Ravenna, Italy (6th century)
I was crossing the street one day at around noon to get some lunch at McDonald’s. I was in my mid-20’s and working a temp job as a “service writer” at a BMW dealership, of all things. In truth I can barely tell the difference between a piston and a gas cap.
In any event, I looked up the hill to see if any cars were coming when suddenly the scene was transfigured. It had spiritual content. On the face of it, this moment was about as mundane as any you might imagine. But in the blink of an eye it became infused with a luminous power. I was stunned, and decided it was God.
Not that I was looking for this sort of thing. If anything, it was just the opposite.
I had left home to go to college in 1969, just as the cultural upheavals of the 60’s were in full swing. During this time the civic-minded idealism of my parents’ generation was rapidly giving way to a new, more radical demand for societal change.
For my parents, change meant working through the system and its institutions, building on the past and seeking positive, if incremental, change.
My generation rejected this entirely. With a mostly unconscious nod to Hegel and Marx (those 19th century German rascals), the “system” was now seen as irreversibly corrupt and had to be replaced. Wholesale revolution, not incremental reform, was the order of the day.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s spiritually-based reform had appealed to the conscience of the nation, that it might make good on its founding principles and ideals. This was replaced by Malcolm X’s “point of a gun.”
The “New Left” viewed raw power as the only remedy to replace an irretrievably unjust system defined and controlled by the “haves.” To seek reform was just another way of being co-opted. Cutting out the old system by “root and branch” was what history demanded. It was inevitable even.
As I say, the impatience of this cultural revolution rejected the institutions and traditions of the “old” civic order. Not least was the church, viewed now as the mere handmaiden to an unjust, oppressive order.
For me, the idealism of my parents’ generation remained, but it was recast by the urgent call for radical change. Which is to say that I still held the values and norms I had grown up with, things like loving one’s neighbor, equality, love, peace, justice, etc.
But seeing what my parents’ generation had wrought, the war, the seeming callousness of U.S. actions, the assassinations, and the general turmoil of the times, was enough to convince me that something else was required. What exactly that might be, of course, never quite occurred to me.
After college, after the 60’s had crashed and burned, I found myself a bit lost and confused. For many the 60’s era was a time of “liberation,” of breaking rules and celebrating unconstrained “freedom.” Though I was not entirely immune to such things, deep down I truly had wanted to create a better world, or at least I think I did.
So when I looked up the hill and saw “God” on that fateful day, I was in a period of searching, for something, but not that.
While attending church as a kid, I had come to think of God as a “big idea.” God, that is to say, was an intellectual construct of sorts. Church mostly seemed to be about being a good person. I didn’t realize God was existentially real, and could be experienced personally, if not mystically.
Not too long after my moment of “rebirth,” my mother was talking to a friend at church. It was the usual conversation about family, etc. When asked what I was doing, Mom said I was reading a lot, mostly in philosophy and religion.
As a “recruiter” for Yale Divinity School, he suggested that I might be just the kind of person they were looking for. My mother called me up and asked if this was something I might be interested in.
I wasn’t. Not in the slightest. The thought of being a pastor was unthinkable, for some of the reasons I’ve stated above. But after some months, I changed my mind and decided to give it a try, not to prepare for ordained ministry, mind you, but in order to pursue the academic subject that was now consuming my every waking hour.