My Encounters With the World Beyond

 

My Encounters With the World Beyond

September 6, 2021

 

I have written and argued that God does not intervene directly in world affairs or in people’s lives to cause things to happen or not to happen. Humanity’s shameful history of war and genocide makes it impossible for me to believe that God does that. God doesn’t do that. God doesn’t do that no matter how hard we ask God to do it. The idea that God does do it always raises an unanswerable question for me. If God prevents some disaster from happening to some person, as so many people believe God does, why does God do it one case but not in another? Is God just capricious? I can’t believe that God is. A God that capricious wouldn’t be worth worshipping and loving. The bulk of the available evidence tells me that God does not intervene in the affairs of the world or in the lives of individual people to stop bad things from happening or to make good things happen. If you think God does do that, go look at those awful pictures from the Nazi death camps. If God’s not going to stop that, and God didn’t, God’s not going to intervene to stop the far less diabolical things that happen to people in their own lives. I am convinced that all that is true. But. Yes, there’s a “but” as there so often is with any blanket statement about nearly anything. The “but” here is that over the course of my life I have had experiences that I either can best explain, if I can explain them at all, only by thinking of them as the work of the Holy Spirit or of a person with an intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit. Here are the most important of them more or less in chronological order.

In the summer of 1997 I was in the grip of a moderately severe clinical depression and had been for at least the preceding three years. I was a lawyer, and I had been trying to run my own law office for over five years by that time. I was failing miserably at it. I sensed that there was something else I was called to do with my life, but I wasn’t at all sure what that something else was. Back in 1994 I had done a Jungian psychological exercise in which my unconscious mind told me I was a preacher not a lawyer, but that made so little sense that I pushed at aside and did nothing else in response to it. For a while I thought that that something else was to go somewhere, earn a PhD in systematic theology, and spend the rest of my professional life teaching at some seminary or other. I also knew, however, that there was no possible way I could do that. So I sat day after day in my office with a sign on the door that read Thomas C. Sorenson, Attorney at Law with next to no law work to do and playing a lot of solitaire on my computer.

Then something happened that I can explain only by thinking of it as providential. At least a couple of years earlier a Presbyterian minister who was a friend and who became a mentor of mine in ministry had given me the business card of a Jungian analyst he knew who was also an episcopal priest. I stuck that card into my wallet and forgot about it. For no reason that I can explain, early in 1997 I pulled that cared out of my wallet, called the number on it, and made an appointment with the Rev. Kimbrough Besheer, Jungian analyst. He was indeed both a graduate of the C. J. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland and an ordained episcopal priest. I had appointments with him nearly without a break until this summer, when he closed his practice and moved to New York state. Kimbrough helped me see and admit that I had gone as far with my legal career as I was going to go. He knew the meaning of a dream I had that represented that truth before I did. Something else lay before me, but for a time neither Kimbrough nor I knew what that something else was. Why did I keep that business card? Surely I had cleaned out my wallet since my friend and mentor had given it to me, but I kept it. Why did I remember that I had it in early 1997? Why did I call and make that first appointment? I have no answers to those questions other than to say it was divine providence. It was God getting me to do what God knew I was supposed to be doing but wasn’t doing.

Then another providential thing happened. I had known for some time that the School of Theology and Ministry of Seattle University offered a fully accredited Master of Divinity degree, the degree usually required for ordination into Christian ministry in most denominations. I also knew however that while some Protestant Christians had done some of their MDiv work there, none of them had ever done all of that work there. I never thought that the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry (STM) had anything to do with me or ever would. Then sometime in the spring of 1997, after I had been seeing Kimbrough weekly for at least a couple of months I learned that STM had worked with representatives of twelve or more Protestant denominations and was creating something they called the Institute for Ecumenical Theological Studies (IETS) within STM. The School was creating IETS for the purpose of offering a complete MDiv program to Protestant Christians in western Washington where no such offering had existed before. My Protestant denomination, the United Church of Christ, was one of the denominations that had worked with STM in the creation of IETS.

Somehow when I heard that there would be such a thing as IETS and that it would commence its work summer term 1997, I knew I had to go there. I didn’t know why I had to go there, but I knew that I did. I told my wife about it. She asked me how I was going to pay for it. I said I didn’t know. I’ll go into debt if I need to, I said, but I have to go. I began a program of study toward an MDiv degree fall term, 1997.

