Dogs About Town

A Foreword

Faith is easy for some people. For them it is like the memory of a parent, it simply always was there. And like a beloved parent, it gives peace and comfort. Others struggle mightily, wishing to believe and never quite being able to do so. That was me. I wandered for thirty years, a stranger to God. Or so I thought. Nothing was plainer to me than the aching void at the center of my life. And the hollow nature of the things with which I attempted to fill it. God had once been there. Where did He go? Or had I left Him?

This is a story of faith thrown away and found again. It tells a little of the events that led me away from God and of the ones that brought me back. Of the odd little quirks of fate, the everyday moments which later revealed themselves to be turning points in my life. Something tells me there are a great many people who may find echoes of their own spiritual wanderings in my tale. I don’t believe I am alone.

Stumbling blindly home. Those words come from a poem I wrote more than twenty years ago. It attempted to portray the arc of my first marriage, from youthful infatuation, to fatherhood and relocation to Missouri, and finally my chaotic retreat to California. They were meant to convey the hapless nature of my life at the time, the total lack of wisdom or direction, how a failure of courage led to the end of my marriage and a painful estrangement from my son.

But my return to California only marked the beginning of my years of stumbling. A combination of moral weakness and willful blindness to the blessings all around me had sent me reeling half way across the country, hoping to return “home”. But the home I couldn’t find was not of this earth.

There could be no peace for me as long as I remained at war with God.

You see, this is the story of one fool’s struggle against God. Of how someone given so much could throw it all away out of pure stubborn defiance. Of how easy it is to displace God from the throne of one’s life and to replace Him with the most banal kinds of foolishness.

And finally, it tells of God’s gift of grace, of a forgiveness that extends even to fools, if they will just fall on their knees before the God who went to the Cross for them. To refuse to do so, to persist in the petty rebellions of self seems not just the height of arrogance but the most profound expression of ingratitude.

Rebellion and ingratitude. Two words that never surfaced in my thoughts about God, His nature, what He might want of me. It was easy to see that a life spent in denial of God was a particularly empty and meaningless affair. But it took many years to see that one could not simply ‘abstain’ from God. To see that such a life was in fact spent in rebellion against God.

I suppose the first baby steps I took back toward faith were born of a need to express gratitude. I can understand faithlessness among people for whom life is a curse. But to come of age in this land of plenty and to never feel the urge to thank God is like finding a gourmet meal prepared at your doorstep every day and to take that for granted. To not even wonder who provided it.

I began to wonder. Thanksgiving would roll around every year. I would find myself in just such a land of plenty, enjoying perfect health, surrounded by friends and family. Someone provided all this. To whom exactly were we to give thanks? Before I could give my heart to the Lord, I first needed to thank Him properly.

I am still thanking Him. This record of my faith journey is part of that thanking process. I am writing this introduction almost two years after I completed the main portion of this work. Reading it now I can watch the faith process unfolding even as I wrote. I can see my faith growing, as I grappled with the residue of decades of stubbornness. Rebellion dies hard. I suppose it still lives in me. For the sin of our oldest ancestors walks with us all through our days, beckoning us back to the fleeting comfort of our own sins. Salvation, once found and accepted, is anything but fleeting.

Looking back, finding it was not that difficult. Accepting it was the problem. All during my years of self-imposed spiritual starvation a veritable feast for the soul was always right before me. From time to time people would approach me with the message of the Gospel, of Christ’s wondrous gift to us. But I would politely nod, happy that they could find comfort in what I considered a myth, certain I could never take it seriously. Oh I was curious about God. But concepts like prayer and worship? They were for people who lacked the resolve to stand alone against the universe.

I could think about God but I could never worship Him.

Worship. I am certain a great many people are driven off by the very substance of this word. Why should I worship? Why would a real God need or want my worship? That is how I thought not so long ago. But viewed another way, would one really expect to approach the creator and sovereign of the universe as one’s equal? Must God stoop so far down as to seem like just another guy, in no way different or better than me? Bill Clinton was loved because people found him to be just like us, someone with whom you could share a beer and a few laughs. Would we really want God to be like that?

I began reading the Bible, entirely prepared to be unpersuaded by its message. I expected to find a tedious history of an otherwise insignificant Middle Eastern tribe, their lengthy genealogies, their wars and miraculous deliverances. Coupled with that I knew to be the New Testament, a tale of a seemingly very different God. One come to earth only to die at the hands of men.

What I found instead was the most minutely detailed and utterly timeless guide to human nature. For the first time, the story of Adam and Eve, of Original Sin, of man’s rebellion against God struck very close to home. It seemed God’s chosen people more often than not, and despite the most lavish and repeated demonstrations of God’s love for them, preferred to chase after a whole host of idols. I had lived just such a pampered and protected life. I too had rejected the God who so blessed me. I too had pursued the trashy sort of idols each generation bows down to. In these pages I could see, not some obscure fable, but the reflection of my own tawdry little rebellions.

Also for the first time, the Word of God, God made flesh, Jesus Christ came to life before my mind’s eye. I saw that even those who walked with Him found his message baffling. I was in some pretty good company in that way. Reading the Gospel of John I was struck by how often Jesus would challenge his followers to believe in Him. I saw that faith in some way came down to whether this supremely unique figure in human history could be trusted. As I made my way through the books of Isaiah and so many of the other prophets, I could now see how perfectly Jesus conformed to what was foretold by them, centuries earlier. How it was only through His perfect sacrifice that the gulf between man and God might finally be closed. That sin could finally be put to death. That a way home could be provided for us. That is some book!

In the time since I completed the main portion of this work my faith has become an ever growing source of comfort and stability. As Psalm 91 puts it so beautifully, “He is my refuge and my fortress; My God, in Him I will trust.”

But when I examine my life with brutal honesty, I cringe with chagrin at so much, not just of what I did, but of what I believed. It seems the core values by which I steered my life I now view as so much hogwash. So I must look to my Bible, to Christ himself and wonder will a day come when I will scoff again at what is holy?

The first time I met Dennis Prager (an influential figure in the pages to come) he was signing books at the UCLA book fair. He was very friendly and outgoing as he signed a copy of one of his books for us. I had a question that I had wanted to ask him for a long time.

“You influence so many people through your writing and your radio show. Do you ever feel a burden, a sense of obligation to be certain you are influencing them for the good?”

He didn’t hesitate.

“My ideas can be tested out. People can apply them in their lives or compare them to the ideas of others. I don’t ask people to accept my ideas on faith.”

I have tested the Bible in my own life. It has not been found wanting. I have only recently reached the end of my first reading of this venerable and still perplexing book. I will never stop reading it. For it is a great deal more than just a book.

In Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, Jesus says this:

I was one of them. For thirty years. I could not believe. I would not believe. What happened? It is my hope that what follows will not only illuminate my story but function as a sort of road map for others who may find themselves disillusioned with the tawdry gods of the secular world. That this humble work might lead them back to the fold, to the Great Shepherd who called me home.

John also says this in Chapter 6:

Non-believers should take comfort from this verse. They are not the first to be perplexed by the message and meaning of Jesus Christ. I still find it baffling. But I have lost the hubris that demanded understanding. As I have heard Prager say, “If I could understand God, I would be God.”

I am content to accept His gift to me, to activate the measure of faith He has given me. He gave such a measure to everyone. May others find their faith as I found mine.

March 17, 2007

The answer seems obvious in retrospect. You simply employ the individuals and institutions traditionally expected to impart knowledge and wisdom to the young to instead infect them with a seamless gospel of malignant nonsense. It is a much different thing when a drug-addled buffoon with a guitar urges you to abandon the values on which your civilization was built, and when that message is coming from the Harvard faculty and the New York Times.

It wasn’t obvious in 1971. There was clearly a sense of liberation in the air; liberation from one’s parents and all they believed in, liberation from any sense of duty, liberation from all personal responsibility. Sadly I and most of my generation mistook this moral anarchy for freedom. We are always free to turn our backs on God. But we should not be surprised when we find ourselves then wandering in emptiness.

A people who go astray in their hearts. That was us. I was part of a whole generation who in their innocent, drug-fueled hubris found the chutzpah to defy God, to set themselves up, each as his own private god.

G.K. Chesterton said that when people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything. My generation proved this. Almost overnight, it seemed I couldn’t find a soul my age who had been raised Catholic like me and still held to the faith. Mention of church-going or matters of faith were likely to be greeted with a stony silence, or open mockery.

It seemed perfectly natural to dabble in all sorts of exotic philosophies, eastern religions enjoying a particular cachet. Novels by Hermann Hesse and Jack Kerouac seemed to speak so much more directly to one’s soul than that musty old Bible ever could.

Even today it seems little has changed. The sixties may be a fading memory but one need only pick up the daily paper to find constant reminders of that decade’s dubious legacy. Just today I read of the whimsical exploits of former NFL running back, Ricky Williams. Gifted as few have been with great speed and explosive power, the type of runner that knocks tacklers right out of their shoes, he grew tired this year of football’s strenuous demands. So he just quit. When he opted out of joining his teammates just before training camp to pursue a life of travel and pot smoking, he was borrowing a page from the ‘60s playbook. He is currently pursuing a career as a “holistic healer”, mastering the mysteries of yoga, massage, meditation and “color and aroma therapies”.

How true. If we could all just free ourselves from the nagging voice of our conscience, reminding us when we are betraying others and ourselves, surely we could then be happy. All we need do is “tune out” the voices of all those other people who demand that we live up to some higher standard than merely pleasing ourselves. Perhaps we should strive to be good rather than happy.

When I don’t care what they say, it’s much easier to be happy. Words surely to live by. Words my whole generation chose to live by. I wish the man this “happiness” he seeks. But something tells me he will not find it by squandering the great talents he has been given. I know a little bit about squandering gifts. It tends to eat at you as the years pass. The path of least resistance, at least in this writer’s case led only to disillusionment and self-recrimination.

Ricky Williams may have been born in 1977 but his actions are pure ‘60s. With uncanny ease he manages to meld together so many disparate threads, all originally spun in that infamous decade. In him is found a marvelous mixture of rampant narcissism, marijuana use, and New Age mumbo jumbo, all expressed with the guilelessness of a child. Where did he get the idea his highest allegiance was to the almighty self? Where does that belief lead?

