ourselves. It seems to me I need protection only from you and my delusional self.”
• • •
I stumbled into the independent, charismatic movement when I returned home, which was heavily influenced by Southern fundamentalism. Over time, I justified my ‘bedrock’ and fundamental beliefs as perhaps quirky, quaint, or incomprehensible. Somehow, the ‘Good News’ but not harmful. With its fuzzy but intractable dogma and indefensible, immobile doctrine, the church has for years been the center of my life and my answer for the storms of life. I had a well-defended and well-rehearsed response to every skeptical query. I went to seminary and was ordained.
I was in my early 30s when I began consciously to question the gray letters worn into the rough, dull stone of American Southern Christian fundamentalism, like tombstones in an old Southern Civil War graveyard long forgotten. There were so many ‘must believe’ fables like PSAT that did not resemble the one who had professed Her Love for me as I was lying there in the cold, worn into the tired hearts of millions. Words that have caused unspeakable damage to Mother’s splendid creation. Sadly, and fortunately, like death after a long illness, I concluded that those tired stories could not be the voice. And, finally, faced with personal wrenching emotional conflict and crisis of trust, I could avoid the wounding no more. I was bleeding out.
• • •
Then something changed, like I awoke from a tormenting dream, one of those in which you can’t quite find your way home through a tangled maze of obstacles, weird characters, and wrong turns to a whole new world in which my tidy but small religious circumstance was now a wilderness of troubling questions that I never thought to ask before, the answers for which terrified me by their implications.
Thankfully. Finally, accepting—instead of justifying any which way I could—the damning patriarchal history of the church at face value, I accepted Christianity is a failed religion. It has not followed the teaching of the prophet Jesus for a long time and, therefore, can no longer claim to be the Kingdom of God or Koinonia that he came to establish. The church claims many things about itself, but what it is actually is not what the Messiah came to do. Rabbi never endorsed the creation of another religion—he was a reformer, not a revolutionary. He only ever pointed to his Father and never once invited his own worship! And yet, worship of Jesus seems to be the only thing the church knows how to do.
What now? I am lost and feel alone. I once felt the warmth of being a part of something that I felt was right and good. But we were a community of like-minded people entirely convinced that we were pleasing to god. Of course, being right is never enough. To be right-minded meant that most of the others who had ever lived were wrong. It occurred to me that if praying the Jesus prayer is the only means of salvation, the vast majority of those who had ever lived who had never heard the name of Jesus, whatever else they may have believed, regardless of whatever kindness they may have practiced, were wrong. And wrong, in our context, meant eternal damnation. An eternal life of torment. So…was this justice?
The thing about Christian fundamentalism is that either you agree or you are out. They don’t like reformers or prophets, and they hate change. I left that world and lost the only community I had ever known.
Helder,
Is there a way forward or backward? Can we know God? I now wonder who I am seeking. I feel an insistent drawing that I cannot explain, coming from deep within, beckons me to a place I somehow know—but have never seen. And I want more than anything to be there because the beautiful voice—that simply must be the Lover of my soul—comes from there.