-C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
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God lives, and He loves me.
I have struggled in my relationship with God for what seems like forever, but in reality is only a few short years. It had started with a moral disagreement with the church I grew up in, but evolved into a "logical" inability to accept a higher being on the grounds of something so inadequate as "faith."
I tricked myself into thinking that inquiry for inquiry's sake was a virtue. That to accept such supernatural and seemingly irrational theories as the existence of God was pure folly. I prided myself in my so-called "humility" that allowed me to end every theological argument by throwing my hands up in the air and quoting the eternal words of Socrates, "If I know one thing, it is that I know nothing."
Nevertheless, despite my firmly held non-faith, I used terminology and held certain beliefs that betrayed my deep desire to believe again. I intensely studied the religions of the world and the philosophies of man. I became obsessed with the pursuit of Joy, which I came to define as a sort of Eternal Happiness. I glorified the Eternal Nature of Love as the one Eternal Truth that existed far before we were born and will continue to exist far after we are dead. I bastardized the name of God into becoming a sterile, empty term that meant something along the lines of Everything and Nothing At All. I searched for, and found, mystical experience. I enjoyed a certain perverse pride in my ability to attribute the fruits of those experiences to my self-created concept of God, Everything and Nothing At All.
In short, I made for a terrible atheist.
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I now see the guiding hand of God (in the literal, Christian sense of the term) in guiding me along this entire path. After disillusionment with my childhood faith, I suffered a kind of first death. The concept of God was shattered in my mind, and I could not, in that state, return to Him with the childlike faith I used to own.
I went through a long period of that sleep called spiritual death. I had a chaotic couple of years, experiencing brief moments of extreme spiritual ecstasy and insight amongst a mostly troubled day-to-day darkness and uncertainty. This period is evidenced most strongly through this blog. I look back and chuckle at some of the things I have written here. I feel a sense of pity for that young man, searching but never finding, thinking his way into convoluted, mystical beliefs, struggling for truth but inherently unable to take anything for granted.
One redeeming trait my old self carried always was his determination to find Joy. That Joy was something attainable seems to be my only truly held belief. God understood this, and so He presented me with a series of people, books, and experiences that kept pushing me in the right direction. He was patient and loving and did not demand my immediate return to Him.
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Apparently at some point during this turbulent time, I had told my friend this statement: "There is no beginning or end to your relationship with God. There is only the moment of realization that you are in it already." I must have gotten that idea from somewhere else because I said that when I was pretty firmly non-theistic. It now serves as a sort of prophecy for where I am now.
My moment of realization came a few weeks back, right before I travelled to Hawaii to spend an amazing week with family and friends. I was sitting outside on the back porch, reading a book on Emotional Intelligence. I had just finished a chapter and was enjoying the sights and sounds of the small oasis of beauty my parents have cultivated behind our house. Out of nowhere, a feeling came to me that said, "It's ok, God is real. You can accept Him now. You don't have to be scared anymore."
I say it was a feeling, and not a thought, because it affected my soul and not my mind. I could do nothing but accept it. It was not a choice, yet it was not something forced upon me. It just was. And it brought tears of unexplainable joy to my eyes. I felt free for the first time in a long while.
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In Hawaii, I experienced God's love in very subtle ways. I appreciated the beauty of His world in a way I never experienced before. The joy I felt while hiking and exploring the island with my good friends and family was overwhelming. It was different in that I could now look out on a beautiful horizon and feel the love of God made manifest in His creation. Before I would appreciate the beauty, but be confused about to where I should attribute its goodness. The same applies to my relationships with my family and friends. They now have a flavor of the Divine in them. I am able to love more fully and sincerely through God.
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I could write down every detail and describe every person, event, and book that were essential to my path back to God, but I will end this short summary with the finishing blow to my non-theism that came just yesterday. I was reading C.S. Lewis's own account of his conversion from atheism to Christianity, aptly entitled "Surprised by Joy."
Lewis went through many of the same intellectual struggles I went through in his path to God. He too was caught up in the hyper rationalism that prevented him from taking that leap of faith. He too was, despite it all, motivated by the pursuit of Joy. He too was dragged kicking and screaming to the seat of Heaven.
While reading Lewis's account of his conversion, I was suddenly and unexplainably overtaken by those same thoughts and feelings that I had experienced so long ago as a high schooler kneeling in prayer. I ugly cried. God told me that He lives, and that He loves me.
They say that man cannot survive looking into the face of God. I'm not sure about that, but I know that I felt an almost physical pain overcome me in that spiritual moment. It felt like a violent cleansing of all the doubt, pain, and anxiety that I had built up over my period of spiritual death. A baptism of fire, so to speak. And after all that, I was reborn. I am surprised by God. I am surprised by Joy. I am now free.
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God is the source of Joy and Love.
God lives, and He loves me.