Something happens to a society that ceases to fear God. Just go to Europe if you don’t believe me. The most enlightened of civilizations has descended in the course of a mere generation (ours) from being the chief repository of western values, to a culture of cynicism and apathy. Once Europe ceased to believe in Christ, it ceased to believe in itself. The people who gave us western civilization now seem prepared to look the other way, to shrug in complete impotence as a hostile civilization openly threatens to swallow theirs up. The people of Europe are more concerned with “global warming” and zero population growth than with a religion of hate and tyranny bent on world domination. They shrug as churches that have stood for centuries are desecrated. In a state of existential apathy, they cannot even muster the enthusiasm to reproduce. Marriage and child-bearing are viewed with disdain. But not for the immigrants in their midst. Europe’s new faith, Tolerance, demands that they embrace a hostile population multiplying before their eyes.

It is not a coincidence that Europe has lost the will to live at the same time it has become a post-Christian society. It is a profound shift, to go from being a child of God, owing him love and obedience, to being just one more product of a vast, formless process that expels planets and stars, people and bugs. A few things become clear quickly.

Such a god tells us nothing about morality. If we equate nature with God then the only prevailing moral law seems to be that the strong should devour the weak. If God is equally interested in every aspect of his creation, then we are of no greater value to him than are the cockroaches and the bacteria. If we are not made in His image, then why should He regard us differently than the whales and the redwoods?

Such a god, one who merely creates and then forgets his creation, a god who is in fact creation and nothing else, does not, indeed cannot love us or value us anymore than he does the trees and the beasts. So it should be no surprise that the last forty years have seen the rise of the environmental movement to the status of a religious cult. When you worship the earth, man just becomes an ugly parasite, something best erased from the (sacred) landscape. So how could any European in good conscience clutter up the earth with more children? It is also no coincidence that so many of my generation have embraced vegetarianism.

Such a value system quickly runs into problems. The relative value of human life and that of plants and animals inevitably come into conflict. Animal rights activists boycott fast food establishments, shouting that meat is murder. But if meat is murder, what is abortion? Try as they might to pretend that the animal rights movement has raised the status of animals, what it in fact has done is to lower the status of humans. And should anyone be surprised that the same people who advocate so vociferously on behalf of a “woman’s right to choose” (to kill her unborn child), also hold candlelight vigils in front of prisons lest a mass murderer be put to death?

Once people cease to believe in any life beyond the handful of years we spend on earth, it is only natural that health concerns should rise to the level of hysteria. In a pathetic obsession with longevity, risk avoidance seems to drive every aspect of day to day life. Quality of life is sacrificed in a miserly attempt to wring a few more years out of what is inevitably a brief life. So while an ugly coarseness degrades our civic culture, when young girls dress and talk like whores, when the popular music of our time defiles our public places with its sullen, obscene rantings, we can take comfort in the fact that our cities are now “smoke free environments.”

Ideas do have consequences. And the ideas that took hold in my youth are no longer merely the pompous musings of campus intellectuals with too much time on their hands. They stand today as the unassailable truths by which society must be guided. In only a generation, concepts of good and evil have been banished, only to be replaced by morally flaccid gobbledygook. Our educators have succeeded in deleting words like courage, honor, and duty from the vocabularies of our children. But how many times a day do you suppose those children hear about “tolerance”, how many times are they told not to be “judgmental”? A people who tolerate everything deserve judgment.

I still have friends who cling tenaciously to the bankrupt values by which we guided our lives in our youth. Surely all that stuff about letting your heart be your guide, doing your own thing, questioning authority would finally produce a better society than one governed by the rigid code of the past, the laws of an all-powerful and all-seeing God.

I directed one such friend to the evidence on view at the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Woodstock. One who still holds to the hippie dream might have expected three more days of peace and music. But what actually occurred was a celebration of anarchy and brutality. While the original multitude of fools had created the illusion of a perfect harmonious society in a muddy field, their descendants, fueled by many of the same drugs but a much angrier brand of music than that of their parents opted for chaos, finally burning down the stage amid a surging mob of drunken rapists.

Following are a few excerpts from news accounts at the time.

So much for peace and love.

What went wrong? The thirty intervening years is the short answer. The original starry-eyed fools of the sixties really believed that by abandoning self-control they could change the world. They would end war and racism, engage in free love, get really stoned and pay no sort of price for their arrogant naiveté.

Their children at Woodstock ‘99 proved them wrong. The stoned idealists of the summer of ‘69 who slept in the mud and chanted, “No more rain!”, who dutifully filled in the blanks when Country Joe shouted, “What’s that spell?”, they had all been raised with Judeo-Christian values in the “uptight, repressive” fifties. So maybe we should not be surprised that six months of smoking pot at a university and listening to Jimi Hendrix really loud hadn’t entirely erased their moral foundation.

But what of their children? The same nonsense the Woodstock generation had invented virtually overnight in the mid to late sixties and guided their lives by became the North Star, Dr. Spock’s child-rearing guide, the very Ten Commandments by which they would steer their children’s lives. Those children had no moral foundation.

There are many opinions expressed about when the decade that refused to die, the sixties finally ended. The orgy of nihilism, the apparent death of personal responsibility in which Woodstock ‘99 culminated would not be a bad choice.

I suppose in the final analysis generations are composed of individuals. As I reflect on those days of waste and folly, when I casually discarded my faith and willfully descended into madness, I want to cry out with a mixture of wonder and chagrin, “Lord, why have you not forsaken me?”

I can’t really say just when it was I forsook Him. It really took no effort at all. As the enticing if worthless values of that time seemed to fill the room of my life like a noxious cloud, the faith I had as a child was simply pushed out. I did not renounce God. I forgot Him.

In seeking to understand how I came to fall so far and so quickly, it might be helpful to read what I wrote some years ago regarding that time. I had come to see how my life had veered off the rails but some years would still have to pass before I could see the Light at the end of the tunnel.

For my friends and me, the sixties didn’t really get underway till just before Christmas, 1970. Football season had ended a few weeks earlier and with it, all sense of purpose. There was a lesson in the way our season had ended, if we had but possessed the wisdom to perceive it. Blessed with outstanding talent at a few of the skill positions, our team was largely composed of under-sized over-achievers. Ed Kinghorn, a good friend then and destined to be one of my fellow voyagers in our psychedelic-era wanderings, was a perfect example. Battling away in the center of the defensive line at a paltry 155 pounds, he more than compensated for lack of size with blinding quickness and an indomitable ferocity. Ed went down with a ruptured spleen in a bitterly contested game three fourths of the way through the season but still we soldiered on. We took our league championship and advanced to the semi-final round of the CIF playoffs. This was further than any of us had any reasonable expectation of getting. It showed. Our practice sessions that week were marked by a listlessness that was not lost on our coach. Frank Hicks knew perfectly well what was wrong. We were tired of practicing and were hungrier for the weeks (indeed years) of inactivity that waited for us after the season ended than we were for the title game that was only one victory away. He warned us that you only play as well as you practice. Not surprisingly, we were clobbered by a team we should have beaten. But we got what we wanted. The fallow field of a future that seemed to stretch endlessly on, uncluttered by any sort of challenge or responsibility.

Coach Hicks, who would heap praise on us when we had played valiantly and lost, this night was silent.

The remainder of that school year slipped away leaving not a trace. Not long before graduation I was inaugurated into the use of marijuana. I had found my life’s purpose. I was joined in this most passive of endeavors by a tightly knit little circle of friends. Eddie had recovered from his abdominal surgery of the previous fall and had grown long hair but he was still his ever-combative self. Doug, my closest friend since junior high, remained my counterpart and at the same time, my near opposite. He could be counted on to deflate my windy flights of naïve sincerity with just the sarcastic barb the moment called for. Dan Melendrez watched over us like a wise guardian angel.

So it was my final year in high school that saw me steadily drifting, from dedicated athlete, to campus mastermind of malicious mischief, to aimless cynic, and just in time for graduation, to a fateful embrace of pot smoking. Here was the new sacrament that would fill the void Christ had only recently occupied. The rich, clinging smoke seemed to never fail to deliver a state of perfect hilarity, making it possible to laugh off anything, even the fact that we were wasting our lives.

Even then there would be moments, quickly shrugged off when a deeply buried voice within would cry out, “This is wrong. Look at what you’re doing.” But then the voice of the drug, almost like a deeply offended friend would shout out, “No, you’re having the time of your life. Don’t listen to that other voice.”

So I didn’t. None of us did. It was the most natural thing to simply drift along with events as that summer turned to fall. We all took John Lennon very seriously when he commanded that one should, “float downstream”. What commandment could possibly be more easily fulfilled? And I cared not a whit if the “stream” was leading directly to a whirlpool, a waterfall, some sort of personal cataclysm. That cataclysm turned out to be a day I would later self-importantly come to call the day the universe changed.

I will continue from my earlier account of that day.

The day dawned cold and bleak and stayed that way. My folks had no more than left for work when my friends arrived and it was goodbye to the world as we had known it. We found ourselves swallowing tiny red or green pills, one apiece. This ceremony was accompanied by much bluster and buffoonery. I remember shouting, “I hope I never come down!” I am sure there are those who would say I never did.

In only a few minutes we could feel the uneasy sensations; dry mouth, a giddy nervous agitation that signaled the monumental upheaval to come. We were still in this initial phase, trying to make light of the grim storm gathering around us when Doug threw up on the living room carpet. It seemed a river was gushing from him. No one knew what to make of this. Doug seemed to be okay. We just had to make our peace with this strange multi-colored mess on the carpet. It seemed to be hurting no one so we went on our way.

In an effort to steer the experience toward the light-hearted sense of wonderment that had dominated our recent experiments with milder drugs, we went outside to throw the football. The aural hallucination produced by the ball’s flight, something we had found quite hilarious, now seemed an insipid gimmick.

Eddie came out of the house saying, “Come here! You have to hear this music.” It was a piece by one of our most favored progressive bands- a sort of hybrid of high energy rock and classical musics. What we heard was Keith Emerson, a fine pianist executing a lovely series of cascading arpeggios, a waterfall-like effect that might have brought a smile to Rachmaninoff’s face.

But for us the boundaries between what was heard, what was seen, what was tangible- they were rapidly dissolving. This music, so familiar to us, now presented an almost physical presence as it washed over us.

It was at this point that we played a just-released album by Yes, aptly titled Fragile. Gone was the sunny optimism of The Yes Album. The very first chord, a grim e minor that grew out of perfect silence till it seemed to fill the room with dread, promised a much more uncertain fate than had the cheery colors of that earlier album. There was a solemn descending scale fragment on the guitar and then the music leaped away in a lurching, queasy gallop.

