God's Spell

Rumor had it that there were spanking chairs in the principal’s office at St. Boniface’s Catholic School a few blocks away from Sea Cliff Elementary where I spent my days as a boy. Though I was never able to picture how the spanking chairs worked, or even what they looked like, I was sure my school was safer. All we ever needed to fear was the occasional swat of Mr. Olson’s paddle (he called it the “Board of Education”).

For some strange reason my dark vision of life among the Catholics didn’t make me fearful of Mrs. Lutz, the kindly Catholic neighbor with whom I enjoyed many happy moments as a child, usually asking questions. Here is one exchange (my parents told me about it years later):

“Mrs. Lutz?”

“Yes, Charlie.”

“Can God do anything?”

“Yes, Charlie, I am sure he can.”

“Could God roller skate off the end of the world?”

(Pause)

“Well, yes, Charlie, I suppose he could do that.”

(Pause)

“When is God going to put his spell on me?”

That final question surprises me in retrospect. I wasn’t a particularly religious kid. I went to church because my family did. I was baptized as a baby, was confirmed at some point during my elementary school years, sang some in the choir, and served as an acolyte assisting the minister at early morning communion. But I was a “pea on a hot griddle” in Sunday School, driving Mrs. Collins to distraction and earning me frequent visits to the superintendent’s office.

As a young teenager, I was wrapped up in typical kid things— baseball, bike riding, school, occasional fist fights, birthday parties, skating on the local pond, the junior sailing program in the summer, some vandalism with my unscrupulous friend Johnny (I keep telling myself it was all his fault—even the bit about peeing in the soap dispensers in the men’s room at the local bathing pavilion).

But somehow, through it all, my question about God’s spell seems never to have disappeared altogether. It came back into focus when my sister Mardi started to get serious about faith and invited me to join her at a week-long camp in my early teens. I turned her down, but felt haunted by the decision. Eventually, in the fall of my sophomore year in high school, I followed her advice and, hardly knowing what it meant, put my life into Jesus’ hands. I felt nothing at the time, apart from embarrassment when Mardi introduced me to some of her believing friends.

But later, sometime that spring, something dramatic happened. I was sitting alone in my room one evening, doing homework, I think (I know I wasn’t doing anything particularly religious), when a cascade of joy and love fell upon me, and kept falling, until it became almost unbearable. And then, abruptly, it ended.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but in later years I tied that experience to the question I had put to Mrs. Lutz. I have since had many experiences of God’s reality and kindness, often connected to a choice, or an event, or a relationship, but this one sticks in my mind because it was so intense, because it came unsought, and because it ended as abruptly as it began.

Jesus compares coming spiritually alive to experiencing the wind (the sailor in me loves this). We feel its impact, but we can’t control it or pinpoint its origin. I think that is what happened to me.

The mystery and power of that experience have lingered with me over sixty years and produced in me two settled convictions about God’s way with people. First, we can’t write the spirituality script or the time-table for one another. God is there and active, but he does his own thing in his own way.

My second settled conviction is that we have to depend on God to change people.

God uses people in people’s lives—not just religious professionals like me, but ordinary people. Shared gifts and arguments and experiences and stories are his method. Nevertheless, and this is my point, if human words and deeds are ever going to make God vivid, beautiful, and relevant to the people we love, God himself has to make that happen.

God has to cast his spell on us.