A Most Reluctant Convert

 I watched "The Most Reluctant Convert" today, a film about C.S. Lewis' life and conversion story based on "Surprised by Joy". It was a good film, but shorter than I had imagined it would be. In it, the actor portraying an older Lewis narrates his life around the actors portraying his younger self. In particular, he talks about the long journey he took from atheism to theism to the Christian faith. One of the more interesting things he talks about is when he first picked up the book "Phantastes" which set him on the path towards God. 

     This is fantasy book written by George MacDonald in the late 1800s, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Christian faith, God, or anything of a religious nature. Nevertheless, he describes his experience as that of a spiritual nature, that his imagination was baptized before the rest of him as it was the first time he had experienced what he described as a feeling of holiness.

     C.S. Lewis in the movie, and as I imagine he presents himself within the book on which the movie is based, appears to be intellectually and emotionally dragged by God towards Himself and then towards Christ as though by his feet with his fingers dug into the ground as he tries to hold on to his materialist atheism to no avail.

     It is this last image with which I most identify over the last twenty two years, and over the last two years in particular. God has been dragging me to Himself, and has been drawing me closer to Jesus Christ, not intellectually (I had already been a professing Christian for years), but relationally and emotionally. And like C.S. Lewis, He has been using materials and sources over the last two decades which have little to do with the doctrines and religious tenets with which I grew up. Indeed, I have been dragged farther and farther from these, but closer and closer to Him. I can honestly say that I am closer to Him now, not just with "believing in Him", but with knowing Him beyond any doubt, with experiencing Him as He is, and with connecting with Him on a personal level in ways that are difficult to explain, and would likely have me labeled a lunatic for trying.

     I fought those things He has used to draw me closer to Himself, to help me to know Him, because they did not follow the doctrine and tenets with which I was indoctrinated. Who am I now would terrify who I was twenty seven years ago when I graduated from the first Bible School I attended. The journey of faith I undertook would have broken that young man's mind. He couldn't have understood and wouldn't have accepted the truths, the realities which the middle-aged man can no longer deny and which have been personal gifts which have brought his soul a peace, a comfort, and a sense of family and home the young, twenty year old man hadn't ever really felt.

     I've tried to chronicle that journey over the years, since about 2008 or so here on Facebook and then on my blog. I'm sure for those who've followed it with me, it's been just as strange of a path for them to read as it was for me to walk. Everything I've learned and had to come to grips with, I've written about, one way or the other, either as my rambles, my sermons, or in the stories I wrote.

      What is most important to take from all of this is that, even as a professing Christian, I was in point of fact like Lewis, a most reluctant convert. I was a reluctant convert and I didn't know it. I didn't understand what it was I was running from or dragging my feet on. All I knew, as it was revealed to me, was that I was. There were things that I was running from, that I was acting like I was running from, that couldn't be revealed to me at first because I wasn't ready to hear them or receive them in any way. It wasn't a moral failing. It wasn't a conscious rejection. It just took time and patience on God's part to build the foundation of relationship, experience, and understanding so that I could eventually accept them.

     It is the easiest thing in the world to hide behind a barrier of doctrines, interpretations, theologies, rules, and so forth thinking that you understand what it's all about. And for that reason, all of those barriers had to be torn down. The doctrines, the interpretations, the theologies, the rules, all of it had to be smashed and left in the dust until it was just He and I. And for that reason, He led me through churches and writings which I had been taught were corrupt, heretical, blasphemous, and so on. I had been told to avoid them and treat them as evil, and so I did until He decided it was time they weren't and I was to see Him and hear His voice speaking through them. To be sure, He helped me see when it wasn't His voice and when they were to be taken with a grain or more than a grain of salt. But the point was to begin unlearning those things which I had learned so that those barriers to connection would be removed.

     He continues to lead me on this wayward path, and I continue to have difficulty with it. I continue to resist until I'm given a chance to see and understand where He is in it, looking for His light in the darkness around me. But where I am now is not where I have been, and the only way forward is through, not back.

     I know Jesus Christ, and I am known by Him. It is not a passing acquaintance, but a deep friendship which goes back a very long time. Longer than I knew. I know His death, burial, and resurrection, and they produce powerful emotions within me, as though they were memories I lived and not just "religious feelings." I know the Father, and there is no describing that. I know Him even when, like Peter, I take my eyes away and look at the storm instead of Him and thus begin to sink. I have experienced the "home" within Him, and it is something I always long for, and feel lost at times when the things experienced by the senses in this world distract me. I know His holy Breath, and know what it is like to have Him speaking and acting through me, always voluntarily, as though I was merely in the passenger's seat of my own body, and that was okay. I get upset. I succumb to despair. I snap. I panic, and none of these things negate any of His relationship and connection with me, or I with Him. He just waits patiently for me to come to my senses and pick up where we left off.

     My knowing Him, my ongoing relationship with Him, goes beyond any one theology, any one denomination, or any one religious faith. It is living, dynamic, and continuing to grow and mature. It is anchored in Him and who He is, and not in the "letter" of doctrines, or the "Law," or religious tenets. While these things in and of themselves are not bad, and used properly that can be useful guides and tutors, they are not Him and are themselves not to be worshiped and adhered to as though they are.

     He is Source, as some say, He is Tao, He is Logos, He is "I Am," He is Yahweh, He is such that it is impossible to accurately describe Him using human language because human language is confined to the symbols it uses which are derived from senses which can only process limited temporal and spatial information; and He is infinite. He is what all dimensions and all motion move through. He is the medium through which all creation moves, our universe and every possible universe and reality, as a sound through the air. We are like holograms, like smoke against the sunlight, or like the rainbow which is briefly visible after a rain and then disappears. But He is the reality, the Being without which not even nothing as we imagine it can exist. The very word we use, "God," is paltry, underwhelming, and nearly useless in describing Him as it was only meant to describe fictions existing in imagined pantheons living in the sky. Words fail. Images fail. Human understanding and intellect fail in comprehending and capturing Him with any accuracy.

     And He does not care if they do. The most important thing to Him is not knowing "what" He is, but "who" is He as a person. It is not knowing about Him, but getting to know and interact with Him. And He will use anything in existence at His disposal, which is everything, if it will achieve this goal. He will also, if it serves this purpose, remove those barriers to this goal as carefully and as slowly as necessary so as to preserve the person He loves, even if for other people they are conduits to knowing Him, and not barriers. He recognizes that each person is different, and must come to know Him in different ways as works for them.

     It is both stunningly beautiful, and abjectly painful. It is frustratingly slow, and altogether too fast for comfort. It is paradox and oxymoron to the human mind, and yet completely sensible and straightforward to Him.

     There is much about my journey that I want to say, that I want to talk about openly. But to do so would cause harm to others and to their journeys, and would, as I said before, label me a lunatic even if I've never felt more sane. But I hope, through what I have explained, and what I have written, that these things have helped others to work out their own journey, their own deliverance into His arms, with both fear and trembling as Paul wrote.