Friday, July 5, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
I’ve been everywhere, man
Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Sitting in the chapel at Trinity Anglican Church in Evansville, I reflected on my spiritual and theological odyssey.
Mom and Dad baptized me as a newly circumcised 8-day-old baby, and my godparents attended the Lutheran service. Every year on my birthday, my godparents paid some kind of attention to me. They took their work seriously, helping my parents rear me as a Christian boy.
When I was confirmed, the pictures show a 13-year-old with braces and a flattop haircut, kept in place with a little dab of Brylcreem, smiling in relief that I had remembered the verse Pastor Neitzel asked me to recite in front of the crowded Zion Lutheran Church.
Lord, in your mercy, hear my prayer.
I came back from college to confront Pastor Clemetsen, asking him to hold his congregation accountable to feed the poor and help the needy. Everyone seemed so selfish to me. I was selfish too, but that’s another side of things. In time I became more Buddhist in my practices, and left Lutheranism to itself.
I attended several humanistic psychology conferences in Chicago, worked in politics on a local level in Valparaiso and Milwaukee, studied deep physical massage techniques, discovered drugs, and wrote college papers, history and philosophy, Bible and theology, art and music. The world called to me from all its wide horizons.
Blessed are they who observe your decrees, who seek you with all their heart.
Suddenly, on a fall afternoon I met Angelina, who nursed me into the beginnings of a traditional religion again. Well, not exactly traditional – her church was called the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, led by Reverend Sun Myung Moon from Korea. In short it was called the Unification Church; shorter still it was labeled the Moonies.
But that was perfect for me, the noncomformist. Perfect to help me slip back into Christianity. Mom and Dad were afraid for me in that “cult.” They prayed prayers that at first asked God to do their will, but then bent back into prayers that invited God to do his will, in their lives and in mine. When Mom “surrendered” me to God, she said she felt immense relief. Over the next few months, I left the Unification Church and hitchhiked home. Dad had work for me to do.
He especially wanted me to meet the girl who square danced with him when Mom got tired, who helped him cut weeds out of his soybean fields, who had come to Lincoln Christian Seminary from Kentucky, and who made him laugh all the time. He didn’t say so right away, but he was pretty sure we would make a good married couple. Which in less than a year, we did.
Margaret had not been baptized as an eight-day-old baby. She belonged to the Christian Church, Church of Christ, and she waited till she was a teenager to profess her faith. She listened with me, critically, to the cassette tapes of Rev. Moon’s teachings, the Divine Principle. Dr. Strauss, Margaret’s philosophy and theology professor, begged to borrow those tapes, just to listen.
A few months later I proposed, and then on Easter I was baptized again in Margaret’s church. After a few years we became leaders at a small church that grew and grew, where we helped shape a community of faith. I had found a community like that in the Moonies, Margaret found it in a campus ministry she helped create, and now we were making something together. Back to school, ordained, and we moved into campus ministry at the University of Illinois.
Don, Christian Campus Fellowship’s senior pastor, introduced me to Henri Nouwen on a daylong retreat we took together at a nearby monastery. I felt my wings spreading. For all my religious life I’d been writing and thinking about something more fulfilling and peaceful than regular church. Henri Nouwen wrote about this in book after book.
Our lives filled with counseling, prison ministry, homeschooling Chris, Marc and Andrea for a bit, continuing education for ourselves and two years of classes to become spiritual directors. We celebrated Sabbath sometimes, and went to church, always. But now we were at Vineyard, a charismatic Bible church with great music and terrific education during the week. We led small groups. We memorized the songs. We sang and sang. We still do.
I have chosen the way of truth; I have set my heart on your laws.
Nouwen and his Catholic cohort changed my life. Vineyard’s music and prophetic ministries changed my life. During two years of Transforming Community spiritual formation weekends I stayed at Cardinal Stritch house north of Chicago, near what the Franciscans called Marytown. I often went downstairs, where the silence welcomed me. Many local priests maintained personal altars in the basement at Cardinal Stritch, furnished with icons and statues, silence and unexpressed experience. I knelt at their altars sometimes and learned again, for the thousandth time, to pray.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
In the Anglican chapel I thought of my Episcopalian friends and relatives, of the Taize community in France I longed to visit but never have, where the singing in several languages of hundreds of young pilgrims fills the air. I thought of my college roommate, Lutheran like me at birth, who spent a year in India pursuing his own version of Hinduism and now lives in a Lutheran monastery near Pontiac, Michigan, where he was born. I thought of my Valpo friend Kathe in San Francisco, who chants at a farmers’ market on Saturdays while her husband plays a drum and small guitar.
I heard the bells of this small church in Evansville and remembered the ringing on top of churches around the world on Sunday morning.
I gasp with open mouth in my yearning for your commands.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
The pastor’s name is Dave. The deacon’s name is Dave. Deacon Dave asked me how I came to be found, how I came to be talking with him today.
I’ve been everywhere, man, I told him.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
What a wonderful world.
(Amos 8, Psalm 119, Matthew 11, Matthew 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
