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My earliest memory of staking out my theological position came when I was about five years old. In my first ever Hebrew school class we learned the story of Jonah and the whale. When my mom came to pick me up I asked, “Isn’t believing in God like believing in magic?” After a moment’s pause she said, “Yes, that is pretty much what I think too.”
I next remember sitting at the lunch table in third grade (about nine years old) questioning with my friends why if God existed don’t we see him? If God existed why did he stop talking to people 2,000 years ago? If God existed why do good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people? If heaven existed where was it? We generally concluded that as primitive man may have thought that thunder was God being angry, all religion was simply a vestige of superstitious, pre-modern science (though admittedly at the age of nine I may have said it a bit differently.) This took me happily through the next 15 years of my life.
I grew up in suburban New Jersey as a comfortably atheist Jew. I did attend Hebrew school all through my time in high school, but like nearly all my classmates just focused on the Jewish traditions, culture, and history. I had a fairly strong sense of being an ethnic Jew but was respectably atheist. In retrospect I was perhaps technically agnostic, but was closer to an optimistic existentialist than anything else. After graduating from Brandeis University in Boston in May 2002, I moved to San Diego with some friends─ moving to southern California being the logical thing to do after suffering through four Boston winters!
Working as the administrator of a small health clinic project, I remember one day overhearing some coworkers discussing religion and saying, “Well, I believe in something, just not God exactly.” It struck me that it had been over a decade since I had any new theological thoughts.
I then moved to England in October 2003 to do a course that ended up as a two year Master’s degree at the University of Sussex. At an introductory meeting for international students the first week, the university chaplain, the Reverend Canon Dr. Gavin Ashenden, mentioned that he held a weekly theology discussion group. In that exploratory mood that accompanies starting a new life in a new place, I thought I would give it a look.
Before the first meeting I made a long list of the reasons I did not believe in God and the questions I felt I had to answer before I could. The general stages I felt were deciding that there was something divine about the world, that that divinity came from a deity in the Judeo-Christian mold, that there was a messianic component to the whole story, and whether or not Jesus of Nazareth was that messiah. Since I had so many stages to go through before getting up to the core of the Christian story, it felt quite safe talking to a Christian clergyman for the time being.
During a few weeks of conversations I was quite stunned to find that the chaplain had reasonable answers to what I thought were intractable and clearly devastating questions about God in general and Christianity in particular. Perhaps more than anything, I was surprised to be sitting across from a sophisticated and very well read, intelligent and highly skeptical academic…who believed. My assumption had always been that only simple-minded, somewhat ignorant and uneducated, superstitious people were religious. Here was undeniable evidence that I was wrong.
One day after speaking with Gavin (as the Reverend Canon Dr. Ashenden insisted on being called) I was walking back from his office and looking up at the sunlight beaming down through the leaves of the tree I was passing under. At that moment I had a feeling that, “You know, there is something divine about the world.” About three seconds later I came to my senses and banished the idea from my mind. “That was strange.” I thought.
One or two weeks of thought-provoking conversation (and a life enhancing introduction to Laphroig single malt whisky) later, Gavin suggested that I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis since it addressed many of my questions. However, as my coursework was starting to pile up I did not have time to get to the book. As the meeting was often just me and him, I felt bad continuing to take his time if I could not even read the one thing he suggested. So in November 2003 I decided to stop going until I had time to read the book. I did not see him rest of my first year in England.
Almost a year and a half later, now April of 2005, a friend of mine asked me and another friend to go to church with her on Easter. Being an atheist Jew I thought it would be an interesting anthropological experience. I think I was also a bit hung-over that Sunday morning and not in the mood to do anything that required much thinking.
Her church was a very big ‘happy clappy’ church with a rock band. A far cry from what I pictured going to church would be like I felt rather uncomfortable with the whole thing. However, at one point in the ‘service’ the preacher said something along the lines of, “There might be someone here today who has never gone to church before and has many intellectual objections to God.” It was almost like he was speaking directly to me. “How many people go to church who don’t believe in God and why would a preacher say that to his entire congregation? Very strange.” I thought. Yet, whatever, the girl standing on the balcony next to me was quite attractive though amusingly carried away with the singing…and therefore a better recipient of my limited attention.
In July while writing my dissertation, I did what all responsible graduate students would do and took two weeks off to go to western Ireland with my family. Our first stop was the ruins of the ancient monastery of Clonmacnoise. While there we watched a little cartoon video of its history, with the narrator discussing how an early missionary had come and converted the local king. Just as this was being said I had a little thought pop into my head that, “Yeah good, the king got that right.” Surprised and slightly concerned about my misfiring synapses, I quickly threw the thought from my mind.
During the rest of the summer of 2005 I felt an ever increasing need to ponder issues of religion and God. Actually, it dawned on me that since those discussions with the university chaplain in autumn 2003, there had been something in the back of my mind encouraging me to go back and give the God question another look. During the summer I also started to feel some vague yet tangible divinity in the world. Almost what you might call a ‘divine presence’. “Perhaps it is just a new found appreciation for nature, an awe of the vastness of time, a sense of the universal connectedness of things, but…very strange.” I thought.
With a sigh of relief I handed in my dissertation at the beginning of September and took a short road trip around northern England with some friends. The last day of the trip I was dropped in York as my other friends needed to get back to London before I did. Walking around the town center I passed a church where people seemed to be gathering for a service which was about to start. As I walked by I was struck by a sudden urge to go join them. But this was more than an urge for an ice cream when passing a store on the beach for example, but an almost physical tingling accompanied with an intense compulsion to walk in the church door. Taking a few steps forward I stopped and reminded myself, “Don’t be ridiculous, why would you want to go in a church?” Coming to my senses and taking a few steps away, I again felt a deep urge to enter the church. Turning around to do so I again stopped myself, now with the thought, “You are Jewish! You have no business going to a church!” With that I finally got a grip on myself and walked away, but with a strange sense of sorrow and guilt coming over me. I have since learned that the church was St. Michael le Belfrey, a famous charismatic parish in the Church of England.
