The God Squad: Treasure holy moments of connection

Q: This question is asked from a contemplative place in my heart after reading your recent column on atonement. Have you ever had a “born again” experience — where you prayed or were in the midst of praying when you actually felt God’s presence, love and pardon for your sins and suddenly knew beyond a doubt that he was there with you at that moment and always? — Nana S., via cyberspace

A: Yes. Even though my religious vocabulary doesn’t usually include being “born again,” I have no problem understanding how a moment of ordinary time (called chronos in Greek) can be suddenly penetrated by a moment of sacred time (in Greek, kairos). We couldn’t live if every moment was ordinary, and we couldn’t breathe if every moment was holy.

I also believe and understand that such moments are not a replacement for the hard work of apologizing to someone you’ve hurt, or forgiving someone who’s hurt you. Still, I understand how God, or more accurately, God’s angels in human form, can enter a person’s life and change everything for the better.

Science can’t provide such theological certainty, but the grace of atonement and forgiveness can. To me, it’s the knowledge that our brokenness is not our ultimate fate, and that in our struggle to find wholeness we are not alone. We’re being helped to wholeness.

So I understand the type of experience to which you refer, and thank God that you apparently were graced with such a moment. (Again, I hope that moment came to you after and not instead of the essential work of apology and forgiveness.)

There are, of course, other moments of theophany, which is the immediate experience of the closeness of God, that have nothing to do with atonement. We can have such an experience when we find another person through love and friendship. I absolutely felt God’s presence in my life when I first met my dear friend Father Tom Hartman.

There’s a wonderful teaching of the founder of Hasidic Judaism, the Baal Shem Tov, that “from each and every person there arises a light that ascends to heaven, but when two people who are meant to be together find each other, a single greater light ascends to heaven from their united being.”

Great friendships and great marriages are not just experiences of interpersonal closeness. They’re moments when we can see the face of God in the one we love. Tommy is very ill, but his light still lifts me up.

We can also have a theophany with no people around and no sins on our mind. The beauty of nature can, as Psalm 19 sings, wordlessly “declare the glory of God.” Perhaps it’s the sheer incommensurability of God’s power in nature and our puny insignificance that moves us so, or perhaps it’s the purity of nature compared to our own complex and conflicted emotions, but nature is another way to God that even those of unconventional faith or no faith can understand.

One of my favorite passages describing such a natural theophany is from William James in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” where he describes the experience of a clergyman who wrote to him of a particularly vivid experience of the closeness of God:

“I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was deep calling unto deep, the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars.

“I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment, nothing but an ineffable joy and exultation remained.

“It’s impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence.

“The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not anymore have doubted that He was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself be, if possible, the less real of the two.”

May we all find a way to find God, but more importantly, may we all find a way to find each other.

(Send QUESTIONS ONLY to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com.)