I am not sure a word was spoken till the record ended. By then our disengagement from conventional reality was complete. I still have a notebook in which I scrawled that day. It is mostly cryptic bursts of words- expressions of futility at trying to capture the torrent of thought in which I was swimming. What can be discerned, even in the more and more unsteady hand, is the progressive onslaught of the experience. As if from one moment to the next my mind was attempting to make sense of an ever-increasing volume of insight. The gentle babbling brook of consciousness was now a raging flash flood, one that seemed to be growing by geometric leaps and bounds.

My final entry in the journal is a repeating expression of sheer awe. The word ‘wow’ over and over in a kind of dumbfounded mantra, the very valleys and peaks of the letter ‘w’, repeating and overlapping.

The room around us, once so reassuringly familiar, was now profoundly changed. In the way that people and places in dreams can be unsettlingly altered yet still recognizable, my little room was now a strange and terrifying place. The walls had taken on a consistency like oatmeal- as if you could have scooped out big handfuls of semi-liquid plaster. But as would always be the case with these sorts of experiences, the visual component was dwarfed in significance by the maelstrom of ideas we were trying to make sense of.

At last, we found ourselves at the end of the road. With terrifying force we slammed up against the most basic questions life can pose.

“Why are we here?”

I remember imploring my friends for an answer. This was no game of words played by students in the comforting confines of a philosophy class. Rather it was the desperate cry of one beholding for the first time the utter void which surrounds us. Having thrown away the faith I had been raised with, I found myself naked before the sheer horrifying meaninglessness of a universe where there is no God.

“What’s life for?”

No one knew. My friends, though not in the state of terror I was, nonetheless had no answers to my questions.

The piece went on to tell how we had wandered through our hometown, me in a state of utter detachment, unable even to speak. And of how I finally found my way home and to the blessed return of normal reality.

On that most reckless day of my youth and many times in the days to come, the days when we quite literally severed our lifeline to the world of conventional reality and took our chances riding the torrent of altered consciousness, I would sometimes find myself grasping for something right before me which seemed to promise not just a way back to the world we had left behind, but a reason to remain there, the contentment to accept the life God had given me, to stop tampering with the consciousness he intended for me.

It seemed to be a Word. Much more than just a “word”. There was something there, something ineffable, completely inexpressible, but ringing in my mind with the most insistent and undeniable meaning. Afterwards, I would try to pronounce this “word”. As near as I could ever come was “Rememberingness”.

I found this in Walking Through The Wardrobe by Sarah Arthur:

Yearning Desire. It's a theme that weaves throughout the life and works of C. S. Lewis. In Surprised by Joy, he introduces the concept of longing as the signature quest of his childhood and young adulthood.

It wasn't until Lewis converted to Christianity that he eventually realized what he'd been longing for: God. Not the Norse gods of the pagan world, not even the gods or spirits of fantasy worlds, but the God of the Bible—a real, living Being in whom we can have life forever.

Now I know what that ringing something in my mind was. What “rememberingness” is. The sense of longing that tore at me at those most faithless of moments, when I had willfully plunged myself into madness, was the Lord I had forsaken, persistently calling me home.

As I concluded about that fateful day…

It still remains a bit of a mystery to me how my friends and I became so disenchanted. Life had been good to all of us. We were strong, healthy and young. Where did we get the idea that life’s promise was so meager or worse yet, fraudulent as to justify such a reckless short-sighted approach to life?

There was something in the air then. Something more than the sweet-smelling smoke that would fill the arenas at rock shows. I used to look back on that era as a time of innocence and idealism.

But wasn’t it really nihilism at whose altar we knelt? Wasn’t that really the defining moment, not just of that day but of the whole era? When we tiptoed right up to the edge and peeked over at the complete nothingness that is the atheist’s god? We were right to be terrified when we glimpsed the paltry nature of the convictions by which we were guiding our lives, on which we were betting our sanity, our very souls.

In some strange way it wasn’t till I awoke to the stunning reality, the ever-present nature of evil that I found myself drawn toward the God of the Bible. Oh, I always believed in Something.

I just read the obituary of a famous yogi. His business card bore this inscription:

Sounds like pantheism. Been there, done that. For years I would wander in the mountains, in awe of nature’s majesty and occasional cruelty. There was clearly something divine behind all this, something impossibly bigger and more enduring than the mountains themselves.

So there was a God. There had to be. I still bore that much of my youthful faith. Even in the darkest days of my drug wandering there were glimpses of the holy. I can remember sitting in my room with Doug at the end of 1971, both of us swept before the maelstrom of an LSD experience. It was like a box of chocolates, you never knew what you were going to get. A bad day would last a million years, the tiniest flaws and failings in one’s life magnified a million-fold, producing a kind of bottomless horror. But when all was going well, the insights were blissfully overwhelming.

That night in my room, Beethoven spilling from the Hi-Fi, it seemed I could grasp the whole of creation; the galaxies seemed to be spinning right before me. But this was not my creation. I was face to face with God.

But God had withdrawn to a more comfortable distance. (Actually, I pushed Him there.) It seemed He no longer bothered with my day to day triumphs and defeats. He was surely too vast and detached to bother with my petty sins. I recall a close friend, herself wrestling with her faith, once asked me what I thought about God. “Nebulous and all-encompassing,” I replied.

He seemed to demand nothing. Perfect! By making God indistinguishable from his creation, I had enabled myself to live free of guilt. The trees and clouds and stars would never bother my conscience no matter how tawdry my personal behavior might become.

No, I had to get in touch with the devil before God would return to my life…

“You believe in God,” the caller said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “I suppose you believe in the devil too?”

“Yes,” said Hugh Hewitt.

“Have you ever seen him?”

“No, but I’ve felt him.”

Hugh Hewitt is a very clever guy. He is also a syndicated talk show host. He is also a man of faith.

His answer to the sneering taunts of the caller resonated with me. I had long since shed the veneer of non-judgmentalism which 20 years of living the secular, progressive lifestyle had equipped me with. Despite the snickers of my still devoutly secular friends, words like good and evil were freely sprinkled in my speech.

But the devil? While I had never really lost the belief that there was something vast and unknowable behind and beyond the universe around us, I had come to view as childish superstition the actual embodiment of evil, a being as supremely fallen as God was holy.

But I too had felt him. Looking back, it seemed that everyday of my life he had been walking beside me. Not some reptilian horned creature, but just a small reassuring voice telling me that I was basically good and not to worry about all those things I might do that aren’t so good.

He had been a good friend to me. He demanded nothing of me. Unless you count demanding that I demand nothing of myself. Then as the moral and social convulsions of the sixties and seventies gained momentum, it soon seemed as if half the non-fiction books on the bookstore shelves were written by my little friend. In the pursuit of mental health, people were encouraged to trust their hearts, to banish guilt, to “give themselves permission” to do pretty much whatever they wanted.

Then one perfect blue morning in the sky above New York City, the devil made himself perfectly visible. As thousands watched in horror, a handful of men driven by the blood lust of their “greater” god, slammed jetliners filled with innocents into the World Trade Center. I believe that having seen that, even the most sophisticated college professor, profoundly steeped in secular humanism and its creed of man’s basic goodness, had to create a niche in his vocabulary (if only for a few days) for the word evil.

I believe that when the history of this period has long since been written, a great irony will become apparent. That these little devils, in their monstrous zeal to glorify their god, will have in fact planted the seed of a great revival of Christianity in this country. I believe that with this vile act of mass human sacrifice they will have awakened people to the one true God, and opened millions of people’s eyes to the fact that good is still at war with evil. I think they will one day be seen as the impetus to millions of people turning, not to Islam but to Jesus Christ, and that the eventual collapse of their faith will be seen to have begun on September 11, 2001.

I know the terrible events of that day were instrumental in pushing me back toward the faith I had known as a child. It wasn’t merely a response to the horror, the enormous nihilistic cruelty, the sense of meaninglessness that seemed to flow out of the smoldering ruins. I had the distinct sense that pure evil had declared war on all that is good. Our President was mocked for expressing the challenge faced by civilized nations in such terms. But for me the time had come to choose.

But this is not a level battlefield. The devil enjoys several distinct advantages. His forces are deployed all around us. While the word and will of our Lord must be sought out in bibles and churches, the devil attacks us from every billboard, in the lurid, debased images on a million websites, from most of what is churned out by Hollywood, and through the sneering, godless rhetoric of our educator class. These people need not believe in the devil to be doing his work. It might be said that their very disbelief makes them all the more effective.

It seems this breastplate of righteousness, this whole armor of God, is a pretty awkward fit for modern man. While service in the army of our Lord requires a genuine leap of faith, all the devil demands is a shrug. While the believer must mount his offensive on pure faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, the world in all its fallen grandeur is plainly visible to even the most cynical. The devil need only produce a sense of weariness, a momentary unwillingness to confront the eternal battle, in even those who wish to believe, to achieve his victory. How much easier it is for Satan to fill his ranks than for Jesus. How is this war to be won?

Dennis Prager is a well known and respected radio personality in Los Angeles. But he’s a lot more than that. He is a theologian who teaches the Old Testament, verse by verse. And he is a great champion of the values on which this country was built. He often speaks of how if this country is to be saved from the destructive forces racking it, it will be Christians and more specifically, Southern Christians who will save it. He is also a devout Jew.

I first recall hearing him perhaps twenty years ago. At the time I was comfortably asleep, morally and intellectually. Oh I suppose I wasn’t such a terrible person as all that. I kept to myself, lived a clean life, read a lot of books. But I had long since fled from God’s sight and had found comfort in the trendy belief systems then sweeping the nation. I absolved myself, as best I could, for the mess I had left in my wake in so many ways, comfortable in the new wisdom that no one is really to blame for anything. But I would still lie awake nights, knowing I certainly was to blame. And that I lacked the power to absolve myself.

The first time I heard Prager he said his show would be about values, that this is what would set him apart from the other personalities on the air. This puzzled me. Values? What was there to talk about?

It turned out there was a great deal to talk about. He displayed the dual gifts of a quick mind and the ability to express complex ideas in simple terms. He also possessed the rare ability to differ with a person’s most fundamental beliefs without ever lapsing into personal attack. I would hear him debate callers who shared the liberal viewpoint I held and invariably, he would make the more cogent, persuasive argument.

As I listened I found myself questioning more and more of the bedrock beliefs I had come to hold. Where was the moral high ground regarding issues like abortion and capital punishment? Was affirmative action a solution to racism or the institutionalization of it? Was America a racist, oppressor nation or still the best hope of mankind? Are people or are they not essentially responsible for their own actions?

