Posted on 11/03/2007 5:03:12 PM PDT by annalex
The following story of my conversion, "His Open Arms Welcomed Me," is the first chapter of the bestseller Surprised by Truth, edited by Patrick Madrid (Basilica, 1994).
I was quite young the first time I saw him, so I don't remember where it happened. But I do remember being terrified by the sight: that tortured man, thorn-crowned, blood-bathed, forsaken. The sculptor had spared no crease of agony; the painter, no crimson stroke. He was a nightmare in wood.
Yet I was strangely drawn to him as well. His open arms welcomed me; his uncovered breast stretched out like a refuge. I wanted to touch him.
Of course, I knew who he was. After all, I'd won the big prize -- a Hershey Bar -- for being the first kindergartner in our little Southern Presbyterian church to memorize the books of the Bible. And my parents had busted with pride on the morning when I stood before the congregation to recite the grand old affirmations of the Westminster Confession: Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever ...
But in our church the cross on the wall was empty and clean. We read about the blood, we sang about the blood, but we didn't splash it on our walls and doorposts.
In the years to follow, the man on the cross haunted me. When I found out that a schoolmate wore a crucifix around his neck, I asked my father to get me one. But he shook his head and said, "That's just for Catholics." There was no malice in his words; he simply spoke matter-of-factly, in the same way he might have observed that yarmulkes were just for Jews.
One day my aunt from New York came south to visit. She was always inheriting odd items from boarders in the residential motel where she worked, and this time she shared them with us. In a box of assorted old treasures calculated to fascinate a little boy for hours, I found him.
He was plaster of Paris, unfinished, maybe a foot long, cross and all. I ran my fingers over the smooth surface. The details were remarkable for so humble a work, though he had a flaw in his right foot. He was beautiful. But he was too white, too clean. So I found some old watercolors and painted every detail lovingly, with crimson dominating the whole. Then I kept him under my bed and took him out regularly so I could look at him, touch him, and wonder why he should be in some Catholic home instead of mine.
I don't remember when I lost that plaster body, but it must have been sometime after I became an arrogant little atheist at the age of twelve. Some school teacher I've long forgotten encouraged me to read Voltaire, the Enlightenment rationalist, who convinced me that all religion was delusion. At the time I didn't need much convincing; the adolescent season of rebellion against my parents had begun, and skepticism was for me the weapon of choice. No doubt I tossed out the man on the Cross in the same trash can with the Westminster Confession.
For six years I ran from him, though I thought I was running to truth. I had no choice about attending the Presbyterian church with my family, but every week I repeated a quiet, private act of defiance: Whenever the congregation said the Apostles' Creed, I remained silent.
My heart was hungry but my head turned away from anything that could have nourished my spirit. So I began to feed on spiritual garbage instead. A science fair project on parapsychology introduced me to supernatural forces. But I thought they were only unexamined natural powers of the human mind. Before long, I was trafficking in spirits, though I would never have dreamed they were anything other than my own psychic energies. They would sometimes tell me what others were thinking, or whisper of events that were taking place at a distance. The more power they gave me, the hungrier I became for it. I began to experiment with seances, levitation, and other occult practices -- all, of course, in the name of science. I wanted to become an expert in parapsychology.
From time to time I saw him again, usually hanging beyond the altar in the church of my Catholic girlfriend. His open arms still welcomed me. But since I was convinced there was no God, the most he could represent to me was a suffering humanity. And in those heady days of the `60s, when American youth were so certain they could transform the world, I didn't want a reminder of human brokenness. We were out to forge our own bright destiny in the new Age of Aquarius, and the crucifix was an unwelcome relic of the old order. Like some child of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, born just a few centuries too late, I was convinced humanity could perfect itself through education. So I set out to prove the thesis in the human laboratory of my high school.
Our particular campus was an odd mix of peril and promise. As a first step in fully desegregating the public schools of our Southern city, the school board by fiat turned an all-black high school into a racially mixed one. Amazingly, those of us with a vision for racial harmony were able to build more of it than many critics had expected: Out of the chaos of a totally new student body gathered from utterly different social and racial backgrounds, we forged well-oiled student organizations that helped smooth the process of integration.
In a short time, blacks and whites were becoming friends and working hard to build a community. We became the city's first model of a school that had been forced to desegregate totally, yet had come out of the process racially integrated as well -- and all without violence. As student body president and a central actor in the drama, I felt as if my Enlightenment strategy for changing the world had been validated.
