How Do We Know When It's God

Chapter 1

The Quest

We and God have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to His influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe, as those parts of it which our personal being constitutes, takes a turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each of us fulfills or evades God's demands.

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Yes! My fellow parishioners and I who have come on this retreat agree wholeheartedly with William James that our lives are better or worse to the extent that each of us "fulfills or evades" God's demands. But that still leaves us with the question that plagues us, the question we have come to explore and try to answer on a weekend of prayer and discussion at a Benedictine monastery outside of Boston.

How do we know when it's God?

That's the riddle that overrides our other concerns, the puzzle that each of us is trying to solve on our particular path of life as we come to the turning points, the big and small decisions that we know will shape our fate, that will lead us up or down, closer or farther away from that fulfillment of the heart and soul we all seek, that sense of being in tune, on track, in synch with ourselves and the universe. If only God would speak to us, boom out instructions from a voice on high, we would gladly go into battle or up the mountain or into the rushing path of charging horses or foaming seas. If only we knew.

For sure.

The way.

We are gathered here during Lent, season of penitence and contemplation, beginning with Ash Wednesday, when we remind ourselves we are dust, and to dust we shall return, yet on this retreat we are not so much considering the transitory nature of our time on earth but rather how to find the right path to take, how to fulfill our true destiny. Outside, the bare limbs of trees, still winter-stripped, reach for the sky like our own yearning. We are mostly middle-aged, middle-class, college-educated people, seeking a different knowledge than we find in books, the far more elusive wisdom of the heart. We sit on chairs or on the floor in the library of the guest house, wearing sweaters and jeans, corduroys or sweat pants, comfortably dressed to address the big questions, ready if need be to wrestle our angel, as Jacob did, and perhaps in the process to find our true name.

A woman in our group who's been going out with the same man for several years but doesn't know if she should marry him prays and meditates about it. Yes, she sees a therapist, but when she asks the therapist a question, the therapist asks her another question back. One day she thinks she sees a sign. She's sitting on the floor in her living room trying to pray about it, and the way the sunlight falls on the carpet seems to form a letter of the alphabet—the first letter of the man's name. Is this a "sign"? Is this the guidance she is praying for? Is it God's way of telling her to marry the man? Or is it just an accident, is it only the way she's sitting or looking or squinting that makes her think she sees this and wonder if it might be a "message"?

A man wonders if he ought to take a job that would pay more money but require him to move to another city and leave his friends and the neighborhood he loves. He makes a list of the pros and cons, totaling up each column, trying to figure if the greater number of reasons on one side means that's the right thing to do, the best course to take, or should each reason be weighted, given a number value according to its importance? And even so, does it all "add up" to an answer, the answer, the course that he should follow?

Like most of our contemporaries, our peers, we wrestle with deciding what's "the right thing to do" with the help of psychiatrists, tests, courses, the advice of friends and experts. Those of us who have a religious faith or try to follow a spiritual path also look to God or Spirit or Higher Power as we understand it for aid or affirmation in such decisions, feeling perhaps that this other dimension is a deeper one, more meaningful and true. We are looking for the kind of guidance and wisdom from God or Spirit that theology calls "discernment," which translated into lay people's language means "how do we know when it's God?" That's what we've titled this retreat and offered as its theme.

We're volunteer members of our church's adult religious education committee, and our job is to plan courses, classes, activities, and retreats that respond to the concerns of our fellow parishioners, the ones who come to church not only out of habit or social obligation or family tradition but as seekers; as men and women who, like so many in the world, want to know and learn how to live for more than the next paycheck or promotion, who want to find greater meaning and purpose in life by getting in tune with a spiritual dimension of experience and trying to live by such light.