He was not intimidated by the pompous cant of the intellectual classes, not when common sense ran counter to their most sacred platitudes. Imagine my shock and delight when I once heard him refer to the “root causes of crime” not as the usual suspects; poverty, social injustice, blah-blah-blah, but rather as “lousy values and no self-control.” If a college professor dared to utter such an obvious truth he would be tarred and feathered. But none ever would.

He made me think about God. And the necessity of God if a society is to have moral coherence. I resisted this thinking. I had decided that an individual could live a moral life without God.

One day I called him and we talked.

Quinn: “I’ve heard you talk a lot of times on the inability of having any sort of ethical code without a theology backing it up.”

Prager: “An objective one.”

Quinn: “How do you mean?”

Prager: “Well you can have a subjective ethical code. I would be absolutely an idiot to deny that an atheist could have an ethical code. An atheist could believe that it’s wrong to steal and wrong to murder…”

Quinn: “I know, but you seem to feel that having a religion backing it up gives it much more authority.”

Prager: “Oh yeah, because it renders it objective. You see the difference between a theistic, God-based ethical code and a personal-based ethical code is opinion versus objective truth. Objective truth based on belief, I acknowledge, but nevertheless that’s the way it is. If I believe that God said, ‘Do not murder,’ then I believe that murder is universally and objectively wrong, that there is moral truth just like there is empirical truth, truth about events. If however I do not have a God-based ‘Thou shalt not murder‘, then I argue against murder based on my own reason and my own feelings. But that‘s a big difference from the God of the universe says murder is wrong.”

Quinn: “Though I’m a devout agnostic myself I was raised in a family where there was an extremely predominant ethical code, and I feel like that is a more difficult thing to defy than a theology. To me it’s an easy thing, especially in today’s moral climate for a person to just renounce and walk away from their religion but I could never renounce and walk away from my parents and their opinion of me. So if I did something terrible I knew that I faced their judgment which to me is so much more tangible and real than something that I might face in the next world.”

Prager: “Right, the problem is that you and I are at least as much aware of kids rebelling against parents as we are about people walking away from religion. So I acknowledge to you that you are 100% right in pointing out the power of parents articulating an ethical code. You and I are in total agreement. All I can say is, that being a parent who does have a very strong ethical code I know how much more powerful it is when I can say to my children, ‘This isn’t Daddy that says this. You are violating the religion. You are violating a God-based code.’ I asked my son who was then nine during the L.A. riots- he was watching on television as people looted all they wanted and got away with it. I asked him, and I knew he wouldn’t do it, so I said, ‘Why wouldn’t you do this?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s in the Ten Commandments.’ And I prefer that to ‘Because I would embarrass Daddy, or shame Daddy’ or whatever Daddy-based code you are offering.”

Quinn: (Audibly) “Sigh.” He had me and I knew it.

Quinn: “Not embarrass Daddy but that you would incur judgment from the people that you most value.”

Prager: “All right. Daddy, you would judge me terrible. That would have satisfied me a lot less. What if I die tomorrow? What if he rebels against me? What if he dislikes me? I mean there are too many variables. Listen, I’m not negating the spectacular importance of parental moral authority. I’m just saying imagine how much more powerful it is when that is ultimately rooted in God-based moral authority.”

Quinn: “I grudgingly have to agree with you and it’s the same part of me that envies people that do have a strong religious belief. But like I say, to me it’s a thing that’s so much closer to home if you do have…”

Prager: “Right. Well if you envy them the only response I can say to you cause I hear that somewhat frequently, is why don’t you devote a year of your life to a serious exploration of religion and see whether or not there is a part of you that might actually respond to it. It’s like if someone said to me, ‘Dennis, I envy your love of classical music.’ I would say, ‘Well why envy me? Why not try to love it yourself?’ And I acknowledge at the outset that even with great effort, not everybody is going to fall in love with Beethoven. I know that. But a lot of people with great effort would. And so too I would say the same thing about religion. With the right tutelage, the right books, the right people, the right environment, most people could truly get into it. So I invite you to give it a try and one day I would love to write a nice essay on how to shop for a religion. That would probably help a lot of people.”

I felt at the time, that I had held my own against my revered mentor. But looking back it seems he clobbered me. When I had this conversation with Dennis Prager in 1994, both my parents were still alive. So their opinion of me was still a living viable force watching over me and prepared to let me know when I had fallen short of their standards.

But what of the countless souls who grow up in moral chaos, with no parents or parents unworthy of the title? From whom are they to get their moral guidance if not God? My theory might work on the individual level but it promised moral anarchy for any society based on it.

“What if I die tomorrow?” Prager had asked. “What if he rebels against me?”

What indeed. Hadn’t I rebelled against my parents in my youth, casually chucking my future in favor of an extended sabbatical of drug-wandering, a years-long period of perfect aimlessness and squandered opportunity? Their opinion of me then hadn’t caused a ripple in my moral universe, even though I could see my actions were causing them nothing but grief.

And parents die. Mine did.

Mom passed away in early ‘95, sending the family spinning into disarray. She had always been the center of gravity around which we all revolved.

Pop lasted till November of 2001. And then, we were alone.

Gone was that source of judgment I had found to be, “so much more tangible and real than something that I might face in the next world.”

Who would judge me now?

Over the years, Christ was always there. It was a simple thing to regard him as someone grand and mysterious, yet remain utterly unconvinced of his true nature. It doesn’t take great moral courage to be an agnostic. Nothing is easier to say than, “I don’t know.”

I worked out my own airtight rationale for not believing in Christ’s divinity, for rejecting his priceless gift. I would shake my head and proclaim Christ’s sacrifice to be a mystery beyond our solving, a riddle that just would not yield to human reasoning. His death on the cross seemed to do nothing to make us more worthy. Indeed the very savage nature of his death only seemed to further implicate mankind, to confirm in the most vivid way our hopelessly fallen nature.

Needless to say, I never bothered to open a Bible and see what Paul had to say on this matter. Had I bothered I might have found this in Chapter 2 of his Letter to the Ephesians:

Or from Chapter 5 of 2^nd Corinthians:

But I just would have scratched my head. “Be sin for us”? What could that possibly mean? Paul also says this in 1^st Corinthians:

As the years passed the deal I had made with the universe grew less satisfying. The god to whom I had given birth demanded nothing of me, but he also promised nothing. I had a vague sense, a hope really that there would be some sort of divine justice, that the decent would be rewarded and the wicked punished. But my “nebulous, all-encompassing” god promised nothing but death and forgottenness.

I can remember over the years encountering a radio broadcast each Christmas Eve. I would be driving my truck, immersed in my duties when I would hear the traditional broadcast from Cambridge, England of the Nine Lessons and Carols. Broadcast live at sunset in England, this would always mean it was morning for me. I would always find ways to linger a bit longer in the cab of the truck for the music was so stirring. Even the preaching didn’t really bother me. The lessons are a sort of thumbnail synopsis of the entire story of the coming of Christ, taking the listener from man’s Fall in the Garden to the wondrous birth of the Christ child. Interspersed between the biblical readings are the most magnificent, soaring hymns performed by choir and organ. Each year it seemed I would be more affected by this than the year past.

My years of truck driving ended and now I would find myself walking dogs in the morning fog, listening intently to this wondrous message that seemed to call me back, not just to the joyous memories of childhood, but to the sheer beauty and hope that overflows from the Christ story. A real yearning was born within me as I would listen. An ache at the emptiness that had grown at the center of my life, a wistful desire to believe what I had once believed.

But my ever-rational mind would say, “Wishing to believe is not believing.” So I would not believe. Faith was for others. They could put their whole hearts into this wondrous and bewildering story but I never could. I didn’t mock people of faith. I envied them. But I just could not create faith out of a desire to believe.

This annual Christmas epiphany was not the first time music had brought me closer to God. Even though the music of my own generation was so often a call to Godlessness, a celebration of the carnal and the ephemeral, I had had glimpses of the divine in the great music of the past from an early age. My father’s taste in classical music though limited had planted a seed in me that today has grown into a mighty passion at the core of my life.

One could not listen to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and not be transported into a magical world. There the trees were perpetually green, the brook always babbled and the birds forever chirped in harmony. Beethoven may not have intended it as a religious work but the face of God was clearly visible behind his portrait of nature.

It wouldn’t be till I had reached adulthood that I discovered the music of Bach. I like so many others had been daunted by the severe and formal nature of his work. “It sounds like mathematics,” is how my mother once characterized it. Perhaps that is a valid criticism. To my ears Bach evokes a superhuman perfection, a universe so sublimely ordered as to seem to no longer be the creation of any merely human being.

Pop was no fan of Bach. So it is no surprise that I never heard his mighty Saint Matthew Passion or the less famous Saint John Passion. But I clearly remember how the story of Christ’s passion had affected him.

First I must say that Pop was a confirmed agnostic. Raised Roman Catholic, he early in life had arrived at the position that man simply cannot know God’s nature or his intentions for us. So he went through life content that this might be all there is, in no fear of what the next life might hold. Without really trying to he managed to infect his three sons with varying degrees of this same sense of cosmic uncertainty.

But how my mother tried. A convert to Catholicism at roughly the same time my father was leaving the church, she did her best to raise us with faith. Her beliefs stood her in good stead all the days of her life. But she had to watch horrified, powerless to change me as I tossed my faith in the trash upon reaching (at least chronologically) adulthood.

When I was in my early thirties I attended a performance of the Saint John Passion at my mom’s church in Whittier. While I left the building still adrift in disbelief, I could not help but feel the tremendous soul-wrenching power of this work. Pop had been right. Despite his decades of agnosticism it was still he who had said that there is no more powerful and deeply moving story in western literature than that of Christ’s passion.

I walked out of the church filled with a vague sense of shame and loss. Shame at feeling implicated, “convicted” to use an Evangelical term, in the terrible suffering of Christ. And loss because of the great gulf I had placed between myself and God.

Those words are from one of the hauntingly beautiful chorales in Bach’s Saint John Passion. I don’t recall if that performance was in English or German. I do know I was pierced that night by the painful message of Christ’s sacrifice and my part in it. I was left bereft for the story’s happy conclusion, of His triumph over death, His and ours, was lost on me.

A few years earlier at a particularly dark and lonely time in my life, I discovered a little stream of living water, again through the mystery of music.