Nevertheless, reality at last bumped up against my carefully crafted visions. First to go was the Aquarian illusion. After a massive transfer of students city-wide in my senior year to complete the desegregation process in all the high schools, the make-up of our student population was radically altered. Some of the new students were militant racists and troublemakers, both black and white. When other campuses in the city began closing down because of rioting, we were put on alert that angry students from other schools were planning to infiltrate our student body and provoke violence there as well.
One lovely fall afternoon, after our homecoming rally, it happened. A riot broke out on campus as I watched helplessly. Black and white friends who had once shared my hopes for a new, peaceful world attacked one another with knives, chains, and tire irons. I naively ran around campus from one little mob to another, trying to break up fights and restore calm. My watch was knocked off my wrist in the struggle, but I was miraculously spared injury -- to my body, that is. My soul was quite another matter. The sight of one young man in particular was branded on my memory. He lay sprawled cruciform in the dust, his arms extended, his face bloody. The wooden nightmare of my childhood had become flesh and blood, and I wept bitterly for the death of a dream. The idol I had made of humanity was shattered, and nothing could put it back together.
Next to die were my delusions about psychic powers. One starless summer night a chilling demonic force, grown tired of its human plaything, commandeered my body. It physically pushed me toward the edge of a nearby river to throw me in. I've never learned to swim, so if a couple of muscular friends who were with me hadn't pinned me down, it would have drowned me.
The next morning I told my English teacher, a Christian who had been praying for me, what had happened. She said I'd had a brush with the Devil. I laughed at her and scoffed: Don't be so medieval. Even so, I had to admit something was out there, and it wasn't a friendly ghost. My teacher gave me C. S. Lewis to read -- at last, an antidote for the poison of Voltaire -- who in turn sent me back to the Scriptures.
It was there that I learned about angels, fallen and unfallen. I found dark references to the powers that had tormented me and the evil mastermind behind them, the god of this world. In the Bible I rediscovered a multi-tiered model of the universe, of nature and super-nature, that fit the realities of my recent experience in ways that parapsychology and the Enlightenment never could.
These were my first faltering steps back toward reality, and with a sobering irony, I came to believe in the Devil before I believed in God. Yet that inverted order of my emerging creed had its purpose in the divine intention: So devoid was I of the fear of God that I had to work my way into it by stages, starting with a fear of demons. The pleasure I'd taken in declaring myself an atheist, unfettered by the rules of any creator, began to crumble: If there was indeed a devil but no God to save me from him, I was in deep trouble.
Yet Scripture was teaching me much more than fear. In the gospels especially, I encountered a man whose wisdom and compassion arrested me. He was the same man I'd sung hymns about as a child, the man on the cross who had stirred me with his suffering; but he was becoming real in a way I'd never imagined possible.
Years before, he'd been much like the hero of a fairy tale: a bright legend that embodied the noblest human traits, but only a legend after all. Now he was entering history for me, breathing the air and walking the soil of a planet where I also breathed and walked. I was still scandalized by the thought that he could actually have been more than a man. But the possibilities were opening up. After all, once you grant the existence of super-nature, you can't rule out God; and if there's a God, what's there to stop him from invading nature? If there's a God, I knew, then the rest of the story, however shocking -- Virgin Birth, miracles, the Resurrection surely becomes possible.
Meanwhile, I began trying prayer as an experiment. My requests were concrete and specific; so were the swift, undeniable answers that came. The evidence was mounting, and though I felt threatened by the prospect of having to submit to the will of Another, a part of me also longed for that submission. Soon I was getting to know believers whose lives convincingly enfleshed the gospel -- or, to use Merton's haunting line, "People whose every action told me something of the country that was my home." When one of them invited me to a small prayer meeting, I came, however awkwardly, and sat silently for most of the evening. But I came back the next week, and the next, because I sensed that these people genuinely loved me, and I was hungry for their love.
A fresh, new breeze was blowing through my mind, sweeping out the cobwebs and debris that had accumulated through six years of darkness. The light of Christ was dawning inside, and all the frayed old arguments of the skeptics soon rotted in its brilliance. The more I knew of the world and myself, the more I found that Christian faith made sense of it all, and the more I longed to meet this man whose followers I had come to love.
Just after my high school graduation, at a massive nationwide rally of evangelical Christians in Dallas sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ, he came to me -- not in a vision or even a dream, but in a quiet, unshakable confidence that he was alive and knocking at the door of my heart. I repented of my unbelief and all its devastating consequences. I confessed to God that Jesus Christ was his Son, and asked him to become my Savior and Lord. My mind at last had given my heart permission to believe, to obey, and to adore.