My friends and I on this retreat in the spring of 1984 belong to King's Chapel, in Boston, a church described in the program for Sunday worship as "Unitarian in theology, Anglican in worship, and Congregational in governance," an amalgam resulting from the more than three centuries of history that make it a stop on the Freedom Trail, where it is identified as "the oldest continuing pulpit in America." We are one of a small percentage of Christian churches in the Unitarian-Universalist Association, most of whose members and churches are Humanist, making us an anomaly in our own denomination. Our liturgy features our own revised version of the Book of Common Prayer, and might be mistaken for a low Episcopal service, leading some denominational wags to refer to King's Chapel as "the St. Peter's of the Unitarians." Trying to explain all this to friends, I usually end up saying, "Just think of it as 'a Boston church.' "

That's how I think of it myself when I first walk into King's Chapel on Christmas Eve of 1980, little knowing it's going to change my life. It's a freezing Boston night and I'm shivering in church, too, maybe out of nervousness as well as the cold. What power do the carols and candles have, what stirs when I sing the Latin words of "Adeste Fidelis" that seem so much more haunting and true than the English? Was it only by chance that I heard a neighborhood man in a bar say he wanted to go to mass on Christmas Eve, and was prompted to look for a church service?

I'm trying to recover from a year of continuous mid-life crisis that includes fleeing from Hollywood and network television in a state of financial and physical crisis, breaking up with the woman I've lived with for seven years whom I hoped and expected to be with the rest of my life, and attending the funerals of my father in May and my mother in November. The one saving grace in the midst of this tumult is finding Dr. Howard Heartily and nurse Jane Shrewd at the stress clinic of Massachusetts General Hospital and getting into an exercise and diet program that lowers my pulse from a runaway 120 (a condition called tachycardia) to a better than normal 60, and my weight from a blubbery 172 to a reasonable 155. Part of this program involves giving up drinking for a month—I've never gone longer than a week in my adult life and that experience left me scratching the walls—but in my healthy new condition I manage to make it. During this newfound state of clarity an impulse leads me to go to church on Christmas Eve for the first time (except for funerals and weddings) since I got out of college in 1955 with a B.A. in English and an informal degree in atheism.

I pick King's Chapel from an ad on the Boston Globe religion page because it's in walking distance and the promise of "candle-light service and carols" doesn't seem too threatening. Even after I start attending Sunday services, I don't pay much if any attention to what denomination it is, thinking of it as generic "church" as in one of those children's maps of Your Town identifying Church, School, Fire Station, Factory, and other institutions.

It later occurs to me I've stumbled into the most appropriate church imaginable for my own outlook. I'm a Christian from childhood, affirmed not only by baptism but a personal experience of Jesus, yet I'm not comfortable with the rules and regulations of particular dogmas, the requirements of belief. I'm somehow relieved and pleased when I learn that some of my fellow parishioners don't consider themselves Christians at all, but are Unitarians who believe only in "the interconnecting web of the universe." While I consider myself a Christian, I don't believe everyone else is wrong or damned or unenlightened. I want my spiritual life to be able to draw on the wisdom of other creeds and faiths, and to think of my friends who follow other beliefs as fellow pilgrims on a spiritual path rather than enemies or rivals whom I need to convert or compete with in some theological playoff.

Within a year I join the church and a year or so later I'm serving as co-chair of its adult religious education committee, finding my deepest fulfillment in planning and going on retreats such as this one at Glastonbury Abbey, in Hingham, a town on the South Shore forty-five minutes from Boston. The first time we go on retreat here, some of our more Humanist-oriented Unitarian members are concerned about the Roman Catholic ura of the setting, the crosses in every room, the monks in their robes going to chapel for prayers and Eucharist services, where we're welcome but not required to join them. The Benedictines' specialty is hospitality, and it usually happens that our skeptics are most charmed of all, sometimes making a special donation to Glastonbury in appreciation of its nonpressure, genuine service to us, and support of our program.

We don't find any answers to our theme of "how do we know when it's God?" but we learn that people throughout the ages have searched for such discernment. Religious leaders and even saints have spent most of their lives trying to learn not only how to do it themselves but also to teach other people how to try—and maybe the best we can do is try. I'm somehow cheered to know how difficult it is (I don't feel so dumb about the subject, knowing this) and that even the greatest authorities, actual certified saints, have trouble discerning the will of God.