In the months following the end of my marriage I wound up living with my older brother, Michael. We were quite the odd couple, he the consummate bachelor, and I the reclusive bookworm.

One evening as Christmas drew near, while my brother was out on the town, I stumbled onto a broadcast of Benjamin Britten’s Saint Nicolas. Don’t be confused by the title. This is not about a jolly guy in a red suit with a bag full of toys. Britten’s cantata tells of the exploits of the long dead saint and Bishop of Myra, bridging a gap of sixteen hundred years through a masterful musical hybrid of the old and the new, retelling his miracles and teachings in a way that brings this mythical figure to vivid life.

It was the music that drew me in. Brilliantly melding the jagged dissonances characteristic of 20^th Century music to a very traditional liturgical form, Britten managed to create a masterpiece, at once reverent yet filled with a searching, restless quality. The performance I remember featured an inspired yet restrained use of images to highlight the texts, to suggest more than depict the events of the story. Nicolas calms the storm, inspires his flock, even restores to life the three “pickled boys”, victims of a murderous innkeeper.

At the time I paid little attention to the words of the piece. Words tend to take a back seat to music in my mind’s ear. But certain passages jumped out at me. The saint speaks bluntly of man’s plight. And this is what I heard.

Elsewhere, after saving the faithless crew of a ship by taming a storm he offers this prayer:

He seemed to be talking to me. So I watched and listened and like Saint Nicolas, I wept. Like the crew of his ship (and Saint Peter at his darkest hour) my conscience was nearly asleep. But ever so slowly my heart was turning toward home, toward the Savior I had

This didn’t happen overnight. It is not an easy thing to do, to relinquish your position at the center of the universe, to bow down to something infinitely greater than yourself. To admit that I am not my own.

Jeanne and I felt ourselves being tugged ever so gently almost from the time we met. We each were living lives we were not entirely proud of, yet were able to see that our presence in each other’s life seemed to make us better people. Once we married the pull became stronger. We had what amounts to an embarrassment of riches; perfect health, work we enjoyed, enough money to live comfortably. Why had we been given so much? We clearly did not deserve this bounty. We felt the need to give thanks. But to whom?

Our journey back to God began haltingly and with a great deal of uncertainty as to the direction we should take. Years of listening to Dennis Prager and Michael Medved had instilled an affinity with the God of the Jews. He was the Father, to whom it seemed the world around us was positively crying out, aching not just for love but for justice. This was a God who saw all and was not too sophisticated to judge between good and evil. It seemed like a good place to start.

We went to a nearby synagogue for an informal discussion of the basics of Judaism aimed at non-Jews and those who had drifted away or never been in touch with their faith. It seemed most of us were fallen away Catholics, still seeking God but long since estranged from the Church. Everyone shared his own theological stumbling blocks. As we sat around the table I told of how I had grown disillusioned with the faith of my childhood. I spoke of how I had come to find the God of the Old Testament to be irreconcilable with Christ. They seemed like very different Gods. When I was younger I had found Jesus to be the more appealing figure, Jehovah seeming all too human in his quick temper and his readiness to wreak havoc on his subjects. But with the passage of the years, I had come to find myself drawn more and more to the fury and majesty of the Old Testament God and less toward Jesus and his gentle ways. Christ had come to seem weak and ineffectual to me.

Perhaps it’s not fair to blame the rabbi who was presiding over the event. He just was not offering what we came in search of. His brand of Judaism was a tad too progressive for us, seeming as it did to embrace every imaginable sort of interpretation of faith. He seemed to have imbibed way too much of the secular tenets of our society, the bland unwillingness to make judgments, the seeming rejection of any sort of absolute good and evil.

Prager had always advised his listeners to return to the religion they had been raised with. So we did. We went one Easter morning to a cozy little Catholic Church right here in Huntington Beach. The priest was just great. Full of wry humor and speaking with a delightful brogue, he managed to lay out the foundation of the Christian faith in a most direct and uncluttered way.

“God doesn’t ask you to understand, he asks you to believe!”

I liked it. I didn’t take communion as decades had passed since I had been in a state of grace and I still wasn’t sure what to believe. Sadly, this fine old priest was not the pastor of the church but was only there on Easter, a brief return to duty then back to Rancho Dominguez which now functions as a home for retired priests.

A year passed. We went back to the same church the following Easter. The organ music wafted out from the choir loft, the place was full of young families in their spring finery. It promised to be a lovely day. Then the pastor spoke.

Grim faced and with an unremitting sourness, he began to scold and berate the congregation. I am a great believer in man’s fallen nature but there is a time for everything. On this, the most joyous day of the Christian year he could find no ray of light. It seemed as if Christ had died in vain. There was no glorious resurrection with its promise of eternal life for us. There was only this bitter old man and the bloated, embattled institution he represented. (Needless to say, in his scathing assessment of his flock with its dire charges of artificial birth control, there was no mention of the grotesque scandal hanging over the Church, of men like himself, supposedly of God, preying on boys.)

With a dizzying rush I was hurled back thirty years. All the empty ceremony and cheerless routine of the Catholic Church was just as I had remembered it. Or I suppose I had forgotten why it had been so easy to walk away from the Church. That bitter old man made it easy. Perhaps it was not fair to let one individual drive me off (as I had done with the rabbi) but nonetheless, I knew the Catholic Church could not lead us to the end of our search.

One night less than two years ago, we found ourselves in a moment of crisis, unsure where to turn. I insisted we kneel and pray, as awkward and foolish as it might feel. We called out in our simple unaffected way and it seems we were heard. Almost immediately things began to change in our lives. Friends and relatives seemed to pop up offering their own stories of doubt and faith, of being drawn and not quite knowing why or to Whom. It seemed we were not alone in this quest.

I discovered an old friend through the internet. We hadn’t seen each other in more than thirty years. But an intimacy and a trust sprang up between us almost immediately. It seemed Christ had reentered his life after many years and things just hadn’t been the same since.

We got together with my young nephew and his wife who were wrestling with their own faith. We met them at a big Evangelical church for Easter services. The music was great. And the place seemed to be filled with a genuine exuberance, a sincere joy at our redemption through Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection. We went to lunch afterward and tried to make sense of it all. How did it work? How could Christ’s goodness and enormous suffering on our behalf make us any more worthy? I remained bewildered yet filled with a new hope.

We signed up for a series of weekly meetings for seekers like ourselves, a chance to learn the basic tenets of Christianity and to ask the troubling questions that had always kept us from faith. This made sense as both of us, I with my sketchy memory of Catholic doctrine and Jeanne having been raised in a secular home, needed a course in Christianity 101.

The program was called Alpha. It seemed to be just what we had been seeking. There was a simple meal served then a speaker would lay out the core principles of Christian belief. Afterward we would talk in small groups. Those who had come to Alpha ranged from people strong in their faith to folks like me, raised in the church but long since drifted away, to those like Jeanne who had been raised without any reference to who had created us or why. No question was too irreverent or too basic.

At last I was able to voice my bewilderment at so many of the principal pillars of Christianity. How can Christ’s sacrifice make us worthy? Why does He seem so different from the God of the Old Testament? Why must Christianity be the only way? What of all the millions of decent souls who lived good lives but just could not accept Christ’s divinity?

It soon became apparent that our stubborn clinging to a works-based philosophy of salvation was our main obstacle to faith. It just did not seem right that all those sages and holy men, whether Buddhist or Hindu or even atheists who had lived exemplary lives should be damned while the most heinous sinners find salvation provided they embrace Christ.

As I looked back it seemed this way of thinking had been with me all my life. It is more than forty years since I attended Catechism classes on Saturday mornings but I sure don’t remember any emphasis being placed on the centrality of Jesus as the way, the truth and the life. It is almost as if all those centuries of accumulated tradition had somehow obscured the simple nature of Christ’s message. Growing up I was always under the impression that if one were to lead a decent life, believe in the Trinity, and receive the sacraments you would be okay. You might have to do some time in purgatory but eventually you would make it to heaven. But leading a decent life seemed to be the key thing. And there was never the all-consuming focus on one’s personal relationship with Christ. In the Church, it seemed you were free to admire Him from a distance.

But Paul says something quite different in Romans:

That’s not all…

Who indeed?

At some point in the Alpha meetings, the concept of man’s stubborn will to self-determination sunk into my thick skull. I finally began to see that my defiant attitude toward God, and more specifically, to Christ, was not so different from the act of Original Defiance by Adam and Eve. I had spent thirty years demanding that God reveal himself to me. I had dared to tamper with the mind God had given me, in a fool’s quest for the knowledge of good and evil and found myself hurled out of God’s presence. Why was this so complicated?

Richie Furay played rhythm guitar in the Buffalo Springfield. He had a high, pure tenor voice that conveyed simple joy and sincerity. They were the most ambitious and gifted American rock band when I was in my early teens. They were the closest thing we had to an American Beatles. The band broke up amid a spate of bruised egos and drug busts. Stephen Stills and Neil Young went on to achieve superstar status. But Richie Furay is the hero of this piece.

I can still just remember hearing at some point in the early seventies that Richie had become a born again Christian. How sad! It was as if he had contracted some strange disease. He wasn’t the only one. This strange new phenomenon, Born Again Christianity seemed to be sweeping the country, just as another wave, one of hedonism and half-baked pseudo-paganism was reaching its crest. Even Bob Dylan flirted with Christ. But it didn’t last. I can remember hearing from a particularly cynical friend that Dylan had, “kicked Jesus”. Ha Ha.

Well the decades have a way of rolling by. Richie did not “kick” Jesus. He became the pastor of a Calvary Chapel church in Boulder, Colorado. I looked up his website on the internet and was struck by his own testimony. He had been immersed in the whole decadent culture of rock stardom when a guy who played pedal steel guitar in his band brought him to Christ. I was genuinely moved. Richie’s life had clearly been changed by this experience. Hit records ceased to be the focus of his life. He made the effort to sustain his marriage, which had been in trouble. Eventually he found his way out of the music business and devoted his life to serving Jesus Christ.

I sent him an e-mail…

Pastor Richie,
You must get a lot of these so I'll try to be brief.  I've never written a fan letter and hopefully, that's not what this is.  I came of age with your music in my soul.  When Bob Swenson turned me on to the Buffalo Springfield and Love and the Byrds, I was still listening to Herman's Hermits.  Bob had a Rickenbacker 12 string in the 8th grade.  He got to see you guys play, a couple times, Whittier Hi and Melodyland.  I didn't even play guitar, but I could hear something new and potent in your stuff.  When Heather Duncan dumped me at the beginning of football season, I couldn't listen to that first Springfield album for a year or so.  Talk about a Sad Memory!