A few days later I returned home to my parents’ home in New Jersey to start the job application process. Underwhelmed by life in the suburbs and finally having time to read something besides economics, I quickly picked up a stack of literature I had been intending to read, including Mere Christianity. Starting to feel this sense of divinity in the world more strongly and still for some unknown reason finding myself increasingly concerned with answering the God question, I threw myself into the book. While I had problems with one of the first steps of Lewis’s argument for the existence of God, and therefore his resulting conclusions, I again was struck that an obviously brilliant man could use logic to come to faith. Perhaps religion was not the domain of the unable or unwilling to think after all.
About this time I also started praying, “God if this presence is you, if it is more than just a random neurological sensation, please make yourself real to me. Please show yourself to me.” But no voice from the heavens or magical apparition ever appeared.
In November in the midst of a not so subtly drunken conversation with a very intelligent friend of mine (us having reverted to our youth and stealing from my parents’ liquor cabinet while they were away for the night) he said that he believed in God. “What?! How could someone with his education and intellectual ability really believe in God? Very strange.” I thought. However, he proceeded to give a description of the deity as the Eternal Source, and mentioned that science tells us that the universe is eternal and infinite. How could that be? If it was, could not God also be eternal and infinite? After all, these are properties or states of being which we know to exist. After a moment of enlightened revelation, I went and took another shot of Hungarian chili vodka. Very strange, but very good!
One weekend in early December I went into Manhattan to see an old college friend. Sunday morning we went to go see the newly released ‘Chronicles of Narnia’. Sneaking out during the movie for a bathroom break, as I walked across the theater lobby I suddenly felt a soft yet firm downward pressure on my shoulders and knowledge─ not an idea but knowledge─ that God existed. Looking around I wondered, “How many other people know this?” Then coming to my senses I quickly banished the idea from my mind. “Forget strange, that was incredibly bizarre!” I thought rather nervously.
I soon found a job working overseas and one evening in late December, going through my books and trying to decide which ones to bring, I suddenly had a very intense ‘day dream’ of standing on a white sand beach that stretched straight out in both directions to the horizon. I had an intuition that while I was on this one place on the beach─ this one place in time─ and that while I could not see the rest of the beach (time) behind me or ahead of me, that even when I was not there, ‘Something’ always would be. That while I may disappear from the beach, the beach itself would remain and continue. That while my participation in history was temporary, history or time itself was a constant. But there was also a feeling that there was something transcendent and conscience about this constant. In that instant I felt that this was what was meant by ‘eternity’. The whole episode lasted just a few seconds.
By the end of February 2006 I had (despite the best efforts of the Sri Lankan embassy in DC) managed to secure a visa to go start my job in Colombo on March 1st. Instead of going directly there however, I decided to stop in England for two weeks to see friends and attend my graduation ceremony before continuing on to Sri Lanka.
Now in a full-blown spiritual crisis and most importantly having finally read Mere Christianity I managed to contact the chaplain at the University of Sussex before leaving. A bit to my surprise, Gavin said he remembered me from 2 ½ years previous and would be happy to meet.
We planned to meet on a Wednesday afternoon for lunch. The night before our meeting I had a very vivid and memorable dream, which struck me as odd since I do not normally remember my dreams.
In the dream I could fly by flapping my arms but I had to get a long run-up to get enough speed to be able to ‘take off’. However, while I could fly, if I stopped flapping my arms I would start to fall (all similar to Super Mario Bros. 3! Very strange.) Next in the dream the police found out I could fly and were driving after me to get me to do so, while I was fleeing from them in a car with my friend whom I had discussed the eternal and infinite nature of God. I was looking at different highway signs to help figure out how to get away and yelling at him to give me driving directions, but he was silent. Eventually the police started shooting at us and I was forced to stop. At gun point I was forced to fly, though again having to flap my arms and starting to fall if I stopped.
In the next scene in the dream I was somewhere pitch black, and there I met God. God himself was like a super dense cloud of energy. My response in the dream was a feeling of utter awe. Terrified but not horrified. God then pointed my towards a series of low dark tunnels with ice floors, long enough to allow me to get up enough speed to fly, but twisty with obstacles jutting out from the sides. I told God I wouldn’t be able to take off and fly since I would lose speed going around the bends and the obstacles. God assured me I would be able to fly, and sure enough I was able to zip around the obstacles and maintain enough speed to fly, this time without flapping my arms.
Next thing I knew I emerged into a big bright room with movie posters on the walls and other people zipping around the room flying and congratulating me on being one of them, on being ‘a flyer’. I then went out a door at the far side of the room onto a stage in dazzling bright sunlight with a crowd of people all dressed in white cheering for me. Then, the dream faded away perfectly and I woke up, just a split second before my alarm went off. “Wow, that was amazing.” I thought. “But quite strange. I must remember that dream.”
A few hours later off I went to my on-campus lunch appointment with Gavin, though due to the sad state of the British rail system (or my instinctive aversion to punctuality─ can’t remember which) I arrived a bit late. Because of this Gavin suggested we just grab a sandwich at the university canteen and head back to his office to eat. Sitting down, in truly European fashion he offered me a glass of shiraz to go with my sandwich. As I got through the first glass of wine, in truly gracious fashion he offered me a top-up. As I got through that second glass of wine and most of my sandwich, in truly social fashion he offered me another glass. As I finished both wine and sandwich, in truly British fashion he offered me a post-lunch glass. I accepted and continued with what was becoming a rollicking theological conversation.
Again, I was stunned that he had brilliant yet often straightforward answers to questions I had struggled with for months. As we were talking I started to feel that divine presence in a particularly strong fashion. After discussing the work of Martin Buber, a well known Jewish theologian I had been reading, I realized that even as I got tipsier (we now were into our dessert glass top-up) that in fact our conversation was remaining remarkably coherent. I also had a sense that as we were talking it was as if (not a hallucination in the proper sense but a vague yet tangible impression) that a beam of light was coming straight down onto him and then out through him onto me. Again, the impression just lasted a few seconds. “Very very strange.” I thought.
