June 13, 1971
Introduction
Today is June 16, 2011. About a week ago, my daughter was going through some old boxes and found something I wrote in 1971, entitled "A True Story." At that time I was in the dark night of the soul, described in Face to Face with the line in the epilogue, "The fire was still in him, and because of it, he passed through himself, deeply humiliated by his sins and the wretchedness of life." I decided to include "A True Story" here in this section on Face to Face since it describes a portion of the personal experiences that gave rise to Face to Face. I had not, in 1971, encountered God as waves of love in the Holy Eucharist, but only as a raging fire as described in the chapter entitled "The Holy Spirit and Fire." After the purifying process of the dark night, I was able, some three years later, to see God face to face as intense love, and then, even more, see all things in God -- how all things relate to God, known in Scripture as the Kingdom of God. This, above all, happened in the Holy Eucharist as described at the end of Face to Face.
I am not sure why I wrote this true story in June of 1971. Perhaps I was thinking of sending it somewhere, but I'm sure I never really did. In fact, I forgot that I had written it. Looking back at what happened in the early part of my life, I sometimes wonder if it really happened since I seem so sane to myself, and surrounded by people who hold what Noam Chomsky calls "Necessary Illusions." I was happy to discover what I had written in 1971, for it showed me that my memory had not deceived me. I was in terrible anguish. I also have a diary from those years but virtually never read it since it is so painful. This "True Story" is painful as well. In regard to illusions, belief in God, for some people, seems an illusion, but as Face to Face describes it, and as I have theologically described it in other essays, God can directly be known as given in the person of Jesus.
Part of the reason I wrote Face to Face was to communicate certain realities that normally lie beyond most people's experience. Conditions in Honduras are rather well known. Encountering God is less well known. If fact, some people might read the story given below and conclude that I was "out of my mind." Certainly, from the perspective of how I live now, I was quite broken. The critical question here, however, is whether the realities described are real. Does God exist? that is the question.
In the fall of 1971 I started teaching at Episcopal High School in Jacksonville, Florida. That next summer, 1972, I spent much of the summer sitting on my front porch praying and thinking. I was reading William James at the time, his Varieties of Religious Experience. I saw there that the sorts of things I had experienced in my life were at the end of the bell curve, but not that unusual. I also gave considerable thought to the question, "What is real and what is an illusion?" I decided that the real is defined by two criteria. First, the real is experienced. Like James in his Radical Empiricism, which I read some years later, I saw no need to postulate the existence of things unless they had effects. I had experienced things that had effects. Secondly, the real is socially recognized, that is, other people experience it as well. Ultimately, there is no way to get out of experience to verify that what we are truly experiencing is real. If others see it, hear it, encounter it, then it is real. A person who is having a hallucination cannot verify it by the experience of others. They do not see what he sees. How do I know that what I encountered should be designated by the word "God?" Anyone who reads the Bible can see that God is often experienced as a consuming fire, that he purifies those he encounters, that demons were cast out in the name of Jesus, that some people spoke in tongues, and so forth. These things are real. Those who encounter these things call them by the names used by others. I use the names used by others in the story given below. The fact that not everyone experiences God does not mean God does not exist. Enough people have encountered God to verify his existence. It is like people going to a foreign country. Most people in the United States have never been to China, but they have met people who have, and they believe their report. Face to Face is a report. So is the true story given below. So is Scripture, but more than a report, God's speech.
I have also wondered about a third criteria for the real, namely, "Are the effects good, do they bring life?" That criteria is not in the same category as the other two, being of value rather than fact, but it is worth considering. In regard to God, in spite of many distortions, at least, according to the witness of Scripture, God is good as known in Jesus Christ. This is also reported in Face to Face. In my case, God has given me immense amounts of love, and it has spilled over into my family, the love I have in my family and with my friends. It means my mind is clear, that I am not tormented by the sorrow that haunted my youth, and that I frequently experience God as love. When I wrote "A True Story" in 1971, I did not know that this would happen, and am very thankful that it did. This third idea, coupled with the first two criteria, are grounds to seek the Lord. In any event, here is what I wrote so long ago.