So the years went by, my friends and I swept up in the worthless values of that time, mocking anyone who sought God.  I recall snickering when I heard of your conversion.  Who was the fool?  Now, I'm 50 and my wife and I have been searching pretty diligently for the path to God.  We're making headway though we're still not ready to "commit".  We've been attending an Alpha series of lectures and discussions at First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton.  The folks there are so nice.  They hold the same values as do we and are ready to answer any question we might throw at them, even the borderline blasphemous ones.  There's no coercion or attempt to compel our conversion.  It really is a huge leap, from merely believing in God, to throwing oneself on Christ's infinite mercy.  It runs against human nature- to relinquish control that way.  We're working at it.

Anyway, I just wanted to tell you I think you've done just great with your life.  What you are doing is so much more important than riding around in a bus, playing night after night on the nostalgia circuit. 

But if there ever is a Springfield reunion, I'll be first in line!  God bless you.

Stephen Quinn
Huntington Beach, Ca.

And he answered!

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for takin’ the time to write; I really appreciate it. 

You’re not the only one who had a few “snickers”, but God is good and we continue to “press on”!  As I look back on my life I really have to stop and give some thought to it all!  I’ve come to the conclusion – I have been blessed!  I’ve lived my childhood dreams of being able to make music and have it appreciated.  I’ve been married to the same woman for 36 years and we have four wonderful daughters, two son-in-laws and two grandsons.  On top of that, the Lord has been gracious and I get a chance to serve Him and look forward to His soon return.  In the meantime, I still write and even get a chance to get out and play some music every once in awhile (this summer at the Orange County Fair, Canyon Theater and Humphrey’s in SD, CA as well as some of the Calvary Chapels around the world!  As far as you looking for God – He’s been searchin’ you out for sometime.  Let me know how things go!  Have you seen our webpage – www.calvarychapel.com/boulder.

Well, again thanks for writin’ and

Jesus loves you,

Richie Furay  

So, Jesus loved me. It all seemed too simple. I hardly loved myself. I knew my true nature and, no doubt Jesus did too. Why would He love me? And why would He suffer so horribly? To redeem a soul of such dubious worth as mine? I couldn’t buy it. One evening after a few glasses of wine, I told him so…

Hey Steve,

I write as you open the door to response because God’s “amazing grace” is just that - amazing.

I don’t know if you had any “religious upbringing”, but sometimes the whole truth of what the Bible, God, Jesus is all about is mis-represented in denominational Christianity – or “organized” religion. I don’t subscribe to some “loose cannon” group with no accountability or some “off the wall religious sect or cult” that makes up the rules as they go, I’m very thankful when I was “saved” I went to a non-denominational church that focused on Jesus and what the Bible taught. I grew up in a denominational church and found I didn’t have a clue about Jesus, the Jesus of the Bible until Al Perkins took the time to show Him to me. For that, I’m forever grateful. Jesus does love you, not for anything in you that would cause Him to, but just because He wants to. I can’t imagine why He’d love me or most of the people of the world, but the Bible says He does, because He wants to. The love He loves you with is unconditional, whether you love or embrace Him or not, He still loves you and there’s nothing you can do to stop that, even if you go to the grave, cross that fine line into eternity, without ever opening your heart to Him. I guess that’s one amazing thing about Him; and to prove His love for you He took action (love is not just a feeling or emotion) it is an action and that’s where the essence of the Gospel (the Good news for you and me and all humanity) comes in: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). All I’m trying to say here is it’s not about you – it’s about Him. Amazing Grace says it very clearly. When you understand the meaning of “grace”, as much as our feeble minds can grasp it, Christianity then begins to make sense. Grace is “getting what I don’t deserve”! I don’t deserve God’s love, forgiveness, acceptance, mercy (“not getting what I do deserve”) or gift of salvation. I deserve justice (getting exactly what I do deserve). So in His mercy, not giving me what I do deserve – justice (and if I understand the Bible correctly this is His world, He can do and give me what He wants) – He decided to offer me His grace and free gift of salvation. I don’t work for it, I don’t deserve it, I can’t earn, be good enough for, but He offers it unconditionally, I, you, man in general accept or rejects it by our own free will!

OK, I’ve gone on pretty long here, so I’m off for now. Oh, just one more thing. You say: “like a defiant child” you’re “unwilling to accept forgiveness”. That’s your choice, free will. It’s also like “cutting your nose off to spite your face”! You’re right that “faith can’t be found through an act of will”, the choice is to activate the faith that’s already been given you or not - “as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith” (Romans 12:3). You have faith whether you want to admit it or not, even the “atheist” has faith. Let me just bring up one more Scripture and then I will go. It’s something Jesus said and goes along with the “amazing grace” concept. No matter how wretched you are, and I suppose you’re probably a mess, but don’t give yourself too much credit cause a lot of us out here would beg to differ with you, even the Apostle Paul said: “This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief” (1 Timothy 1:15). But regardless, Jesus said: "… … I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men” (Matthew 12:31). What that is, is to reject His (the Holy Spirit’s mission) to accurately tell the world who Jesus is. To reject that message is to write one’s own destiny, again one’s free will. No matter how awful you think you are, His amazing grace extends beyond your sin. When those arms were spread out on the Cross, He couldn’t offer anymore than that – He gave His all for you, me and the whole world who will receive.

Take care Steve,

Jesus does love you, and that’s without qualification

Richie Furay

I had never thought of it that way. I had waited sullenly for thirty odd years for God to show His face to me. When He didn’t, I excused myself from the dialog. Pastor Richie had opened my eyes. It is we who must seek Him. To wander in this world like a petulant child, demanding that God reveal Himself, scoffing when He remains invisible, is to remain forever a child.

I sent one last message to Richie Furay…

Pastor Richie,
I’m so touched that you would take this time to try to bring me into the Light.  I guess I was a bit hard on myself last night- I have the gift of exaggerating my own shortcomings.  I suppose as sinners go, I'm small potatoes.  But if you're right, my indecision could cause me to make the most terrible sin. 

I love the passage from John:  Whoever believes in me ...streams of living water will flow from within him.  The message you try so diligently to bring to my wife and me keeps coming to me from different people, an old friend I hadn't seen in 35 years, a young in-law, the fellows from a local church who will come over tomorrow night to help us with this, and now, you.  Your faith and theirs makes mine stronger.  That living water is plainly visible, even to me. 

Yet I remain, standing at the door, unable or unwilling to knock.  I so admire what you have done.  Do you know how rare it is for one to turn his back on the world of celebrity with all its temptations, to pursue a much higher calling as you have?  My wife and I need to do the hard work; we need to pray, and read God's word, and ask Him into our lives.  Perhaps then, I can have the kind of faith you do, not this wishy-washy ebb and flow, of faith that is strong one day, weak the next and not there at all other times. 

Don't feel that you must respond to all this.  I know you've got a lot on your plate.  And don't feel that you have failed- even if I never am able to walk with Jesus as you do.  Your efforts have not been wasted.  Thanks so much!

Steve Quinn

It was only a week or two after I wrote that when a client of mine, knowing we were trying to find a church where we felt at home, recommended a little non-denominational church in downtown Huntington Beach. We went one Sunday. They played Amazing Grace. I finally got it.

I used to have trouble trying to make sense of the Holy Spirit. I am sure I’m not the first. One God in three persons is no simple concept to grasp. It has led to so much misunderstanding that followers of Islam actually regard Christians as polytheists. I’ll give them this. They do worship a single god. We won’t go into his true identity here.

We quickly found ourselves feeling at home in this little church. In no time, I was playing bass for the worship team and rehearsing with the choir for their Christmas program. I found myself playing contemporary Christian music, the sort of stuff I had always regarded with total derision, and loving it. Not just loving playing it, but feeling the words being sung going directly into my heart. I could see people out in the congregation being similarly affected.

Our pastor is probably the primary reason we found ourselves coming back to this church rather than just drifting along as we had been. He brought a plainspoken manner and a droll wit to his core message which never veered from the Bible’s unsettling challenge: having heard God’s word, what are you prepared to do about it? One could not hear his message without leaving the building feeling newly convicted, not in a bad sense of being reminded of your own sinfulness, but rather called to live for something higher than mere creature comforts, to consecrate yourself to God.

At various times during the service, other voices would speak out. Deacons and elders would sometimes lead prayers and I was soon struck by the boundless eloquence that seemed to flow out of every mouth in this church. After choir practice, we would form a circle and after soliciting prayer requests, we would hold hands and our leader, Roger would offer up these prayers with a simple, un-self conscious dignity. I could never do that I thought to myself. My prayers always seemed to revolve around doubt and unworthiness.

I remember seeing a couple years back, the fine Civil War movie, Gods and Generals. I was so struck by the scenes where Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson would pray with their men. They spoke with the most magnificent simplicity and sincerity, directly to God.

When we had spent some time in this little Bible church, I realized that such an honest, uncluttered approach to God had not passed from the earth. They pray there just like my old Civil War heroes, with a child-like humility I had never heard.

Time after time I was struck by these same deeply felt expressions of faith, by so many members of the congregation. How did they do it? Had they all attended some lofty academy of the rhetorical arts? Hardly. It soon became clear that this gift extended to members from all walks of life.

It also became obvious to me that there seemed to be more wisdom in these simple unassuming people than in the combined faculties of Harvard, Stanford and USC. I had many times heard Dennis Prager quote Proverbs and Psalm 111: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. He would tell how his faith was strengthened when he went to college and witnessed the nonsense taken so seriously by secular minds. I was familiar with the nonsense. Now I was being exposed to wisdom.

Finally, it struck me one day that there was an explanation for the wondrous gift of faith so many of these people shared. I was seeing the Holy Spirit in action, week after week. Christ was not kidding when He said in Luke, Chapter 21, Verse 15,

It is Christmas Day, 2004. I have been thrashing around, wondering just how to bring this project to an end. I had intended to write a sort of road map, explaining how one mocking, cynical disbeliever found his way to faith, that others might follow.

Now, I wonder if I’ll ever complete this work.

I had hoped to conclude this piece with an expression of unshakeable faith, the awe-inspiring, life-changing sense of certainty I see around me every Sunday morning in our little church. But I know that I must tell of my faith, not someone else’s.

My determination to follow Christ grows stronger everyday. If I seem to waver, perhaps it is because I am witness to my own failures, my own weakness and inability to put my sins behind me.

