\n
On the northern coast of Lake Michigan in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, 1998<\/span> [my photograph]<\/p>\n(originally written in 1997; slightly revised on 19 September 2003 and \u00a0slightly edited and expanded on 23 September 2015)<\/p>\n
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If I was anything at all, religiously speaking, I was a nature mystic before I became an evangelical Protestant Christian in 1977. I relate to C. S. Lewis\u2019 story in\u00a0Surprised by Joy<\/i>\u00a0in many respects: the experiences of the painful, melancholy, yet \u201cjoyful\u201d yearnings he calls\u00a0sehnsucht,<\/i>\u00a0the fascination with mythology and fantasy, as exemplified in music by Wagner,\u00a0Northernness,<\/i>\u00a0the Middle Ages, knights, castles, Camelot, fairy-tales,\u00a0Robin Hood<\/i>, Celtic mythology, etc. This is an idealized, mythological, parabolic, analogical, poetic thought-picture and \u201cworld\u201d (in retrospect very \u201cmedieval\u201d and Catholic).<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
I instinctively sensed the\u00a0God-behind-nature<\/i>, never wholly descending to paganism or pantheism (although I toyed with several brands of the occult). Lewis discovered to his surprise that Romanticism was a bridge leading to Christianity. That might be said to be true for me as well. Romanticism was and is very dear and special to me, and I think at bottom it is essentially Christian, whether consciously or not. What the true Romantic seeks can only be\u00a0consummated\u00a0<\/i>within a Christian worldview and structure.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
So when I first heard orchestral excerpts of Richard Wagner\u2019s\u00a0Ring of the Nibelungs<\/i>\u00a0in 1974 (for those unfamiliar with it, think of a musical version of Lord of the Rings<\/em>), it was very much a religious, quintessentially romantic, indescribable, astounding mystical experience. Here was gorgeous, inspired music which immediately conjured up all these deep, mystical, other-worldly images which I found within myself from an early age. Beethoven had that effect, too, in a lesser fashion: his music was more abstract, not conjuring up images so much as the strivings and aspirations of man, dynamism, the will to overcome adversity (symbolized by his own ineffably tragic deafness), etc.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Beethoven\u2019s\u00a0Ninth Symphony\u00a0<\/i>in particular is nothing less than a testament to the human spirit, which is, of course, derived from God\u2019s image, and one might say that it is almost a religious experience to hear it. An online acquaintance shared with me that she never felt God\u2019s presence so undeniably as in certain points of Beethoven\u2019s\u00a0Ninth<\/i>. I also experienced very much the same feeling upon first hearing Gustav Mahler\u2019s\u00a0First Symphony<\/i>, a work likewise steeped in Germanic nature mysticism and Romantic wonder, in both its ecstatic and terrifying elements (and I first heard the triumphalistic last movement, for those who are familiar with this work).<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
C. S. Lewis, in his extraordinary autobiography\u00a0Surprised by Joy,<\/i>\u00a0recounts experiences and thought-processes (during his nominally Christian days, between the ages of thirteen and fifteen) very similar to mine at the same period of my life \u2013 which in turn reinforces his contention that such experiences are well-nigh universal:<\/span><\/div>\nI had read . . . the words\u00a0Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods<\/i>. What I had seen was one of Arthur Rackham\u2019s illustrations to that volume. I had never heard of Wagner, nor of Siegfried . . . Pure \u201cNorthernness\u201d engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity . . . and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago . . .<\/span><\/p>\nAnd with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the whole experience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say\u00a0It is<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span>And at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to \u201chave it again\u201d was the supreme and only important object of desire . . .<\/span><\/p>\nAll this time I had still not heard a note of Wagner\u2019s music . . . I first heard a record of the\u00a0Ride of the Valkyries<\/i>. They laugh at it nowadays, and, indeed, wrenched from its context to make a concert piece, it may be a poor thing. But I had this in common with Wagner, that I was thinking not of concert pieces but of heroic drama. To a boy already crazed with \u201cthe Northernness,\u201d whose highest musical experience had been Sullivan, the\u00a0Ride<\/i>\u00a0came like a thunderbolt. From that moment Wagnerian records (principally from the\u00a0Ring<\/i>, but also from\u00a0Lohengrin<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Parsifal<\/i>) became the chief drain on my pocket money . . .<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cMusic\u201d was one thing, \u201cWagnerian music\u201d quite another, and there was no common measure between them; it was not a new pleasure but a new kind of pleasure, if indeed \u201cpleasure\u201d is the right word, rather than trouble, ecstasy, astonishment, \u201ca conflict of sensations without name.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0. . . You will misunderstand everything unless you realize that, at the time, Asgard and the Valkyries seemed to me incomparably more important than anything else in my experience . . . More shockingly, they seemed much more important than my steadily growing doubts about Christianity . . . If the Northernness seemed then a bigger thing than my religion, that may partly have been because my attitude toward it contained elements which my religion ought to have contained and did not.