A True Story
June 13, 1971
It was about nine months ago when Jesus told me to sit down and write. I was disobedient, mainly because I was afraid, the problem being that my spirit was bound into my mind. The center of my being overlapped with my mind and its activities. This was very unpleasant, as my mind has been raging along for years, filled with all sorts of horrible thoughts, straining at gnats and believing lies, trying vainly to make sense of the great pile of garbage in which I seem to live. Like a fool, I believed some of its peripatetic idiocy. I should have known (not figured it out) long ago. The turning point came about a month-and-a-half ago when Julie prayed that Jesus would break me of the fear of my imagination, and that started some things. Later on, the Holy Spirit hit me, causing about three weeks of madness. The Holy Spirit assured me in a dream that I would return to normalcy. Then, about four days ago, I laid hands on Jimmy Brown and asked Jesus to break the bonds between Jimmy and his mind. He was afraid of going insane. However, insanity begins in your mind, if you are in your mind, it is utter agony and hell. But if by the love of our blessed friend, Jesus Christ, you're out of your mind, then what difference does it make? So God has driven me out of my mind, and I watch it run along and do its thing, and sometimes I get in it and get taken for a ride. But more and more I am resting in Jesus. So if I continue with this writing, the above will explain how I can manage to write without agonizing over my past.
Right now I'm listening to Mississippi Fred McDowell. He is singing “Baby Please Don’t Go.” About three months ago I was wandering around, feeling utterly lonely. I said to God that if he would love me in a tangible way, I wouldn't be so lonely. I got to thinking about the first woman I ever lived with, and told Jesus that I was hurting inside so bad that I needed something to take away the pain. Somehow that first woman only made the pain worse. But it was real, the pain, and it only made me love her more. We made love one day on top of a hill outside Lawrence, Kansas. At that time my heart was filled with such sorrow that the countryside echoed with some fallen beauty whose source I could not perceive. And all the while, holy God, you were the one, you were the only one. So now I let it go, blessed Jesus, take it all away and burn my bridges down. I started noticing about four months ago that human love was standing between me and God. I wrote the following in my diary.
November 14, 1970, Saturday. Got up at nine and went down to the church to pray. And fasting today. Have been thinking about the time I want to see Ileen in the winter of 1969. Remember the very cold day when she and I drove out to where she was living with her boyfriend. There was snow and ice everywhere, a cold wind was rattling the brown oak leaves. We went walking up the lane to the house, it was too icy to drive, happy to be together and loving each other, and that cold day is deep inside me.
That day was one of the few days where, for one brief moment, I felt beautiful and good. [I just had to get up, pace a bit, pray in tongues, and ask Jesus to calm me down.] About five weeks ago when the powerful Holy Spirit hit me like a wall, I experienced inside and around me a fiery light burning down upon me. It was God looking. He still shines on me. Some nights when I go down to the church, I would get brief perceptions of him, and would get exorcised on the spot. The fire of God. Anyway, I sort of fell apart after the Holy Spirit hit me. It was as if this hard knot of personality within me had been delivered a fatal blow. Forces raged back and forth inside of me and I was coerced by all sorts of evils desires which I resisted by the blood of Jesus. I flipped out over at Alfred's and he jumped up and exorcised me. I was screaming and rolling on the floor with all sorts of stabbing feelings in my stomach. Part of the personality center that Jesus took out involved demons that regulated my sexual response and gave me manipulative power over women. It was also tangled up with resentment and hatred toward God, since inside I turned toward women instead of him, and resented him because they never loved me. So all this came out in the open, and I began to experience these mechanisms in operation. I prayed constantly, in English and in tongues, and got exorcised several times. I'm glad it is over as I feel much better. The Holy Spirit has entered me in a much more powerful way, and with the loss of my mind, I am very content and resting in Jesus. God and I are calmly loving each other. One wonderful consequence is that my relationships with my wife has improved. The personality knot the Jesus blasted out of me was resentful of my being with only one woman, and although not in the light, exerted a hidden destructive force upon us.
