In one of my hopeless arguments about religion with an atheist friend, when I cite this experience as part of my explanation of being a Christian, he asks in frustration, "You mean that has primacy?" I've never heard that term before, but I get the gist and answer yes. Later in the year of that childhood experience I buy at the neighborhood dime store a framed picture of Jesus as a boy which is on the bureau of my bedroom today, the only possession I have from my childhood. In more than a half century of moves and travels all over the country and the world, I have lost or misplaced or given or thrown away everything else. Yes. It has primacy.

My parents have me baptized in the Presbyterian Church, and as a preschool child I enjoy and am moved by the Sunday school teaching of the minister's wife, round and apple-cheeked Amy Franz, who becomes a treasured friend and wise counselor of our family, and whose spirit still feels close to me. My religious feelings really catch fire, though, when a friend from my grade school and Cub Scout den invites me to go to a Bible class with him at a Baptist church, taught by a lively young minister and his wife who have come north from preaching in Kentucky, in the hills. They are both tall and bony and angular, and filled with a love of God and of Jesus that brightens and animates them. They convey their faith through stories they act out and illustrate, like Moses drawing water from a rock, which is represented by a brown paper bag tied over a drinking fountain that spouts a jet of water through the bag ("rock") at the crucial moment. We sing stirring hymns like "Throw out the lifeline, someone is drifting away" and gesture with our arms, tossing imaginary lifesavers to the spiritually drowning. At the end of the course I go forward with others who are so moved to proclaim my commitment to Jesus.

One can speculate that my experience of light was "caused" by the influence of the Bible school, yet I know of no others who had such an episode. It is not anything I invoke or try to create but is as totally surprising as it is awesome. I don't tell anyone about it at the time, and a few years later when I try to describe it to a friend in my grade school class, I can see he doesn't get it and finds it pretty weird, though he doesn't try to make fun of me about it (I pick him because I know he isn't that kind of guy). I don't tell anyone else and later I worry it's a sign of being crazy, so I just forget about it.

I'm amazed and relieved when in college I read about this phenomenon in [William James'] Varieties of Religious Experience and learn there is even a psychological name for it: "photism." James writes that this kind of experience "possibly deserves special notice on account of its frequency. . . . St. Paul's blinding heavenly vision seems to have been a phenomenon of this sort; so does Constantine's cross in the sky."

Nor is experience of "the light" limited to Christianity; it has come to people on all the great religious paths, and sometimes brought people with no religious faith to a spiritual transformation and a new life centered on God. One of the most famous examples is that of Bill Wilson, a drunkard who in 1936 fell to his knees in prayer, asking God to reveal himself if he really existed, and at that moment the room filled with a great white light. It brought with it "ecstasy" and "peace," as Wilson lost the urge to drink and with a doctor friend founded Alcoholics Anonymous, the model of all the life-saving twelve-step programs based on a surrender to a Higher Power.

In his book on religious experience, James devotes a whole section to what he calls "the reality of the unseen," observing that "the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally . . . may be present to our sense, or they may be present only to our thought. In either case they elicit from us a reaction, and the reaction due to things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may even be stronger." As James puts this concept another way, "God is real since He produces real effects."

What I learn again and again from my own experience and that of other seekers and believers is best summed up by the words of a man as humble and undogmatic as William James, the Benedictine Father Nicholas Morcone, abbot of Glastonbury Abbey. In a homily there one morning he speaks of his confusion after reading and rereading both the Old Testament lesson and the New Testament lesson in the lectionary that day, for the different views of God each presents are hard to reconcile. He admits he has been confused before by conflicting images of God he finds in the Bible and decides that "we must take God as he comes to each of us."

I accept however God comes to any sincere seeker, whether Christian or Jew, Muslim or Buddhist, Quaker or Shaker or Sikh. I also accept whatever form God assumes in the mind and heart of believers, whether it is masculine or feminine or simply a "Cloud of Unknowing." It's easy for me to think of God as she, since I grew up with a mother who loved me and tried to provide me with everything I wanted. When I think of a stern God I think of a he, like my father, who also loved me but expressed it with rules and sometimes punishments (though more often threats of them) that I sometimes didn't understand but tried to accept as they were given, "for my own good."

Most often I think of God as Spirit, that Cloud of Unknowing, the ineffable divine mystery from which we come and to which we go. I also honor those seekers whose doubts may preclude a Deity, who look to what they conceive as a Higher Power; and those who are simply still looking, engaged in a quest, the great search for meaning that begins at the beginning and continues to the end, if end there be.




Copyright © 1999 by Dan Wakefield

From How Do We Know When It's God? by Dan Wakefield (Boston: Little, Brown, Inc., 1999).. Used by arrangement with Little, Brown, Inc.