An Introduction

Art history class met very early. We would hustle out of the cold Ann Arbor air and into the warm auditorium with its soft, worn seats. The instructor would dim the lights, put up a slide, and begin lecturing in the hushed, resonant tone of someone accustomed to speaking in museums. The low hum of the projector, combined with the professor’s sedate British accent, consistently lulled me back to sleep. As a result, my knowledge of art history has a kind of episodic quality: for example, I remember a great deal about cave painting, but almost nothing about Impressionism. It’s the sort of idiosyncratic exposure that people sometimes mistake for sophistication.

Occasionally I would stir from sleep and open an eye half way. An image would register in my foggy semi-consciousness, and a few words might get through as well, but these distant sensations usually just hastened me back to my dreams. Ironically, many of those dreams centered on the exotic-looking dark-haired young woman who sat in front of me in art history class. I might have convinced her we should get to know each other if I could have rallied a bit, demonstrated some appreciation for beautiful things, and stayed awake for more than the first ten minutes. But this was not to be.

I recall one morning when, glancing up at the screen as I rolled over from my left upright sleeping position to my right upright sleeping position, I noticed that the screen seemed oddly lit. I blinked a few times, looked more closely, and realized that the strange light came from the painting itself. The edges of the painting merged with the darkened walls of the room, but the figures in the center glowed magically. There was the broad side of a horse, and a groom tucked into the shadows holding its reins. At the forefront of the picture was a man, lying on his back, grasping up blindly toward the powerful shock of light that had thrown him off the horse and onto the ground. It was, of course, Caravaggio’s famous painting of the conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

Even in my post-adolescent sleepiness the painting made a powerful impression. Surely, the work of God must look like this. Surely, the grasp of God must bathe us and blind us and bludgeon us like this. Surely, this must be what it is like to have the hands of the Lord reshape your heart. Auden tells us that the Old Masters were never wrong about suffering. Nor were they ever wrong about ecstasy.

At that age I knew only one other conversion story. I think I first heard it from my grandfather. My grandfather was a fine person and devout churchgoer who nevertheless swore with greater fluency than anyone I have ever known. On one occasion, my uncle—convinced that my grandfather let all these expletives slip without thinking—secretly tape-recorded a brief conversation with him and then played it back to make the point. My grandfather listened with disbelief and, at the end of the tape, barked out a spontaneous curse.

In any event, my grandfather was a Methodist hardwired with that denomination’s passion for old hymns. So, of course, he told me the story of John Newton, the eighteenth-century captain of a slave ship who experienced a “great deliverance” during a violent storm at sea, became a minister, and composed “Amazing Grace.” This story made a powerful impression, too, and at an early age I understood that if God really wanted to get your attention God knew how to do it. Still, for many years my life trudged along without a blinding light or a tidal wave.

Then, in December of 2004, everything changed. It was about a week before Christmas. On that day my wife, Lisa, and I had shopped for presents, decorated the house, and trimmed the tree. By evening we were bone tired. We shut off all the lamps, put on some quiet holiday music, and dropped down on the couch. The tree glimmered, the fireplace flickered, and the dogs snored. Peace settled over us, and, then, something more than peace.

I felt stirrings deep inside me that brought back memories of another, much less happy Christmas. I was about five years old. My father’s business had collapsed and he had been criminally charged for various financial improprieties. Everyone in the family thought of my father as a good man who had overextended himself, and no one believed he would be convicted of a crime. But he was, and when the judge sentenced him to a lengthy prison term our astonishment and sorrow seemed boundless. We lost everything—our house, neighborhood, and friends—and moved in with my grandparents, who lived in a big and impressive house in a tired and unimpressive corner of St. Louis.

I have a clear recollection of the first Christmas Eve without my father. I felt his absence palpably. I missed his smile, the way he hushed us and cupped his hand around his ear to check whether he had heard the ring of sleigh bells, and his elaborate ritualized hanging of favorite ornaments—ugly antique German ones he had inherited from his father’s father and that had been worn free of paint. Like everyone else in the family, I distracted myself from such memories on that Christmas Eve by bustling around the house with a kind of grim purposefulness. I was bone tired at the end of that day, too.

After dinner, I wandered into the dark, paneled living room where my grandparents had put up their Christmas tree. The lights were off, except for those on the tree, and I could hear a scratchy holiday album playing in another room. It was as if you could hear the house’s sadness as well. I lay down on the couch and stared at the tree and wondered what my father was doing at that moment. I imagined his loneliness, and settled into mine.

And then a remarkable thing happened. A deep sense of well-being, of understanding, of reassurance, of comfort, descended on me. It cannot be described, except perhaps by saying that I knew my family was loved by someone, someone very strong who would help us find our way. Or maybe it is best described by borrowing John Wesley’s phrase: I felt my heart “strangely warmed.” When I experienced that feeling as a child I did not know what it was; I only knew it was wonderful. When the feeling reappeared forty-two years later, I still knew it was wonderful; but I also knew what it was.

