The Cracks That Let In The Light Of God
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(OPINION) On Friday, I spent 30 minutes or so on the phone getting acquainted with the editor-in-chief of Rapt, an interdenominational online Christian magazine based on the West Coast.
He’d contacted me because he’d read my columns and liked them, which I found flattering, of course.
He turned out to be a fascinating guy: a former Wall Street lawyer and Silicon Valley venture capitalist who decided that sort of life wasn’t fulfilling him anymore. So he and his wife founded this excellent, prize-winning publication.
We had a free-flowing conversation and amened each other and praised our maker. We might never talk again, I don’t know. Still, that was an illuminating half hour.
The next morning, I was out in the parking lot of the rural church I lead, wandering among dozens of sputtering motorcycles, as well as four-wheel-drive Jeeps and other assorted vehicles.
Every year there’s a charity ride to raise money for research into neurofibromatosis, or NF. The ride starts in our parking lot. The event centers around Owen, a delightful kid whom everybody loves and who struggles with NF.
Owen used to go to our church but now attends elsewhere with his parents and siblings. But his grandparents, uncle, aunt and cousins still are at Bethesda week in and week out. I cross paths with good old Owen regularly. He’s one of my favorite people.
My job for the charity ride is to bless the bikes, which I do just before they go roaring out of the parking lot onto U.S. 60. I ask the Lord to give the riders a safe and enjoyable journey and to help NF researchers find a cure and to comfort those who battle this wretched disease.
It’s always an interesting crowd. Lots of leather and beards and unusual haircuts and lots and lots of tattoos. Polite, friendly folks — folks generous enough to pay out of their own pockets and give up their Saturday off to encourage little Owen and his family. At a glance, some might see them as a rough-looking bunch — but if so, they’d miss their sweet souls.
On Sunday, I began preaching a new series on the grace of God, which in my loose definition encompasses just about everything anybody needs to know about the Lord of the universe.
Grace is about being loved by the creator even when you’re at your absolute lowest point — sinful or stupid or sick or broke or divorced or lonely or bitter. Or all of the above.
Grace says that no matter how badly you screw up, God forgives you before you ask. It says Jesus didn’t come into the world to judge you, but to deliver you. It says that even if you never manage to get all of it right, you’re OK with the one who sees your heart.
About the only thing God asks in return is that we pay his gift forward. We’re to forgive others as fully as we’ve been forgiven. We’re to extend the grace we’ve received.
After the service, a parishioner — an ex-marine and a successful businessman — came up to me. I understand grace, he said — I know what God’s done for me. It’s that part about showing the same grace to others that I find hard, sometimes even when it’s my own kids.
You and all of us, I thought. That’s the rub. Embracing grace for yourself is easier than granting it to someone who broke your heart.
That afternoon, my wife, Liz, and I met at a coffee shop with an Episcopal priest and his mother, whom he was visiting in our town.
I’d asked for this meeting. The priest had been featured recently in a New Yorker magazine article, which reported on a scientific study of how clergy volunteers reacted to hallucinogens — whether they encountered God in new, powerful ways while under the influence.
The priest had been a test subject in the study, and indeed experienced a spiritual awakening.
The four of us spent more than an hour discussing this, and I expect to write a column about our conversation soon. I’ve never taken hallucinogenic drugs, but we all got some chuckles from how similar his experiences on mushrooms were to my nonchemically induced experiences as a Pentecostal.
So, in just one weekend, a Wall Street lawyer turned venture capitalist turned Christian editor, a biker rally, a conversation about grace with a parishioner, reflections from a priest about shrooms.
I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say here, friends. I think that’s my point, actually.
It’s all untelling, this God thing. The whole weekend I had an inexpressible sense of God’s realness, God’s omnipresence, God’s utter majesty.
God was working in one way through the editor in San Francisco, another way through those good-hearted bikers, another way in my parishioner and still another in the Episcopal priest.
God is a mystery. If you think you’ve got the answers … well, no, you don’t.
Also this weekend The New York Times ran a wide-ranging interview by journalist Peter Wehner with Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury.
Mentioning examples as diverse as Dostoyevsky and Leonard Cohen, Williams said there are special people who serve as cracks in the world. They let divine light in to the rest of us. Neither we nor they see the whole of it, but through them we get a glimpse, a sliver.
That’s what those people this past weekend were to me — cracks in the superstructure, each revealing a different portion of the same Lord.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.