<\/span><\/p>\nIt was not itself a new religion, for it contained no trace of belief and imposed no duties. Yet . . . there was in it something very like adoration, some kind of quite disinterested self-abandonment to an object which securely claimed this by simply being the object it was . . . Sometimes I can almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself . . .<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0Secondly, this imaginative Renaissance almost at once produced a new appreciation of external nature . . . I was always involuntarily looking for scenes that might belong to the Wagnerian world . . . But soon . . . nature ceased to be a mere reminder of the books, became herself the medium of the real joy. I do not say she ceased to be a reminder. All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still \u201cabout to be.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n(Surprised by Joy<\/i>, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955, 72-73, 75-78)<\/span><\/p>\n\n
His descriptions of what he felt upon hearing Wagner\u2019s music (especially the <\/span><\/span>Ring<\/i><\/span><\/span>) are uncannily like my own experiences. It conjured up images in his head of \u201cheroic drama . . . ecstasy, astonishment\u201d and displayed \u201celements which my religion ought to have contained . . . very like adoration.\u201d Lewis ends his extraordinary recollections by observing that he came across \u201cthe false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n I read this work of Lewis several years after my own stunning, quasi-religious encounter with Wagner\u2019s music. I had never come across anything that so incredibly described my own interior feelings, that I was not able to verbalize (or possibly not even <\/span><\/span>conceptualize<\/i><\/span><\/span>) at all until I read Lewis, writing about almost identical experiences and feelings of his own. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Here was the meeting of music and religion (what is sometimes called \u201cimaginative \u2013 or romantic \u2013 theology\u201d), just as I had already experienced the intersection of architecture and stained glass with vague religious feeling, years earlier in my young life. If God can\u2019t reach us through the mind and theology, He has many other ways. In my case, knowing my interests, He drew me to Himself via art, music, and nature.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In my own vague, ethereal, only half-conscious Romanticism \u2014 before I was educated enough to be able to understand, let alone articulate, Christian doctrines and dogmas \u2014 I subconsciously sought out religious experiences or intimations which transported me into \u201creligious,\u201d \u201cmystical,\u201d \u201csupernatural,\u201d \u201cfantastic\u201d realms. Romantic orchestral music (above all, Wagner) served this \u201csecondary\u201d function for me. Nature was another such medium. I found everything there symbolic and parabolic. The forest wilderness, for example, represented the \u201cother,\u201d the unattainable, the transcendent, the fairy-tale environment.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Of course I knew the reality was otherwise, but that is beside the point: sheer idealism and symbolism is what matters in such imaginings. Mountains and oceans also fulfilled this role in my fantasy-ruminations, as they have in countless works of literature, music, poetry, and painting.<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nVarious mythologies and quasi-historical \u201cworlds\u201d played into this as-yet undefined mysticism: the \u201cwild west,\u201d colonial America, knights, Robin Hood and William Tell, King Arthur, Greek mythology, the American Indians, the ancient Egyptians, pristine ancient Ireland and its elves, the Scottish Highlands and its legends and ghosts, the Alps, the Black Forest and Rhine River in Germany, even some of the biblical figures (about whom I knew little), etc. I didn\u2019t know how many other people possessed these feelings. Nor was I likely to inquire. I was happy to find out that my wife Judy felt much the same way (she loves Wagner, too), as did C. S. Lewis (per the above excerpts).<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nAlas, at that time I had no inkling of the fact that what has been called the \u201cmythopoeic imagination\u201d is deeply, profoundly Christian and substantially identical with the \u201cmedieval worldview.\u201d Malcolm Muggeridge wrote about this symbolism in an article entitled \u201cNature is a Parable\u201d (after a phrase from Newman):<\/span><\/div>\nEverything that happens to us or in connection with us, all the happenings in the world, great and small, the whole exterior phenomenon of nature and of life \u2014 all that amounts to God speaking to us, sending out messages in code, and faith is the key whereby we may decipher them. It sounds very simple, but it\u2019s somehow difficult to convey exactly . . . Nature is speaking to us. It is a parable of life itself, a revelation of fearful symmetry . . .<\/span><\/p>\n(National Review<\/i>, December 24, 1982, 1608)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The notion of nature being a\u00a0parable<\/i>\u00a0(it is no coincidence that Jesus often utilized agricultural parables to illustrate principles of the kingdom of heaven) is also part and parcel of the\u00a0Incarnation\u00a0<\/i>and its extension of\u00a0sacramentalism<\/i>. For God became man (John 1:1-5,14-18) and in so doing raised matter and particularly human flesh to untold heights. Thus creation bespeaks not only God\u2019s existence as Creator, but also His ineffable glory, as we know from God\u2019s own revelation (Romans 1:19-20).<\/span>
