Starting with the proper title always seems like a good beginning. The phrase “ultimate concern” comes from Paul Tillich’s book, “The Dynamics of Faith,” an important text in my history toward becoming a Christian. (Simon is asleep in the chair behind me, so I get to set my iPad on the dining room table.). This is one of those thematic entries, all about one thing. Association will play a part too, I imagine, but the purpose of the entry is to define what I am centered on and how that came to be. My iPad is perceptive; it put up the word Christ after I wrote the preceding sentence. Yes, I am a Christ-centered Christian, and I thought I might do well to explain how that came about. (Simon is awake, and barking, so it is to the chair. Maybe.)
In 1962, I graduated from Heidelberg College in my hometown of Tiffin, Ohio. I had only six hours of education courses from a summer at Mexico City College (in Mexico City, of course). I thought about pursuing an education degree to teach in high school, but that idea was dismal. My Dean and head of the English Department at Heidelberg, Frederic Lempke, had other ideas too. He sent to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for an application for graduate school and “ordered” me to fill it out and apply for a scholarship. I did, was accepted, and given a tuition scholarship, and as they say, the rest is history. The thing is, down the line, I began to sense something behind me, working itself out in my life. I had the feeling later that I had been sent there. I was convinced to major in English at Heidelberg, and enjoyed the change away from math and science, in my sophomore year, for I loved to read. Graduate school in literature might be fun, I thought, and it was. The odd thing was that when I arrived at OU, I was an atheist/agnostic, and somewhat cocky. A year or two later I was an ardent Christian and have been ever since.
Even more oddly, my best friend in grad school, Bill Elkins, was a born-again Free Will Baptist from Jenkins in Letcher County, Kentucky. He was also a new grad student in 1962 who had played football for both UK and EKU. He and I used to play one on one with a small rubber football; he always won. Sometimes, we went down to one of the athletic fields and played two against two with whoever was there and willing. He died on an operating table at the age of 62. He visited me once in Berea, and much later when he became president of a small college in Tennessee, maybe, he invited me to apply for his deanship. I wasn’t tempted.
In grad school we were at first an odd couple. He was an earnest Baptist; I swore often, drank beer and smoked. I went to church with him once, after my conversion. In the lobby was a large sign that defined the rules about Jesus, the 10 commandments, along with a list of evils like smoking and drinking to be avoided. He and I acquired a second friend, also not a Christian, a semester or so later. I had not thought much about this friendship with Bill being part of my journey toward Christ, but it was. We teased one another a bit, but there was no mocking. We took each other seriously, we had fun together, we were in the same classes together, we were in graduate school. The event that made the real difference though was a course In literary criticism, given by the best teacher we ever had, Professor Eric Thompson.
The thing about Professor Thompson was that he saw more depth in literature than I saw in life. He made me think, not just about literature, but about a number of things. He wasn’t a Christian, as far as I could see, but because of him I started reading things like Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith, a key text, for Tillich wrote that every one has an ultimate concern, whether they know it or not; therefore, one ought to make certain his or her ultimate concern really is ultimate. I haven’t read that small text in a while, but its effect was large. If Tillich was my first “book teacher,” C.S. Lewis became my second. Reading Lewis’s Mere Christianity made a tremendous difference. I was at the point in 1963 where I really wanted to know what was true, was God who “they” said he was or not(?), and while I think that reason was essential to my journey, it was not the final cause of my becoming a Christian. That was what I call my meeting with God at my kitchen table in Athens.
I had started reciting the prayer of the gospel character who said, “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.” Sitting at my kitchen table one evening, I repeated it various times. All of a sudden I was overwhelmed with a silent presence that made me realize that I was really praying and that if I was really praying, God was present; one can pray, I think, only if God is truly present within. I was no longer outside the Kingdom of Heaven, but across the river, so to speak, and inside. I saw that God was present there and that Jesus was indeed Lord. My joy was intense. I sought out my other Christian friend, Richard (Bill was married by then, though I sought him out the next day; he was not surprised—ha! But pleased; turned out he had put my name in a prayer basket at his church) and Richard and I celebrated, though I remember no more of that night from that moment of change or conversion. Later, several of us found a Lutheran Church with an intelligent pastor whose sermons became our great delight. We asked him to print some, but he said no. He would lose the spontaneity. So we went to his church and listened instead, and Christian life was exciting and intellectually stimulating in graduate school.
That second year of grad school a group of us were in OU’s doctoral program, and curiously, we were all Christians. I have been ever since, ending up a Catholic. My mother was somewhat appalled at that, but after she died my dad would even go to Mass with us.
Now, regarding the nature of my conversion, read T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men”; the insight about prayer occurs at the end of his poem. If the HM could finish the Lord’s Prayer, “they” would be on the other side of the river and in the Kingdom of God. But in the poem they can’t finish the prayer, only see the consequences of finishing it. “That is the way the world ends…not with a bang, but a whimper.” Eliot himself a little later, after this poem, I think, also became a Christian. Read his Ash Wednesday or the 4 Quartets. I discovered Eliot in a Thompson class; Thompson has a book on one of the 4 Quartets, as a matter of fact.
Years later when I read St. Augustine’s conversion story, his Confessions, I saw my kitchen table experience like his “Take it and read” garden experience, and I saw the same pattern in C.S. Lewis’s conversion story, Surprised by Joy.
When I think about the bare bones pattern of secondary causes that led to my conversion moment, I realize that Shakespeare is there too: 9th grade: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I was Bottom; loved the play); 12th grade: discovered The Tempest. Ohio University: write a Master’s Thesis or take a two semester Pro-Seminar course in (guess what!) Shakespeare. I took the course route, read Shakespeare with an excellent scholar and teacher, and wrote my major second semester paper on The Tempest. Even better, I met Bill in that course! Then, Professor Thompson, Paul Tillich, C.S. Lewis, and the kitchen table moment.
To put that experience into a Biblical perspective, I will end with a quote from the Grail edition of Psalm 139:
“If I say, ‘Let the darkness hide me/and the light around me be night,’/even darkness is not dark to you,/
the night shall be as bright as day,/and darkness the same as the light.
For it was you who formed my inmost being,/knit me together in my mother’s womb./
I thank you who wonderfully made me;/how wonderful are your works,/
which my soul knows well!
My frame was not hidden from you,/when I was being fashioned in secret/and molded in the depths of the earth./Your eyes saw me yet unformed;/and all days are recorded in your book,/formed before one of them came into being.
To me how precious your thoughts, O God;/how great is the sum of them!/If I count them, they are more than the sand;/
at the end I am still at your side.”
(Ps. 139: 11-18)
From my best theological understanding, I have learned that God is not a being in the way that a person is, or a dog, or a flower; or a Greek or Roman “god” like Zeus or Apollo. Everything visible and invisible in that sense has being. Being is a gift bestowed upon all that is, from microscopic viruses to stellar galaxies. God, however, is being, as he tells Moses in Exodus, chapter 3. Inside this essay is my Confession, so to speak, my story, my journey to the feet of the Lord.