Dean: Longing

“Somehow the most fundamental traditions of the church have become desperately important to me—little things in the liturgy: speaking the Lord’s Prayer, reciting the creeds, receiving pastoral benediction, and, supremely, communion. I find myself longing for the experience of communion.”

Edited by Cliff Williams from an interview with Dean in 2003. "Dean" is a pseudonym.

My earliest memories are of church, Bible stories, and church nurseries. My parents were Southern Baptist, somewhere in between fundamentalist and evangelical. That sort of fundamentalist-evangelical Southern Baptist Christian faith was central to their whole life. Dad was minister of music in a big Baptist church. Mom was very active in youth work and Sunday School. It pretty much bled through everything they did. They taught me to be a Christian.

When I was three or four, I moved out of children’s church and went to big church. My first experiences of religious Angst or personal crisis of faith, what I was going to do with Christianity, were bound up with the altar call. I don’t remember a single sermon the pastor preached, but I remember the general feeling of sitting under his preaching. He was a great big man, about six-four, over 200 pounds. At the end of the service, we sang a hymn twice through. He was convinced that there were people there who needed to be at the front. So there he was, pacing back and forth in front of the altar, telling us what the Holy Spirit was telling him about who’s out there who needed to come forward.

I remember thinking what an utterly impossible situation I was in. I was aware of some feeling of conscience, or fear, that I needed to do what he was asking us to do. I needed to go forward to give my heart to Jesus. There would be dire consequences if I didn’t. At the same time, I thought that to do that I had to go forward and let this great big hulk of a man kneel over me and sweat over me and pray over me. He was such a figure up there, he was like Yahweh himself, right there in the front in all his scary Sinai splendor. There was just no going up there. You do not draw near. But I had to do it.

So when I was about four, I got on my knees underneath the pew, a kind of compromise. Maybe I could find a tertium quid and ask Jesus into my heart without having to go into the maw of Jehovah. I thought, “Maybe I’ll just do this and I’ll feel better.” I knelt and I prayed and I asked Jesus to come into my heart, or whatever he had asked us to pray so many times. But that didn’t help, because there still was this feeling that I needed to go up front.

When I was about seven, a southern gospel quartet came to sing. A lady in the church that everybody had been praying for went forward. While the pastor was working with her, I thought, “Here’s my chance. He’s distracted. The face of Jehovah is turned elsewhere and I can move forward now and I’ll be official because I will have gone forward.” Involved in this was that you would get baptized after your public confession.

So I went forward and knelt at the altar. I was scared to death. My dad was the minister of music, so he was there toward the front. He came forward and knelt over me and asked if I wanted to pray or if I had come to ask for baptism. I told him I had just come to pray. In the moment of truth, I got so very close to going through with what I thought was the formula. I kept drawing ever closer, but did not pass over to the promised land.

That’s the way it stayed for the remainder of my childhood. My parents believed I was a Christian, and I believed that I had been born again, that I had asked Jesus into my heart. But, according to the phrase at the time, I had not followed the Lord in believer’s baptism, so I could not take communion. It remained that way until I was not quite twelve, when my dad took a pastorate at a little Baptist church in Ohio.

What made it urgent for me, made it come to a crisis of, “What has happened to my soul?”, was the pressure, the guilt, of prepubescent sexuality. I was starting to want things and think about things and indulge in a lot of seeking that troubled my conscience. I started looking at my mom’s magazines, checking out the women’s underwear section of the J. C. Penney catalog, trying to figure out how to masturbate, all the things that guys do at that age. I was interested in anything sexual, in the sexual function of my own body. I didn’t know what was going on and I didn’t want to talk to anybody about it. I was home-schooled and wasn’t in the context of a lot of guys, so I didn’t know that everybody else was doing these things at the same time. I thought, “I must be a horrible, horrible sinner.” I was consumed with this.