I read Oswald Chambers everyday and find myself falling far short…

The life of a saint, easy? Not for me. My sins seem to be inseparable from me, to be woven into my flesh. Chambers says this:

There is where I stumble. Do I really want to be “dead to all interest in sin, worldliness, and self”? I do want Christ in my life but I certainly am guilty of keeping sin alive in my life. I remain a sinner. That won’t change. But now I like to think I fight against my sins, rather than shrug at them.

I woke early yesterday to hear the annual broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols from Cambridge, England. The impact of this event only grows stronger each year. What began as a haunted sense of nostalgia has come to fill my life with the most profound sort of joy. Each year as I listen I stand in ever greater wonder at the God who not only gave us life, but who took human form in this most humble and poignant manner, only to take our sins upon himself, enduring degradation and death that we might have life everlasting. He didn’t have to do this. He chose to. And so must we choose whether we will follow Him.

Only four years ago I remained beyond the reach of this wondrous message. Wandering stubbornly in my self-made wilderness, I was blind to the torrent of living water that had surged around me, all the days of my life. Eagerly anticipating the Christmas Eve broadcast from Cambridge and moved by Dennis Prager’s remarks on Christmas and the emotions it evokes, I sent him this e-mail…

What is going on here, the reader might wonder. A declaration of lost faith ending with ’God bless you’ and referring to ‘this holy time’… Holy to whom? Prager, a Jew? Perhaps my faith never really left but was just lulled to sleep for thirty years by the enticements of a godless culture. Never has it been easier or more respectable to turn one’s back on God.

New Year’s came and found us surrounded by a small but dear circle of friends. Among them was Ed, a friend who has been beside me through most of my life’s great and not so great moments. Ever combative, and fueled by the wine of jollity (and some of the real stuff too) he and I were soon locked in verbal combat over the subject of faith, and more particularly, my new-found allegiance to Christ.

He maintained that all religious conviction is simply something the believer has convinced himself of, has chosen to believe. For some reason, he doesn’t seem to see that his is also a choice. Despite the evidence everywhere of a magnificent order and beauty behind all we see, he has chosen to believe in a god of complete indifference, the great god chance. To place meaninglessness on a throne is surely a choice but not a terribly satisfying one. With the help of a culture that believes in nothing higher than the self, Ed has convinced himself that God is a sort of cosmic assembly line worker, cheerlessly churning out universes and promptly forgetting them, no more concerned with the lives he creates than is a laborer who assembles computers with his creations.

I don’t think I changed Ed’s mind. I am not sure why his choice strikes him as perfectly rational while the concept of a God who embodies Good and Light, who would endure hell on the cross on our behalf, seems the stuff of fairy tales. I do know this. We can’t both be right.

Ed is not alone among my friends and family who have made light of my new-found faith, of its depth and commitment. That is understandable. My early life was not distinguished by great fortitude or maturity. One family member laughingly compared my devotion to Christ to my former reliance on a big plastic bong, a marijuana water pipe, through which I would puff furiously. I used to call it the Horn of Forgetfulness. I outgrew that. I would surely outgrow this.

But Jesus is not pot. He brought meaning into my life. The dream life I thought I was enjoying all the years I smoked weed was a flight from meaning, the rejection of meaning.

So is Ed right? Has my hunger for meaning in a meaningless world enabled me to find faith where it didn’t exist before? Viktor Frankl, himself a survivor of Auschwitz has made the case that the need for meaning is as powerful a longing in people as the need for food and sex. He watched people die all around him almost the moment they ceased to believe their suffering had meaning.

I don’t think so. There are all sorts of pursuits and obsessions people can throw themselves into, some noble, some contemptible that will give their lives meaning. Christ doesn’t just come into one’s life and make everything pleasant, like a guy handing out candy to children. He calls us to become like Him. To suffer any cost our belief might bring. The follower of Christ is promised persecution as well as salvation. This is no picnic.

And what of salvation? As Jeanne and I contemplate joining our church I still find myself hobbled by my own long established theological habits. A question on the application form for would be members reads: Do you know for certain that when you die you will go to heaven? Why?

Why is this so hard? As I told our pastor, I have committed my life to Jesus. Why do I still balk at accepting His gift to me? Must I fight the same battle over and over? Is this not the same voice in me that scoffed at salvation because of my own undeniable unworthiness? Have I learned nothing?

When Jesus hung on the cross, there were only two criminals hanging beside him. One who mocked Him and one who said, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Those are our choices. No matter how much I might wish there to be a third criminal, one who loves Jesus and is in awe of Him but can’t see past this fallen world, there remain only two.

I choose Jesus. Still the form remains incomplete. Am I saved? Is this very tendency to hang back, this reluctance to fully accept the gift of grace itself damning?

Peter was strong in his faith but promptly denied Christ three times. How many times have I denied Him? Why do I still?

CS Lewis offers scant comfort…

That’s me. Wishing to be of Christ yet still attached to the things and ideas dragging me back into the enemy’s camp.

Oswald Chambers is even more unequivocal:

Perhaps there is hope for me. Lewis spoke of “an undefeated but daily resisted” enemy. This is my fight. I advised the reader back at the beginning that faith had always been a struggle for me. I hope my credentials in that area have been established.

So far, the cost has been minimal. My life grows richer every day. Still I know I fail to profess Christ’s message as I should. Lest I start to grow bloated with pride at my lofty status among the saved, I need only look at myself. I see little of Christ there and all too much of my old self.

As Oswald Chambers says:

Driving home the other day I realized that these are the happiest, most fulfilling days of my life. I told Jeanne. She feels the same way. I don’t know why we’ve been rewarded this way. I do know that sickness and tragedy are unavoidable components of life, that these blessed days we enjoy now cannot last. I believe the joy I’ve found flows from following Christ. It’s not a reward like one might give a dog for performing a trick. But rather the fruit of placing truth at the center of one’s life instead of self.

CS Lewis put it this way…

I read CS Lewis’ daily devotional every morning as I eat my breakfast. I am more than a little alarmed at how much of what I have written here is a clumsy restatement of his words and thoughts. I knew his book, Mere Christianity had been pivotal in forcing me to face Christ, and ultimately to choose Him. But I had no idea to what extent Lewis’ ideas had permeated my own thinking, leaving me thinking these were my ideas. If this constitutes plagiarism, it was certainly unconscious and unintentional.

My path to faith was shaped by outside events as well. For years I had been coming to see things more and more as a battle, never ending, between what is right and what is wrong. Despite all the efforts of our most educated class to stamp out such a worldview, it was slowly taking root in me. They might be willing to attribute all sorts of horrors to differences in class or culture. I increasingly was not.

Then came September 11, 2001. From that day forward I suspect a great many people came to view good and evil differently. I know I did. No longer was it merely a subject for philosophical dispute, but a great war that always had been raging though people had managed to convince themselves the war ended long ago.

It is not over. For my generation it is only beginning. A generation marked by fecklessness and irresoluteness must decide whether to remain paralyzed by apathy and effeteness or to answer the call of the great battle of this age.

In the days following the atrocities of September 11, I came to see that this world is indeed a battleground between good and evil. Evil had shown his face quite plainly. Who then embodied Good?

That is easy. No one in human history said or did what Jesus did. But why is everyone not drawn like a moth to the flame by good? Is it so naïve to believe that good will triumph over evil? Indeed, that it already has?

I know people want to believe this. Why else do they respond so powerfully to stories that embrace this theme? Just think of the staggering popularity of the recent cinematic epic, The Lord of the Rings. It’s difficult to single out among all its powerful scenes, one that embodies the theme I have in mind. But one does come to mind. At the climax of the first of the three films, the fearless but headstrong warrior, Boromir falls as surely as did Adam and Eve. But it’s not the serpent tempting him but the all-corrupting lust for the power embodied in the One Ring. He attempts to seize it by force from the Christ-like ring-bearer, Frodo. But at the same moment, a horde of the Dark Lord’s brutes comes surging out of the woods and a desperate battle ensues.

Boromir atones for his sin of only moments before by giving his life in defense of the little hobbit he had threatened. As he lies dying, pierced with arrows, he is comforted by Aragorn, the rightful king he had refused to recognize. “My brother… My king,” and Boromir is gone.

Those words are not to be found in Tolkien’s book. Yet this is among the most deeply moving and satisfying scenes in the whole trilogy. Why did Peter Jackson put those words in Boromir’s farewell scene?

I believe it is because he knew, if only instinctively, just how deep is the desire in people, not just to see this story depicted, but for it to be true. Tolkien was a devout Christian but, to the best of my knowledge, Peter Jackson is not. Yet even he knew of the universal longing for good to utterly and finally destroy evil, for a King of Goodness to return to reclaim this fallen world.

I watch that movie now and I see in Boromir, not just myself, but Stubborn Man. Adequate unto himself, as capable as any god. Boromir is not redeemed until he acknowledges his true king. There is only one Man in human history who proclaimed himself to be the rightful king of this world. Why this universal longing to believe in such a King? To the skeptical I would say, perhaps because it is true.

Only a week or so ago I wrote to a dear friend of my spiritual struggle. It's like I want to enlist in Christ's army but I'm not sure of the outcome. But I know this is at the core of His message. If His death and resurrection didn't pave the way to heaven for us, it was all just an impressive stunt… I want to follow Christ because He is Good. Not because I fear damnation.

And so the battle goes on. As CS Lewis said, we fight here on earth, in the enemy’s territory. But I am now sure of victory. There will be a Return of the King.

It occurs to me that I have avoided in writing this, the actual experience, the moment when I knew, the day my faith was restored. I am not sure there was such a day. A person walking uphill eventually finds himself at the top of a great mountain. Can he always say at what point the ground began to rise?

There was a day when I finally knocked timidly on the door. Sitting on a particularly quiet and lovely day at the dog park where I spend so many of my days, I finally opened my heart to Christ. Perhaps a better metaphor might be to say that I turned to face Him after having stubbornly refused to for so many years. The sky didn’t open up, no choirs of angels sang, but my heart was gladdened and my life has not been the same since that day.

As I look back at what I’ve written it seems I’ve been trying to make arguments why someone should believe, as a lawyer might build a case to persuade a jury. I fear I have failed if that is what I’ve done.

That’s Oswald Chambers again. I tried for years to reason my way to faith. It can’t be done.

Reading what I have been writing here it seems I am still doing it.