St. Ignites of Loyola, perhaps the greatest authority on discernment in the Christian tradition, who wrote the "Rules of Discernment of Spirits," had such difficulties himself. Although he was able to discern from daydreams that God was leading him into a new way of life, and the Madonna came to him in a vision, he still couldn't decide whether or not to kill a Moor who didn't believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. In an argument about the subject, the Moor saw how upset Ignatius was getting and wisely hurried on ahead, while Ignatius became more disturbed and wondered if he'd failed in his duty to defend the honor of the Madonna.

Ignatius wanted to pursue the Moor and stab him with his dagger, but he couldn't quite make up his mind to do it. He couldn't "discern" what to do, in other words. Luckily for the Moor, Ignatius let the mule he was riding make the decision, and the mule didn't follow the road the Moor took. After I read this account in An Approach to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, by the Jesuit spiritual director William Barry, I feel a sense of relief. If it's that hard for St. Ignatius to discern whether it's God's will for him to stab a Moor in a theological argument, perhaps those of us looking for signs in patterns of sunlight and lists of pros and cons are not so stupid or hopeless after all. Perhaps we too can learn to discern.

The year after our "how do we know when it's God?" retreat, I take a course in religious autobiography our minister gives. The Reverend Carl Scovel is a remarkable man, all the more so for trying to appear unremarkable—he is quiet, low-key, unassuming, with a sly perception and a wry sense of humor. In his seemingly everyday, commonplace way he gives us the most memorable sermons—never generalities, always specific insight and story—and teaches stimulating classes on Bible study, Christian and Unitarian history, everything pertinent to our spiritual growth.

A bony, pale New Englander whose favorite sport is hiking up New Hampshire's White Mountains, Carl jogs around Beacon Hill and over the bridges that span the Charles River, in old New Balance running shoes, wearing plain shorts and slogan-less T-shirts, a man of little adornment and no pretension, clad for more formal occasions in frayed cuffs and collars and serviceable tweed sportcoat. Carl is my own age, our birthdays only a week apart, and he has lived a life almost opposite from mine—married once and for life, father of three children, minister of this church for almost all his career. For all our differences we communicate, and I resonate to his style—what in writing I would call "the plain style," the one I most admire. It's my special good fortune to have him as minister and friend, the guide of my return to church and faith.

His course in religious autobiography not only deepens my sense of belonging and being part of the church, it helps me see my own spiritual path from early childhood to the present. As part of the course I write an essay about my recent experience returning to faith. I've always written about what interests me most, and now I'm finding that the whole religious dimension from which I've closed myself for so long is the subject I find most fascinating. Later I hear this same feeling expressed by Michael Murphy, founder of the Esalen Institute, who says, "The great game, the game of games, the story of stories is the unfolding of the Divine."

The essay I write in my religious autobiography class, called "Returning to Church," is published in the New York Times Magazine in Christmas week of 1985 and draws a response of hundreds of letters, more mail than I've ever received about anything I've written. It leads to an offer from a publisher to write it more fully as a book, which becomes Returning: A Spiritual Journey.

* * *

It's now—amazingly—eighteen years ago since I first walked into King's Chapel and began a whole new story of my life. The beginning of that story is told in Returning, a title, by the way, that means to me not just "going back" but more importantly "turning again," suggesting a new path. (I'm inspired and relieved when my minister explains that the word "conversion" in Hebrew and Greek does not mean "reborn" but "turning," which is much closer to my own experience.)

I want to tell now of the spiritual journey as it looks over the long haul, not just the first flush of rediscovery, and speak as honestly as I can of the pitfalls as well as the peaks of such experience. William James writes, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, "Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in which seasons of lively and of diffi-cult faith are described as alternating."

I have known the whole range now, from romance to disillusionment and anger, from honeymoon to separation. Whatever value my own story has is not because it's not unique, but common—the kind of thing others may expect beginning such a journey, or find reassuringly familiar if they've traveled it for long on their own.