Why did I hear of the creation of IETS? I’d had no contact with Seattle University before then. I hardly knew where it was. Where did that strong conviction that I had to go come from? Seattle University’s STM (now sadly being shut down for financial reasons) existed to train church ministers not systematic theologians. I had no idea what I would do with an MDiv degree. I just knew I had to go get one, which made absolutely no sense. I had been telling myself for at least three years by that time that I was too old and couldn’t afford to go back to school for any purpose. Both of those things were true. Neither of them mattered. My knowledge that I had to go get an MDiv degree has to have come from God. That I did it probably saved my life. I don’t contend that Seattle University created IETS specifically for me. Of course not. But I believe that God the Holy Spirit was working within me to get me going where God knew I needed to go but resisting going with all of the might my depressed psyche could muster.

Then something even more providential happened. I knew I would be only a halftime student at IETS and that I would need a parttime job while I was in school. I had absolutely no idea what that job would be. I didn’t think I’d ever find a parttime law job that’d I want. I knew that the conventional wisdom around job searches was don’t bother with the help wanted ads in the local newspaper. No one, I had been told by people who claimed to know, ever got a job that way. Nonetheless, one day in the summer of 1997 I looked at the help wanted ads in the Seattle Times. There it was, a job listing for a halftime attorney with a local nonprofit service agency, Catholic Community Services of Western Washington. The ad didn’t say what kind of law work the agency wanted the lawyer to do, but I applied immediately. It turned out that the job was with a program of Catholic Community Services called the Legal Action Center. That program did only one thing. It gave free representation to low income tenants in eviction cases. I never thought I’d find a job like that. I’m sure Mark and Barbara, the two attorneys working with the Center at the time, ever thought they’d get to hire a lawyer who had been a senior litigation associate with the fourth largest law firm in the country, which I once had been. They offered me the job, and I took it.

That job turned out to be, perhaps along with my getting my first call to be a church pastor, the most providential thing that ever happened for me. It didn’t pay much, but it came with full medical benefits. I was most surprised when I learned that because I worked at least twenty hours a week for an agency of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle I would get a twenty-five percent tuition reduction at Seattle University. Best of all though was the fact that at the Legal Action Center I was doing legal representation that felt worth doing. When I was with that fourth largest law firm in the country I had tried personal injury and wrongful death cases in which millions of dollars were potentially at stake for my clients (always defendants in those cases). To me every single case I handled at the Legal Action Center was a bigger case. That’s because they all directly affected real people facing a real crisis in their life. Sometimes that legal representation felt as much like ministry as it felt like law. I can explain that job being there for me and all the benefits it brought me only as an act of divine providence in my life.

Yet all that wasn’t the total of all the benefits I got from that job. My boss Mark knew when he hired me that I was in seminary and would be for about three years. As I was nearing the end of my time at IETS in the fall of 2000 I told Mark that when I finished my seminary education I would have to find a fulltime job and that that job almost certainly would not be in ministry. He said he understood. The next day he came to me and said, “How about we make this job fulltime for you?” I said that would be wonderful, so on January 1, 2001, I became a fulltime attorney with the Legal Action Center. Nothing could have been better for me at that point in my life.

But even that wasn’t the end of the benefits I got from that job. In March, 2002, I was offered the call to be a halftime pastor of a local United Church of Christ congregation, but there was a complication. The church wanted me to be physically at the church on Sundays and on one weekday every week. My being fulltime at the Legal Action Center meant that I really couldn’t be at the church on a weekday every week. I told the good folks at the church that I would see what I could work out. I explained the situation to Mark. He said OK, we’ll cut your time here down to four days a week. I was able to accept the call to that church, and on June 9, 2002, I was ordained to the ministry of Jesus Christ in the United Church of Christ. In February, 2003, the church wanted to make my position fulltime, and I resigned from the Legal Action Center to become a fulltime church pastor.

The string of events that led up to my being an ordained Christian minister is so full of occurrences that at best were unlikely and at times seemed simply impossible that I can explain it only one way. It was divine providence. God was looking out for me and making my path to ordained ministry not only possible but relatively easy. I am fully aware of the issue that contention raises of why God would do that for me but not do it or something like it for so many others. I have no answer to that question. I know that I am no more deserving of God’s providential care than anyone else. I only know the events of my life, how they felt to me, and how I can explain them. I can’t prove that I received divine providence on my way to ordained ministry. Divine providence isn’t something you can take into a laboratory and run scientific tests on to confirm or disprove it. All I know is my experience of what happened in my life. That experience tells me that I was a recipient of divine providence. I can’t explain what happened to me any other way.