When Prince Hamlet curses his situation—son to a murdered father, called to avenge the wrong—he says the “time is out of joint.” Most of us obviously don’t confront Hamlet’s precise dilemma—when and how to kill our stepfather. But most of us do seem to wander through lives that feel “out of joint.” Still, we make adjustments and learn to live with this misalignment.

After all, this situation does not strike us as tragic or unendurable. And so we keep moving forward by deploying all the mechanisms at our disposal. We make ourselves excessively busy. We fill our time with trivia. We drink. We eat. We watch. We buy things we can’t afford with money we don’t have. And, above all else, we live in a state of denial. Or, more properly, we live in a state of substantial denial, because we cannot help but have some distant consciousness of the quiet crisis that plagues our souls.

I spent the forty years after that first Christmas Eve in such a state of substantial denial, largely ignoring that occasion when God had been so immediately present to me, and for me. Through those years I busied myself with school, a hectic professional life, a kind of spiritual life, a cluttered social life, with working out and running, always running, running and running. Along the way, I acquired a collection of experiences typically reserved for bad Country Western songs: the death of my grandparents while we were still living with them; my father’s release from prison and our move from St. Louis to Detroit the year of the riots; our subsequent move to a remote house in the country where my father could fish and hide from his past; my father’s death; my marriage to a woman who struggled with profound mental illness; the late-term death of an unborn child; a painful divorce; my ex-wife’s suicide; remarriage to a woman I love so deeply and uncontrollably it defies all my understanding of what we can expect from our time on earth.

During those forty-some years I rode the horse very hard. I rode through brush and across rivers. I rode through the cold rain and the dry heat. I pulled up to a full stop for no reason. I spurred on into a full gallop without any sense of destination. We found wonderful and terrible places together. And then, at the age of forty-seven, I fell off the horse.

I was not blinded by light and tossed to the earth. I was not seized and shaken and thrown to the ground. I just sort of tumbled off, without grandeur or drama. And, when I did, there was that feeling again after all that time, the same warm sense of well-being and comfort, the feeling of being helped to my feet and held up, the feeling of coming to my senses—the way you do when your mind has wandered and someone says your name. I felt knocked into a state of awareness; I felt called; and I felt an overpowering compulsion to answer. That is how I felt the last week of December 2004. The first week of January 2005, I became a seminary student.

My seminary studies came to an abrupt halt when a nephew of mine passed away, leaving behind children who needed the sort of home Lisa and I could provide. So I put my formal studies aside and contented myself with teaching law school, practicing law, and trying to figure out how to be a decent parent. As the saying goes, though, when the seminary door closed another opened: my church approached me about the possibility of preaching once a month and performing some other worship leadership functions. I leapt, and have not yet landed. This blog offers up the resulting sermons and prayers.

I do not offer these sermons because I claim any special academic credentials. Certainly, more than twenty years ago I had the good fortune to study with Hans Kung, one of the leading theologians of our age, and David Noel Freedman, one of the most insightful biblical scholars of our time, and my interactions with those two men deeply inform my thinking. But those studies have grown rusty with disuse and it would be unfair to claim that such sturdy scholars parented such fragile offspring.

Nor do I offer these sermons because I claim any unique life experience. My life, like all lives, bears the marks of birth and victory and joy and celebration, and also the scars of death and failure and pain and loss. I am not saying my life has been any harder or better or more interesting than that of anyone else—to the contrary, it has not been, and that is precisely the point.

Years ago I knew someone who attended a conference for artists and writers, one of those settings where people talk about anguish and claim it for their own. A group around a dinner table waded into a deep discussion of the inspiration they had drawn from their painful childhoods. At last one weary listener observed: “This is all well and good, but the line of people with painful childhoods starts here and goes around the world.” This is a bitter truth, and one that also applies to those who have lived hard and complicated lives: the line starts here and goes around the world. Or, more properly, the line starts with a carpenter from Nazareth and goes around the world, and goes around still.

So these sermons make no special claims of experience, enlightenment, or expertise. And—the pun intended—Heaven knows they make no special claims of spiritual clarity or purity. The man who fell off the horse is the same man still (alas) even if he is also a different man altogether (amen). But, again, that is precisely the point. I offer these sermons because there is nothing extraordinary about me at all, and God has a stunning track record of making remarkable use of unremarkable instruments. God raises the lowly and we are amused; God saves the wretched and we are amazed; and I am tempted to think of myself as just another example of God’s love of irony and paradox.

These sermons, written by a fellow traveler, invite you to slow your horse down and to hear the sound of God walking beside you. And they invite you to brace yourself. For God may greet you as a blinding light, a clap of thunder, a burning bush, or a pillar of fire. Or God may greet you as a gentle whisper, as distant music, as the soft voice of the dying, or as a child’s tug on the sleeve. God may throw you off the horse suddenly and dramatically. Or you may fall off the horse slowly and haltingly. We are an infinitely complex species. But God has an infinitely complex understanding of how to speak to us. That is what God does: watches us; loves us; talks to us.

So stop charging forward. Pull back the reins. Find the silence that rests in all of us. Be still. And listen.