The Journey Toward God

In 1977, I had a profound and unexpected conversion experience, which I have written about previously, in which I was "baptized in the Holy Spirit" after being prayed over in the hospital.  

Initially, I connected the event with a temporary phenomenon, perhaps an emotional experience, which would eventually disappear. Instinctively, I knew that there was no power within my own nature that could continue this newfound awakening of my spirit towards God.  Within a few weeks, I expressed my fear to my doctor, who had first prayed for me for the baptism of the Holy Spirit.  He laughed and said that he also had experienced the "baptism" some 14 years previously, and that it does not go away, but only gets better over time.    You do not have the Holy Spirit, he said to me; He has you, and He is not letting go.  If you leave Him at the corner, He does not wait until you come back.  He goes right around the corner with you and keeps guiding you in the right path.

My experience with the Holy Spirit was a "moment" in time that I can look back on now, some 44 years later.  As I began to grow in the Spirit with the help of friends and a supportive community, I asked a few times at first:  Is this real, or are we imagining things?  I did not want to be caught up in an emotional experience fed by others who were also deluded -- sort of like a Jim Jones cult.  Once, in prayer, I even told the Lord that I did not want to imagine that He was guiding me if this was all my imagination.  "Did you imagine things like this before the baptism?" the Voice inside said to me.  I had to admit that my imagination before this experience was practically dead to the things to God, while very alive and active toward fear and anxiety about the world around me.  Now, the things I was "imagining" brought me joy and confidence instead of worry.

During the past two years in our parish, as we began studying Alan Schreck's book, Your Life in the Holy Spirit,  I have watched at least three men in the parish also go through a kind of awakening to the action of the Holy Spirit in their lives.  For them, there has been no "moment" of conversion, but rather a gradual movement that has been more like a pilot light softly moving into flame.  As we studied and discussed each chapter week after week, one of the men described what was happening to him as "shifting from first into second gear."  Far from an emotional experience, these men have softly and gradually begun to become active in parish activities, reaching out to others, and leading discussion groups, taking leadership roles and emerging from the pews.  Anyone watching from a distance as I have been doing can see that something has happened in these men.  They are more attentive to the spiritual life in themselves and in others.  They are no longer afraid to talk about their faith, and they are considering ways to bring other men into the kind of experience they have had.

Yesterday, I started reading an anthology of great spiritual writers -- Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox.  The book is called The Journey Toward God, edited by Benedict Groeschel.  In his introduction, Groeschel writes:

Conversion, or metanoia, as the Greek New Testament refers to it, is the first real experience of the Christian spiritual life.  For some who have grown up in a devout home and have never deviated much from Christ's teaching, conversion takes on more the aspect of an awakening, like the call of Nathanael, who was asleep under a tree and whom our Lord called a man without guile.  Others, who have never really been active disciples even though they were baptized, or who have simply had no relation to the Gospel at all and are unbaptized, may experience a conversion that affects every level of their lives.  If their conversion is authentically spiritual, it will be experiential (affecting how they perceive things), theological (affecting what they believe), moral (affecting what they do), and even emotional (affecting what they feel).  In the beginning of a conversion, the emotional and spiritual are so close to each other that they are experienced as the same thing.  In time a wise person will come to see that they are not identical at all.

Why do I believe in the Holy Spirit?  I have seen Him, so to speak, living and acting in myself and in others for 44 years now, gradually changing people, including myself, in mysterious ways, and drawing them deeper and deeper into a relationship with God and with other people.  Some things just cannot be denied!