305 - Discerning the Presence

Discerning the Presence

Consider the following three personal episodes. As I was delivering mail in the health-care clinic attached to the retirement community where I now live, a black woman "companion," as we call uniformed attendants to wheelchair patients, was playing "Amazing Grace" on the piano in the social room. I guessed she was not a "paper" musician, for her notes, rhythm, and variations were very much her own. It was a sort of "stride" style, but slow and deliberate, and every now and then she punctuated the familiar words with her own refrain-"Praise God! Praise God!" Her patient was slumped over in her wheelchair as nurses, doctors, volunteers, and maintenance people passed by detached and unobserving. I stood for a few minutes quietly at the side, caught the eye of the piano player, and muttered a somewhat embarrassed "thank you." Then I left.

The annual Princeton Theological Seminary commencement is held in the neo-gothic chapel of Princeton University. The sacred space, which so often during the academic year is sparsely occupied by University students and faculty, is always jammed to the full for the Seminary commencement. As I was making my way toward the Chapel through a crowded town square, I found myself behind a family of a father, a mother, an older daughter, and a younger, severely handicapped, daughter. They were dressed in their best and were heading toward the Chapel, perhaps to see another member of the family graduate. As I was walking behind them, the spastic daughter suddenly tripped over a cobblestone and fell flat on her face. I was about to intervene, but the family, who apparently had dealt with this kind of situation before, without a word, quickly picked up the stricken person who, curiously, had a benign smile on her face. Later, in the narthex of the Chapel, I saw the family happily making their way toward the few empty spaces in the back pews. I felt somewhat foolish as I whispered audibly, "Jesus, be with that person." And later, I reflected that Jesus, too, had faltered, perhaps stumbling over the rough roadway, and that he needed someone to help. I never saw any of them again.

In the television documentary series known as "Our World," the time-span for a recent broadcast covered "Liberation Summer, 1944." Toward the end of the program, Linda Ellerbee, one of the narrators,

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told about her father, an army sergeant who always hoped to see Paris but who died before the liberation. Thirty-four years later, she made her own trip to Paris and raised a toast: "Here's to Paris, France. To the Americans who saw her in 1944 and to the one who never saw her at all." And then she added: "Liberation summer and my Daddy are gone forever. The salute still stands." Haven't we read someplace, "Honor your father and ... "?

It may seem preposterous to suggest that all three episodes, within a few days of each other, became fixed in memory as extraordinary experiences, bordering on immediate and certain awareness of something numinous and sacred. Are such personal episodes, which everyone has at one time or another, authentic theophanies or merely intense, subjective, emotional reactions? And this raises the old but persistent question: "How do God, the Almighty Creator, the living and redeeming Christ, and the empowering and enlightening Holy Spirit become real to us?"

I

Traditional theological answers suggest that we come to know the divine presence through the Scriptures, the sacraments, in prayer and meditation, and in and through the community of the faithful. But if there are sacred Scriptures, holy places, and sacramental rituals, it is also true that the divine glory is everywhere, for everyone, at all times, and not just within the confines of theological conventions.

Abraham's three visitors "by the oaks of Mamre" were not recognized by him as divine or angelic messengers (Gen. 18:1-8). His gracious gesture of hospitality foreshadows both the promise of Jesus that "as you did it to one of the least...you did it to me" (Matt. 25:40) and the mysterious aside of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews that "some have entertained angels unawares" (Heb. 13:2). Jacob, asleep in the out-of-doors, his head resting on a stone pillow, awakes to declare that "this is the house of God" (Gen. 28:16-17).

Other such unconventional experiences of the divine splendor occur frequently throughout the Scriptures. Moses sees the divine in a burning bush (Ex. 3:2); Elijah at Horeb expects the Almightly to be in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire but is surprised by "a still small voice" (I Kings 19:11-12); Ezekiel by the river Chebar, in hostile territory, experiences a mystical-symbolic vision of stormy clouds, weird winged creatures, fiery torches, and wheels within wheels, and we are told that "such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord" (Ezek., chap. 1). As with the cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, the holy "Shekinah" hovering over the Tabernacle, it seems that the divine presence, like the Spirit, moves here and there and everywhere, sometimes recognized but more often not.