Just listened to Janis Joplin singing "Bobby McGee." About three weeks ago, while my wife was in New York, I came home and found it lying on the table. I played "Bobby McGee, having never really heard it before. The first lines, "Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train, feeling nearly faded as my jeans," brought down on me a deep despairing darkness. I felt like I was falling into a dark abyss. It was so deep and dreadful that I cried out, "Oh no," over and over again, with tears running down my face and hands over my eyes. With the words, "freedom's just another word for what nothing left to lose," I saw clearly that I had literally lost my life. Lost it, lost it years ago, and more and more, so that by the time I came to God, I gave it all away. So I started looking back on it all, and remembered the day that I began to die. I was twelve. It had just rained, the wind was blowing from the west where the sun was setting. Good, clean, and clear, and I was running barefooted down toward the back lot. Something in me was dying. I had chills all over my body, in ecstasy at the beauty of the wind, rain, and land, yet the ecstasy I was feeling was the last reflection of the sorrow, for I remember thinking, this is the last day of my life, never again such beauty, never again such light. Then, later on, the darkness started coming down.
One night in 1969, while in the process of busting up with Mona, I was riding across country alone. Outside Indianapolis, I got to thinking about my family. Once we were fair and once we were young, nails in our hands and nails in our feet. I could see the shadow fall across all of us, and if seemed so horrible that I started screaming and crying, driving down Interstate 70. This happened again out near Oconomee, Wissonsin, and I begin to suspect that something was wrong with me, for I would cry in horror when this happened. Before I came to Jesus I never cried. So anyway, the other day, the darkness came over me really bad and it was interspersed with the light of God's gaze. The darkness lasted for while and it was hurting me. So B.E., Stuart, and I went down to the church to ask Jesus to take it away. They were praying for me, and it came on me again, and all the sudden I got the strong perception that the follow Jesus, I might have to wander alone through hell, so I said: "Jesus I love you, if I have to go to hell to follow you, then I will go." Then the darkness came down, and in that dreadful abyss, I saw Jesus face-to-face. He was clear in gaze and utterly together. Brothers and sisters, he has been there, and is still waiting there for anyone who comes that way. And there was darkness over the earth from about the sixth hour to the ninth hour.
One thing that is really good about these activities is that some of them are not me. Since I been reborn by the Holy Spirit and water, I have a new personality. This personality is in Jesus, and normally I swing from old to new, but sometimes I am in a sort of a neutral state. In the new personality I love God, delighted to seek him and to be his son. My old personality is afraid of God and shrinks from his presence, for in the light of God, my old personality is burned away. The disintegration of the old is transformed into the construction of the new. One especially wonderful thing about my last round of purification, is that I am more securely established in Jesus. My hatred toward God seems gone. This really is satisfying since our friendship is now on a more solid basis. Thank you, Blessed Lord Jesus, for purifying my soul that I might dwell in the presence of God. It is good to know that, even beset with difficulties, there exists within me a part of myself which is indestructible and lives in the depths of God. So when I fell into the abyss, a part of me watched the other part fall. Had there been no part to watch, it would have been hideous. As it was, it wasn't bad at all.