The part of the conversation that most impacted me was at one point he said, “Look, everything you know about the world scientifically you know because you have read it in a book or someone has told you it is so. Because it makes logical sense to you and you trust the source of the information, you believe it. But on some level you are taking it on faith.” I realized then that over two years of conversations with him what he said was logical and that I trusted his opinion. “Well then…in your opinion…is God real?” I asked. With a smile he answered, “Maybe.” Tossing me a small Gideon’s Bible he told me that all the theoretical stuff was fine and good, but that I should do the core reading.
A week later I was on the plane to Sri Lanka and reading the Bible (as discreetly as possible─ hidden behind other books or tucked deep into my lap) for the first time.
A few days after arriving I was walking around looking at some houses for rent when I passed a church with a big Alpha Course sign in front of it. Having heard about the course while in England, a few days later I stopped by and asked the priest if I could join. He said that actually they were already up to the fifth week of the twelve week program and that normally they take down the sign after the second week since they feel it is too late to join after that. However, this time around they for some reason forgot to do so. He decided to let me go ahead.
Walking into the first session the following week (with nervous backward glances to make sure no one I knew happened to be vacationing in Sri Lanka and walking by at that moment) the group started with some passionate worship music and singing which made me very uncomfortable. After breaking up into groups it became apparent that most everyone there was several decades older than me, had been Christians their whole lives, and had never struggled too much with the type of questions I had. However, they were incredibly nice and welcoming so despite my discomfort and occasional frustration, I stuck it out. Plus they provided free Sri Lankan dinners.
During the following weeks I continued to feel the divine presence in the world and continued to become increasingly torn with figuring out if God existed, even as I became more settled in the city, with my new job, and was starting to meet people. I also continued talking into the air asking that presence to make itself real to me if it really was God. In addition I continued to read the New Testament I had been given, which I found to be a series of short, repetitive, choppy stories all thrown together with little attention to flow or style.
At the end of March was the Holy Spirit Weekend retreat with Alpha Course. We went to a lodge on a lake a ways outside of the city and for the whole weekend I felt a terrible frustration trying to answer enough questions so that I logically could say “Because A and B, therefore God must exist.” My conversations in the groups did not help as we got stuck debating human origins and the literalness of the entire Bible, just a few of the things which made it impossible for me to believe.
Saturday evening the preacher on the video presentations used as the focus of the course (Nicky Gumbel, the vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton in London) was discussing how the Holy Spirit turns nominal Christians into Christians overflowing with God. However, he suggested that some people might not even feel like nominal Christians yet, so before asking them to invite the Holy Spirit into their lives he offered a basic conversion prayer. Feeling completely fed up with a weekend of agonizing mental struggle and prayer without any success, not to mention a month in Sri Lanka consumed with trying to reach God and really six months previous of constant theological questioning, I gave up.
I prayed to the best of my ability, “Okay God, I don’t know if you are real but I can not reach you intellectually. I give up. I am Jewish and I don’t really believe in Jesus, but if he is part of the equation then fine. But you are going to have to come to me.” I then went down to the lake by myself and looking out over the scene of villages surrounding the water and fisherman fishing on small wooden boats, all framed with lush vegetation at sunset, I again repeated that I had nothing left, that I could not make God make sense and was done trying. A few minutes later I felt a deep and tranquil peace, but having finally ended months of trying to work through my objections to believing in God, I figured that the feeling was merely some long overdue mental relaxation and relief.
Later that evening a rather loud preacher came in shouting about banishing demons from himself and people yelling, ‘Hallelujah!’ and ‘Amen!’ He then laid hands on people and everyone seemed to immediately fall backwards onto the ground and many started crying. When he prayed over me I felt nothing. As he kept on repeating it─ including blowing on my face─ I decided to just end the drama and fall to the ground also. Suffice to say I found the whole episode rather fake and a bit disconcerting, confirming my suspicions that Christianity was merely proof of the psychosomatic power of the imagination. Just as strange was that when the preacher had first walked in the room he came over to me, said, “Shalom.” and asked me if I was from Israel. I said no, I was Jewish, but I was American.
Sunday morning everyone was congratulating each other on a life changing weekend but I felt rather disappointed. We finished the weekend of activities with a little questionnaire which was supposed to identify our spiritual gifts. I ended up the only person getting ‘Stimulating the Faith of Others’. This made me even more depressed that the whole thing was ridiculous since how could I stimulate the faith of others if I didn’t have any faith myself? “This is truly absurd.” I thought.
We arrived back at our local church in the early evening and by the time I got home I was exhausted both mentally and emotionally. Really wanting nothing to do with thinking about God for the first time since I arrived in Sri Lanka, I just threw on a DVD of some Hollywood action movie and sat back to relax.
After a few minutes I suddenly felt that divine presence again though this time it was particularly strong. Despite feeling fed up with it all, I decided to once again get on my knees and pray for that presence, if it was God, to make itself real to me. Looking at the clock on my computer it was 6:26pm on March 26, 2006.
Kneeling down I closed my eyes to pray but then realized I felt quite hot. Looking down at the tiles on my bedroom floor which at that moment looked particularly nice and cool, I thought I would lie down. As I did, I felt myself shivering a bit and then started to breathe deeply. The shivering intensified along with my breathing until I found myself trembling so much that I was almost convulsing on the floor, “Now this is really weird, am I doing this myself?” I thought. I then felt an overwhelmingly intense physical force in the core of my body and started to breathe much harder, almost hyperventilating. As I exhaled it was almost as if I started mumbling. And then as the force I felt in my body became even more intense, that mumbling became words. But not English. Not any language I knew or had ever heard of.
After a few moments of desperately and insistently chanting what seemed to be repeated words, I felt that the feeling welling up inside of me was so intense that if it didn’t stop I would burst. Forcing myself up I said, “God, if this is you, then you have to stop, I can’t take this.” And instantaneously the feeling stopped. Sitting on my floor in a state numbed shock I thought, “Woah, I think I just spoke in tongues…that really just happened…which means…I think…that God exists. The God really actually exists.”