Last Sunday after service, Jeanne and I were engaged in conversation with one of the elders of our church. We spoke of the difficulty of offering Christ’s message to those who prefer not to hear. The element of choice came up. We all must choose, even those who like to think they are abstaining from the choice. Tom, our elder, mentioned the same passage from Romans that Richie Furay had. The same one that had been pivotal in my transformation from nostalgic skeptic to true follower. God has dealt to each one a measure of faith. Richie said that even the atheist has faith. We each decide in whom or what we will place it. For many today, their faith is placed in nothing higher than their own wants and their tawdry achievements.

That’s how I put it in a letter (unpublished) to the LA Times. I have made my choice. I am sorry it took so many years. I may not have had a terribly high opinion of myself all that time but it still took a great effort to knock myself off of God’s throne. Like Ricky Williams, I tuned out all the voices that made any demands of me. Like him, I found comfort in the horn of forgetfulness, though true forgetfulness, of those I had wronged, of all I had thrown away, that never came. And happiness? No, that didn’t come either.

Richie was right. Oswald Chambers too. I choose Christ. Now and always. I will have my days of doubt but they will pass. Somehow I don’t believe my final hours will be among those days.

I drove past a local church yesterday and this is what the sign out front said…

My oldest brother and I have recently been engaged in a heated round of emails on the subject of faith, the nature of God, why in the world we are here. It’s an old family tradition and one that shows no sign of going away. He, like so many people, bristles at the core message of Christians, that Christ really meant what he said, that no one comes to the Father but through Him. He feels the need to mock traditional belief, favoring a much more new age belief system wherein each individual has immediate access to God, where there’s no such thing as sin and therefore, no need for redemption. Interestingly, it seems that it is he rather than I who is most intent on converting the other.

I do believe in sin. That’s why the sign in front of that church strikes me like an oasis of cool water to a man dying of thirst in the desert. I know I need to be forgiven. I see now that to abstain from the gift Jesus offered us on the cross is to render his sacrifice meaningless. If we say to Christ, “Thank you, but I don’t need to be forgiven,” he becomes merely another victim of human cruelty, a good man who lived and died, nothing more. We crucify Him again when we say we don’t need salvation.

My brother, Michael and I struck a deal a week or two back. He vowed to read the Gospel of John if I would read the book that had so changed his life, Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God. So, I am reading it. I am only a little way in but the prospects for Michael and me finding some sort of theological common ground are looking pretty remote. Let’s face it. From what I have seen of this book, it not only differs from (what I consider) the revealed word of God, it demands that the reader reject that word. The idea of God as a father who demands obedience and exacts judgment is tossed out as, “a simplistic view of God, based on your mythology.” Really? Somehow I always find myself more persuaded by wisdom that has endured for millennia, this “mythology” upon which western civilization has been built, and for which tens of thousands have chosen death before renunciation, rather than the newly gleaned insights of a prophet from Oregon who counts among his sources of inspiration, John Denver and Barbara Streisand.

Besides, it seems to me that it is precisely this non-judgmental god with whom Mr. Walsch communicates who has come to dominate so many of our secular (and sadly, quite a few religious) institutions over the past forty or so years. This god of unconditional love, a god who is, “the observer, not the creator,” who, “does not even care about the outcome,” of our lives strikes me as the same one, the only god our secular, educated class is prepared to acknowledge. We need only look to our cities, teeming with fatherless children, each bereft of the most basic moral guidelines, to see the fruit of the tree of “non-judgmentalism” and “unconditional love.” Maybe a Father is not such a bad thing.

I also find much of it to be oddly familiar. The reader stumbles upon ideas recycled from all sorts of sources ranging from Buddhism to contemporary self-help books to the Star Wars saga (I can almost hear Yoda whispering in Mr. Walsch‘s ear, “Don’t think! Feel!”)

Some passages strike me as pure Wizard of Oz, words strung together to sound as if they mean something, an empty striving for profundity. Here’s one: “The more you are, the more you can become, and the more you can become, the more you can yet be.” Here’s another: “God is not now revealed, for if God were, you would not ask God to be.” Okay.

The more I read of this the more it seems part of the long seamless tale of man’s defiance of God. It might strike my brother as the path to God but to my ears it sounds like nothing so much as man mistaking himself for God. What else is one to make of passages like, “Listen to your feelings,” and, “the greatest reminder is not anyone outside you, but the voice within you.” When he says, “Not even God could find fault in such a being,” I am reminded of Chapter 14, Verse 11 from Luke’s Gospel:

But that’s just mythology. And very simplistic at that.

The need to forgive oneself is a recurring theme. As I was reading, I couldn’t help but recall a piece of music I once took great solace in, though one whose lyrics I now find kind of dubious. I fear it might sound terribly dated today, as the whole genre of jazz fusion has gone the way of the dinosaur. But there remains a certain brilliance to the music. Beginning with soft electronic murmurings, it builds steadily, the rhythm pounding inexorably to a climax. It is then that a husky female voice sings/speaks this message of new age comfort:

It gets better. Here is the chorus…

And it is. That much is true. But it was these words from the final verse that really spoke to me then.

It was 1980 and I was having a lot of trouble ‘releasing myself from the past’, having fled in panic from a marriage that might have been saved, stranding a beautiful young son half a continent away. No god of self-esteem, of self-forgiveness could save me from what I had done.

But I must be fair. My brother finds the Gospel of John to be just as unpersuasive. Here’s what he says.

“I'm telling you Steve my eyes go over the lines and I want to understand and absorb the content but it all sounds like gibberish to me.“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life". What the hell does that mean?”

“To buy what the Bible teaches, you have to believe that God didn't really give us free will because before any of us was born He already knew which of us would fail the test and end up in His ovens. That's pretty small. Can't you see that that's man giving God human shortcomings?”

Sound arguments. The same ones I used to make as reasons not to believe. I suppose it comes down to this: If you don’t believe that this is a fallen world, then you don’t need a savior. You are then free to “find” God within yourself, to listen to your heart until your dying day.

But there remains that troubling figure of Christ. He didn’t just die for you and me, he conquered death on our behalf. How is that conundrum to be fitted into a world governed by a god who is just an observer? If we consign Christ to the category of “great men”, we reduce him beyond recognition, to perfect insignificance. If Christ really did rise from the dead, (and hundreds of people testified to having seen the risen Christ, walking among men, and many of them chose death rather than renounce this fact) we are forced to ask why He lived and died. And lives still.

Christ says, "Follow me," not "Follow your heart."

My brother asked,

“Why couldn't He have just meant that one must have a more loving way of thinking in order to return to God?”

I responded,

“I suppose he could have. I love that sentence. The grammar yearns to find in Christ's words, what you want Him to say. But all we have to go on is what He says.”

I am prepared to take His word at its face value. I suppose I would say to my brother, you’ve got a guy who says he’s talked to God. I’ve got a Man who is God!

It is roughly a year since I began this task. Thankfully, I am now ready to say it is finished. I have no illusions that this little piece of work will change any hearts, but I would like to think that it might find its way into someone’s hands, someone just as cynical and headstrong as was I, someone who has long since decided that Jesus Christ is a pipedream, a crutch for weaklings and ignoramuses. Let him read this.

It is my hope that what I have written here constitutes just a little trickle of that living water, that it might help someone, someday to find their way back to the God who loves them. I know my thirst ended when I drank from that stream.

Last Sunday I had a brief interview with Pastor Gary and one of the elders in order to become a member of Community Bible Church. I like to refer to it as my induction ceremony. There were no mysterious rites, no secret handshakes. I suppose my brother would say that now I have truly “drunk the kool-aid”. Sadly, one man’s living water is another man’s mind control cult.

Only a month or two ago, I was still stymied by one of the questions on the application form for church membership.

That’s me. This is a world of prodigal sons (and daughters), of sheep who have gone astray. This Great Shepherd will never cease calling us home.

Fifteen years ago, in a last burst of youthful folly, two close friends and I went on a backpacking expedition in the local mountains. We bit off a little more than we could chew, but that was the whole point. We came through some harrowing passages and were camped just below the summit of Mt Baldy, anticipating a short hike to the peak the next morning, then the homeward trail. It was Memorial Day weekend and the weather had been beautiful.

It began to snow just before dark and continued all night. We got up the next day, snow blind, and dressed for warm weather. Perhaps we were already feeling the effects of hypothermia (confusion, poor judgment) for we decided to hike the rest of the way to Mt. Baldy’s summit rather than turning immediately downhill. About half way up the final slope, I was unable to continue. Hypothermia had me stumbling and falling down in the knee high drifts. Shorts and a down vest are not the attire for a blizzard at 10,000 feet.

It only took a moment to decide what to do. Eddie and Nancy would continue on and send help for me; I would go to ground, curl up in my sleeping bag and attempt to regain my body warmth. We said goodbye and they disappeared into the whiteness.

I did not expect to ever leave that spot. But there was no sense of panic. Almost the opposite. A sense that all my struggles were now over. I had given up one last time.

It was clearly time to pray. But I refused. I had turned my back on God. Some odd sense of honor and propriety insisted that it would be wrong for me now to plead for my life. So I didn’t.

But something odd happened. Just as I had resigned myself to this fool’s fate, I felt myself warming up, sensation coming back in my limbs. Perhaps, I thought with just a trace of disappointment, this was not the end. I could now see just a ghost of the sun through the clouds above and I realized, I have to get up and continue my life.

So I did. I gathered up my gear and hiked down the mountain.

It began to rain so I crawled into a hole in the rocks, stretched out my bag and got nice and cozy. I stayed there all night. Men and dogs, volunteers from many agencies were searching for me through the night but I was safe and warm in my little cave. The next morning, I walked out into a beautiful day and was soon spotted by a Sheriff’s Department helicopter. I was saved.

I see now that God was not done with me. He didn’t answer my prayers because I was still too stubborn to utter them. But it seems He was determined to save that which was lost.

My father used to sing a song that went like this…

We are poor little lambs

Who have lost our way

Bah, Bah, Bah

We’re little black sheep

Who have gone astray

Bah, Bah, Bah

I tried to sing it at his memorial service. It was not one of my more effective performances. But I will always believe that the song is about us, not just the Quinns, but all humanity. We turn our backs on God and He forgives us. Who could invent such a story?

I like to think my days of stumbling are behind me. I like to think I now have eyes to see. I think 33 years spent cutting off my nose to spite my face is about right. I am not yet quite home but I have lived long enough to see that home is just over the horizon, that when I get there, I will be welcomed.

All is forgiven.

May 21, 2005

Huntington Beach