Through all these highs and lows of the spirit over nearly two decades, I never in the deepest pit lost faith in God. What I did lose faith in was my own discernment, my own ability to answer the question How do we know when it's God? That question seems to me to carry the shape of my experience better than any other concept, the best lens to look through in tracing the map of my own journey. I could never have predicted its course, or anticipated how often I would fail in discernment, nor imagine I could still find forgiveness after all my mistakes. In a sense then, this is a "how not to do it" book, and as such I think may prove more useful and perhaps more encouraging to other stumbling pilgrims than the tomes that so confidently tell us the five or seven or ten easy steps to fulfillment, satire, salvation, and material (as well as spiritual) success.

My story does not relate the sort of tragedy that Rabbi Harold Kosher so eloquently addresses in his classic When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In fact, this memoir of mine could more aptly be titled When Good People Do Bad Things—or at least, stupid things, things that hurt themselves and others. And, of course, I'm presuming the grace of God and the reader's tolerance will allow me to call myself a good person. I think most sinners do think of themselves as good people, and their sins as aberrations, mistakes, false steps they indeed are responsible for, but seem alien from their intentions and out of kilter with their true identity. I am not the victim of a malevolent fate or a wrathful God, but rather the unintentional creator of the pain I've caused myself and others while at the same time trying to follow a spiritual path. Perhaps "following a spiritual path" simply means the effort to live in a decent, fruitful way with the talents and flaws you've been given and the circumstances you've been dealt (and dealt yourself), and attempting to do so by the light of some faith in God, a Higher Power, and/or religious tradition to guide you. That effort in my own experience has not made life "easier" or smoother, but in some ways more difficult and confusing, yet in spite of all the pitfalls and trials, more meaningful and ultimately fulfilling.

By laying bare my own mistakes and struggles, I hope to make fellow seekers aware of pitfalls they may face themselves, and that raising these flags of warning may provide on one level a kind of "guidebook-in-reverse" to their own journey. Perhaps I may alert them to contemporary kinds of delusion that lie in their path with all the shimmering hope of oases in the desert, only to prove illusory, leading one deeper into dry, barren places of the soul. In a happier way, I hope that others may profit from following the techniques and strategies I've found—or that found me—that helped me work my way out of the darkness, up from pits of despond that seemed bottomless, and back to a path of fulfillment, forgiveness, and contribution.

At the nadir of this journey I lost my most familiar and comfortable way of communication with my faith, when language itself, the ritual words and prayers and Psalms, the liturgy of belief, became meaningless to me. It was then I felt words fail me, as I put it in the title of a chapter describing that experience—the most discouraging and frightening prospect for one who has depended on words for his work, his living as a writer, and his inspiration as a person of faith. Yet out of that period of fail-ure with words, I learned the power of silence and the spiritual healing to be found through the body, the wordless disciplines like hatha yoga that provide another, silent, way of prayer and enlarged my communication with Spirit.

I have learned from my own experience that the famous "dark night of the soul" on the path of illumination should not be spoken of in the singular, as it usually is described. I've learned there is not just one but many such tests and passages, and probably will continue to be, as long as one is on the path, as long as one is alive and seeking. Since emerging from that latest dark night of the soul when words failed me, my life has seemed more in the spirit of a prayer I learned from my friend Ann Brower, who has given up the practice of medicine to seek a theology degree and find a ministry. She carries a copy of this prayer, from Guerrillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle, by Ted Loder, in her pocket:

Help me to believe in beginnings, to make a beginning, to be a beginning
So that I may not just grow old, But grow new each day
To this wild, amazing life You call me to live
With the passion of Jesus Christ.

Those who are not Christian may of course feel the same sentiment in being called to live with the passion of Mohammed or Krishna, Moses and Yahweh, or the Higher Power that some twelve-step followers imagine for themselves with idiosyncratic flair (my friend Ivan Gold posits his Higher Power as an image of a tap-dancing Sammy Davis, Jr., while a woman I know envisions hers as an owl.) Though my own image of my Higher Power is Jesus Christ, I respect all others, and ask only that mine be respected in return.