By indirection, through an angelic apparition, Mary is made aware of her special mission in life; the cosmic Bethlehem star is observed by only a few shepherds going about their business, "keeping watch over their

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flock by night"; the first disciples often seem bewildered and uncomprehending; many of the sayings of Jesus are in the form of "parables of reversal"; Paul sees a bright light in the sky and is never the same again. So it goes, not according to our usual understanding of revelation or the stages of faith development. We assume that God is our "temple tenant" and available through the ordinary means of grace, but the divine presence has a provocative way of breaking our boundaries and appearing, so it seems, at random, even capriciously,

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend to heaven, thou art there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there! (Psalm 139:7-8).

As the old hymn put it:

Lord, thy glory fills the heaven,
Earth is with thy fullness stored.

But if we all agree with the psalmist and the hymnist, must we not also ask, "that being the case, how are we to recognize the signs of the divine presence? What are we looking for? How can the blind be made to see the hand of God when it is right before our eyes"?

II

It would be intriguing to follow this theme further and ponder, for example, why Jesus calls those who cannot discern "the signs of the times" hypocrites, or why he calls the anointing by the woman at Bethany "this gospel" when apparently no one else seemed to know what was happening.

But let two or three suggestions serve to prod anyone interested in pursuing what Samuel Terrien calls in another connection "the elusive presence." That is the title of his major work on biblical theology, but the phrase has many implications, especially for those who cannot see the Kingdom in their midst or do not even know where to look.

F. Forrester Church, minister of New York's All Souls Church, has written an amusing and probing book, Entertaining Angels: A Guide to Heaven for Atheists and True Believers (1987). Epigrams sprout on every page, such as this:

My thesis is a simple one. If angels came in packages, we'd almost always pick the wrong one. Even as the devil is evil disguised as good, angels are goodness disguised. They show up in foolscap, calico, and gingham, and brown paper bags. Jesus discovered the realm of God in a mustard seed, the smallest and least portentous of all seeds. Mustard seeds and angels have this in common. They are little epiphanies of the divine amidst the ordinary (p. 11).

Wayne E. Oates, who has already given us so much, has a new book, The Presence of God in Pastoral Counseling (1986). He reflects on a longtime career about how the sense of the divine presence frequently accompanies the reconciliation of a seemingly intractable family disruption. This, to use Terrien's word, often seems "elusive" and contrary to popular views about the divine presence.

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Marketplace thought about the presence of God is one of sentimental familiarity. Country-western songs speak of "having a little talk with Jesus" almost as if the Lord were a chum with whom one has a chitchat... In stark contrast, however, is the persistent biblical wisdom that God's presence comes to us when we know it not. At the least, our awareness of the presence is an afterthought (p. 53).

Ronald F. Thiemann, the new Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, in his article, "The Unnamed Woman at Bethany," in the July issue of THEOLOGY TODAY, carries forward with exciting inferences the contrasts and parallels between the presence and absence of Jesus and the presence of the poor and Jesus' assurance that "I am with you always."

III

What about the three personal experiences with which we began? I really haven't any idea how to evaluate whether they were authentic theophanies or merely subjective fantasies. As Scrooge observed, cynically and physiologically, when encountering the Ghost of Christmas Past, it may only be "a bit of mustard or a piece of underdone potato." But the experiences certainly were real and powerful at the time, and quite unrelated to what I had for breakfast. My guess is that most of us could recount similar experiences which have broadened our vision and warmed the heart. We needn't leave all such intensely felt spiritual moments to biblical models, the saints, or the mystics.

After she decided to join the Catholic Church, Clare Booth Luce recalled an early experience when she was a young girl of about sixteen. It took place on a summer day at the seashore, early in the morning, and she remembers "a sensation of utter aloneness." As she stood by the water's edge, something happened. Years later after her conversion, she wrote about it in short, jerky sentences with certain words emphasized.

I find it difficult to explain what did happen. I expect that the easiest thing is to say that suddenly SOMETHING WAS. My whole soul was cleft clean by it, as a silk veil slit by a shining sword. And I knew. I do not know now what I knew. I remember, I didn't know even then. That is, I didn't know with any "faculty." It was not in my mind or heart or blood stream. But whatever it was I knew, it was something that made ENORMOUS SENSE... Then joy abounded in all of me. Or rather, I abounded in joy. I seemed to have no nature, and yet my whole nature was adrift in this immense joy, as a speck of dust is seen to dance in a great golden shaft of sunlight.

Making allowances for personal factors involved in all such visions and experiences, we must surely entertain the possibility that "the elusive presence" is in many curious ways, like the Kingdom itself, "among us" or "in our midst" or "within" (Lk. 17:21), if only we had eyes to see.

Hugh T. Kerr