The next three events in my life that I’m going to present here are all related to my first wife in one way or another. On July 31, 2002, my wife of thirty years, the mother of my two children, whose name was Francie, died of breast cancer. I had known that her death was coming. She’d been in hospice care for a few weeks by then. I though I was ready for it. I wasn’t. When she died I felt an emotional anguish not only stronger than any I had ever had before but stronger than I would have thought possible. Never as an adult had I cried the way I did that evening of Francie’s death and for at least a year thereafter. On the morning of Saturday, August 3, 2002, three days after Francie’s death, I was standing in the shower weeping. I began to sink to my knees. The weight of my grief was just too much to bear. As I sank down, without having planned to do it at all, I said out loud, “Lift me up, Lord.” Immediately, and I mean truly immediately, after I uttered that spontaneous four word prayer a force I did not control and did not know was present physically lifted me up and put me back on my feet. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t have done it. I was falling down in grief and despair, yet something picked me up in the shower that morning. It was one of the most powerful experiences in my life. Because I am so sure that I didn’t lift myself up the force that did lift me up must have come from outside me. That, at least, is how I experienced what happened. In Christianity we call that force the Holy Spirit.

The next event I’m going to describe must have happened in the spring of 2003, around nine months after Francie’s death. It was the practice of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ, in which I was then and am now ordained, to hold an annual meeting in the spring, usually in April. I attended the Conference’s 2003 annual meeting as I was required to do to maintain my standing in the Conference. That year people from one of the Conference’s churches brought a roll up labyrinth. They laid it out on the floor of one of the rooms of the convention center where we were meeting. Walking the labyrinth can be a powerful spiritual experience. A labyrinth is not a maze, and it’s not a game. You enter at a starting point, then walk a marked out path that takes you in toward the center of the labyrinth, then back out to the edge of the labyrinth, then back in again. The marked course you’re walking eventually takes you to a space at the very center of the labyrinth. You spend as much time in that center as you want, usually either meditating or praying silently. When you’re ready you retrace your steps that brought you to the center until you arrive back at the starting point. I walked that portable labyrinth. As I did I knew that Francie was walking it with me. We didn’t talk. Silence is appropriate when walking the labyrinth. I didn’t see her physical form, but I had no doubt that she was there walking the labyrinth with me. Then after a short time she was gone. I had (and have) no doubt that her spirit had come to me and walked with me. It was a powerful and powerfully comforting experience. It is one I can explain only as some essence of Francie coming to me from beyond this four dimensional universe. I can’t prove that that’s true. It is however how I experience what happened that evening.

Now we move forward more than eight years to September 12, 2011. Francie and I had an Irish Terrier named Jake. We got him in 1998 as I was beginning my second year at IETS. Jake was the best dog for me that I’d ever had or ever will have again. He was with me when I graduated from STM in December, 2000. He was with me when I got my call to my first church. Most importantly he was with me when Francie died, for he was her dog too. He was with me after Francie’s death through a couple of residential moves, through my remarriage to my current wife Jane, through the deaths of both of my parents and my twin brother’s debilitating stroke. Jake was with me through some of the most difficult times of my life and after that through some of the most joyous ones. By September, 2011, when Jake was just short of thirteen years old, he was in nearly total kidney failure. He wasn’t going to get over it. It was time to end his pain by ending his life. He was already at the vet’s clinic. I left my home and started driving there to have Jake put down. I was an emotional wreck. Losing Jake hurt more than anything else I had ever experience except losing Francie. Then, as I was driving, Francie appeared to me. It’s hard to describe just how she appeared, but I knew she was there. She was somehow just above my eye level and slightly off to my left. She wasn’t there physically, but she was there. She spoke to me. She said, “It’s OK. I’m here waiting for him.” Then she was gone. I lost Jake and had that experience nearly ten years ago, but Francie appearing me to me and seeking to comfort me feels like it happened yesterday. That’s how powerful that experience was. Once again, I can’t prove that it happened, I just know what I experienced. I can’t explain my experience except by understanding that once again Francie had come to me from a place beyond, spoken a word of comfort to me, then returned to that place.

I consider all of these experiences to be supernatural phenomena that broke into my life just when I needed them most. They all make sense to me only if I trust that there is a spiritual reality we call God the Holy Spirit and that some essence of who we are as human beings survives our physical death and exists on some plane of reality that those of us who are still alive on earth can’t perceive. They key word here is trust. Our call is to trust the reality of God, what Christianity traditionally calls heaven, and the survival of the soul. To trust these things is not to take them as established facts. It is rather to live as though we knew them to be established facts while knowing that we can never truly establish them. That means we live in the midst of a paradox, but then all profound truth is paradoxical. Do I know that God is real? No, I trust that God is real. Do I know that our essence survives our death and continues in being on a plane of existence that we cannot comprehend? No, I trust that that is true. That’s what faith is—living in trust that good things you can’t prove are nonetheless real. It’s not easy. My knowledge that I can’t prove those things gnaws at me from time to time. Yet I strive to hold onto trust in God and all that flows from trust in God. It’s all I can do, and it is enough.