Wednesday, May 20, 2020
Susan Mennel
When in your life have you experienced the nearness of God?
Strange as it sounds, I can barely remember a time when I did not feel nearness to God—except perhaps in one of my undergrad years in my hippie stage in Chicago, when I fell under the spell of Zen Buddhism.
Even then, though, God was not exactly distant. But He was not exactly God either. He was Everything and In Everything and All Things were One. Nothing mattered too much because all separation—including time itself—was an illusion, I believed then.
I was wrong—as I was to realize the next year in my wonderful class in Ancient History. Studying the rise and fall of ancient empires, I woke up to the reality of time and history, culminating in the Roman Empire that spread through the entire known world.
In the last class before Christmas vacation, Professor Hawkinson suggested that the common language and Roman roads were part of a long historical plan to prepare the way to spread the Good News from an outlying province: A baby had been born who would show us God’s love and change the world forever!
The God I had known and loved since childhood was so near to me at that moment that I couldn’t move. I stayed in the darkened classroom as the snow fell outside long after everybody had left the building, and I wept tears of joy at His presence.
God was real and time and history were real and human beings were real, and I was real. Everybody and Everything mattered, as I had always known before my year of illusion.
I had grown up close to the earth on a farm on the prairie in a Swedish immigrant family close to our country church. Life doesn’t get much more real than planting, harvesting, milking the cow, gathering eggs, and growing all our food ourselves.
And never a day went by when we didn’t sing as we worked. Hymns, choruses, anthems, gospel—there was a song for every occasion and I learned them all by heart. It is a rich heritage, and still today, it is in music and singing that God is especially near to me.
Eventually I returned to graduate school at UNH, and again, in the History classes of the amazing Professor Donald J. Wilcox, God drew nearer to me, and I to God. I gained a deeper understanding of the radical difference of the Bible from all other books—mostly through the works of St. Augustine (354-430).
It was Augustine who brought Christianity to the educated classes of the Roman empire. Their classical Greco-Roman writers described a one-dimensional world, exclusively about the ruling classes. Their characters do not develop; they wake up every morning as if it were the first day of their lives.
The biblical personages, in contrast—and Augustine himself—live in a multi-dimensional world, fraught with background and history. Faith moves them from their inner depths and from the heights of Transcendence. They suffer deep humiliation and exalt in divine redemption, growing into richly developed persons.
St. Augustine tells his own story in his Confessions, a book that has brought hundreds of people to Jesus over the centuries—including one of my own students when I later taught at UNH. Diana had come from China where she had been raised in Confucianism and communism. After our discussion of the Confessions, she came to me and asked how to be baptised. I talked to Goldi, then our interim rector, and she was baptised at St. John’s on Easter Eve, with Bob and me as her godparents. God was very near to all of us that night.
The other great difference between the Bible and all other writing before it is that it is not about the upper classes. The most sublime and tragic events take place among the common people—in the house, the workplace, the garden, the streets.
In other words, they are stories about us—about our complex, multilayered selves, as we live through our own humiliation and despair and joy and redemption—as much as they are about those who lived long ago.
God is always near to me when I read the Bible, even when I open it at random. Newspapers have lately reported on a longing for Transcendence in our own one-dimensional secular world. And that perhaps explains why the Bible remains the best-selling book in the world, even today.