One night I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I went to my parents. They had no idea what was going on with me emotionally. I said, “I need to know that I’m a Christian.” I thought if I got this settled, then maybe the impurity would go away. I was basically trying to fend off my guilt at being pubescent. We talked and I prayed the sinner’s prayer again. I don’t know how many times I had prayed it before, but this time I was baptized. I was not quite twelve. I don’t remember the immediate effect on my sexual exploration, but maybe it was postponed for a week. I quickly realized that no essential change had been wrought in myself.

That was very discouraging. It was compounded by the fact that my family’s understanding of what it meant to grow in Christian faith at that time was tied to pietistic, fundamentalist notions of sanctification. If you can get to the point where you completely give yourself to Jesus, where you completely surrender, you won’t have to fight with sin anymore. Stop struggling, let God do the work. I kept waiting for this to happen. But it never did. 

I had never talked to my parents about my burgeoning sexual interests. I still didn’t know that this was ordinary. When I was about fifteen, I finally sat down with my parents and told them everything. I spilled myself to them, told them everything that I had been thinking and struggling with since I was twelve. My dad told me, “It happens to everybody. I’m sorry you felt that way, because it happened to me. It happened to everybody I know of.”

I was tremendously relieved. It freed me to develop in a different direction. Up to that point, the whole focus of my spirituality had been defeating my sex drive. When that was demythologized for me, I began to interact with my faith in a broader way. I began to think more of what it meant to be a Christian beyond the struggle not to commit certain sins. My whole spirituality at that time had focused on defeating any dramatic area of sin—anger, bitterness, pride, with lust being part of that.

When I was sixteen years old, I was at a church meeting and we sang the hymn, “Grace is Greater than All Our Sins.” One of the verses says, “Dark is the stain we cannot hide, what can avail to wash away? Look, there is falling a crimson tide, white as the snow, you may feed today.” As I was going to bed that night, meditating on those words, for the first time in my life I had a sense of what it meant for Christ to suffer for my sin. I remember thinking, “I’ve never felt this before.” It had never been existentially present to me—that complete cover offered to us in Christ’s sacrifice for us.

I wept as I considered these things. I had never done that before. For the first time it was a matter of my sin, my stains. I don’t know if that was the point of my conversion. I never doubted the Christian story, but I certainly felt it for the first time then. I’ve ceased worrying about exactly when I was converted. I don’t think I have to know. I know that I believe, and that’s enough.

The age of about sixteen to the beginning of my college years was a very happy time for me. I was getting to be very close to my parents. We have a large family, so increasingly I had more responsibility, helping with the younger children.

When I was seventeen or eighteen, I lived a very mystical faith. I was very disciplined in prayer and Bible reading and fasting. Before, I would have focused on freedom from sin. Now it was more a matter of communion with God, of seeking to have dramatic experiences of God’s presence and of the Holy Spirit. I would spend hours singing hymns by myself, praying, sometimes achieving a kind of transport. We were Baptists, we were Reformed, so we didn’t practice charismatic gifts, but I did have episodes of religious ecstasy.

Gradually, it is hard to say how this happened, those experiences began to come less and less and my faith became more intellectual, more cognitive. A friend of ours, a pastor from England, started giving us books, mostly historical in nature—of people like Whitfield, Wesley, Spurgeon, and some of the Puritans. I started to read these and got interested in the history of revival. I found out that a lot of the revivalists were Calvinistic in their thinking. So I started reading theology books of increasingly heavier import. When I was about eighteen or nineteen, I read nearly the whole of Calvin’s Institutes, a lot of other Puritan works, and works of other Reformers.

I got to be quite a doctrinaire Calvinist. I liked nothing better than talking about these matters with people in my dad’s church. I grew to identify myself with the Reformed movement in Baptist circles. I liked proselytizing, bringing people to see things the Reformed way. Most people we knew hadn’t thought about these things, so it was quite easy to string together a few Bible verses and have them when you wanted them.