My first reaction was to go immediately to the church to talk to the priest. Leaving my house I kind of went into or realized I had gone into some type of altered state. My head felt perfectly clear, but suddenly things looked a bit different, and I felt incredibly different. Walking down my street I resisted the urge to run to the church so as to not make a scene. I reminded myself to smile at the soldiers on the corner and wave like I always did so they wouldn’t think anything strange was happening.
As I got to the church only the priest’s wife was there and as I walked in the door I blurted out, “I just talked in tongues and God is real!” “Praise the Lord.” she said, “We have all been praying for you so much.” As I managed to collapse into a chair I again was overwhelmed with a physical force and began trembling. But the feeling as before was wonderful. Despite having experimented with my share of drugs in college, I had never felt anything like this. It was the best feeling I had ever had. It was the most amazing feeling I ever could have. After some time of basking in the power of what I knew at that moment to be the living God, I decided I should go pray by myself. The priest’s wife showed me into a small guest room and shut the door. On the wall in the sparsely decorated room was a picture of Jesus. Looking at it I felt myself saying, “Jesus, if you had to die so I could feel this good, so I could have this experience with God, then…thank you.” I then let myself fall on the bed and felt myself starting to come to tears, overwhelmed by the realization that I did not deserve to feel this amazing, I did not deserve to have this transcendently sublime experience.
Looking around the room I saw lots of Christian literature, including some with Bible verses. At that moment I was struck by the knowledge─ not the thought, but much deeper and more immediate, really knowledge─ that it was all true.
I then spent the next few hours, still in this altered state of perceiving God, having dinner and talking with the priest (who had now returned home) and his family. However, they did not seem to fully appreciate the momentousness of what was happening to me. They seemed to not fully understand the shattering of my worldview that before I did not know God exists and suddenly…now I did. At about 9pm I excused myself to return home.
That night I could not sleep but was overwhelmed by joy─ a word used by C.S. Lewis to explain his conversion experience. At that moment it made perfect sense, he had felt this too. Even more than that, perhaps that one simple word is as close as the English language allows us to come in accurately communicating the incredible sensation of revelation.
Throughout the night I was filled with one epiphany after another. I also felt overwhelmingly Jewish, stunned that the God I had always pushed aside as an irrelevant part of my Jewish heritage was truly real. I sang the Sh’ma, I wanted to wrap myself in a tallis, I wanted so badly to be in a synagogue.
I also started reading some of the books on my bedside table. The first was an introductory book about Christianity by Paul E. Little. Going through it I was overwhelmed with the knowledge (again not the thought but knowledge) that the author of this book had experienced what I was now experiencing. I then picked up a copy of the Quran I had been given and reading it, had this same sense of knowledge that while it referred to the God I was feeling at that moment, that that God was in the book, while recognizable, somehow the description of God was significantly different from what I was experiencing. Finally picking up my copy of the New Testament (which coincidently I had finished reading that morning) the parts in the gospels where Jesus was speaking almost leapt off the page. As with the light I had ‘seen’ when talking to Gavin in England, it was not quite a real hallucination, but rather a deep impression. Going to the epistles I was again filled with an amazed knowledge that what they said was true and incredible, but was not quite as incredible as the gospels where Jesus was speaking. I also was filled with a sense of knowledge that they were written by someone in the same state I was in. Written while the author was experiencing what I was experiencing.
Later in the night I again picked up the bible I had been given and saying it, signed the conversion prayer in the back of the book, mistakenly dating it April 26th. I did manage to sleep an hour or two but woke up before sunrise. Still in this state of perceiving and feeling God, I went outside as the sun rose and looking around was overwhelmed by the fact that we lived in a world where God was real. I kept saying to myself, “God EXISTS. God IS.” It was like magic, what a stroke of luck! How incredible that a real God really was real! How much more amazing the world suddenly was! It was like living in a fairy tale, but it was true! Walking around the block it struck me that even the ancient Mayans who worshipped their local deities mostly had it right. They sensed and thought there was a Something. I thought there was nothing. They were right.
An hour later, now the morning of Monday March 27th, I got ready to go to work, still feeling like the barrier between the seen and the unseen had been folded back and the power and reality of God was beating down on me with incredible force. Arriving at work people kept asking me how my weekend was and deciding that it probably was not professionally acceptable to say, “Oh you know, pretty good, God revealed Himself to me. How about you?” I managed to get into my office as soon as possible and close the door. Sitting at my computer I still could hardly breathe, still filled with an overwhelming spiritual force and revelation. Needless to say, analyzing export data seemed at the moment to be a rather trivial task. I did manage to write the following email to Gavin and a few Christians friends,
Gavin, Lara, Phil, and Johanna,
Last night, while watching a movie after coming home from a slightly frustrating Alpha Course retreat, I felt that presence that I have been feeling the last weeks. As I have done a thousand times the last month I kneeled down to pray, to try to make that presence stronger and more clear. I then felt the urge to lie down on the cool tiles of my floor. I started to hyperventilate, really gasping for breath. As unbelievable as this sounds to me and perhaps to you, I started to convulse, was filled with what can only be described as the Holy Spirit, started speaking in tongues (sounded a bit like French), and God, a real live living God was revealed to me. I can't explain theologically why it is true, but I trust and feel that it is because of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ, that I have been awaken to the greatest epiphany the world has to offer. Today is my first day as a Christian. Amazing. Absolutely amazing.... Terrifying in its implications, nerve racking in what it will do to my existing relationships, but indescribably amazing.
I didn't really sleep last night as I was flooded with epiphanies, even now at work I am literally having a hard time breathing I am so overwhelmed by God.
I can not wait to move forward in God given fellowship with you all.
I am laughing that me, who this time yesterday was in his heart of hearts an atheist-leaning, agonostic Jew can say this, but God bless you.
