Liturgical Explorations – A Prefatory Autobiographical Rumination (Part 2)
(continuing from the last entry…)
Several years later, I enrolled at Houghton College, a Christian (Wesleyan) college in Western New York. During the first week of classes, we had nightly services which were a vestigial form of revival services. On the first evening, the preacher gave a strong call for repentance and total commitment to Christ. I had always loved God and perceived myself to be more committed to God than most of my friends and the people in my youth group, but that night comparing myself to others was woefully insufficient. I wanted to give myself entirely, exhaustively and exclusively to God. When I went forward for the altar call, the Spirit of God gripped me as I knelt there weeping. Through that entire year, I thrust myself into the passages of Scripture that call for repentance, complete abandonment and radical discipleship (e.g., Gospel of Luke, Galatians, minor prophets) as well as the writings of Charles Finney and Leonard Ravenhill. This was my first exposure to the Holiness tradition. Here I learned the thrill of offering myself fully to God. I began to discover a dimension of freedom, from sin and compromise, to love God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength. I cannot claim to have fully attained it then, but it became a burning vision for me. It was something I refused to live without fighting for.
Unfortunately, I fell into some of the snares that lurk around Holiness tradition as well (NB: The terminology “lurk around” is very specific. These snares attempt to capture people zealous for holiness, but are not inherent to the Holiness tradition. They can, however, be a danger if one does not have maturity, balance or wise counsel. I had none of them). I acquired a form of legalism where I gauged holiness by a list of do’s and don’ts and my emotional well-being rode on how well I measured up to it. I lived in constant shame and regret, never believing that I was ever good enough or doing enough for God. I also began to see my form of commitment to Jesus as the standard for everyone else, regardless of their calling and the season of their life. I was again empowered by unrighteous judgment, not over worship styles, but concerning whether I perceived people to be fully devoted to God.
A positive lesson I learned however was the priority of prayer in a believer’s life. I started to hold prayer meetings, for better or for worse, modeled as closely as I could to Charles Finney’s “formula for revival.” Finney taught that one must focus prayer meetings on sin, repentance and judgment. People ought to center their hearts on the horrible state of the church and arouse corresponding deep feelings. Oddly enough, (said tongue-in-cheek) I found very few people interested in attending such meetings. It grieved me even more that people would rather watch TV or play card games than come to my “groaning prayer meetings.” In retrospect, it was probably the grace of God saving them from my goofy distortions of holiness teaching in the Bible.
That summer, while I was home on school break, I devoted the entire three months to learn everything I could about prayer. Charles Finney taught that revival (which I defined as people turning to God out of compromise and into holiness) only happens when people pray. However, in my experience people did not go to prayer meetings. Therefore, I gave myself to learning everything possible, so I would be able to get people to come to prayer meetings and see revival come, specifically to Houghton College, but also to America as a whole. Being a college student with limited financial means, I searched on the Internet for any free resources on prayer I could find. I stumbled upon a website with streaming videos from a prayer conference. The preacher spoke of enjoying prayer rooted in knowing God as the one who loves us even as we work through all our issues of struggle, sin, weakness and immaturity. This was definitely a new idea for me, and one that I did not like. Prayer had to be serious, weighty and cranky (as I perceived Finney to be teaching). It couldn’t be joyful. Furthermore, I thought the speaker was overdoing the “love thing.” “What about sin?” I kept wondering, “Isn’t that important?”
Consequently, the message rather bugged me, but it was free of charge and there were a bunch more on the same website, so I kept listening. After a couple of messages on loosely the same subject, I just broke down crying in front of the computer screen as two shocking realizations hit me: first, that I was called to prayer as my primary occupation and ministry for my entire life; second, that God actually loved me; not the ideal me, not the super-sanctified-image me, but He actually loved actual me. Years of pressure to be more holy than I was and shame for not measuring up to the ultra-high standards I placed on myself (which cannot solely attributed to the teachings of Finney but surely were aided by the perfectionistic mores of my community of origin) came crashing out from a place within me I did not know existed. This all took me as quite a surprise and my heart quickly transitioned from being annoyed and offended to being overwhelmed by the love of God. I was reasonably bewildered by the whole experience and wasn’t sure what had happened. All I knew was that it was God, I really liked it and I wanted more of it.
This was a somewhat shocking introduction to the Contemplative tradition, with its emphasis on deep heart-felt intimacy with the Lord and devotional prayer. Over the course of the next couple of years, I gave myself to studying and meditating on the attributes of God, specifically the relational ones: his love, gladness, mercy, kindness, etc. I spent more time in solitude and quietness not seeking as much to get something from God, but simply to know Him more. In this place, I discovered a dimension of freedom in that I found liberation from a defiled conscience when I came before God through understanding his heart towards me and the person ramifications of the atonement. Holiness was still a vital part of my life, but I began to learn that God’s heart towards me and the atonement, not my personal performance were the basis of my position before God and my relationship with Him. Understanding the love and forgiveness of God just a little bit, lifted enough weight off my heart so that I actually began to enjoy being with God again, similar to my high school days, but now it was deeper, more grounded and more God-centered.
To be continued…
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