THE SPRITUAL JOURNEY

I HAVE 'FIRED' GOD TWICE in my life.
The first time came at the end of the week in which my sister died. She was active, beautiful, talented, a great tennis player, an excellent pianist, she loved motor bikes, and she was a lot of fun. None of this stopped her catching the most virulent strain of poliomyelitis. I said goodbye to her as she was taken out to the ambulance and did not see again. I prayed all the week that she would get better but on the following Saturday we got word from the hospital that she had died. She was 19; I was four years younger. God got fired.

Motor bikes got me going to the local Methodist church. I was still too young to ride but lots of the church crowd had bikes. In a year or two, religious belief had its hold on me, this time it was 'you must be born again' Protestantism (vs. the nominal Catholicism of my younger days). Caught up in this enthusiasm, I think I became something of a pain in the neck (standing on street corners, giving my 'testimony', handing out tracts, asking if you had found Jesus, and the like). During my first year at Uni, I became convinced that God was calling me to become a minister. In 1958, at age 20, I entered into a four year theological course to become a Baptist minister. It was good work and I am very glad that I followed this course.

However, while studying theology, I also took courses in history and philosophy at Adelaide University. I was fortunate indeed to have excellent teachers in both disciplines. Theology is a form of history. My studies of the Lutheran reformation and the writings of Luther, for instance, were at a much greater depth and far more critical that similar courses at the theological college. On the other hand, my theology teachers guided me to a far more objective and critical appreciate of the scriptures than I had at the outset. These studies sowed seeds that took some while to germinate and grow, but grow they did.

As they did so, I had more and more difficulty maintaining the duality (body and spirit; heaven and earth, life and life-after-death) implicit in the Christian view of the world. I might also add that I had kept up my interest in physics, organic chemistry, and biology which I had studied at the undergraduate level.

Then, on Christmas Night of 1967, my father collapsed with a ruptured aortic aneurism and, despite a successful repair of the vessel, fell into a coma for several weeks. A few weeks after emerging from the coma, he suffered a pulmonary embolism and died. It was a Sunday morning but I preached no sermon that day.

I got to the hospital a little more than half an hour after he died. As I looked at his form in death, I quite clearly saw that all any of us have is just one life.

God got sacked a second time. This time not due to disappointment in his failure to answer prayer (I had never prayed for my father’s recovery, being content to do all I could for him and to see how it all would turn out). Rather, his death affirmed for me the correctness of the process of critical examination of faith and increasing skepticism I had been experiencing.

Now I am sacking God a third time. More of that next posting..