Love,
Dan
Looking in the mirror of the office bathroom I noticed my eyes had a warm and glowing, soft and peaceful look to them, which was somehow familiar. I then remembered something that had happened in June 2004. On a train ride from Spain to Germany to start a month of travel with my Eurail pass that summer, I had a three hour layover in Paris. Deciding to make the most of it I set off for the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. Power walking through the museum following the signs to the famous smile, I passed an icon of what I assumed was Mary. Glancing at it I looked at her eyes in the painting and had a sudden burst of knowledge that that was what someone looks like when they are filled with God. Religious epiphanies not being on my tourist agenda, I raised my eyebrows at that incredibly strange thought and continued on to what would be an ultimately disappointing visit to the world’s most famous painting.
The look in my eyes that morning, was the same as the look I had seen in hers.
After a few hours, by about 11am I felt that I could not take it, I could not be at work and had to go talk to someone about this. Being as an old Anglo-Catholic church was directly across from my office I first went looking for a priest there. Walking in, I noticed all the crucifixes and statues and felt a deep sense of knowledge that whoever created all this had definitely experienced what I was experiencing at some distant point. It was a deep sense that the experience of the God I was encountering was at the core of all this and that the expression of faith represented by this church grew out of a collective experience of what I was feeling. However, I also sensed that the personal immediacy of the encounter I was in the midst of was made muted by time and the visual expression of God used in this church. The priest was out of town that day so I next went to a Methodist church down the road that I passed daily on the way to work.
Asked to sit in the anteroom, still trembling and feeling stunned by the presence of the living God, after quite some time out of the corner of my eye I saw an older white man walking over to me. I had a deep conviction and knowledge that he was there for me to talk to. It was an emotion unlike any I had ever had.
As he sat down he said, “How are you?” in a soft Irish accent. I looked at him and quite haltingly asked, “You aren’t by any chance a minister are you?” He responded that in fact he was an ordained minister but was now working as an aid worker in the east but was back in Colombo for a few days to renew his visa. “Why, what’s up?” he asked.
I then proceeded to tell him my whole story, saying. “Last week I was reading Bertrand Russell and thought he was pretty much correct! Do you know who he is?” “Yes I do.” said the minister. “But as you are now feeling, God is not a label we put on the mystery of the world, God is not an intellectual hypothesis, or a superstitious legend. God is real. But coming from a Jewish atheist background this must be rather traumatic for you.”
It is hard to express, but somehow, those were exactly the words that I needed to hear. He understood.
I returned to work and by about 2pm or 3pm in the afternoon, some 20 hours after it had begun, the sensation that I was directly experiencing and perceiving God had faded away. I called up a couple I had met the previous week at church (having very randomly woken up quite early that Sunday and just as randomly decided to go to church.) That evening, feeling suddenly terrified that the feeling was gone and that I would never experience it again, they prayed for me, and sinking back into their sofa I felt the deepest sense of tranquility one could imagine.
The next day the questions started. “WHAT just happened to me?” My first thought was that I had perhaps experienced a rather intense psychotic episode. However, having unfortunately seen people firsthand in the midst of psychotic episodes, I felt my experience was very different. First, psychosis overwhelms and disorients those experiencing it. The trauma is they are not aware that they are acting psychotically. In my case even as I was speaking in tongues I was able to step outside of the experience and say, “Woah, I am speaking in tongues.” I was able to walk outside and decide not to run since that would make the soldiers on the corner think something was wrong and I was able to talk to people at work without revealing what I was experiencing. Therefore, I was able to judge how my actions would appear to others and adjust myself accordingly. This does not seem like reasoning ability someone in a psychotic episode would have. Psychosis is also negative. It dehumanizes and harms the person suffering from it. My experience was overwhelmingly positive. At the same time it was not a manic episode associated with bipolar disorder because I did not feel like I was God, and despite the overwhelming joy I felt, was rather humbled. Neither was it a depressive episode as the experience was pleasurable in a way I had never before imagined possible. Lastly, I did not feel out of control at all. I was able to make the force inside of me stop by simply asking it to. It therefore seemed unlikely that what I had gone through was a psychotic episode.
I next wondered if I had ingested something or had some wild drug flashback. However, I did not eat anything out of the ordinary that day and again, having tried a variety of drugs in my past, realized that this was a wholly different feeling. Also there was no hangover of any sort the next day. No moldy rye bread explanation seemed to make sense either.
It then struck me that the experience happened at the first moment in months that I was not thinking about religion at all, so it could not have been some kind of mental state I worked myself into. Furthermore, the experience did not start the Saturday night when everyone else was falling on the ground and crying─ and mine was a very different experience to what I saw─ so it was not some religious frenzy, power of suggestion, imitation or herd behavior that led me to it. I was left with no other logical explanation but that what I had experienced was what I had originally felt it was. God. In fact it was the perfect experience to convince me that God existed.
Had I had that experience while in New Jersey I would have had no one to talk to since all my friends and family there were Jews and/or atheists. Had it happened when I first got to Sri Lanka it would have made settling in impossible and I would still have had no one to turn to, in order to help make sense of the experience. Had it happened during the weekend retreat I would have wondered if it was just my mind playing tricks on me.
It did happen at the first possible moment that it would be a wholly positive and perfectly convincing experience to me. It honestly seemed and still does seem, as if someone with knowledge of what I was going to be doing in the future… had planned it.
For the next month however I was wracked with confusion about my self-identity. Overwhelmingly my experience was about the revelation of the real God. So was I merely a Theist? However, there was all the stuff about talking in tongues and seeing the picture of Jesus on the wall, and reading the New Testament and knowing it was true. So was I Christian? At the same time I had had an incredible sense of being deeply and truly Jewish, and still did not understand a lot of Christian doctrine or feel particularly on the same page with lots of Christians I knew (or knew about). So was I Jewish?
All through April I really struggled with this question, at some point realizing that I had signed the conversion prayer in the bible I had been given April 26, 2006 when in reality the experience had started March 26, 2006.