There is another matter that comes to my mind -- compromise. When I was eight, I compromise myself. Things around the house seemed unjust and ridiculous. I fought it, but finally around eight, I gave up, There was something sick about it, agreeing to do things which did not seem right, and hourly acting as if certain things were true, while in the heart I knew they were a lie. It diseased me, my life was compromised. When I was in my fifth year of graduate study, becoming a research mathematician, I did the same. It seemed that the only sane alternative to our sick and polluted society was to bring the entire thing down by violence. But I was afraid and thinking I was crazy. Standing every morning at Spartan Village Apartments, watching the mothers bringing groceries, the fathers with their books and cars, and thinking how blind they all were. While every day, doom loomed from the daily news, while our leaders and institutions, arranged in a killing combination, raced ever faster toward the point of no return. And behind it all, I kept seeing the grief-maimed faces of the Vietnamese women, the starving children of Guatemala, and for that and that alone, it justice could ever exist, we all deserved to die. All the while, I stood and watched, afraid to lift a finger. And before that, when my major professor went to Michigan State, and I busted up with my girlfriend to go back to being alone, living alone in a cellar, reading Gurdjieff and Colin Wilson, watching my gonads shrink, thinking that I could never love again, or talk, or feel, or be again. And then finally .... it seems somewhere secret in me, shameful ... I agreed to get married in order to live and not die. Over and over again, compromise after compromise. And although, in the end I psyched myself up to it, leaving wife, PhD and family, to go to Boston to join the far left, I was so badly hurt inside that even death seemed chicken then. What a drag it all was. The love, the sex, the hate, the constant interminable hassle over truth, hassling my political views with my home upbringing, trying to figure out what was real and what a dream. Getting stoned and hating it. Stealing and getting bored. I hated it, all of it. It is better to die in God than to live in this world. Can we ever love one another? Just once, pure, clean, sunshine free, and all forever? You're the only one, God, the only one. All things are possible with you and in you I will find my rest. Lord Jesus have compassion on me a sinner. And while it was all going on, the hell around us and the shadow falling ever sharper, I stayed together, held together, and coming back for more. Indefatigable, like Faulkner's M.C. Snopes, you get down to the gut level of one day after the next, and driving on. But all it took was Jesus, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and the Jesus inside of me saying, "Do you love me?" That's all it took, and I literally, after all the hell and pain, fell apart at his feet.
There are only couple more things to say, one having to do with justice. It is the evening of June 14, 1971. In 10 days I'll be 29, it seems forever. When a child, I told you I chickened out at eight, the issue was justice. It all seems so unfair -- I was powerless to change or change it. And the weariness at twelve, came upon me, where once I had been strong and sharp. Every day fighting to stay awake, humiliated, and utterly mystified by the conflict between expressed ideas and reality. The conflict Lang speaks up in The Divided Self. Then the first disastrous love love affair, friends fading into the twilight, and everything good and beautiful gone. All the while I can see M.C. Snopes scrabbling, crying and aching for so those tiny crumbs of purity that life dribbled in his face. All the while, down inside, hating you God, then at last, the whole sinking herd of humanity bowed down in decay---laying it at your feet, God. I'm putting it there. ... So I was reading The Brothers Karamazov, and couldn't understand, couldn't understand at all. .... And then, later on, justice demanded my death for sitting on the sidelines while others died. I saw you die, God, I saw you there. So was I just, God, was I, leaving wife and go friends, willing to sacrifice my little brother to that old con game, politics, years of unkindness to my mother, ... could it ever be repaid? Then last summer Jesus says to me: "Go down to the church and tell him what you think." So I went down and started talking, screaming, raving, crying, because I hated his guts, begging, begging, night after night, for mercy -- for all of us -- and where was I to go if not to you God? You never heard me, never heard a word, all my rage never came before him, and God, deep, immovable, vast, and holy, remained unmoved in the utter silence of himself. And then finally, shaking like a leaf, I said: "God, if heaven earth pass away, and all mankind descends into the abyss, and I, I alone, stand before you, while at my back they creep from gloom into the darkness, and you say to me, "My son Robert what do you think of my justice? Then Almighty God by the love of Jesus Christ and your grace shed on me, I would I would be glad to say, "You are perfect, perfect holy, and just." ... So we got it down to that. God began to hear me, turned his gaze upon me, and I began to live and die. Brothers and sisters, everything, all of it must go. Every idea conception, thought, and law. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can come between us and God.
Now this is about all I got to say. This seems sort of like my last letter to the world. I hope you publish this. I've never written anything to be published, then I read the Last Supplement, and knew that somebody out there loved God, and me too. I could tell. So I'm writing to say that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the light. Get your friends together and asked Jesus to send you his Holy Spirit. Seek the gifts of tongues and healing. Jesus can heal diseases instantly. Tongues come from the deep soul and go straight to God. Pray in tongues all the the time. In the name of Jesus and by the power of his blood, lay hands on one another and command Satan out. Read the Bible and take communion. Confess your sins, love one another, Jesus wants to dwell in us. He's been around a long time, has gone to lots of lonely places, and you may be the only one to ever go to those places. So ask him in, "Come into my heart blessed Lord Jesus, and make your home with me. Purify my heart, and I will always love you, Holy God, that we all may dwell in you, in love with you forever. So be it."
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