I am moved by Ann Brower's prayer because "beginning" is one of the continuing themes of my life, even before my return to church and faith. My first novel, Going All the Way, ends with the word: "Begin." My second novel is called Starting Over. One of my deep connections with Christianity is its emphasis on forgiveness and the offer of grace to be able to begin again. What is new for me in Ann's prayer is the admission of growing old, and the thrill and recognition that these years after sixty can more than ever be truly described as "this wild, amazing life you call me to live." I have never felt so alive, nor has my life ever seemed as amazing, as in "amazing grace" and in the sheer wonder of new, unexpected experience.

When I finished Returning, I had the urge to "give back" the kind of experience I got from the religious autobiography course I took at King's Chapel, and I started leading workshops in "spiritual autobiography." I offer them to people of any faith, or even seekers without a faith, who simply want to look at their life in the context of "spirit" in its broadest sense (I use the Oxford English Dictionary definition of spirit as "the animating or vital principle in man [and animals] . . . in contrast to its purely material elements; the breath of life"). For the past decade I have given this workshop, as well as another in "Creating from the Spirit," throughout the U.S. and in Mexico and Northern Ireland, at adult education centers, churches, synagogues, retreats, health spas, and at Sing Sing prison. When-ever I offer this work, I confess my own faith and at the same time give assurance it is not my intent to proselytize, or to question —much less attack—the beliefs held sincerely by anyone else. I say the same now of these pages. I believe an assault on the spirit—an attack or undermining of anyone's sincerely held religious beliefs, whatever they may be—is a form of rape, and its perpetration is criminal.

My faith as a Christian is personal and intimate rather than intellectual or theological. It was deeply confirmed by a childhood experience that turns out to be perhaps the most defining moment of my life. One night when I am nine years old I go to bed, say the Lord's Prayer, and before going to sleep (I am clearly and vividly awake during this whole experience), I feel or sense—I experience—my whole body filling with light. The light is white and so bright that it seems almost silver. It is not accompanied by any voice or sound, but I know quite clearly the light is Christ, the presence of Jesus Christ. I am not transported anywhere, I am all the time in my room at the top of the stairs in our house at 6129 Winthrop, Indianapolis, Indiana, a place as familiar as my own hand. Everything is the same as always, my bed and the desk across from it, the pictures on the wall of my favorite football heroes, like Tommy Harmon of Michigan. Everything is normal and solid and real, the only thing different is the Light, and after it has infused me, maybe I too am different, or in some way changed—not better or brighter or nicer but simply changed, the way a person is changed by deep experience, altered in how the world is perceived, more open to the unexplainable, the great mysteries, the gift of grace. The light is not frightening to me as a child, but reassuring, like a blessing. It is so real that in fact it seems today like the very bedrock of my existence.

In one of those hopeless arguments about religion with an atheist friend, when I cite this experience as part of my explanation of being a Christian, he asks in frustration, "You mean that has primacy?" I never heard that term before, but I get the gist and answer yes. Later in the year of that childhood experience I buy at the neighborhood dime store a framed picture of Jesus as a boy which is on the bureau in my bedroom today, the only possession I have from my childhood. In more than a half century of moves and travels all over the country and the world, I have lost or misplaced or given or thrown away everything else. Yes. It has primacy.

