I wrote Face to Face during a time of intense personal suffering. This suffering was not so much physical or material, as spiritual. We had, my wife and I, sought to be obedient to God for some twenty years. Out of obedience we did things that entailed poverty, uncertainty, isolation, and being personally attacked for standing for Christian truth. Some of these difficulties were a direct result of obedience, for example, going to graduate school when we had little money and little prospects for Mona finding work. At that time, God could have found a good job for Mona, gotten me a good scholarship (I had some extremely high qualifications), found us some friends, and much more. But he did not. Our years in graduate school were very difficult. When we were missionaries, God could have found us a place where we were supported and encouraged. Instead, he placed us in a situation where we were terribly betrayed by the church, due to my not participating in a cover-up. This process dragged on for months and eventually, summer 1898, forced us to return to the States with little money and very limited prospects for work.
Eventually, I found a job as the rector of a church. Even then, God could have placed us in a church where, as rector, my theological education and spiritual life could have borne fruit. Instead, I ended up in a parish where the people wanted to be a club rather than a dynamic body of Christ reaching out into the community with evangelism, healing, and social concern. After seeing how the Hondurans lived, the idea of our being a club was so painful that I could hardly bear it. I tried all sorts of things to establish the Kingdom, but none worked. The people were good people, very likeable, but I had no idea what to preach or what to do. I got up each morning and prayed to God to give me strength for each day.
At that time, my relationship with Mona fell into the abyss. We had, for years, been in difficult circumstances, difficult parishes, without money, lonely in foreign countries, and betrayed. We had deeply entrenched sins that sprang upon us. We collapsed under the weight of our own sins and the abuse we had received in the church. This was a terrible experience. As it unfolded, and it was the cumulative effect of years of difficulty, I experienced such anguish before God that I could hardly breathe. I wondered what I had done wrong. I repented of all my sins, I sought to love my wife, to bear her weaknesses, and to love my parishioners. This was very difficult. There were Saturday nights in which I was in anguish because of the sermon I must preach the next day. About half the time the lessons for Sunday were things the parishioners would like to hear. Other lessons spoke of the requirements of the Christian life. I knew they would not do what Scripture said. I could never decide whether to preach a prophetic word of judgment, dilute the meaning of Scripture, or avoid the matter altogether. Looking back over the process, I spoke of the mercy and kindness of God for some years, and when they did not respond in kind, I preached some sermons on his severity. It appeared to make little difference either way. The whole time I was doing this I worried if my own sins were contributing to their unwillingness to embrace the gospel. I could never figure it out, whether it was me, them, or God had withdrawn his favor from us. There was really no one to talk to. This went on for some years.
Eventually I found a friend, as well as a couple who had worked for years in Africa. They had some glimpse of my anguish. For much of the time, however, I was utterly alone among clergy who had followed the traditional track: graduate from seminary, get the best parish you can, keep moving up, building up your parish by doing good while looking out for the salary, pension, and the perks. I had refused that route. It seemed to me, and still does, to be the route the devil offered Jesus in the temptations. At times, however, I wondered if a sense of self-loathing had made it impossible for me to hear God's call to an easier life, that perhaps, for Mona' sake, I should have taken the more lucrative and prestigious way. When I graduated from seminary my seminary evaluations stated that I was one of the strongest candidates for ministry that they had had in some years. I was offered a job as canon at the cathedral, a real "opportunity." I did not feel called to take it, rather, I took a position I thought might bring in the Kingdom. This effort to "bring in the Kingdom" got nowhere that I could see, only suffering, especially for Mona. The abuse we took in the Episcopal Church had terrible effects on Mona, I can hardly bear to think of it. I think, in part, it contributed to her early death.
Somewhere around 1996 or 1997, Mona and I changed. A mysterious and radical acceptance and love began to permeate our relationship. Our children could see it and so could their friends who came to our house. Things did not change at church, but I decided to pour my efforts into studying, writing, and prayer. For the people, I was their pastor and did the best I could for them. A number of them told me it was the best years at the parish in many years. We scarcely entered the Kingdom of God, but there was a limited peace and that is a kingdom quality. Let God be praised. But as I wrote Face to Face, little of this was clear, and some of it is not clear even now.
As these events were unfolding, I began to receive intense perceptions of the love and beauty of God in the Holy Eucharist. As this happened, I saw the end of all things in the presence of God. By this I mean that I could see how all things related to God coming together in worship before the throne. By "all things" I mean everything that happens to us, life, the world, time, personal relationships, economics, politics, and social life, and all this in relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ who stands victorious at the right hand of the Father who sits upon the throne, surrounded by the four and twenty elders, the martyrs beneath the alter, and before them, made concrete as the congregation in church, the great multitude from every tribe and nation, praising God with "Holy, holy, holy, God of heaven and earth." Once I saw this, and saw also that virtually no one in recent history had ever written of such a thing, I decided to write of it myself. I began writing in earnest about about 1994, when my suffering was at its worst.
I had read enough of the saints to know that sometimes God allows difficulties and disappointments, and that he withdraws a sense of his presence in order to prove us and purge us of "lesser loves," to use a phrase from Face to Face. Once their hearts were pure the saints were able to see God, to hear his Word, to live in his presence. I knew that this could be what God was doing to me, but I always wondered if so many of the saints got it right. For me, the ultimate was not spiritual marriage as taught by St. Theresa or John of the Cross, but the coming of his Kingdom as the transformation of the whole of reality. This is what I experienced in the Holy Eucharist. Now that I think of it, however, the saints always proclaimed the Kingdom because the Kingdom comes when people love each other. That is the great reality that happens before the throne of God, visibly seen in the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. I said as much in Face to Face. That is the Kingdom and love is impossible unless one lives with and for the true God, the Father of Jesus Christ who loved his own to the end.
As I wrote Face to Face, I poured my heart into the characters. For example, the professor makes a confession before his death in which he states that he was bitter with God because he had seen the Kingdom in his visions yet God had scarcely brought in his Kingdom. That is how I felt. I knew and still know there is a Kingdom and that it can come on earth as on heaven. I know that, I have seen it, and I have read about it in the Bible and it has happened at times in Christian history. I have scarcely seen it come in my life and it has caused me intense suffering. It has made me rage at God and the professor confessed his anger toward God as did I when I wrote his words. Or, I have felt betrayed by God as did Sonia, and I wrote of how it feels to be betrayed, and how, at a deep spiritual level, that betrayal leads to our taking our lives in our own hands rather than surrendering them to God. Or, I knew what it was like to have love between a man and a woman fall into the abyss, and I wrote of that in the relationship between Jack and his wife, Deb. All of these things, all the characters, convey the great, terrible, and beautiful realities of life with God, each other, in this world of so much suffering and joy.
Writing Face to Face was a result of obedience. The call to write began in the early 70s, but it was the events of the 80s and 90s that drove me to write. In one sense I wrote in self defense, to maintain my soul in a place where God had seemingly died, where people placed comfort over love and sacrifice, and in a culture that had lost any real sense of the wonderful and terrible realities that surround us on all sides.
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
