I have searched for a way to tell this story. I have started it over and over for the past several months grasping for words - words that are well chosen, well placed, correct. And I have failed. This attempt will, I’m certain, also be a failure, because failure is inevitable here. Because this is about God. And thought and language are profoundly inadequate when it comes to God. Unfortunately, however, thought and language are often the only tools available (art, music, silence may get us closer, but they are not always at our disposal), which is, I suppose, why theology exists; as reasoning beings in the world as it is, we need ways in which to think and speak about things even — and perhaps, especially — when that thinking and speaking only serves to show us the degree to which our thoughts and language are limited in their reach. But I am risking digression into the general, when this is meant to be about the specific. I should, I think, simply dive right in, for it finally occurs to me after all of the scrapped attempts at writing this story, that the best I can do is to present it as I wrote it on the two days when it happened. And so…
8/17/19
I was tired. Exhausted. I had no business staying awake. But some months ago I began reading Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis’s autobiographical account of the first three decades or so of his life leading up to his conversion to Christianity, and I felt compelled tonight to continue. I was well into the second half of the book, and though I had found the account of Lewis’s early years interesting and quite readable, it had not been particularly affecting. Tonight, however, as I began to read, moving ever closer to Lewis’s telling of his own religious conversion, something was different. I felt the book’s chronology sweeping forward to meet me in my present. It was as if two lines — one representing the story of Lewis’s life and the other the story of my own life — had gradually been moving toward intersection, and here, in Lewis’s recounting of his reluctant turn from atheism, was that intersection. Every word resonated within me. It all felt so purposeful, so full of meaning and import. And in Lewis’s words: “For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a hareem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.” This cut me, broke me, sent me reeling. I wept.
At this point, I needed a break from reading - a moment to clear my head - so I walked outside to the front porch. A storm was in the western distance. I counted the seconds for each lightning strike. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. All the way to twenty-five. Then a quiet rolling thunder. Five miles. I collected my thoughts as best I could and went in to read more. Every page, every sentence, every word seemed meant for me. I read and thought and considered. And the storm approached. And then — I can think of no other way to put it — I was called back outside. There is certainly a part of me that would like to somehow soften that and say it another way, but truly, it felt I was called. I haven’t believed in any “calling” of that sort for two decades, but this felt as real as the storm itself. I once again set the book aside and walked toward the door. I said aloud to myself “This is your storm.” It’s not that I believed that the storm’s existence was only for me. But a storm, like anything else, can have multiple purposes and meanings or perhaps none of either, and I felt — I feel— that regardless of whatever else that storm was meant for or whatever degree of purposelessness it had, it was also meant for me.
I opened the door to pouring rain and brilliant lightning crashes. Had I been counting at that point, the seconds would have been far fewer, but this seemed no time for counting. For several minutes I just watched. Is this God speaking? What do you want? How do I listen? I put my hand out into the downpour, reaching for whatever was out there, whatever had called me. For a few moments — nothing. And then a great flash that lit the ground and sky with all the illuminating power of a bright mid-summer day and an almost simultaneous crash that shook the house - shook the ground. No counting of seconds necessary (or even possible). I jerked my hand back. More than that - I pulled my entire body quickly and almost involuntarily back away from the rain under the overhang of the porch, chills up my back and neck. The fear of God? Perhaps. I stayed just a bit longer to watch and wait, tentatively, respectfully, fearfully. One more crash at least as loud as the one before. A little start… and then I laughed. Ok. You win. I’ve spent 20 years not believing in signs, not believing in miracles, sure that even if there were a god, that god would not likely be the kind that intervenes in the physical world. Suddenly, though, the world was different. Or — more accurately, I suppose — the world was just as it had been; I now saw it differently… because I was different.
I came back in, finished the book, and sat for a while contemplating what had just happened to me. After a while, a second wave of the storm moved in. Once more out to the porch. I sat and watched. The lightning and thunder were still raging, but slightly more at a distance. I witnessed the power, but felt safe and appreciated the grandeur and beauty of it all.
“God was to be obeyed simply because He was God. Long since, through the gods of Asgard, and later through the notion of the Absolute, He had taught me how a thing can be revered not for what it can do to us but for what it is in itself. That is why, though it was a terror, it was no surprise to learn that God is to be obeyed because of what He is in Himself. If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, ‘I am.’ To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him. In His nature His sovereignty de jure is revealed.”
-C.S. Lewis from Surprised by Joy
8/18/19
The Encore.
I taught lessons today. My last student cancelled so I left early just in the wake of some more intense storms. I drove home as the sun was getting low in the sky on a cloudy evening. I forgot I had to pick up photos from Walgreens. Turned around. Drove back. Wrong Walgreens. Had to keep going and began to notice the strange yellow light of this sunset caused by an unseen sun sending rays around the end of a wall of gray clouds. Got the photos. The light grew more intense and stranger. Made one more quick stop. By the time I came out the light had become like nothing I’d ever seen - almost otherworldly. And here again I felt the “voice” of God. I drove toward the light - a bright outline at the edge of the aforementioned wall of clouds, rays visibly projecting through the sky from behind it. And once it was all in full view, I turned from heading west to heading north toward bluish gray storm clouds. A lightning show above an oddly lit landscape in which everything was either silhouette, light, or yellow reflection. A more gradual turn to the northeast only to come upon a visibly solid rainbow up against and beneath the dark of the storm clouds and the coming night - a rainbow in the darkness. And again, I began to laugh. This was like a show - beauty so awe-inspiring that it was teetering at the edge of the absurd. Almost too much. Almost. A turn to the east and more storm clouds, then, stretching out across the sky above me, a bright broad hundred fingered expanse of lightning the likes of which I have never seen. As I pulled into the neighborhood, the rainbow disappeared, the lightning stopped and an all too normal looking sunset was nearing its end. Had I been in lessons for the normal scheduled time, I would have missed it all. Had I gone to the right Walgreens in the first place I would have missed it as well. But there was a cancellation and I did go to the wrong place. And I didn’t miss a moment.
And that’s it. Two days of my life recounted in part. Two days of change. I was an atheist-leaning agnostic who, more than twenty years ago, abandoned a Christianity in which I felt I could no longer justifiably believe. Two days, two storms, and the back half of a book… and I come out on the other side, somehow… a Christian? I suppose so.