The final day of Alpha Course was Monday April 24th when they announced that the head of Alpha in Sri Lanka would come and speak that Wednesday. It did cross my mind that that would be the 26th and I wondered if anything would happen then.
The next day there was a bomb attack on a senior officer in the army, so on Wednesday morning I decided that perhaps it was a good time to go register with the embassy! Walking towards the embassy which happens to be just next to the Methodist church, I suddenly started thinking about the C.S. Lewis argument that Jesus, if he existed, was either a liar for saying he was God if he knew he wasn’t; a lunatic if he said he was God and thought he was but in reality was not; or he was just what he said (or rather showed and implied) he was, God incarnate. It seemed to me unlikely that Christianity would start and spread so quickly with no basis whatsoever and that even as a Jew I had always been taught that Jesus was a real person. Then assuming that anything at all in the New Testament was accurate, it seemed unlikely that Jesus or his disciples making up a legend about him would be willing to die for what they knew to be a lie. It did seem that Jesus sounded like a lunatic for claiming to be God (after all that would be our response if someone today made that claim) but then what was it that made people believe him? Having read the book of Acts the day before, I realized that it was because they had had experiences similar to mine. So, as incredible as it sounded, logically, perhaps Jesus was God incarnate after all.
Pondering this for the rest of the afternoon, I headed over to my church after work, not being able to remember if the speaker was at 6pm or 6:30pm. As the speaker was to start at 6:30pm I went into the chapel and picked up a copy of the Bible, still feeling overwhelmed by how big it was and how much I had to go through. I flipped through until I got to Isaiah, which I somewhat had skimmed before having heard it contained many messianic prophecies (especially Isaiah 53).
Reading through it with attention this time, I kept seeing passages that sounded exactly like they referred to Jesus or that they could have been part of the New Testament describing Christian theology. However, this was not the New Testament but a Jewish book recognized by Jews as part of the Jewish Scriptures. Eventually I got to Isaiah chapter 49 verse 6 which reads,
“It
is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes
of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may
bring
salvation to the ends of the earth.”
At that moment it became clear to me that I did not have to choose between being Jewish or becoming Christian, but that they were two parts of the same story. Christianity was not the polar opposite ‘other’ from the Judaism that I now loved more than any other point in my life, but rather the natural extension of it. Realizing that it was almost time for the speaker to start, I put down the bible and started walking towards the exit of the chapel. I then stopped and turning to the front of the chapel, looked at the cross and said, “God, I know you exist because I have felt you. I guess now for the first time I understand that you really were Jesus and that this whole story is true. I recognize that I have not known you for the last 26 years, but if it is okay with you, I would like to start again. I would like to start afresh.” I then turned and headed for the exit, looking at my watch to see if I was late. The time was 6:26pm on April 26, 2006. Shaking my head and with an amazed smile, I realized that it was a month to the minute that my conversion experience had started. On the very day that I had ‘mistakenly’ dated the conversion prayer in my bible a month before─ I actually said that prayer in earnest for the first time.
More
Confirmation and Formation
An experience which happened in the first week of June deeply confirmed my new faith. I was lying in bed one night reading The Story We Find Ourselves In by Brian McLaren. I was reading his beautiful discussion of God’s work at the moment of Creation when I suddenly felt and remembered the sensation I had during my experience on March 26 (which some weeks after it happened I found out was a quintessential experience of what Christians call being ‘baptized with the Holy Spirit’.) It was a sensation and deep impression of perceiving God as an absolutely overwhelming and sizzling, black, dense cloud. Not only that, but at that moment all the doubts I had about doctrine and identity─ even the concept of religion and different religions─ seemed to fade away, and the only thing that mattered was that God exists, and that we exist in relation to God. I leaned over and wrote on a scrap of paper, “God IS”. The impression lasted just a few seconds. I then realized that not only had I felt this same sensation and impression of God on March 26, but it was the same as the impression of God I had in my dream the night before having lunch with Gavin in February.
Several weeks later on June 26th, I was reading the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) for the first time and got to the description of the revelation at Mount Sinai in the book of Exodus. A few moments after reading the passage I wrote an email to some friends describing what had just happened. I started off by quoting an email I had written
earlier in the month just after reading the McLaren book. The quote from that email was:
“And then I did meet God…and my intuition of God was exactly that of my dream. God as a black (perhaps colorless is a better word) cloud (though without clear borders, maybe infinite cloud) of amazingly dense, sizzling energy. Conscience energy.”
I then added in what I had just read in Exodus, writing:
“From Exodus which I read today.
Verse 9. "Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after."
Verse 16,17. "On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled. 17Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God."
As God revealed himself to the Jewish people so did he reveal himself to this Jew (I later also read 1 Kings 8:12.). The God I had perceived was quintessentially Jewish.
Realizing this, the next day I was feeling particularly stressed about believing in Jesus─ being a Christian─ and really prayed to God for some confirmation that Jesus was in fact the Jewish messiah. During the middle of the night (around 3am the morning of June 28th) I woke up and as I did, it was almost as if I was saying out loud to myself, “Ephraim says, don’t fear of me, for you have awaken to the glory of the Lord.”
Thinking it must be some Bible verse I went back to sleep. The next day however I could not find any verse even similar to that. For about a week and a half I wondered what had happened, and then on July 5th I was reading an article by Larry Brandt on the Jews for Jesus website about the Old Testament background to the doctrine of the Second Coming. He discussed how traditionally there are two biblical descriptions or literary pictures of what the messiah will be like, one suffering and one victorious. The victorious messiah (the one Jews were and are awaiting) is called in Hebrew, Messiah ben David. The suffering messiah─ or the suffering version of the messiah─ the one that Christians claim Jesus of Nazareth to be, is sometimes called Messiah ben Ephraim. In this context, the sentence I found myself hearing or speaking, “Ephraim says, don’t fear of me, for you have awaken to the glory of the Lord” was the Jewish name for the Jewish suffering messiah. This Ephraim was speaking in the present tense, using a name which reassured me of the Jewishness and messianic identity of Jesus, as well as addressing my fear of Jesus as a 'stumbling block' for me on my spiritual journey. It was truly an (immediately) answered prayer.