\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nMost of us could ascertain that apart from revelation by means of experiences and insights such as those described presently. But others, due to an improper upbringing, misfortune, misinformation, or rebellion (Romans 1:18-32) cannot (or,\u00a0will<\/i>\u00a0not) see God in His creation, which \u2014 with us \u2014 awaits \u201credemption\u201d (Romans 8:19-25).<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nIn other words, I was experiencing God and Christianity on an unconscious level, by means of nature, fantasy, myth, and music. Christianity is the fulfillment of all this longing. C. S. Lewis often makes the argument throughout his works that such intense, painfully powerful yearnings within us are grounded in the fact that we were made for heaven. The fleeting pangs of nostalgia, melancholy, vivid dreams, idealism, the Quest<\/em>, paradise, (deja vu?), etc. which so infect us are thus explained as having an origin in ontological, spiritual, divinely-ordained reality.<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nNot only that, I will speculate further (hopefully not excessively so) and submit that within all of us is an innate consciousness of immortality and a sense of \u201cpre-existence\u201d (as Wordsworth alludes to in his poetry): not in the monistic, eastern sense of reincarnation, but rather, in the idealistic Platonic sense of eternal existence in the omniscient mind of God, the First Cause, the Creator, in whom \u201cwe live and move and have our being\u201d (Acts 17:28). Perhaps also we retain a consciousness of the Garden of Eden and the pristine, luminescent, perfect, unfallen paradisal earth, which reappears in frustratingly short-lived instances of the painful Nostalgia or\u00a0sehnsucht<\/i>\u00a0which Lewis so marvelously describes.<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nSince orthodox Christianity accepts the notion of a corporate Fall of the entire human race (i.e., Original Sin \u2013 see 1 Corinthians 15:22), why would it not be possible for us to have some slightest hint and remnant within us of what we have lost? And this \u2014 if true \u2014 would be yet another one of the many ways in which God speaks to us and intimates that there is something much better<\/em>\u00a0that awaits us, both in this life (once a commitment to Christ is made), and especially in the next, where those of us who are to be saved shall at last be made perfect, receive our resurrected bodies, and live in utmost bliss worshiping God and enjoying the New Heaven and Earth and each other forever (Revelation 21:1-27, 22:1-5).<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nI strongly, passionately believe all this now, but back in the late sixties and early seventies (during roughly the ages of ten to twenty in my life), I was searching for the meaning which lay behind my \u201cmystical\u201d experiences and ruminations. I still vividly recall the profound, quasi-religious experience of\u00a02001: A Space Odyssey<\/i>\u00a0and its incredible \u201clight show\u201d which represented a trip through eternity, time and space. I viewed this again on a wide screen last year, and the scene still has the capacity of leaving me (and many others) dumbstruck with awe. There is something\u00a0behind\u00a0<\/i>all of that, which gives it its challenging, \u201cspiritual\u201d quality.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
It was another religious experience brought on by the art of cinema and music, with philosophical and scientific aspects also added in. My inquisitive mysticism and curiosity were running wild. This was literally my \u201creligion\u201d in 1968, after the \u201cdud\u201d of my previous Methodist churchgoing experience. Hearing Wagner took it a step further six years later.<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nDuring this period I sought the transcendent and supernatural in the occult, ESP, the ouija board, telepathy, and an intense fascination with ghost stories and \u201cunexplained happenings\u201d (UFOs,\u00a0Night Gallery, The Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond, The Outer Limits<\/i>, etc.). Then I became interested in Eric von Daniken (sp?) and his\u00a0Chariots of the Gods<\/i>\u00a0series of quack pseudo-scientific, ersatz archaeological speculations. While these were the wrong avenues to reach the true God, yet God in His mercy used them to bring me to Himself. He eventually revealed to me that He was the fulfillment of all these aspirations.<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nI believed in the spiritual, supernatural world, but I needed a doctrinal, rational basis upon which to discern truth from falsity, good from evil, edifying from destructive. All this is a fair indication, I think, that the drive for God and the transcendent is inherently within us, whether or not we understand the origin and goal of it. We are made in\u00a0God\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0image \u2014 funny that we should constantly try to remake God in\u00a0our<\/i>\u00a0image.<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nC. S. Lewis (my favorite writer), was also seriously involved in the occult in the period just before his encounter with Wagner and \u201cNorthernness\u201d:<\/span><\/div>\nNow, for the first time, there burst upon me the idea that there might be real marvels all about us, that the visible world might only be a curtain to conceal huge realms uncharted by my very simple theology. And that started in me something with which, on and off, I have had plenty of trouble since \u2013 the desire for the preternatural, simply as such, the passion for the Occult. Not everyone has this disease; those who have will know what I mean [I do, very well] . . . It is a spiritual lust; and like the lust of the body it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it lasts.<\/span><\/p>\n(Ibid<\/i>., 60)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
As it turned out, God also saw to it that my morbid fascination for the unknown and the mysterious got channeled into an interest in Bible prophecy, shortly before, and for several years after my conversion. That allowed me to explore an area of \u201ctranscendent,\u201d \u201cunusual\u201d happenings, all the while remaining within orthodox Christianity.<\/span>
