Sunday, Continuing One Woman's Journey From Atheism To Faith

GROUNDBREAKING

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
---W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

HOW COULD I EVER HEAR THE GOOD NEWS? The Word was necessary, but so too was a heart disposed to hear it. Without a preliminary groundbreaking, the seed would have fallen on hard soil, unable to take root---and my life had been hard and rocky ground indeed for many years....

I was not looking for God. Make no mistake. I did not believe that He existed. But by the spring of my 31st year, something had changed: I was drawn against my conscious will and against my inclination, to be interested in matters of faith. I had an incoherent and inchoate desire to push into territory that I vaguely feared and yet found compelling. Even at this time, I recognized that my interest was extraordinary. What was going on?

In the preceding year, something strange had happened in my interior life. The hardened ground of my heart was being broken up in preparation for the work ahead.

I had started to read poetry again.

I had my degrees in English literature, but I had become seriously burned out on literature while getting my doctorate. For several years after I had finished my degree, I worked in jobs outside my field, unsuccessfully casting around for some sense of purpose, some meaningful way to use the skills I knew I had...I tried my hand at creative writing, ending up with reams of half-finished stories shoved into my desk drawers and a vague frustration with my own lack of direction. I watched a lot---and I do mean a lot---of television. I was not reading the literature I had fallen in love with as an undergraduate.

But now I was in California, with an unexpected fresh start, and I started teaching part-time at the college where I would be hired full-time the following year. I was excited to be back in the college classroom for the first time since I was a graduate student---and teaching literature and not freshman composition.....I dusted off my beloved Norton Anthology of Literature, and turned to the canonical poets whom I had encountered as an undergraduate and now knew I needed to teach.

The greatest works of English literature sprung from Christian roots.

And so, atheist though I was, when I turned to literature I found myself rereading poems of explicit and profound Christian faith.

Consciously, I dismissed their faith as antiquated, or personal, or irrelevant; condescendingly, I viewed it as literature to teach in spite of this irritating fascination with God.

But God works even (especially?) where we least expect to find Him. In order to teach a poem you must know it inside and out....Knowing a poem is experiential, like knowing a person. You must not just read it, but reread it, and a great poem speaks more fully and deeply upon each reading of it. I didn't recognize that God was the source of and reason for the beauty in the poems I was reading; I just saw that they were beautiful, and so I read and reread them.

And something happened.

John Keats, in Ode to a Grecian Urn, closes with these words: Beauty is truth, truth beauty,---that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Beauty: I had admired it, appreciated it, responded to it, but until now, only on the surface. Something had changed. Now I sensed something deeper in the poems I was reading. I could feel power thrumming in the lines of the poems, an electricity of meaning, drawing from some source beyond my reach...

I read John Donne's Holy Sonnet 14---and was drawn into it. For the first time, I was responding with the heart, not just with the head. I was deeply moved without knowing why. Donne speaks directly to God, offering a confession of weakness, pleading for Him to break down the barriers of sin and pride:

Batter my heart, three person God; for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.

Break, blow, burn, and make me new: Those words rang my heart like a bell. I did not believe as Donne believed; yet I felt moved in a way that I had never been moved before. The words....now felt alive and powerful.

I turned to Gerard Manley Hopkins, that poet-priest virtuoso of language whom I had coolly admired in college. In this strange new state of mind, his poetry was bread to me, feeling a hunger I ever knew I had until that moment....

To hear his voice of hope wrestling with despair cut me to the heart. I had so carefully constructed my defenses of denial, of unconcern, of rebellion, and yet here was Hopkins relentlessly finding the chinks in my armor:

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist---slack they may be---these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more, I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

Hadn't I been feasting on Despair for years? And I was starving....Hopkins spoke what I had never shared with anyone, what I had scarcely dared to admit---he had been where I was---and yet, and yet, he had not stayed there. Hope, wish day come......Was there such a thing as day for me to hope for?

Hopkins was passionately, unashamedly Christian---and yet he did not blunt sharp edges. Here was no call to a comforting and trivial faith, no bland assurance that if I would come to Jesus I would feel better....

It was the winter of my soul. I had no conscious desire to find God; I thought I knew that He did not exist. And yet something was at work in me, just as Hopkins wrote in The Windhover:....My heart in hiding/Stirred.... Stirred for I knew not what----but for something beyond my experience.

Poetry had done its work. The ground was broken up, ready for the Word. And the person who would speak that Word to me would not be a poet, or a professor, but rather, my fencing coach. Who would have thought?

----Holly Ordway, Not God's Type, A Rational Academic Finds a Radical Faith