My parents have me baptized as a baby in the Presbyterian Church, and as a preschool child I enjoy and am moved by the Sunday school teaching of the minister's wife, round and apple-cheeked Amy Franz, who becomes a treasured friend and wise counselor of our family, and whose spirit still feels close to me. My religious feelings really catch fire, though, when a friend from my grade school and Cub Scout den invites me to go to a Bible class with him at a Baptist church, taught by a lively young minister and his wife who have come north from preaching in Kentucky, in the hills. They are both tall and bony and angular, and filled with a love of God and of Jesus that brightens and animates them. They convey their faith through stories they act out and illustrate, like Moses drawing water from a rock, which is represented by a brown paper bag tied over a drinking fountain that spouts a jet of water through the bag ("rock") at the crucial moment. We sing stirring hymns like "Throw out the lifeline, someone is drifting away" and gesture with our arms, tossing imaginary lifesavers to the spiritually drowning. At the end of the course I go forward with others who are so moved to proclaim my commitment to Jesus.

One can speculate that my experience of light is "caused" by the influence of the Bible school, yet I know of no others who had such an episode. It is not anything I invoke or try to create but is as totally surprising as it is awesome. I don't tell anyone about it at the time, and a few years later when I try to describe it to a friend in my grade school class, I can see he doesn't get it and finds it pretty weird, though he doesn't try to make fun of me about it (I pick him to tell because I know he isn't that kind of guy). I don't tell anyone else and later I worry it's a sign of being crazy, so I try to just forget about it.

I'm amazed and relieved when in college I read about this phenomenon in The Varieties of Religious Experience and learn there is even a psychological name for it: "photism." James writes that this kind of experience "possibly deserves special notice on account of its frequency. . . . Saint Paul's blinding heavenly vision seems to have been a phenomenon of this sort; so does Constantine's cross in the sky." Nor is this phenomenon limited to great historical figures; it comes up frequently in reports of nineteenth-century American religious experience, as in this account of one C. G. Finney:

"All at once the glory of God shone upon and roundabout me in a manner almost marvelous. . . . A light perfectly ineffable shone in my soul, that almost prostrated me on the ground. . . . I think I knew something then, by actual experience, of that light that prostrated Paul on the way to Damascus." Nor is experience of "the light" limited to Christianity; it has come to people on all the great religious paths, and sometimes brought people with no religious faith to a spiritual transformation and a new life centered on God. One of the most famous examples is that of Bill Wilson, a drunkard who in 1936 fell to his knees in prayer, asking God to reveal himself if he really existed, and at that moment the room filled with a great white light. It brought with it "ecstasy" and "peace," as Wilson lost the urge to drink and with a doctor friend founded Alcoholics Anonymous, the model of all the life-saving twelve-step programs based on surrender to a Higher Power.

In his book on religious experience, James devotes a whole section to what he calls "the reality of the unseen," observing that "the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally ...may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In either case they elicit from us a reaction, and the reaction due to things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even stronger." As James puts this concept another way, "God is real since He produces real effects."

What I learn again and again from my own experience and that of other seekers and believers is best summed up by the words of a man as humble and undogmatic as William James, the Benedictine Father Nicholas Morcone, abbot of Glastonbury Abbey. In a homily there one morning he speaks of his confusion after reading and rereading both the Old Testament lesson and the New Testament lesson in the lectionary that day, for the different view of God each presents is hard to reconcile. He admits he has been confused before by conflicting images of God he finds in the Bible and decides that "we must take God as he comes to each of us."

I accept however God comes to any sincere believer, whether Christian or Jew, Muslim or Buddhist, Quaker or Shaker or Sikh. I also accept whatever form God assumes in the mind and heart of believers, whether it is masculine or feminine or simply a "Cloud of Unknowing." It's easy for me to think of God as she, since I grew up with a mother who loved me and tried to provide me with everything I wanted. When I think of a stern God I think of a he, like my father, who also loved me but expressed it with rules and sometimes punishments (though more often threats of them) that I sometimes didn't understand but tried to accept as they were given, "for my own good." Most often I think of God as Spirit, that Cloud of Unknowing, the ineffable divine mystery from which we come and to which we go. I also honor those seekers whose doubts may preclude a Deity, who look to what they conceive as a Higher Power; and those who are simply still looking, engaged in the quest, the great search for meaning that begins at the beginning and continues to the end, if end there be.

This is the story of my own continuing quest.

© 1999 by Dan Wakefield

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