On July 17th I went to another Alpha Course session I was helping with at a different church, this one with updated videos from the Alpha Course I had participated in. During the video presentation, the speaker read a letter from a woman saying, “Although I always thought of myself as a thinking kind of person, on the Holy Spirit weekend I was overwhelmed with a physical experience of the Holy Spirit that I didn’t think could exist. During the experience, although I didn’t initially enjoy them, I had one of the worship songs we had been singing running continuously through my mind.”
Funny enough, I too considered myself to be a thinking person and a skeptic until I had an overwhelming and undeniable physical experience of the Holy Spirit. Like the woman in the letter, I was not a fan of the worship songs either─ yet had one coursing through my mind throughout my experience. Someone else on the other side of the world at another time and place had experienced exactly what I had. It was incredibly confirming. After all, how many people go insane in an identical manner?
On July 23rd, at a helpers’ meeting preparing for the Alpha Course session the following day, I was told about ‘words of wisdom’ for the first time. They were defined as, “a picture, impression, or words formed at the tip of your tongue.” I realized that I had had pictures (of the beach and eternity as well as of God as a thick dense cloud), impressions (of a beam of light when talking to the chaplain as well as the name of Jesus leaping off the page of the Bible), and words formed at the tip of my tongue (Ephraim says…) All these experiences I had had in the weeks and months before first hearing about words of wisdom, yet far from being random signs of mental illness, these seemingly supernatural experiences were quintessentially Christian.
At the session the following day one of the participants on the course invited me to attend his Assemblies of God church that weekend. Having settled into my Anglican church after quite a few weeks of trying different churches, I thought it might be interesting to again explore another denomination. Arriving at the church on Sunday, July 28th, it turned out that the congregation was having its monthly healing service. After a lengthy bout of very enthusiastic worship music (I was still holding on to my disdain for it) the worship leader invited people up to be prayed for by a prayer team lead by a visiting preacher. It turned out the preacher was the same preacher who had been at the Alpha Course weekend I had attended in March. When I got to the front I was somewhat relieved that it was another person who prayed with me, as I was still feeling a bit annoyed at the preacher for blowing on my face, trying to push me over, and generally freaking me out that evening of the retreat some months before. After being prayed for, I then decided that I wanted to say hello to the preacher just to tell him that I had come to faith.
Walking over to him he was surrounded by a large group of people he was praying for but we made eye contact and he very happily said that he remembered me and wanted to pray for me. “Oh okay, why not.” I thought. Unfortunately, I was not the only one he wanted to pray for so I had to wait for almost 20 minutes for him to get up to me. He started by putting his hands on my shoulders then after a moment moved one hand down and put it firmly on my abdomen. After the prayer I walked away wondering why he had done that. I had had a queasy stomach when I arrived at church due to a fun night out the previous evening (Sunday mornings have the unfortunate habit of coming directly after Saturday nights) but I had not mentioned it to him and did not think I had made any physical indications that my stomach was hurting. It then occurred to me that my stomach actually felt much better. Still not so sure about all this talk of miraculous healings, I concluded that really there are only so many places to put your hands when praying for someone (head, shoulders, arms, chest, stomach) so that his choice of my stomach must have been random and the change in my stomach condition was probably just from having had a few more hours in the morning for my hangover to wear off.
A week or so later at work I had a piece of birthday cake with icing on it but after eating it my stomach felt fine. This was strange because I had suffered from a life long and rather severe lactose intolerance (though due to the difficulty of avoiding dairy all together I often ate small amounts of milk products and just dealt with the discomfort which followed.) In the following weeks I kept noticing that when I would eat things with a bit of dairy such as bread with bits of cheese baked on top, a piece of milk chocolate, Indian curry with a cream base, my stomach would feel almost completely fine afterwards. Over the next weeks I began testing the situation by eating slightly more milk chocolate, having a slice of pizza, eating a small bowl of ice cream, etc. I then on a few occasions had several slices of pizza or a large helping of cheese curry, followed by a massive bowl of ice cream or some other creamy dessert. Still, essentially no stomach problem whatsoever (beyond that which accompanies stuffing yourself with pizza, cream sauce, and mass amounts of dessert.) Writing this in late November, almost four months later and still being able to eat large quantities of dairy with no problem, I have to conclude that my lactose intolerance really has disappeared.
But why did it disappear? Being as I was lactose intolerant from birth, through puberty, adolescence, university and beyond, I do not think any physiological change occurred which could have played a role. Having spent several months in Sri Lanka previously eating the local food and still being lactose intolerant I have no reason to think that Sri Lankan dairy is somehow lactose free or interacts with my digestive system differently than food anywhere else. While I do not know for sure that I was healed by God, this sudden medical change did occur immediately after I was prayed over at what was billed as a healing service. Was it the placebo effect? Arguably, but the fact of the matter is the placebo effect works when you believe you will be healed of something. In my case I was skeptical of the service to begin with, I was skeptical of the service after I was prayed for, and my only thought was that perhaps it was my upset stomach due to a hangover which might be cured. It never crossed my mind that my lactose intolerance would be cured until I started to notice that it actually was.
After all these events, months of conversations, reflection, reading and studying, I decided that the best explanation for all I had experienced and for the start and continuation of the Christian faith, as well as for the existence and content of the New Testament, is that God exists and this Christian story about God is true. I decided to get baptized into the Anglican church on September 7th, 2006.
Given leeway by
my very kind priest to personalize the
baptismal liturgy, I was able to put together a very meaningful service
reflecting my path to faith and Jewish identity. Using
the Anglican baptismal liturgy as a guide, I chose readings
which had been very influential in my journey to faith.
However, the liturgy also called for a psalm
to be read at one point during the service.