When I took up Scripture again to read, the centuries were suddenly compressed, and the historical Figure that had replaced the noble Legend was himself now replaced with a living Friend. In my hands were letters he had addressed personally to me, written two millennia ago yet delivered to my home at this moment, so fresh that it seemed the ink should still be wet. He read my thoughts, nailed my sins, told my story, plumbed the depths of my pain.
Overwhelmed, I asked him to fill me with himself.
Two months later I was sitting alone in our Presbyterian church's sanctuary, late in the evening after a service had ended. I'd opened my Bible to the book of Acts -- no one had warned me that it was an incendiary tract -- and I read about the day of Pentecost. I'd never been taught about the baptism of the Holy Spirit or his gifts. But I told God that if what happened to those first believers on that day long ago could happen to me this evening, I wanted it. And I was willing to sit there all night until it happened.
I didn't have to wait long. Suddenly a flood of words in a tongue I'd never studied came bursting out of me, followed by a flood of joy that washed over me for a week. The Holy Spirit baptism was for me a baptism in laughter; I giggled like a fool for days over this sweet joke of God. It was a liberation from the chains of the Enlightenment. This irrational -- or perhaps I should say para-rational -- experience opened my eyes to realms that soared beyond my understanding, and left me face-to-face with mystery. For years, reason had masqueraded as a god in my life, but now I saw it for what it truly was: only a servant, however brilliantly attired.
That realization served me well in the following years when I majored in religious studies at Yale. That school's great, Neo-Gothic library best illustrates the spirit I encountered there: Painted on the wall high above the altar of its massive circulation desk is an awesome icon of Knowledge -- or perhaps Wisdom, though I rarely heard her voice in the classrooms of that campus. She was personified as a queen enthroned above us lowly student mortals, and though we freshmen were tempted to genuflect, I owed my first allegiance to another sovereign.
In the twenty years that came after, faith grew, establishing itself as the heart of the vocations that consumed me: I went on to a graduate school program in religion, and I served as a missionary evangelist in Europe, an associate pastor of a charismatic congregation, and a writer and editor for several Christian publishers.
Those were good years, years of settling into a deep relationship with the God I'd once abandoned. He gave me a beloved Christian wife and two children who learned to seek his face from a tender age. But at last the time came for yet another conversion in my life -- and another baptism of joy.
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an English version of the letters to be found in Lightfoot's "Apostolic Fathers", London, 1907, from which are taken all the quotations of the letters in this article, and to which all citations refer.On the history of the letters, controversies, and codices, see St. Ignatius of Antioch, form which the above attribution note is taken.
In my church we have Altar Call every Sunday. It's called Holy Eucharist. We are all about charisma. That is what Holy Eucharist means, Eu = True, Charism = Anointing. It's just that the charism is not about personalities in our church because we have the True Body of Jesus Christ present on our altar and on our tongues. Talk about your gift of tongues!
I’ve really been trying to focus on Him in the Mass lately. And I’ve been trying to emphasize, in my attention, the part AFTER the priest says “this is My body... this is My blood.” I’m trying to focus on the part about “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us,” the part where he breaks the bread. Being able to partake of it is icing on the cake... the real miracle is in the sacrifice. Glory be to Him.
They were. The churches selected their Elders and Deacons. It was after the Apostolic Era ended that there began to be a push for a hierarchal system.
OK, thanks much for the confirmation. I knew I remembered your saying that before. :)
Alright, that sounds reasonable. When the word "hierarchal" was used I was thinking in terms of something comparable to today (very centralized government for the whole Church), but it sounds like that didn't happen for a while.
My point was just to show that we also have leaders in our churches, a "type" of hierarchy, but we do not have a hierarchal system such as you do today. If the early churches revolved around a single Bishop (respectively), who led and delegated various responsibilities to "staff", then I was thinking that would be more comparable to the way Protestants do it today. However, I am still a little unclear on the role of the laity (if any) in choosing priests and Bishops. As I'm sure you know, in many/most Protestant churches the laity has sole discretion.
After St. Peter we had a short-lived papacy of St. Linus of which we know next to nothing; he was succeeded by St. Clement who was controlling things in Corinth over the heads of the local bishops, so definitely we had a papacy in the person of St. Clement, while the papacy of St. Peter is clear from the scripture.
