I have just been re reading in my Mustard Seed Dulle’s little book on his conversion to Catholicism in the early 1940’s. It is entitled Testimonial to Grace and it is a moving account of what God can do in the heart of a genuinely good man. The introduction to the book says, “” When a Avery Dulles entered Harvard in 1936 he seems to have been as completely without malice as he was without faith. He had neither belief in God nor in his own soul, but only because his education had left him with impression that neither was worthy of the attention of an educated man. His position was typical of many young men and women today- good will but no faith, nor any notion of the need of faith.” The description could fit a lot of people in our own country today.
The book tells the story of how Dulles struggled through Aristotle and Plato and St. Thomas toward intellectual acceptance of God. But the most moving part of the book is Dulle’s account of how faith touch him one rainy afternoon in Cambridge. He tells the story of how he was reading St. Agustine for and assignment in a Medieval History course in Widener Library, and was prompted to close the book and go out and walk in the rain. He walked aimlessly along the bank of the Charles River toward Boston. Something impelled him to look at a young tree eagerly waiting the spring which was not too far off. The thought came to him suddenly like a revelation that those buds in all their innocence followed a rule, a law of which he know nothing. How could it be. he amused, that this delicate tree sprang up and blossomed from a tiny seed? That all its complicated cellular structure contrived to make it grow and bring forth leaves and blossom?
That night, Dulles said, for the first time in many years, he prayed. How knelt down by his bed as his mother had taught him when he was a boy. He recited the Our Father.” It was a moment of special grace for a man who was looking for God.
A few months later, he was baptised and in 1946, he entered the Jesuits. Today he is the one of the outstanding theologian of the Church. He searched for God in books and in libraries, but he found Him in a little tree along the Charles River outside Boston.
The spiritual writers call it a faith experience and most of us have had experience like that of Avery Dulles at one time or another, though it might not have been as profound as his was.
A young man told me once how toughed he had been one day standing at the top of the Zigzag Road in Baguio and marvelling how God could have created that valley and those mountains through thousands of year of archaeological development. He later went on to enter the seminary and his now a priest in Mindanao. Others tell us of similar experience at Lourdes or at Medjurje,or at the bedside of someone they have love is dying – happy and at peace in God.
I remember looking at the complicated perfection of a tiny premature baby in an incubator in a hospital in Brooklyn. After they had baptised the baby, who was hardly bigger than the palm of my hand, I couldn’t help marvelling how God created life out of a single sperm and ovum. The wonder and the beauty of Gods creation!
Gregory Baum says, these faith experiences make us suddenly aware of God, of the holy, of something beyond our material existence. They make us realize how contingent we are, that we are so totally dependent upon something above us and beyond us. And that at any moment we can cease to exist. But they make a deep impression on us and often lead us to deeper and more meaningful living.
Faith experiences are like little epiphanies. They are manifestations of God. In the midst of our daily routine, they are like a window in heaven, opening up and letting God shine through.
Sometimes it comes in the form of a retreat, sometimes in a sermon. Sometimes its a death or a birth in our lives. Sometimes it’s a thought that comes to us when we are waiting for a friend in Makati, or watching a movie. But for the truly religious person, everything is potentially a faith experience. Everything is grace. Everything is God. If only we have eyes to see.