As of the night before the baptism, I had yet to pick one that I
felt
really had meaning for me. With these
thoughts on the back of my mind, on the night of September 6th
at my
weekly Bible study my friend Dorothy suggested we try to doing ‘lectio
divina’. This devotional exercise was
completely new to me. Meaning
‘spiritual reading’ the practice derives from a form of ancient
monastic
worship and spiritual reflection. The
method is to repeat a small verse of Scripture, meditating on it and
listening
for God to speak to you through it. Before starting, I suggested
we ask
God if he had a particular verse for us to study. After
a few moments of prayer Dorothy said that Psalm 16 had come
to her mind. Reading it through, every verse spoke
to me about my experiences and my thoughts. It summed up my path
to faith
and feelings at that exact moment. It
was perfect.
During the quiet repetitive
reading, I also had an image come to mind of being in a small boat with
lots of
short ropes holding the boat close to the dock. I
felt at that moment that throughout my experiences I had tried
so hard to remain objective and critical in everything, so scared was I
of
drifting into superstitions or platitudes about God.
In doing so however, I had not really let myself set sail so to
speak. I then had a picture of just
cutting the ropes and letting the boat go free. In
my mind’s eye I saw myself sailing on a wonderfully smooth and
clear ocean with Jesus holding the rudder, a huge bright sun watching
overhead,
and a special wind filling the sails. I
felt that it was God saying to me, “Let go, don’t fight this, don’t be
afraid,
trust me, and let this voyage begin.”
The next day I was baptized.
On October 12th I ran
across a sermon by Gavin which had been posted online.
In it, he described life in God’s kingdom as
us putting up our sails at the beginning of each day and giving God
permission
to push and direct us as he desires. My
mental image involving the boat happened the night before my baptism
(which
symbolized my entry into God's kingdom) and weeks before I heard Gavin
(of all
people!) use a practically identical metaphor to describe life in God’s
kingdom. While perhaps it was a
coincidence, it was just the type of thing God would want me to know at
just
that moment, and confirming it in a way which resonated with me
personally. As God first used Gavin to open the doors to a life
with God
for me, so it seems God used him to confirm that it was right and it
was good,
as I officially walked through those doors.
During my walk (probably closer to a stumble) to and with God, I have slowly learned that speaking in tongues as well as ‘charismatic’ experiences overall are a bit of a sensitive topic. However, speaking in tongues is mostly something that I choose to do or not. But every once in a while─ and it has only been a handful of times─ it just happens when in prayer, it just pours out. It just flows from my mouth.
On September 8th, the morning after my baptism, as I woke up I knelt beside my bed to pray and said, “Well Jesus, here I am, right or wrong I have thrown my lot in to follow you. So I guess it is your turn now." Just at that moment, I had that little full body shudder that has become more and more familiar, and I started praying from my soul.
Epilogue
In the last few weeks since my baptism I have fully realized that the dream I had in February before meeting the university chaplain in England perfectly foreshadowed my spiritual journey. As in the dream, first I could kind of feel God, what I called a 'divine presence' in the months before and first month in Sri Lanka, but only if I tried. I could make believing in God make a bit of sense, but only with lots of mental gymnastics. This was the hesitant and tenuous flying. During that same phase I was reading lots of books (highway signs) trying to find my way, though with little success, and was writing to my friend I had discussed God and eternity with. But in real life as in the dream, he never wrote back, he truly was silent. After some time I gave in and tried to follow the advice of Christians I knew (the police) who were encouraging me to follow God in a very specific and certain way. But even then I could still only feel God (fly) with much effort.
Then I did meet God. As in the dream as well as my feeling when reading The Story We Find Ourselves In, my perception was of God as a dense cloud.
After that encounter I did feel that I could fly spiritually, but as in the dream not in some wild over the top way, but just skimming the earth. Slightly above it but part of it. I realized the 'bends' in the tunnel in the dream were my objections and confusions about religion. Even though they were still there, now that I had met God, I could move around them without stopping flying. This is true in my life as well. Knowing God now has not meant that I have no theological questions or confusions, arguably the reverse, but I now can deal with them immeasurably better than I could before.
As for the ice floor of the tunnel in my dream, for a long time I was very unsure of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. One day however, I read a metaphor about the Trinity that as water, ice, and steam are all one collection of molecules of H2O, so is the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit all one God. As with H2O, I always think of ice as solidified water and steam as gaseous water, not water as liquid steam, thought that also is accurate. Similarly, I think of God as the Father as the 'main' form of God and Jesus as the solid form of God the Father and therefore ice and the Holy Spirit as the more vapory form of God the Father and therefore steam. So maybe this was foreshadowing how the Trinity would start to make sense to me as well as to show that it was by skimming on the supportive surface of the ice─ the solid form of God, Jesus─ that I could fly. While this metaphor does not do real theological justice to the doctrine of the Trinity I found it a helpful simplification and window to start to glimpse the depth of the nature of God.
Then with the bright movie poster filled room where I started zipping around after emerging from the dark tunnels, I realized that after my baptism (which signifies raising from the water ‘born again’ to a new life and light in Christ) that my core doubts about the existence of God and the importance of Jesus as the Jewish messiah really have faded away and I sense the presence of God almost continually. At the conclusion of my baptism service I received many congratulations and kept being told “Welcome into the family of God.” This reflects the part of my dream where I was being congratulated on becoming one of them, on becoming ‘a flyer’.
As for the movie posters, I was first filled with the Holy Spirit while watching a movie on my computer, and a few months earlier when still in the U.S. I was walking through the lobby of a movie theater (watching the Chronicles of Narnia) when I felt that pressure on my shoulders and had my first burst of knowledge that God exists. So the room lined with movie posters fit with my experience as well.
As for the next scene of walking onto a stage in dazzling sunlight, surrounded by cheering people dressed in shimmering white? Well, I am not there yet, but God willing one day I will be…
As Peter says in chapter 1, verse 16 of his second letter, “We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” As strange as it seems to this lifelong atheist Jew to say, the writer of 1 John 1:3 sums it up perfectly when they say, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus [the Messiah]. We write this to make our joy complete.”
