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 1700’s 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.