This is a time in my family’s life that was somewhat difficult in that we had been in the victorious Christian life movement for years. The emphasis during my childhood up to the middle part of my teenage years was on practical Christianity, being sanctified, living the victorious life. Now we started to move away from that and more toward Reformed thinking.

I studied by extension for a year at home and worked as a tutor. I got a reputation in our church as a smart guy. We lived in a rural area where hardly anybody goes to college. People thought, “Andrew’s boy is real smart.” I started to have an intellectual self-consciousness. When I was about sixteen, I watched the movie, “Shadowlands,” and I thought, “Ah, that’s what I want—those guys in there, in their marble halls and academic robes.” I began wearing sweater vests and adopted a self-consciously academic appearance. People noticed. It wasn’t difficult to establish that kind of reputation in southern Ohio.

When I moved to Chicago, I started going to a church that was full of Calvinists. That was great, I thought, because in Ohio, although my dad was Reformed, the people in his church were not. I thought, “If we could just get everybody in this church to be Reformed, our problems would be over. It would be a little taste of the millennium.” But going to the church that was full of Calvinists turned out to be a turning point for me, because I very quickly realized that these folks were worse off in many ways than the people in my dad’s church and other nonReformed types I had been around. Even though there was a strong consensus about Reformed theology—the things I had taken so seriously, that were so important to me—the people were quite carnal in many ways. Things were not as I thought they would be. I had a growing dissatisfaction and ended up leaving that church after a couple of years. I transferred to another college about the same time.

I also realized I had lost something in my faith. I had become so focused on intellectual aspects of the faith that I had lost something valuable. And being in a broader academic environment, I met people who were more theologically astute than I was, who took the scripture very seriously, who had thought about these things longer and harder than I had, and who weren’t Calvinists. They even held to some positions I thought were pretty abhorrent. I didn’t know what to do about that. I knew that my absolute conviction that the Reformed way of thinking and living was the only way would have to be amended. I could no longer live that way. The tenacity with which I held certain beliefs couldn’t be that way anymore.

This is where I am right now. I am closer to being a mere Christian in the C. S. Lewis sense. I don’t find myself having critical difficulties with the Apostle’s Creed, the fundamentals of the Christian faith. But I don’t have any real sense of settledness about much else. And somehow the most fundamental traditions of the church have become desperately important to me—little things in the liturgy: speaking the Lord’s Prayer, reciting the Creeds, receiving pastoral benediction, and, supremely, communion. Somehow these things have assumed a kind of weight that they didn’t have before. I really can’t say how that happened. I find myself longing for the experience of communion.

That definitely represents a change, because when I was younger I always approached the communion table with a good bit of fear. We put a more dangerous spin than was necessary on some of the warnings that you have in the Epistles about approaching unworthily. So I would always desperately be thinking of all the sins I could recall and repenting of them and asking for forgiveness and absolution, so I could be sure that I would not die after I took communion.

That’s changed. I think so often now of the parable of Christ where he speaks of Lazarus, the beggar, who wanted to partake of the crumbs from the rich man’s table. That parable is in my thoughts often as I approach communion. I am not worthy of the crumbs that fall. I need to be near, I need to be as near as I can be to the body and blood of the Lord. That is very much the center of my faith now.

At the church I have been attending, we go forward and take the bread and the wine, and the pastor says, “Dean, the body of Christ was broken and his blood was shed that you might have eternal life.” In that moment, as I take and eat, I feel as near as breath to Christ. In that moment, at least, I am incapable of doubt or fear. That is so very important to me. I don’t know how that has happened, but it certainly has happened in some way.

I am grateful for my parents. They have been very supportive through my changes. I have always been able to talk to them about what I’m thinking and where I’m struggling and what I really don’t know about anymore. I have always gotten a sense from them that they trust me. Right now it’s not so much a matter of my actively disagreeing with anything they believe. It’s a matter of certainty. My certainties aren’t their certainties. My areas of confidence don’t correspond to theirs. But they have been quite willing to let that be.

Turning Points: Faith Journeys of Twenty-Five People

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