\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nChristianity is the environment and backdrop within which a proper, ethical, inspiring, soul-moving, beautiful Romantic ethos grounded in truth and reality can flourish and cause no harm. Without that base,\u00a0German Romanticism\u00a0<\/i>reduces to Nazism, the\u00a0French Revolution<\/i>\u00a0to tyranny, severed heads rolling down church aisles, and Napoleon,\u00a0Hegelian Idealism<\/i>\u00a0to Stalinist Communism,\u00a0Bohemian\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Beatnik Romanticism<\/i>\u00a0to drunkenness, libertinism, madness, and debauchery,\u00a0Hippie Romanticism<\/i>\u00a0to drug deaths and broken marriages and homes due to sexual promiscuity, and\u00a0\u201cSexually-liberated\u201d Romanticism<\/i>\u00a0to perversion, child molestation, massive sexual harassment and divorce, and partial-birth \u201cabortion\u201d (infanticide).<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nAll this flows from disconnecting an unbridled, relativistic, antinomian \u201cRomanticism\u201d from both metaphysical reality and true love and ethics, and by making the Romantic endeavors\u00a0ends in themselves, rather than signposts of and towards God<\/i>. Christianity provides meaning, content, purpose, and ethics to our innate Romantic longings, and it was the realization of this which was crucial in making me decide to wholeheartedly follow Christ and devote my life to Him. Only then can hope and idealism flourish unhindered, and the horrible twin scourges of cynicism and pride die a well-deserved and welcome death (well, almost!).<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nIn terms of popular music, Van Morrison, whom I joyfully discovered in 1979 provided another delightful avenue of Romanticism of Wagnerian proportions for me. He is an Irish Romantic Mystic and Musical Poet. He helped usher me into a vague Celtic mysticism, which I now know is Christian and Catholic at bottom. Likewise, the free-association poetic Romanticism of the early and \u201cmiddle period\u201d Bob Dylan . . . It is no accident that both Dylan and Morrison have professed (and expressed in music) Christianity, although it is by no means certain how morally consistent or \u201corthodox\u201d either of them are. At any rate, the Romanticism and idealism which is prevalent in their music (especially Morrison\u2019s), are directly attributable to Christianity, and \u2014 in my humble opinion \u2014 are\u00a0fully<\/em> enjoyed within that framework and milieu.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
1977 was the worst year of my life, because I experienced a massive, six-month clinical bout of depression.\u00a0I\u2019ve always interpreted what I call the terrifying \u201cGreat Depression\u201d period of my life as God, in effect, saying, \u201cokay, Dave. You want to live without<\/i> Me? Do you truly<\/i> want to see what it would be like to live a life of no hope and meaning; a world without God? Alright; I\u2019ll let you do that.\u201d And I saw what a truly Godless, nihilistic universe would be like and wanted no part of that whatsoever! I couldn\u2019t play that game anymore.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In my case, obviously God knew (being omniscient) that I would soon cry out, so it was literally an act of mercy to give me totally over to my own corrupt desire of living a life of \u201cpractical atheism.\u201d Many atheists can delude themselves and pretend as if a world without God still has meaning, but I was allowed the privilege of seeing what a consistent atheism leads and reduces to: black despair and meaninglessness.<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\nShortly after I converted in 1977 (in the middle of this depression), I wrote a poem which merged stories of Jesus with nature, sort of a St. Francis-type of ethos and mindset, which was the culmination and fitting conclusion of my odyssey from nature mysticism to Christianity.\u00a0This poem literally connected my \u201cnature romanticism\u201d to Christianity and being a disciple of Jesus. Here it is:<\/span><\/div>\n\n
The Dream<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nOnce I had a dream<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>A very special dream<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>mountains<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>rivers<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>forests<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>glowed with pristine gleam<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nsky of deepest blue<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>clouds<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>white dove in flight<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>sun with mighty splendor shone on earth so very bright<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nPastures in the morning<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>Beautiful<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>green<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>country scent<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>Down into the valley seeking solitude I went<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nslowly I walked, looking for what I had never found<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>Longing to hear the loveliness of nature\u2019s sounds<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nmusic of birds singing<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>flowing water<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>filled my head<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>Lying on the ground wondering<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span>with only leaves for a bed<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
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