But did St. Clement and other early Popes exercise power in any way comparable to modern day Popes? I can't imagine a communication system was established enough such that the early Popes could have "ruled" on something, and then word got out to all Christian churches everywhere. I also can't imagine the Orthodox going along with this. :)
Thanks very much. I didn't know that. As you probably saw, I noted to Alex that the author of the testimony spoke approvingly of "Charismatic Catholics", and then Alex said they were "OK" and not part of some fringe Catholic group (like the nuns who want women priests). I doubt the Church would be accepting of the author's charismatic background, so I was thinking the Charismatic Catholics must be something different.
A great example of how the early churches operated is in Acts. The council in Jerusalem reveals that decision making was done as a group and no one person made authoritative decisions on their own, a presbyterian system. IOW, a sacerdotal order is unknown, it was the process of declaring an episcopal ordination that established the distinction between the laity and differing levels of clergy. Until this happened a "bishop" was an elder who had no special authority other than to conduct the service.
The development of "Metropolitans" is what really accelerated the process, until then the presbyters and bishops were viewed as equals. A metropolitan was a bishop who was appointed to preside at a meeting involving a group of churches where there was a theological issue. What happened was the "metropolitans" took their titles home with them and claimed superior authority. Over time the episcopal order was established and a system where the clergy assumed the role of the Holy Spirit of maintaining the people in their relations with God was formalized.
did St. Clement and other early Popes exercise power in any way comparable to modern day Popes?
An ability to reach over the head of the local bishop is what defines papacy. St. Clement exercised that. There are some aspects of papal power that were perhaps acquired later, especially in the West, but the fundamental power of the papacy as a single authority above bishops dates back to the very first popes. some aspects fo papal powere were also lost; for example, the papal states were lost, and with decline of monarchies the ability to influence politics also declined.
Yes, this is the piece I didn't understand. Thanks very much.
Wmfights’ is at best a very tendentious reading of Acts, and it is not consistent with Corinthians, where we see Paul defining a hierarchical system of authority. In Acts, we see St. James presiding, as bishop, over the meeting and dictating the canon regarding the admission of the Gentiles. I don’t understand where Wmfights finds his “no special authority other than to conduct the service”.
OK, but at that council, Peter was there, right? If he truly was the first Pope, then why didn't he preside in accordance with the hierarchal system?
I assume the “he” in the title is the pope?
Correct ! Peters incorrect actions were a part of the problem addressed by the 1st church council. Looking at the totality it looks like James had more authority than Peter and Peter submitted to it
Scripture indicates that there was a joint headship no pope
It didn't exist. :-)
The Apostles were evangelists. The Judaic model didn't begin until after the Apostolic Era. The excuse then was it was needed to protect against "divisions". We see that worked out really well.
The key phrases in Acts 15 is verse 6.
Now the apostles and elders came together to consider this matter.
Decision making was done as a group, not by an "elite" few.
Apostles did help in the picking of elders of churches, but ultimately the decisions were made at the local level. The Apostles did not consider themselves superior to other Christians.
IPeter 5:1 The elders who are among you I exhort, I who am a fellow elder...
The striking feature of the early Christian churches was the flexibility in worship, the belief that we are all a part of the priesthood, the equality of believers and most striking the absence of any clergy that manage the relationship between the believers and God. The Christian church had two ordinances the Lord's Supper (a part of the Agape feast) and Baptism, it was not the highly structured service, or organization, we see in most churches today.
Yes, that's all I can see too. Thanks.
He wouldn’t; the local bishop, James, presides. The scriptural support for the leadership of Peter comes from the renaming, the keyes, and the “I pray for you that you strengthen your brethren” at the Last Supper, as well as from “feed my lambs”.
I was quite young the first time I saw him, so I don't remember where it happened. But I do remember being terrified by the sight: that tortured man, thorn-crowned, blood-bathed, forsaken. The sculptor had spared no crease of agony; the painter, no crimson stroke. He was a nightmare in wood.Yet I was strangely drawn to him as well. His open arms welcomed me; his uncovered breast stretched out like a refuge. I wanted to touch him.
Yeah, right. Very funny. That must be the reason you guys run away from crucifixes like devil from holy water.
I grant you that the papacy became stronger under the guidance of the Holy Ghost over the years, and certainly the Church remains conciliar even today, but where do you find “the absence of any clergy that manage the relationship between the believers and God” in the scripture?
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