Rumors of Another World: The Hint in Our Hearts

     I promise you that she has been suffering--tethered to oxygen tanks for over six years.   Yet, last week I received the news that my friend, Alice, has been miraculously healed of her terminal lung disease.

      Hold on, reader.  I know what you’re thinking.  I’ve got another friend who suffers from this same disease.  Despite a lung transplant he and his family continue gasping for air.  There’s no rhyme or reason why something so wondrous has happened in Alice’s case and not in his.

     When I taught High School in Houston I was asked to lead prayer for a Muslim faculty member at a 7:00 AM faculty meeting.  His newborn baby lay dying in neo-natal intensive care when I invoked a blessing on his child.  The next morning, I was informed that the baby had made a dramatic recovery around 7:00 AM the previous day.

       But hold on, reader.  I’ve also held the still-born baby of a first-time Mother who was so distraught over her loss that she later could not even remember that I was with her at the hospital. And for the life of me, I can’t figure any rhyme or reason as to why these two innocent children experienced such vastly different outcomes.   It’s just plain maddening.

       But this enigma doesn’t change the fact that unexplained healings happen.  My friend Alice couldn’t believe it herself.  She questioned her pulmonologist after he gave her the good news:

      “Was I misdiagnosed?” she asked.  The doctor said “no.”  He showed her the results of the biopsy and put up the CT scans from six years ago.

     “My latest CT scan shows that 98% of the scarring is gone,” Alice celebrates.

       That’s why 98% of the world’s population believes in God.  The rumor is too strong for most to ignore.  Stronger still is the hint in our hearts—the one that knows still-born babies is a miscarriage of justice. It’s not just that we’d rather things be different.  It’s our innate sense that this is monstrously wrong.  Where, I wonder, do you think we get that idea?

Rumors of Another World: Thin Places

       Phillip Yancey in his book, Rumors of Another World, argues that people tend to have experiences which suggest life is about more than meets the eye.  My years in ministry tell me he’s right. Repeatedly, people worry about their sanity as they secretly report to me encounters they had thought impossible.  They are sometimes surprised to discover that these spiritual experiences are not as rare as they thought.  They discover that others have also had brushes with another dimension.

       The people who tell me these stories are often high functioning and skeptical. They are disgusted by religious hucksterism.  Yet, they have seen Jesus in a German Cathedral, received angelic visitors in the night, and heard the sound of the heavenly host during communion.

       Celtic Christians speak of “thin places” where the wall dividing the spiritual and physical world seems paper thin.  Ten years ago when I was in Chiapas, Mexico I felt like I was in such a “thin place.”  A group of pastors asked a local missionary from the United States what could possibly account for the enormous wave of Christian conversion there.   He told us that people were hearing “rumors of another world.”  He said,   “Living here has dramatically changed my view of what is most deeply real.”

      Sociologists of religion speak of widespread experience which both haunts and fascinates.  Scientists like Albert Einstein insist such mystery is at the heart of all good science.  He writes, “He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause… and stand…in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

      My undergraduate history professor was once asked if he believed in God.  He admitted, “My own sense is that there is something out there, I just choose not to think about it very much.”  Frederick Buechner says most of us ignore the evidence like that:  “We have seen more than we have let on, even to ourselves…We catch glimmers of what the mystics are blinded by…only we go on as though nothing happened.”

      What would it take for us to stop ignoring these persistent rumors?

Rumors of Another World: Nostalgia

   I keep my grandfather’s books on my shelves mostly as mementos.  Yet, on a whim last year I opened one.  The trapped air in the long-unused book smelled exactly like—no, the air was actually from- my deceased papaw’s study.  The aroma gave me an instant nostalgic high.  Forgive me, but I leaned into the book, and I admit it: I inhaled deeply.

     O, the transport!  I remembered myself in papaw’s study around 1975.  Like Mark Twain told his friend, Will Bowen, “Old voices greeted me wailing down the centuries.”  Before me appeared such a vivid and joyous set of possibilities that my childhood dread of bedtime returned.   

       The experience didn’t last long, of course.  I came crashing back to intensified grief over something that I now sense is missing.  This grief is painful enough that most people try to suppress these nostalgic stirrings of the soul as if they were just foolish.

      But the producers of those infomercials about musical collections of the oldies know that our nostalgia is more than just wanting to turn back time.  The music, itself, bears witness.  Bruce Springsteen sings of “glory days.” For Brian Adams it is not just about the “Summer of 69;” it’s that somehow that summer seemed to “last forever.”  John Mellencamp in his “little ditty 'bout Jack and Diane” feels our loss: “O yea life goes on, long after the thrill of livin’ is gone.”

     That lyric is no different than my six-year old’s observation about Christmas a few years ago.   “Daddy, the Christmas tree isn’t giving me any warmth anymore.”

     “Yes,” I said, “for it was never really the tree that gave the warmth.”

       With Abraham we are homesick for a city built on better foundations—for a warm place, where the days are glorious, the voices cross the centuries, the summers last forever, and the thrill of living is restored.  Occasionally we do something like open our grandfather’s book and are reminded that our earliest childhood tastes of that true and eternal home were no lie.   

Rumors of Another World: The Day Voltaire Died

     On the third floor of Ballantine Hall, at Indiana University there was a study room.  At 11:00 AM I plopped my book-bag down near an open window.  It was seasonably warm and uncommonly still for early Spring in Bloomington.

       I began reading about the Enlightenment (that intellectual movement in the 1700s that denied the miraculous) when the tree outside the window unaccountably twisted. Its branches violently shook in a sudden burst of near gale-force wind.  I would have ignored this except that along with the burst I felt a simultaneous shock and heaviness.  My heart rate accelerated and the back of my neck burned.  I got up to “walk it off” as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me.

     The experience seemed unaccountable.  It was probably five minutes before my heart rate returned to something closer to normal, and I was able to plunge back into my study of that sharp-tongued advocate of Enlightenment--Voltaire.

     A voluminous writer, a champion of human rights and toleration, Voltaire was also a bitterly sarcastic philanderer and critic of Christianity.  He died May 30, 1778, angrily dismissing the Catholic priests who tried to minister to him.

      That evening, as I was returning home from class, I noticed dozens of cars in my grandparents’ yard.  I stopped, and my Father, teary-eyed, walked toward me with the news:     

    “We lost Papaw this morning.” 

      It had happened at 11:00 AM.

      March 24, 1987, was not just the day my grandfather died.  It marked the death of the Enlightenment’s influence on me.  However I might have construed my 11:00 AM experience that day, its exact synchronicity with papaw’s heart attack was too much to ignore. Voltaire simply couldn’t account for it.  I concluded that mysterious powers were at work in the world, and they were not merely indifferent to my grief.

      People wonder how someone with an appreciation for hard science can believe that Christ’s body rose from the dead. One kind of answer is that I know that I’m not imagining things.  My experience was real.  Voltaire was wrong. That tree moved.